"Join the Federation! At least we're not the Romulan Empire."
Is Starfleet Too Powerful?
- Thread starter TommyR01D
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"Join the Federation! At least we're not the Romulan Empire."
This is kinda tangentially related to the topic but I like the idea that even in a post-scarcity civilisation there might still be corporations around, that make all the stuff that Starfleet uses, kinda like Lockheed or other defense contractors. Yoyodyne could be one of those. I was thinking of that to explain why there's design families, like the Galaxy-class and Ambassador-class and those First Contact ships families, all overlapping around the same time, and it's because different corporations designs were used.
Really you could stupstitute pretty much all the other known star empires for "Romulan Empire"
"at least we're not the Klingons.
at least we're not the Cardassians.
at least we're not the Ferengi.
at least we're not the Orion Syndicate.
at least we're not the Domion.
Really, what other choice do you have?"
Isn't it kinda silly how the Federation is the only "positive" Empire around?
Maybe at an earlier point there were cooperative bodies like it, but they morphed into the Federation?
It is hard to believe that, prior to the UFP, no planets ever peacefully cooperated. But once the UFP became the biggest and most successful one, it does start to make sense there wouldn't be an obvious competitor anymore.
It's not like there's a competitor European Union, for example.
As for the other empires, there are gradations.
We don't really know, for example, how much autonomy planets in the Ferengi Alliance have. Or if there are non-Ferengi worlds in the Alliance. It could be like a Trade Federation or twenty-fourth-century Hanseatic League.
It is hard to believe that, prior to the UFP, no planets ever peacefully cooperated. But once the UFP became the biggest and most successful one, it does start to make sense there wouldn't be an obvious competitor anymore.
It's not like there's a competitor European Union, for example.
As for the other empires, there are gradations.
We don't really know, for example, how much autonomy planets in the Ferengi Alliance have. Or if there are non-Ferengi worlds in the Alliance. It could be like a Trade Federation or twenty-fourth-century Hanseatic League.
It's funny, something from the most recent episode of Picard reminded me of this thread.
In the episode, Seven and Raffi seem genuinely surprised and confused at the fact there's more than one law enforcement agency operating in modern day Los Angeles. In this case, Rios has been arrested by ICE, Seven and Raffi go to the LAPD to get information on him and are perplexed by the fact there's a distinction between the LAPD and ICE. I wonder if this is supposed to be because they're used to Starfleet handling everything in the 24th century?
Perhaps the underlying assumption is that those goody-do-empires have a tendency to merge quickly. After all, they'll agree that cooperation is better than conflict and perhaps even competition. It would also explain how the Federation got so large in a relatively limited time span.
Also (but that's a tangential question) I still wonder whether worlds or species join the Federation. I mean, we've seen lost human colonies that weren't part of the Federation, but have we ever seen a colony of humans or Vulcans that refused to join the Federation? (I don't count the 32nd century in this, that seems a fundamentally different situation).
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I can see the promotional posters of the Federation now. Life-sized picture of both Captain Picard and Captain Janeway standing side by side, with huge capital lettering over it:
"WE * OFFER * INSUFFERABLE * SMUGNESS"
and then, in tiny print at the bottom of the poster
'Still a step up from the abject terror the others have to offer!'
Probably draws in new prospective member worlds by the dozens.
DS9 S3 "Shakaar" establishes pretty definitively that the First Minister of the Republic of Bajor is a popularly-elected office. Popular elections are more commonly associated in real life with heads of state rather than heads of government, but elected heads of government aren't unknown -- the Israeli Prime Minister was popularly elected from 1996 to 2001, for instance.
That would make sense, yeah. I imagine the Federation Constitution probably prohibits the UFP itself from having an official religion, but not its Member States.
I mean, I can imagine scenarios in which glassing a planetary surface might seem to some people like a reasonable course of action -- if a mostly-uninhabited colony world's surface is contaminated with an extremely contagious virus, or if a powerful alien force based on the surface poses a threat to other systems. So I can see where a constitutional amendment might well be necessary to restrain that point of view.
I just don't see how that's any more efficient than just having a division that specializes in shipbuilding.
For whatever it's worth, we know from ST09 that in the 2240s of the Kelvin Timeline, the theft of an antique motor vehicle in Iowa was handled by what appeared to be a non-Starfleet civilian peace officer.
For the same reason no Star Trek series until S1-3 of DIS had anyone other than the commanding officer as the main character: The writers want to depict the biggest conflicts as falling all upon the same character, so they consolidate both ship command responsibilities and diplomatic leadership responsibilities onto the commanding officer.
Meh. I hope it's a worker-owned co-op.
To be specific, they never said per se that the concern was confusing the viewer. What Moore said was, "We discussed having the Prez 'federalize' the Earth defense forces or supercede the authority of an indigenous Earth Govt, but the story kept getting too complicated and we didn't want to start mentioning all these other players and organizations that we weren't going to see." He's not making an assertion about what the audiences will or will not be able to follow -- he's making an argument about keeping a 45-minute television episode streamlined to its most essential elements.
I mean, that's just the nature of having a military of any sort. The armed forces will always be the most physically powerful unified force in the state and will always be physically capable of a coup. The key is to have a political culture and operational ethos that makes it politically impossible even if it's physically possible.
Yeah, Star Trek does yield to at least one aspect of the international relations school of realism: the acknowledgment that in the absence of a larger legitimate governing body, there will tend to be a handful of states with imperialistic tendencies that fill the power vacuum and attempt to establish an imperial structure. Star Trek arguably draws upon International Relations Realism's rival school of thought, International Relations Liberalism, in its assertion that a genuinely democratic state with constitutional rights which treats smaller states as equals can serve as an effective large-scale counter to imperial powers.
I'm not sure what you're referring to?
In fairness to the UFP, even the most critical look at the Federation, Deep Space Nine, makes it very clear that no planet is pressured to join the Federation if they don't want to. Bajor literally never suffers negative consequences for its government's vacillation on whether to join the UFP or kick the UFP out of the system.
To me that's like saying you like the idea that private prisons are still around. Defense contractors, with their need for profits and eternal growth, tend to use their political power to influence governments to create perverse incentives against peaceful resolution of conflicts.
The Rise of the Federation book series posits that, yeah. Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel establishes that the Rigel planets consisted of multiple planets that eventually came into contact with one-another in their system and then united as a single polity called the United Rigel Worlds and Colonies. The Federation had to persuade the URWC that they should join the UFP as a single Federation Member State, as the URWC felt that they were already a successful example of interplanetary cooperation
I think they just can't quite believe that there's a supposed "law enforcement agency" dedicated to criminalizing immigrants on the basis of ethnicity.
That would certainly make sense. What's the point of the Interstellar Commonwealth, the Intersystems Union, and the United Federation of Planets all maintaining themselves as separate entities, if they can instead unite under one flag or the other on nearly identical terms and thereby pool their resources?
I don't see how you could claim that an entire species belongs to the Federation. There are always going to be dissident colonies that want independence, y'know?
Nor does it make sense per se to imagine that it's worlds that join. What if you have a civilization that inhabits space habitats built into asteroids in their system's asteroid belt, having abandoned their planet altogether? Or a species like the Andorians and Aenar, who are native to a moon rather than a planet? Or if there's a population of Tellarites living on Qo'noS because they don't want to be UFP citizens?
Just like Long Island isn't a "member" of the United States but the State of New York is, I think it makes more sense to assume that Federation Members are polities, not units of geography or biology. Earth did not join the Federation; United Earth, whose territory encompasses Earth, Luna, and Titan, joined the Federation. The Andorians did not join the Federation; the Andorian Empire, whose citizenry consists chiefly of biological Andorians and Aenar, joined the Federation. Etc.
The need for never ending profits and eternal growth isn't limited to defense contractors. It's applicable to all companies who think that eternal profits / growth is realistic or that they've failed if they don't have eternal growth / profit.
It's a unrealistic expectation perpetuated by greed & lust for power.
It's the idiots who use "Crony Capitalism" to rig the government to have legislators in their pockets and give Corporations / Entities similar rights to people and to screw over the citizenry.
That's the main issue.
Well in fiction, maybe I'm for all that. Whatever produces the most interesting story. If Starfleet and the Federation are kind of fantasy of the idealistic military/space exploration group and a working communist utopia then there's room for good defense contractors. And especially in fiction there's always need for antagonists if not outright villains. Starfleet is supposedly pure and good morals and yet never stopped a writer for making another bad egg of an Admiral/Captain or what have you. I'm sure the novels and other media have had plenty of underhanded politicians or other government officials. Anyway, I'm more thinking of the guys that people like Leah Brahms might have worked with, good salt of the earth people who just want to make some new Starfleet toys.
Okay, so you're talking about episodes like "The Apple" then?
This is very true. And also a reason why I love ST's traditional anti-capitalist stance.
I mean, I think there's always a tension between the desire to write the Federation as an example of a progressive society worth emulating, and the desire to depict the Federation doing things that are bad as an example of what society should not do. My personal stance is that some level of deconstructionism is fine, but the ultimate answer should still be that the UFP represents a more enlightened society than real life.
The latter negates the former.
Well, again, all I can say is that I hope those companies are worker-owned, democratically managed co-ops.
The Borg? They're just sitting in the corner looking sly and so fly... they cremated the Federation once, became tissue paper three years later, then magically became strong again - at least for a while. ("I Bprg" isn't perfect at times, but in retrospect they tried to do something original and not just do "more of the epic!" and it's better off as a result.)
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