United Isles of Europe

By Little Bit Bigelow

The United Isles of Europe are an odd duck, really, as far as these things go. Not quite a country, a bit more than a consortium. Find ten people from different backgrounds who all hate each other's guts, and then put them in a house together and tell them they're a family. See how long you go before somebody gets popped in the nose. That's pretty much what the United Isles had to work with, but they actually pulled it off, with a lot of picky rules like "Everybody gets one free import" and "No stepping on each other's national holidays" and "We won't pick an official language, so the anthem won't have any words and everyone will just have to hum it at the start of cricket events and sound like total prats."

Nobody hated the Isles enough to start a war or anything, but nobody loved it either, which is why 150 years in, they were still trying to drill patriotism into schoolchildren with books like "John and Gustav Fight the Russians" and "John and Gustav Fight the Mongolians" and "John and Gustav Plant a Tree." (The books always started with a big family tree to show how John and Gustav had ancestors from every part of the Isles). There were also a lot of songs, like:

We're a land of love and riches

Connected by the big stone bridges

They fell down into the sea

And were built back up by the UIE


Parker, Churchill, Köhler, Morgan,

Kaczyński, Clinton, Röntgen too,

Patten, Chapelle, and von Tusseau,

The first ten leaders of the Isles true.

We had a lot of schoolyard versions of that one, mostly involving lists of euphemisms for farting.

Anyway, the United Isles of Europe formed in 1802 and have been a bulwark of relative peace and calm. They kept their noses out of the Subterranean Wars, though plenty of UIE citizens signed up for private fighting forces on both sides. They left the Patagonian League alone. They ignored The Trans-Sylvanian Troubles completely. They put their fingers in their ears and said "la-la-la" during the Tight Pants Uprising. Things like that. And you know, on the whole, it worked. Within the Isles, everything is peaceful. You really wonder what they're up to.

And oh, hell, now I have "We're a land of love and riches" stuck in my head.

See: Hillary Clinton, Patagonian League, Second Subterranean War, The Trans-Sylvanian Troubles, Tight Pants Uprising
