Reconstruction (Ottonia)
Reconstruction, sometimes also referred to as The Great Rebuild, The Ottonian Spring, or abroad as The Ottonian Reconstruction, was a nearly quarter-century-long process of economic restructuring and recovery, as well as significant political and social reforms, undertaken in North Ottonia following the Great Ottonian War and strongly influenced by the Northern Revolution that resulted in dramatic shifts in the North Ottonian culture and government. The era is considered to be of tremendous importance in understanding the modern Ottonian state, since while the ratification of the New Foundation For Ottonia officially concluded the Northern Revolution, the latter decade of Reconstruction was when the ideals and changes outlined in the new constitution were put into practice.
Background
In 1943, the Kraag-Klaussunn Agreement ended the Great Ottonian War in a functional draw; the South Ottonians had managed to seize the old Imperial capital of Ottonia City and briefly occupy much of the industrialized western portion of North Ottonia with the help of their Ghantish allies, only to be driven back mostly to the pre-1935 borders by the autumn of 1942, and both sides were exhausted and reeling from the war. Much of North Ottonia's industrial base had been severely damaged by bombing and shelling by Ghantish and South Ottonian forces and the only somewhat-less-destructive efforts by defenders and other Northerners to retake their cities, and South Ottonia's principle cities had only fared a little better. Shortages of critical goods had been weathered for years, but were reaching critical mass and there was real reason to fear the prospect of famine (or at least food shortages) brought on by the destruction of the Northwest's infrastructure, making it difficult to bring foodstuffs from the relatively unharmed eastern regions to feed the large (and often-displaced and unhoused) coastal population.
Fearing the consequences of too much centralized power (and the temptation to use it), Otto Kraag, the Commander-in-Chief of the United Front government that had prosecuted the war for the North, resigned his post in the interest of resuming the pre-war system of government, centered on the Presidency and Moet legislative body based in Ottonia City. Riding Kraag's coattails, an alliance with the Radical Liberal Party, and a few constitutional quirks of the Unification Charter, the Ottonian National Party was able to capture a solid legislative majority to carry out its vision for rebuilding the country.
First Phase (1943 - 1947)
The initial rebuilding efforts were largely focused on repairing the ruined infrastructure of the North, the Northwest in particular, and getting factories back on-line to produce the material that the effort required. The Ottonia City government largely facilitated this by providing grants to the North's industrial powerhouses to hire large numbers of people to provide workforce for repairs and the resumption of assembly lines. To some extent, this worked as intended, although the system was rife with graft and was easily abused by business owners seeking to improve their own lot in the short term. Notably, the same wage issues that had created unrest prior to the Great Ottonian War had not gone away, even as the prices of staple commodities, including food, shot up due to scarcity and difficulty of transport.
It would take until 1945 for supply lines between eastern and western territories to approach their pre-war scope (and even then, this was in the form of dirt and gravel roads often enough; the rail lines were nearing the end of repairs in many cases but their reopening was still months away and the rolling stock to move goods in volume was still not yet available), and during that time shortages and breadlines were common. In August of 1945 the government legally fixed prices for certain staple food goods and resumed the wartime rationing system that had been, optimistically and prematurely, abandoned in June of 1943.
While this rebuilding effort was not without its victories, by the end of 1945 there was a feeling that the recovery effort was stagnating. The populace had been suffering privation for a decade at this point, and there was little sense that things were getting better for the general public, even as political and economic elites largely resumed their luxurious prewar lifestyles. The lessons of organizing and local democracy had been learned during the war, and as a result local councils and committees increasingly appeared to fill the voids that the ONP's government seemed uninterested in filling. While people were willing, to a large extent, to tolerate and bear difficulties in the march towards a recovery, the seeming lack of progress, including persistant issues with wages and supplies for basic human needs in the face of increasing evidence that these things were available to those with resources, made for an increasingly restive and frustrated populace, and as 1946 began, so did work stoppages, strikes, and sit-ins.
The Northern Revolution
The unrest in the cities of North Ottonia and even, to a lesser extent, in the countryside, would provide the impetus for the formation of the Popular Front, an alliance of political organizations, local councils and governments, labor organizations, public intellectuals, and civil servants, and their subsequent drafting of the New Foundation For Ottonia, a new constitution to supercede and replace the flawed Unification Charter. The New Foundation called for major, hard-codified economic and political reforms to create a more democratic society and economy. Incidentally, most of these reforms also threatened the long-term viability of the ONP's grip on power, and as a result the ONP responded to the 1947 publishing of the New Foundation by drafting their own replacement constitution. The manner in which they largely steamrolled the objections of the RLP saw their onetime legislative allies abandon them, and their own party leader in Kraag endorsed the Popular Front's document over theirs.
What unfolded over the course of late 1947 and 1948 was a slow-motion revolution as city after city, starting with Dunnmaar and Skarrsboro, fell to Popular Front supporters and found their provincial and municipal governments replaced with directly elected and appointed people, many of them veterans of the United Front effort. By early 1949, the ONP was confined to Ottonia City before they finally fled to Drevstran, leaving the Popular Front in de facto control of the country to implement the New Foundation's principles.
The Northern Revolution was to have dramatic consequences for the energy and scope of the Reconstruction effort, prompting historians to divide Reconstruction largely into its early (pre-Revolution) and late (post-Revolution) stages.
Second Phase (1949 - 1960)
With the ratification of the New Foundation in summer of 1949, elections were planned and preparations to put the new government in place were undertaken. This involved the relocation of the capital from Ottonia City to Innsboro, and the creation of a bureaucratic force to organize the undertaking, as well as the work of lawyers, civil servants, economists, and union leaders to craft the new rules of the system being undertaken. Notably, help was solicited from the syndicalist societies on the Rubric Coast, Talahara and Tyreseia in implementing these new systems. The new government that was elected in the fall of 1949 and was seated in January of 1950 saw a supermajority coalition government between the PODA and UPP in the newly-constituted Folksmoot (the former being the senior partner), with former Dunnmaar mayor and PODA leader Harald Baaltrsunn being directly elected as Premier, promising to devolve power to local governments and build a new era of democracy.
PODA largely favored market systems and pushed for the emphasizing of cooperatively and socially-owned private enterprises as part of the radical restructuring of the economy, while the more central-planning and Wernerist-oriented UPP pushed the government to invest, plan, and drive much of the recovery effort directly. As a result of the different strategies, the government expanded and defined itself as it pursued both avenues. In addition to restoring old infrastructure and industrial capacity, an effort was made to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the country's ruination. Where cities had been levelled provided the chance to plan better, more human-centered settlements. Where railroads needed to be rebuilt, they could also be expanded. Dams for power generation and flood control needed to be built. Mines could be made safer as they were reopened. And all of this meant putting people to work so that they were drawing wages, often newly-increased ones as the demand for manpower caught up to the number of people seeking work.
And, importantly, it provided the opportunity to create the housing, kitchens, and bureaucracy needed to keep the populace fed and housed, and to make sure that anyone hurt on the job or forced off the job by circumstance would not fall through the cracks. The scope of the task was nothing compared to an optimistic fervor that seemed to overtake the people of North Ottonia. The challenge was vast, but things were getting better. Even the brief interlude of the Highlands War (1954 - 1955) couldn't blunt the public optimism, and mild trepidation turned to elation when the Bluwaald region was able to elect to join the North's new Federation of Republics.
Of course, this wasn't without drawbacks. North Ottonia's public debt ballooned significantly during this period due to the impetus to spend large amounts of resources on the recovery effort. While not ideal, this was tolerated due to the percieved necessity of the expenditures: better to burn resources improving things than to become miserly and strangle the recovery. However, this also led to the rapid inflation of the Otomark, at its height reaching an approximate exchange rate of 408:1 against the Rezese lir in 1957. Though this would decrease over time, even today the Otomark remains one of the more inflated national currencies in the world.
Final Phase (1960 - 1968)
As the PODA-UPP coalition fragmented and the Folksmoot shifted to solely being led by PODA and its smaller allies, the opportunity was taken to dial back some of the public spending and aggressive investment that the rapidly-weakning UPP had advocated for. While PODA was not inclined to revert to the ONP's more lassaiz-faire and pro-business policies by any means, there was a sense that the country's economic engine had been sufficiently revved-up and now it was time to let it cruise at speed. During the final approximate decade of the Reconstruction program, attention shifted to the civil service and ensuring social safety nets were sufficiently-robust as the workforce began to contract somewhat. This led to the creation of a number of agencies, including the National Public Pension Bureau, the Federal Housing Authority, the Social Insurance Agency, and the restructuring of the nation's food rationing system into the Federal Food Assistance Program, which to this day maintains the Ottonian Food Dole. The Federal Health System, originally a patchwork of doctors and hospitals working together under government instruction, was formalized into the Federal Health Service. The groups that had reshaped the land and embarked on a decade of major civil engineering projects was contracted and organized into a form of national service, the Federal Services Corps. And the schooling system was standardized and reformed into the current Standard Education system that is one of Ottonia's proudest achievements.
Legacy
Ottonia would not be what it is today without Reconstruction. It was a radical transformation of the country into a democratic, socialist, industrial powerhouse that it is today. I'll write more later but I just want to get this done.
Involvement by Other Nations
It would be a mistake to think that the vast task of Reconstruction, with its comprehensive mission of reform in its latter decades, was purely an Ottonian achievement. The task was aided, often greatly, by assistance from foreign nations, many if not all of them still considered friends and allies of the Ottonian people to this day.