Have any novels dealt with the question of which city has United Earth's government headquarters? (Somebody asked that question over in General Trek and I didn't know what to tell them.)
Memory Beta claims it's London and cites Starfleet: Year One and an STO mission called Divided Earth. Kinda boring IMO. ETA: See here.
Memory Alpha talks about six regions of United Earth governed from their capitals of San Francisco, Paris, Kyoto, Lima, Cape Town, and Christchurch. I generally assume Paris is where they meet if they have to have a conference in person, based on Star Trek VI and Articles of the Federation.
I'm not actually sure if ENT specified where Prime Minister Nathan Samuels kept his permanent office.
So London is the capital of Earth and Paris is the capital of the Federation. Appears European dominance continues well into the future.
There's no such STO mission. Someone on M-B is making stuff up, fixed the article (the citation at least). Are you sure you were reading Memory-Alpha? The Memory-Alpha page on United Earth doesn't say anything like that.
Thanks, I appreciate the correction! Out of curiosity I checked, and this is the user who added the false information. They apparently also added incorrect stuff to other pages (some of which has been corrected), with an apparent anti-religion agenda. Also, the article originally cited the ENT novel Kobayashi Maru for San Fransisco as the location of the prime minister's office.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Earth# Under the trivia section is where I was looking. Whether the data actually answers the question being asked or is correct, I cannot say, as I do not own either of those reference books.
The novels never really established it. The ENT Relaunch variously implied it was San Francisco and Paris. The Myriad Universes novella A Less Perfect Union established that the United Earth capital of at least one alternate timeline was Geneva, Switzerland. Personally, I would prefer to imagine that the U.E. capital is either in Asia, Africa, or South America, to get away from the implicit idea of Euro-American dominance. My personal headcanon is that it's Mogadishu, Somalia.
Whichever city it is, I hope it's a real, existing city. None of this "Federal District" crap like we have in the US.
That's a good point. It probably wouldn't be an existing city or even an existing country. For almost exactly the same reasons. I'm suddenly thinking it's in Antarctica.
Setting aside the environmental damage putting a city in Antarctica would cause... I mean, there's no landmass on Earth except that one which remains even partially unclaimed. So even if a nation cedes a city to the U.E. federal government or cedes territory upon which a new city is founded, it is culturally going to be a part of the nation it was taken from. The problem with the idea of a "neutral capital city," is that then you've got a territory full of people who aren't represented in the federal government through the polity from which the territory was taken. You can get around that if the "federal district" is given the same rights as the other polities -- internal autonomy, equitable voting representation in the federal legislature as if it were itself a normal member polity. But then that opens up the question of, exactly what is the point of it being a federal district then? Culturally, it'll still be part of whatever nation it came from; legally, it's just functionally equivalent to a new member polity. Why not just let the city be a part of whatever nation it came from, and just give the federal government control of parts of the city where there are no residents to ensure its own functionality? There are federal unions that do that today. Ottawa is still part of the Province of Ontario, for instance.
Again, they are planning on RAISING A NEW CONTINENT. Probably sounded like a cooler idea in 1990 than it does now. Getting all sci-fi, if you had an administrative city someplace like Antarctica given the tech we've seen in the rest of Star Trek, nobody has to live there meaning there is no one to be represented. (Like DC was supposed to be.)
1) The mere presence of the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, and all of the attendant support agencies means that you're going to have such a large human(oid) presence that you're going to damage the local environment. Human(oids) are not meant to live in Antarctica and such a large-scale presence would displace wildlife and disrupt the local ecosystem. (And who would want to live in an environment like that??) 2) The presence of the legislature, executive, judiciary, and support agencies would inevitably lead to the development of a permanent settlement with permanent residents. Federal legislators' legislative correspondents, the executive assistants to the deputy chiefs of staff for the United Earth Cabinet secretaries, the people running the bureaucracy -- all of these people are going to have basic needs and wants. They're gonna want to go out to the bar after work. They're gonna want to go to restaurants. They're gonna want to go to the theatre or see a movie. They're gonna want to go to museums, etc. AND, there will be civil society! Organizations advocating for this group or for that group, or fighting for this cause or for that cause, who will open offices near the legislature and will seek to influence it. AND, foreign diplomatic missions! And all of THEIR staffs! And we already know from the reference to "transporter credits" that beaming from one city to another can still be an expensive thing in the 24th Century -- so the idea that so many people are just beaming in and out all day is not feasible, either. The development of a city is inevitable. The idea that you can just put a government in a settlement and nobody will live there is just... not real. It never has been. 3) Even aside from that, United Earth was founded in the 2100s before transporter technology was common. So it wouldn't have designated its capital city with that in mind. 4) Again... why go the federal district route? What's the point? Hosting the capital city is not inherently going to give the country it's in some sort of advantage over the others. It's not gonna give them more representation in the legislature or make their national government more influential with the U.E. federal government. The only reason the District of Columbia isn't a state is that the Articles of Confederation Congress relied upon state militias to defend it, but came under attack at one point and the Governor of Pennsylvania refused to defend them. (D.C. not being a state actually backfired during the January 6 attacks, since it meant the Mayor of the District of Columbia was not legally empowered to unilaterally call up the D.C. National Guard to defend the Capitol and instead only the President could do so [and he infamously refused].) Anyway, concern over relying on a member polity government for protection may have been a valid concern in the 1780s, but it's clearly not an issue in the modern world. Canada does not rely upon the Province of Ontario to defend Ottawa or the Parliament and Prime Minister's Office. United Earth would not need to rely upon Morocco, or Somalia, or Switzerland, or France, or the United States, or whatever, to defend the United Earth capital, legislature, executive, etc.
I don't agree. Other countries manage, don't they? Ottawa, for example, is the capital of Canada, yet it is still a normal Canadian city just like any other. If it worked there, it can work here. I mean, the only reason the *US* has this federal district bullshit is because of the Pennsylvania Mutiny...