Journey to Europe

Having arranged East Africa's affairs, Ernst prepared to leave for Europe. Before that, he had specifically looked into potential destabilizing factors. Now, all internal affairs in East Africa were stable and orderly; the only matter worth watching was the Orange Free State civil war.

Although the Orange Free State civil war would not spread to East Africa, the Orange Free State was, after all, East Africa's neighbor. Guided by ideas from his previous life, Ernst knew that relations with one's neighbors could be an exceedingly thorny problem. Just like the cluster of countries surrounding the Far East Empire—if they went three days without fighting, they would climb onto the roof to tear off tiles. They might not cause much damage, but their disgusting tricks emerged one after another.

Russia was much the same. However, Russia had never been good at handling neighborly relations—or rather, it was good at handling them through violence. Resorting to force was indeed the simplest and most effective method, but Russia was prone to capsizing in a gutter. Fortunately, its great-power bulk meant it would not suffer too heavily. If Russia showed even the slightest additional weakness, those neighbors would likely have joined forces long ago to swallow it whole and strip it to the bone.

East Africa handled relations with its neighbors mainly in two directions: the north and the south.

Its northern neighbors got along fairly well with East Africa. All three colonial regimes—the Belgian-controlled Congo colony, the Italian East African colony, namely parts of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the Sigmaringen Royal Territory—had East Africa backing them from behind. So did the two traditional sovereign states, Egypt and the Abyssinian Empire.

Although Egypt was a British semi-colony, it still retained some autonomy. At the very least, it would not dare pull chestnuts from the