Returning to this thread after being absent for several days (sorry, these posts take a lot of time and energy to write!)...
You can't serve two masters.
That's the point I'm trying to make, the members are the masters, the central government is
their servant. It exists solely for their needs. Community, protection, security, trade.
The problem with this idea is that it defies the majority of the canonical evidence. We've
seen distinct evidence that the Federation practices federalism in the modern sense, that Federation law overrules Member State law, and that sovereignty falls to the Federation (though there seems to be dual sovereignty).
The evidence? The Federation Council gets to set a Federation-wide Warp 5 speed limit in "Forces of Nature." The Federation President gets to conduct foreign relations without consulting the Member State governments in
Star Trek VI. In "Journey to Babel," Sarek indicates that Federation law even regulates the distribution of wealth
within a Federation Member State when he notes that if Coridan joins the Federation, its wealth will be administered for the benefit of its people according to Federation law. Most of all, in "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost," we see the Federation President declare martial law on a Federation Member State's capital planet, and we hear other Federation Members being spoken of as regarding the Federation President as "their" president.
The preponderance of evidence is that the Federation is a federal state. It probably gives far more autonomy to its Member States than present-day federations, but it remains a state, not a mere confederation or alliance.
I very much doubt the governments of Earth, Andor, Vulcan, Tellar, AC created the Federation so they could then hand over their authority and control to it.
Why not? The thirteen states in the Union created the modern United States federal government and handed over their authority and control to it after they realized that the confederation created in the Articles of Confederation was not powerful enough. The Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland even
dissolved themselves and handed power over to a new Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The Communist states of Eastern Europe handed over their sovereignty to the newly-created Soviet Union in the early 20th Century. The provinces of northern North America handed authority to a federal government called Canada in the late 1860s. The colonies of Australia federated into their own federal Commonwealth in the early 1900s. Etc.
History is
full of states that willingly give up their sovereignty to larger federal unions if they feel it's better for them to do so.
The only power the Federation has is what is delegated to it by the member planets.
Then why is there, for instance, a Federation Naval Patrol ("Thirty Days," VOY)? Surely that's the sort of thing the Federation would have no authority over.
Local laws also apply within the star system of a member state - Federation laws apply in "Deep Space", areas outside the gravity well of the system star.
Federation law is in the area of interstellar space (warp speed limits) and interactions between member states, commerce, trade.
Again, the problem with this claim is that "Journey to Babel" and "Homefront" make clear the exact opposite is true: Federation law applies even to the internal affairs of Member States. A Federated Coridan would be obliged to distribute its wealth in a way that benefits the general population; the Federation President can declare martial law on a Federation world without consulting that world's Member State government. Hell, even "Accession" establishes that the Federation bans all forms of caste-based discrimination in Federation Member States (and the novel
Articles of the Federation establishes that slavery is also banned).
Some additional thoughts.
* The Federation lacks the power to directly tax the member states.
This part is just absurd. I'm sorry, but that was one of the reasons the American confederation collapsed in the 1780s -- it wasn't possible
two hundred years ago for a government to function on the world stage without the ability to tax its members. How could the Federation possibly function on the galactic stage, having to marshal that many more resources, if it cannot tax its Member States or their citizens?
* Not all member states are democracies. But they all do possess a single stable government.
I fundamentally disagree with this idea. The Federation has consistently been depicted as disrespecting undemocratic regimes, and the only Federation Members we've ever seen have been established to be some form of democracies. How could a Federation based on the ideas of freedom and self-determination
not require its Member States to gain democratic mandates from their citizens?
So, I'm thinking, what kind of representation do people from these colonies get? They're not Member State citizens so they don't elect Councillors.
Oh, I dunno about that.
I think the most elegant solution would be this:
When a new colony is founded that is not considered a colony of a Member State, that colony has the option of either declaring independence, cutting itself off from the Federation and all of its Member States and automatically granting to its inhabitants a new citizenship, or it has the option of establishing itself as a Federation colony.
For Federation colonies, the residents will retain their prior Member States citizenship until such time as that colony becomes a Member State in its own right. As such, they would retain the right to vote absentee in their prior Member State elections, including elections for Federation Councillors or Member State parliamentary elections. The Federation colony would retain its status as a Federation colony until its population reaches a certain size as defined by statute, at which point it could apply for Federation Membership.
Once Membership is conferred upon the colony, that Member can never cease being a Member unless its population votes to secede and declare independence, and the new Member State's population is given new citizenship and loses their prior Member State citizenship unless they move back to their prior Member State.
I assume they still get to vote in the presidential elections.
Oh, certainly.
In terms of how many people any given Federation Councillor represents on the Council, the only real comparison I can think of in a democracy would be the
Lok Sabha in India, whose members have so many constituents that there are serious questions about how any one person could possibly represent so many people or be democratically accountable. I'd consider it almost inevitable that you'd end up with some Member States with populations so large that they might opt for a form of indirect democracy with their Federation Councillor.
Which brings up the question of how the Federation President is elected. After all, he represents far more people than any single Councillor. Should he also be indirectly elected, by the Council? OTOH if he's elected by the Council, people from the above mentioned colonies get no vote at all. Maybe some kind of Electoral College is in order (a real one, not just a formal one like in the US), with representatives from both Member States (and their colonies) and federal colonies?
The novels establish -- and I agree with -- a direct popular election for the President. Yes, the presidency is going to be less democratically accountable because of the sheer size of its constituency, but that's
always the case for any presidency. Presidents are supposed to be more independent than legislators, so I don't object to that idea.
So, I'm thinking, what kind of representation do people from these colonies get? They're not Member State citizens so they don't elect Councillors. Maybe they have non-voting representatives? What if their colony is very small?
I assume they still get to vote in the presidential elections. If you relocated to one of United Earth's colonies I think you would still be a UE citizen. If on the other hand you were to immigrate to another Member states home world or colony, until you became a "naturalized" citizen there, you probably wouldn't get a vote.
Why make it so hard? Surely citizenship shouldn't be hard to acquire from Member State to Member State -- freedom of movement within the Federation should be a Constitutional right the way it is in liberal democracies today. They should probably just be required to declare their new Member State to be their Member State of permanent residence and thereby gain their new Member State citizenship (and lose their old Member State citizenship) after a given length of time (maybe a standard year or so).
Just before the Dominion war it would be easy to imagine the Federation's population approaching one trillion. A popular election might be unwieldy.
Why? Federation computer technology is so much more advanced that they tend to count their data in
quads, a unit of data so large we don't even know how large it is in comparison to modern units. I sincerely doubt that the mere ability to
count is beyond Federation science, even if elections take a while to tabulate.
Given the size of the Federation, would the candidates campaign on all the member worlds and the larger colonies too? Multiple cities on each world. It's hard to see a sitting president taking that much time away from official duties.
I would tend to hope that the people of the Federation would be educated enough not to hold it against a candidate if he or she didn't get around to stumping on their particular planet. 150 Member States, most of those with multiple planets under their jurisdiction? I think a reasonable Federation populace wouldn't hold that against a candidate so long as a good-faith effort was made to get to at least all of the different general regions of the Federation.
It's amazing to read of people here who can't concieve of a world without money.
Reagan and Thatcher have so much to answer for.
I agree that Reagan and Thatcher have a lot to answer for, particularly their support for murderous South American dictatorships.
But the simple fact that money will always exist, even if poverty and great disparities in levels of personal wealth are eliminated, is not the same thing as supporting modern Capitalism.
Money hasn't always been around. Before that, we had barter.
Yes, and barter was a horribly inefficient system. Jim wants some shoes from Bob, but Jim can only trade a banjo for the shoes and Bob wants drums, not a banjo, so Jim has to trade his banjo to Billy to get some drums. Only Billy doesn't have drums, Billy has a violin, so Jim has to get Billy to trade his violin to John in return for a fiddle, which Jim then trades his banjo to Billy for to get some drums so he can give those drums to Bob in return for some shoes. Oy gevalt!
Money wasn't invented because it's evil; money was invented because it simplifies trade and facilitates peaceful interaction that way.
The thing is, you're system isn't much better than the system we have today.
Only someone who has never been in danger of losing their home and who has never not known how they were going to eat next week could possibly claim that that system is not decidedly superior to the one we have today.
Penta:
You seem to be seeing things very much in a 20th/21st century way.
If there's anything I've learned from ST, it's that the human beings in it are different from the ones we see today. Didn't Quark observe that?
Actually, Quark's usual soapbox point was that Humans
are not that much different in the 24th Century than they were in the 20th. Witness his rant about how Humans are as savage as Klingons if threatened in "The Siege of AR-558."
And, no, Humans of the 24th Century are not inherently different, or better, than people today. They like to spout that propaganda, but it's nonsense. People are people. The
cultures are different, not the people.
I think that human beings will be so successful on their own planet, that they will not need to ravish another. The only argument for establishing humans on another planet would be in case ours is destroyed by some disaster.
That's just ridiculous. People want to spread out and always will -- and as long as they're not displacing native inhabitants, there's nothing wrong with that. Why
shouldn't people be allowed to colonize an uninhabited world?
You're confusing
Star Trek's depiction of colonization -- the process of establishing permanent Federation settlements on worlds where intelligent life has not evolved -- with real-life colonialism.
T'Girl: Oh, boy.
I'll leave the colonial stuff for the colonization thread.
Describing United Earth would be incredibly hard to do without the thread getting derailed or descending into a flamewar. It requires a number of political evolutions to simply get to UE, let alone to the UFP. Trying to figure out how even one of those evolutions happened, and the knock-on effects, would be difficult.
I do have a simple solution: If the Monarchy exists, nobody took the swans away. I mean, why would they bother?
(The British Monarchy existing would be an open question I'm not getting into, because it'd depend highly upon how United Earth got to being.)
For whatever it's worth,
Articles of the Federation established that United Earth was founded with the signing of the Traité d'Unification in Paris in 2130. A number of states remained holdouts, though, with the last state -- the Independent Republic of Australia -- not signing on until 2150 (
Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru), the year before the NX-01 was launched.
They also establish that United Earth practices federalism, which seems to mean that the states that join U.E. remain in existence. This is confirmed when the President of the United States is depicted as touring the devastated City of San Francisco after the 2375 Breen attack along with the Prime Minister of United Earth and President of the United Federation of Planets. (It's also confirmed in an address seen onscreen on a computer display in ENT's "Afflication," which refers to San Francisco, CA, as being in the USA in the address line.)
We know for a fact that the Royal Navy existed on Earth as recently as Malcolm Reed's early 20s, which would indeed be the 2130s ("Silent Enemy"). Personally, I see no reason not to think that the United Kingdom remains a part of U.E. and that the British Monarchy still exists.
We also know from
Vulcan's Forge that the Israeli Knesset still exists in the 2290s, and from
Kobayashi Maru that Israel and Palestine finally came to some sort of mutually-acceptable solution to their conflict.
I don't think the UFP is a nation-state.
Of course it's not. It's a multinational state.
But it's not a supranational organization like the European Union. The Federation President wouldn't have the power to declare martial law if it were.
Sovereignty being retained by the member worlds is evidenced by Kor being appointed Klingon ambassador to Vulcan. If the Federation were a fully sovereign state, only an ambassador to Paris would suffice and relations with Vulcan would be handled by a Consul-General.
Sort of? On the other hand, we know from numerous films and episodes that the Federation conducts foreign relations on behalf of its Member States without seeking their permission or input. So the fact that there exists ambassadorships to Federation Member States does not automatically mean that they remain the ability to conduct their own foreign relations.
For comparison, states in the U.S. retain the authority to conduct some foreign relations, and to even enter into compacts with foreign states, provided that they remain subject to federal regulation from Congress. I see no reason to think this isn't also possible for the Federation and its Member States.
Well this could explain why humans seems to dominate starfleet (starfleet academy is on earth, not on vulcan) in the 24th century, while in 22th century, manking is just a junior space power compared to the vulcans.
I don't think we've seen enough of the Federation Starfleet to presume that Humans make up the majority of its membership. Any number of Human-looking officers could actually be non-Humans whose species Humans simply resemble (Ardanans, Betazoids, Bajorans, etc.), for instance. Meanwhile, we've only gotten a good look at four Starfleet crews out of a Starfleet of hundreds of ships and starbases. Hardly enough to come to any sort of conclusion about its overall makeup.
On top of that, it's been canonically established that Starfleet Academy has satellite campuses throughout the Federation. I'm sure there's a Starfleet Academy campus in ShiKahr and in Laibok and in Ashalla and in Leran Manev.
