I was wondering if there was any kind of Typhon Pact symbol/seal/insignia descibed in any of the books? If not, what do you imagine such a symbol to look like? I imagine it would be a stylized six-armed galaxyish spiral, like the Typhon-1 space station, or the main conference table within are decscribed to like. Each arm representing one of the member nations.
The problem with giving them a spiral-shaped insignia is that then we'd never be able to convince people it wasn't the Typhoon Pact.
The Typhon Pact currency, seen in A Singular Destiny, features an hexagonal shape imprinted on it, if I recall correctly. So that was, if not their official insignia, something clearly representing the Pact.
True -- though that's not necessarily their only insignia. After all, there's a variation of the bald eagle from the Great Seal of the United States on the U.S.'s quarters, but it isn't exactly the same as the Great Seal, and it's certainly not what our flag looks like.
I'd forgotten about the hexagon on the currency in ASD. Thanks, Nasat! Perhaps a hexagon in the centre of the symbol, where each arm spirals off? Sci, what about each arm of the spiral being colour-coded to each species? Green for the Romulans, orange-red for the Tholians, red for the Kinshaya, dark green for the Gorn, gold for the Tzenkethi and beige for the Breen.
Considering Federation-centric nature of most of the Pact's previous actions and the fact that there is a giant map of the Neutral Zone on the floor of the Romulan Senate, I imagine that the Typhon Pact's seal is simply the UFP seal with a giant red X or "NO" over it.
^Are the Pact's actions really mostly Federation-centric, or does it just look that way because we've mostly seen them from the Federation's perspective? Certainly the Kinshaya have had very little interaction with the Federation. Their aggression in A Singular Destiny was against the Klingons, and The Struggle Within, as the title suggests, showed them dealing with internal matters, both the struggle for control between different factions of their own society and their relations with the Breen and Romulans. We also saw plenty of internal factionalism within the Romulans in Rough Beasts of Empire, the Breen in Zero Sum Game, and the Gorn in Seize the Fire -- a book that was mainly about the Gorn dealing with an internal crisis, with a single Federation ship just happening to get in the way. So just from what we have seen, it's quite clear that the Pact and its members have a lot of domestic concerns to occupy their attention, and we also know they have interactions with foreign powers other than the Federation, such as the Klingons or the Kobheerians (erstwhile Cardassian allies with whom the Pact struck an exclusive trade deal prior to ASW). It's likely that they have other foreign-policy concerns involving nations other than the Federation. For instance, The Buried Age established that the Breen and the Sheliak have some ongoing territorial disputes, so for all we know, the Pact devotes a fair amount of its attention to the Sheliak. But we don't see that because the books we read are told from the Federation's point of view and thus present an incomplete, slanted perspective on what the Pact does.
Gasp. Shock. Do you mean to imply that the Milky Way Galaxy does not in fact revolve around the United Federation of Planets?
You raise a lot of very good points to counter my somewhat lighthearted previous post. I can see what you're saying and can envision that we are getting a somewhat limited perspective of the Pact's activities because of the focus the novels that are published. However, the Pact was arguably created in direct response to President Bacco's actions during the Borg invasion (and the member states are largely comprised of nations that have had a long-standing antagonistic or at least neutral relationship with the UFP). The Pact also initially established its presence through subterfuge and sabotage of Federation interests and only declared the union's existence after a Federation investigation. While the Pact may have other interests and pursuits, they still seem strongly focused against the Federation (and countering the Federation's technological advantage in the slipstream drive, which they have some cause to be worried about). When I was writing the earlier post, I was recalling a scene from "Plagues of Night" where different Typhon Pact members discuss their latest, relevant actions with their colleagues. The relatively moderate Romulan representative observed that many of their actions appeared to be geared to destabilize political relations (which seemed to primarily be against the Federation, but partly the Klingons). Ultimately, I do think a significant portion of the Pact's activities are geared against the Federation (culminating in the climax of "Plagues of Night"). However, I don't think they would be so Federation-centric as to make their main symbol an anti-UFP statement — although sometimes designers and other creators may sometimes like to draw such bold distinctions (such as the Neutral Zone map in the Romulan Senate).
Yes, and the Federation was created in response to the Romulan War, but that doesn't mean that everything they've done from then on was about the Romulans. And the United States was created by a revolution against England, but our entire history has not been defined by our relations with England. It's natural that the Pact would be especially concerned about the Federation, because the Federation is the 800-pound gorilla, the dominant superpower in local space. So naturally it informs the politics of just about anything that happens in the region. But think about it realistically. Think of the Pact as six living, breathing, working nations forging an alliance, rather than just a story device. Those nations have their own citizens/subjects, their own economies, their own domestic affairs and border issues, etc. By the very fact that they exist as nation-states, they must have a wide range of concerns. (During the Cold War, the USSR dominated America's foreign policy, but the US government still had plenty of other concerns like civil rights, crime, drugs, gas shortages, internal scandals, etc.) Besides, the whole reason the Pact was formed was to counter the Federation's dominance as the sole superpower in the region. Naturally they're concerned about it as long as it remains the 800-pound gorilla, but their long-term goal (insofar as the Pact can be said to have a single goal) is to give their members and their allies the ability to stand on their own and not have their lives dominated by the Federation's whims, so that they can get on with focusing on their own interests and policies instead. The Federation is not their overwhelming preoccupation, which is exactly why they want to be strong enough to assert their own interests and priorities without being at the mercy of the Federation's whims. As long as the Federation remains a dominant power, the Pact is going to resist that, but if the UFP's influence and involvement diminished enough and the Pact members felt they were free to go their own way, then most of them (with some exceptions) would probably be content to stop worrying about the UFP, to leave it alone as long as it left them alone. Well, I haven't read that book yet, but that goes to show the diversity of factions within the Pact. Some factions see it just as a way to undermine the Federation, while others are more interested in pursuing their own independent concerns. I think that's reading too much into a careless bit of set design. The designers didn't include that map on the Senate floor to make some statement about Romulan politics; they just copied the Neutral Zone map from "Balance of Terror" because it was available and recognizable, and they probably didn't consider the broader implications. If anything, the dialogue in the Senate scene establishes that Hiren's government was in a state of detente with the Federation (the same detente achieved during the Dominion War) and had no interest in renewed aggression against them, which was why the revanchist military faction worked with Shinzon to assassinate Hiren and his moderate Senate.
Praetor Hiren's detente isn't incompatible with a long-standing Romulan obsession with the defeat by Earth and its allies. Back in "The Neutral Zone", Troi describes a pronounced Romulan interest in humans:"For some reason they have exhibited a fascination with humans and that fascination, more than anything else, has kept the peace." This fascination is born as much of resentment at the role humans played in aborting Romulan hegemony as anything else, IMHO.
That's a very good point. There are a lot of actors on this galactic stage with different motivations. Although the novels have largely looked at the Pact's actions against the Federation, I do recall the Tzenkethi resorting to assassination to accomplish its goals in the Romulan Empire. Getting back to the Pact symbol, maybe it's similar to the Google Chrome logo?
But it's still reading way too much into the fact that the set designers for that scene chose to stick in the map from "Balance of Terror."
The floor tiling of the Romulan Senate is explainable by specific choices made by the set designers, sure, but I don't think that this choice and the implications it has for the traditional Romulan perspective on the Federation and humans needs to be retconned away. There are other oddities that have been incorporated likewise. This isn't incompatible with Romulan interest in detente. If something Duaneverse-like happened in the current Pocket continuity, the Empress Ael came to power and instituted a relatively pro-Federation regime that lasted for several decades in the late 23rd century. In the late 24th century, Praetor Hiren's regime likewise seemed interested in detente, as does Praetor Kamemor's in the few years it (likely) has before Hobus' supernova. The gradual changeover in the Romulan elites in the long Vulcanoid generations since the Romulan War may finally be producing positive results. The idea of die-hard anti-human sentiment that can't be easily overridden--at least to the point of retiling the iconic floor of the Romulan Senate--complicates things, but it's plausible enough, described in both the shows and the literature. And as you pointed out, there are gradations in anti-human sentiment: the Romulans who supported Shinzon wanted to end Hiren's detente and strive for supremacy, not use WMDs to annihilate Earth and who knows what other planet.
It occurs to me that we may be speaking past each other and actually be in fundamental agreement. (Or, at least that I am.) Just wanted to say this. I've been conscious of late of the risk for miscommunications in the bandwidth-limited online.
The questions remains: Aside from the fact that we do not know whether the Typhon Pact indeed has its own isnignia, is it possible at all that the Pact has no symbol?
I suppose it is, but at least some of the Pact members have national logos and other visual symbols of their shared identity, so I'd expect it to come up at some point in the process of establishing the new partnership. I assume they would design an official insignia for the Pact, maybe several; it seems in keeping with their established psychologies and habits. The Romulans of course are very big on images and logos weighted with political symbolism, reminding people of their allegiance or the sovereignty of the Star Empire. I assume they'd want something to put on a banner. The urge to mount dragon-birds on every visible wall seems to be strong among Romulans, (judging by the TV shows, anyway) so I imagine they'll want a Pact symbol too. I imagine some of them would like that symbol to be another dragon-bird, but the Tzenkethi seem to have tweaked things well enough to ensure the Pact remains a true partnership and not Romulus'n'friends. Kinshaya are very big on visual cues and display gestures (their ships even have the equivalent of flags in those captain-specific coloured patterns), so they'd probably want a banner too. The Breen have a national logo (which I think is actually a Roman shield design for some reason...) so they clearly share the desire to create meaningful images as a focus for affirmation of group identity. In The Gorn Crisis, the Gorn were depicted using specific combinations of shapes and colours to identify clan and caste background as well as rank, and they seemed big on meaningful images and visual cues. Their clans and possibly castes have specific insignia, so they too seem to share the desire to symbolise a political entity with a logo. The Star Charts book decided to give the Tholians a logo, though I don't know if it's been referenced elsewhere. Given that they have the Lattice, they might not share the urge to reinforce group identity through symbolic shorthand? Is it possible the Tzenkethi don't care?