Why you can't turn Paraguay into a great power
Discussion

This is a response to this thread, in which many commenters seemed not to understand how industry and technology worked in the Victoria 3 period.

https://old.reddit.com/r/victoria3/comments/rdvpsd/would_paraguay_have_the_potential_to_become_a/

Paraguay, or any remote landlocked minor nation for that matter, should not be able to become a great power in Victoria 3. This also applies to pre-industrial African slave kingdoms as well such as Sokoto and Ethiopia.

Finances

In history, and I hope in Victoria 3, technologies were not researched by pouring abstract research points into them at no financial expense. Instead, they were developed for agricultural, engineering, and military projects with hefty sums of money. Inventors would often need to take out loans to gain the capital needed to develop something like a new locomotive or fertiliser, and so rapid industrial growth required a strong financial base and banking sector. Britain, the number 1 great power in 1836, obviously had this, with the banks of London insuring shipping and investing in railways. At a basic level, operating global shipping lanes without proper insurance would be dicing with disaster. As the USA grew to supersede Britain by the 1890s, so did the financial sector of Wall Street.

It should hardly need stating that Paraguay and the Sokoto Caliphate did not have these established financial systems, meaning that they had no way of financing major technological projects. In fact, what we see in South America in general during this period is expertise and technology being bought in from the great powers, mainly the USA and Britain. Britain built railways across the region, and along with the USA built the dreadnoughts for the pointless arms race in the early 20th century. This put the region in the market of the great powers, resulting in such events as the European powers blockading Venezuela in the early 1900s and the USA bullying various minor states in the region in the Banana Wars.

Balance of power

Since any technological development in weaker nations was largely due to imported equipment and expertise from the great powers, this meant the great powers themselves were invested in not allowing weaker states to rise to challenge them. An obvious example from the start of the period is the Ottomans, who called in the great powers to save them from Egypt. In exchange, Britain pressured them into signing the Treaty of Balta Liman, which forced open their markets to industrially produced British textiles. These underpriced local textiles and collapsed the domestic textile industries in the empire. The Ottomans couldn't do much about this because they needed Britain and France to protect them from the Russian empire, so they were left de-industrialised and stagnant. And this is a country that was erroneously called a "great power" in Victoria 2! Imagine the challenges that would face Paraguay or Sokoto in this position.

Historically, Ethiopia got some support from Russia, who sold them some modern weapons. Russia didn't have colonies in Africa so was not concerned about Ethiopia, but Britain, France, and Italy did and would not have wanted to support a potential threat to their colonies. The Russian support was enough to hold off the Italians in the 1890s, but most European powers at the time did not want to support Ethiopia in case their colonies were threatened.

Internal problems

Hostile great powers and lack of financial institutions are not the only problems either. Poor countries during the Victoria 3 time period were typically dominated by corrupt landowners and bureaucrats, who formed reactionary interest groups. Brazil for example was dominated by slave owners who resisted industrialisation that would undermine their power base, to the point where they deposed the empire when slavery was abolished and there was relatively little industrial progress made until the 1930s. Brazilian politics came to be known as "coffee and milk" because of the dominance of agriculture. Similar factors applied to most South American countries at the time, and certainly to places like Sokoto and Ethiopia, which had a huge enslaved population and ensconced landowners who wanted to keep it that way.

China is a particular tragedy in that, unlike the Ottomans or the various South American countries, they actually had a chance of becoming a great power during this period and completely blew it because of corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats. After the humiliations of the opium wars and Taiping rebellion, China embarked on major military reforms which saw some success, fighting the French to a stalemate on land in the 1880s. However, the navy remained a serious problem. China had bought modern ships for the fleet, but the fleet was split up into regional fleets led by local warlords which could be defeated in detail. Naval budget cuts and corruption meant that by 1895, despite fielding stronger ships than Japan, the navy had been weakened by a racket that sold gunpowder and swapped it for sawdust. The result was catastrophe and the rise of Japan, who would otherwise have been much too small to seriously threaten China. This is actually one case where the player should be able to make a real difference, since China only failed due to multiple extremely poor decisions, which we will probably see replicated by Paradox AI. For Paraguay or Sokoto, the road to great power status is outright impossible. Create agruements against this reddit posted by lutyforliberty.