[1] In 1964, General Étienne Fourre, once a village apothecary, is the leader of the French Maquisard Brotherhood and serves as France's representative in the Supreme Council of United Free Europe.

Reinach is sending a tiny delegation to Rio de Janeiro to represent Europe at the relaunch of the United Nations, refuses to establish a parliamentary government, and intends to recognize a neo-fascist dictator as ruler of Macedonia.

Still, not only did humanity enjoy three centuries of (mostly) peace and prosperity, but it had the chance to go into space, become established throughout the Solar System and take its first interstellar steps - so that a war on Earth, however vastly destructive, would not imperil humankind as a whole.

It is also made clear that the new United Nations being established in Rio will be much more powerful than its pre-war incarnation, and will be dominated for the foreseeable future by Western democracies.

Macedonia, which serves as the proximate cause setting off the armed confrontation in the story, had been a hotly disputed territory ever since the beginning of the 20th century, due to the incompatible claims of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia/Yugoslavia and its own Macedonian nationalism.

The devastation caused by the 1958 global conflict gave Papas the chance to carve out his "Macedonian Free State", presumably transcending the former borders and taking in parts of pre-war Greek territory ("Aegean Macedonia") as well as those which had been in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria - a plausible enough development given the previous history of this corner of the Balkan, up to the time Anderson wrote the story.