Size and Strength of Empires

[Timo]

In fact, I am now reminded that in the entire history of Trek, it's been all but openly stated that Starfleet has almost no permanent presence on Vulcan in the first place (the Vulcans, having recently found out they are pacifists, don't have a fleet of their own).

The same is true of Earth, though. There don't appear to be any permanently positioned starships there in peacetime, and even in the middle of heated war most of these ships find much better things to do than hang around Earth.

Apparently, keeping fleets within star systems is unwise for some reason. It's never done in peacetime, and it seems it's seldom done in wartime, either. In the former case, there might be contrary political pressures; in the latter, the forces might be better used operating at some distance to provide depth of defense. The end result is clear, though: Starfleet is not a sessile force, in terms of starship deployments.

Fixed fortifications are a different thing - we never saw if Starfleet operates something comparable to Chin'toka, but we did hear of fixed defenses at Betazed and previously at Earth, Mars and Jupiter. Things would probably make better sense if such potent fortifications indeed were commonplace, and the fortress troops might indeed be heavily "ethnic", then. But we haven't properly seen that element of Starfleet yet.

There's no indication they were tasked with protecting Betazed at all. It's just as likely they were the only task force within range to reinforce the Betazed after they were defeated.

As per the quotes, the same argument should apply to the 3rd Fleet vs. Earth...

Is Bajor a general assignment? Or are there some undisclosed historical/economic/political ties between Earth and Bajor?

In theory, there might be. But none seemed to play a role in the last bit of local nastiness before the show, as Starfleet apparently didn't lift a finger to help Bajor out of Cardassian rule while otherwise fighting the Union.

Or is it simple proximity; it is apparently possible to make the Earth-Bajor run at Warp 8 in about four days.

Distance to, say, Vulcan or Andor would be pretty much identical. And we've never heard of a division of labor in the defense of the Federation, not as regards its inner assets, not as regards its more distant ambitions. Starfleet fights near Earth, defends the Romulan border near Vulcan, has ambitions towards Bajor, is the only force ever referred to as standing between the UFP and the Klingons or the Breen or the Tholians... It's very difficult to argue that they could be so self-centered as to forget to mention other major or even moderate contributions.

What are the odds that Nazis or Allies in an average WWII movie would forget to mention Italy, even if in the sense of "they aren't contributing much"? Perhaps 50% or so. But we aren't watching a movie - we're watching close to a thousand hours of material. The complete absence of references to Starfleet's "colleagues" or "competitors" is utterly implausible there.

...with Bajor's almost legendary pride, I severely doubt they would submit to turning in Bajoran uniforms, weapons, equipment and customs for those of an alien race they have only known for a handful of years.

In which case the UFP gives them the finger and tells them to try again in a century or so, when they have learned to behave. Starfleet Vulcans aren't seen wielding lirpas or walking in aluminum miniskirts much, now are they? Who knows, perhaps humans also were told to ditch blue or green coveralls and shoulder patches and hats and ceremonial swords and gunpowder sidearms and hand salutes, on the pain of exclusion from Starfleet?

And yet we rarely saw colonies whose populations were composed primarily of non-humans. The most likely explanation is that Enterprise, like all ships in the Earth branch, placed supervision and patrol of Earth colonies as one of their priorities.

That was the unvoiced premise of TOS, yes. And Kirk's ship seldom responded to acute colonial crises at all, perhaps because of problems with reaction time - so their colonial visits could all easily have been on a preplanned human-biased schedule.

We could just as easily agrue, though, that humans are virtually the only UFP members out there who happen to be in a colonizing phase right now. Older cultures might be satisfied with what they have already, and their people would have no internal pressures for an exodus. Younger cultures might be too timid. So it's just the crazy humans who colonize, or join Starfleet.

Either possibility separately, or both jointly, would help explain away the obvious bias towards humans in Star Trek. But neither should be used for worsening the problem, by implying that there are even less aliens in the mix than shown. Mixed crews and colonies are portrayed whenever the budgets allow; this effort should be supported, not opposed.

Back to the Vulcan situation:

It is implied in Amok Time, Gambit, and STXI, all three instances would have rendered the prevailing situation immensely silly if a Starfleet base (with its own contingent of vessels) existed in orbit of the planet.

But bases don't tend to have contingents of vessels, from what we see. Even bases at military hot spots are hard pressed to pull together two dozen ships of which half are truly operational. Earth doesn't tend to have contingents of vessels, either.

What in STXI would have been different if Starfleet had a major presence at Vulcan? Nero would still have wiped it out and effected a communications blackout.

What in "Gambit" would have been different? Should Picard have gone through some sort of Starfleet bureaucracy before being allowed to beam down in hunt of the pirates and agents targeted by his undercover mission? Should local Starfleet ships have come to blast Baran's ship out of the sky? Should local Starfleet police have stormed the caves?

If Starfleet were present on Vulcan, they'd have known to stand aside. If Starfleet weren't... Now there we would have had problems, as then Vulcan authorities would not necessarily have known to stand aside.

And Sela stops just short of stating this outright, since the entire "using civilian ships to land invasion troops" plan depends on those troops being able to capture and hold ground and then fortify their positions before Starfleet forces could arrive to dig them out. That plan goes all to hell if a Starfleet presence is already there that can stamp out the invasion before they can go anywhere.

Yet the episode establishes that there are Vulcan defense vessels responding to the threat, once it is recognized. Sela would have known this, too; her calculations would not have hinged on the absence of defenses.

What the episode doesn't establish is that the defense vessels would be anything else than generic Starfleet.

The same also occurs in STXI, where Nero has no trouble at all pulling into orbit of Vulcan and drilling holes in the planet, but apparently needs to get the access codes to the defense system to pull the same trick on Earth.

What makes you think he didn't need or have access codes to Vulcan? He had a simple means of obtaining such codes, and it seemed to work just fine in case of Earth. And he had certainly demonstrated that starship fleets, regardless of their ethnic nature, were no hindrance.

Unless it was known the 10th fleet was in the area and Starfleet thought that angle was well covered.

A situation identical with the 3rd Fleet vs. Earth, then.

Although the dialogue is specific in that the 10th was caught outside the Betazed system, meaning it was supposed to be inside the system.

Given the ease with which a Ferengi marauder can abduct people from their planet, it does not seem that Betazed is a major Starfleet post either.

Nor is Earth. A Ferengi Marauder can surprise the Moon into panic, as in "Descent". And our heroes and villains secretly come and go to and from the Klingon and Romulan homeworlds as they please; in "Menage a Troi", Daimon Tog didn't need to sneak in or out or anything, he just publicly sailed out with two forcibly beamed-up passengers aboard.

The idea of a "major Starfleet post" just doesn't seem to exist. There are starbases where dozens of ships temporarily receive maintenance, repair and overhaul, but none is known to lie close to a major UFP planet. And then there are major UFP planets where Starfleet has representatives and surface and orbital installations but no known permanently positioned starships.

I'd agree that the Bajoran Militia might still exist and function within the Bajoran system

I'd actually dispute even this - as we have never heard of such an arrangement before. There are no local militias or even police forces in evidence anywhere within the UFP. The known "ethnic" contribution of the ancient and proud Vulcan culture to their own defense or policing is an intelligence agency, a bunch of paper-pushers. And as "Gambit" shows, Starfleet actually does even this work for them...

...invalidating the references to the Enterprise as a United Earth ship in early TOS.

All the more easily done because there were no such references!

Apart from the second pilot episode, the only "Earth ships" mentioned in TOS by our heroes were Mudd's vessel, and the vessels Spock wanted to warn of Balok in "Corbomite Maneuver".

Of course, aliens would speak of Earth even when they meant the Federation, just like Germans spoke of England when they meant Great Britain plus the Polish, Norwegian, French etc. refugee governments. And even Spock could be considered a foreigner in this context: he kept on considering mankind an "Earth" thing, referring to "Earth" emotions and practices and stains in history whenever he meant mankind. So his "Earth ships" in "Corbomite" could be dismissed on this basis, leaving just Kirk's single "Is Mudd's ship an Earth ship?". And Kirk might well have had a solid practical reason of asking that specifically, rather than "Is Mudd's ship a Federation ship?".

Even in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", where Kirk muses that there might have been "another Earth ship" before them at the galactic barrier, his choice of words is perfectly defensible. If that other, ancient ship is a human one, then it must automatically be an Earth ship, not a Starfleet or Federation ship. Doesn't mean that Kirk's own ship would have to be considered an "Earth ship", despite the use of the specifier "another".

Starfleet culture is naturally going to be a very different kind of operational culture than any of the worlds its officers come from; that's why you get four years of Academy training: To break you of your native culture and rebuild you into the Starfleet operational culture.

And that seems to work just fine for Vulcans and Andorians in Starfleet. And for Bolians and Bajorans and Klingons and Ferengi and whatnot. Just because we haven't seen a Tellarite in uniform (or did we, in the movies?) doesn't mean Tellarites would need specially constructed ships. After all, we haven't seen such ships, either - it's two cases of absence against each other.

It makes no sense that independent races that only recently MET each other, who do not even share the same planet together, would begin to associate themselves primarily as members of an interplanetary superstate and not first and foremost as members of a species that has many allies.

In that case, the races may remain independent. The UFP and Starfleet have many allies: Klingons, and lately Romulans and Cardassians. They also have many members: Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites. The two sets of cultures made two different types of choice. Some allied, others joined. Both have to pay a price for their choice.

So what? Earth is the capital planet of the Federation. That doesn't mean that Starfleet owes any more special loyalty to Earth because it's Earth; they'd react the same way if the Federation capital planet was Vulcan or Andor or Deneva or Delta or Bolarus.

And here again "Earth" is prefectly valid shorthand for "the Federation". If the region of Earth is left poorly defended, this means the Federation is left poorly defended, because Earth, Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Berengaria and so forth all supposedly lie in the same area, as seen from the distant Bajor at least.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RAMA]

My power ranking, circa the end of the Dominion war, from 1-10:

1. Dominion-9 Depleted but still strong
2. UFP-7.5 Re-armed for war but also heavy losses
3. Romulans-7 Lost a fleet but took less drastic losses than the Klingons.
4. Klingons-6 Battle happy Klingons took heavy losses despite probably having numerical superiority in ships over the UFP
5. Breen-4 Still allied with Dominion?
6. Tholians-4 Neutral but still a small force
7. Cardassians-1 Not so good

The only difference I would have with you you is I would put the Breen in a lot better position. They were still militarily very strong having joined the war so late. If they found a way to tweak their dampening weapon again they'd be a major threat to the Romulans and the Federation. And just because they were allied with the Dominion doesn't mean they'd let the victors run over them post war. In fact if there was any post DS9 Trek I would have bet on the Breen to be the major adversaries.

Well the Breen could be considered part of the Dominion as well. Any advantage the Breen had with their dampening weapon was lost when they were counteracted by the AQ allies.

RAMA

 

[Xerxes1979]

The Cardassian Union has never had a strong case for a large or expansive stellar empire.

If Cardassia is only a day's travel from Bajor then you get the rather unimpressive distance of 2.81 ly at warp 8 or 4.15 ly at warp 9.

Any space fairing race should expand outward from an origin point until it reaches a contraint on territorial expansion. The Federation obviously met such a constraint in terms of bumping into Romulan and Klingon space. But by then the radius of explored space was at least 20-50 light years distant from Earth.

If there was an economic and or colonial justification for the occupation why would it not have been undertaken shortly after the Cardassian development of FTL? From onscreen references it would appear that either neutral space or Federation territory lies some distance beyond Bajor. The occupation of Bajor and the border wars with the Federation only make sense if those events where viewed as the results of a wave of first time exploration not a bizzare doubling back and exploitation of charted space.

 

[Timo]

One could argue that Cardassia spread radially and evenly out of the home system, by the usual means of conquests and alliances - and that Bajor at first was an alliance rather than a conquest. But then the Union would have run into the UFP, the Klingons and the Breen.

Now, as I had a hand in creating the Star Charts maps of the situation, let me speculate the way I did there. The basis would be the onscreen maps showing the Union as a large lump extending to the left (spinwards) from the home system, but only as a narrow pseudopod to the lower right (antispinwards) from there. Why the seeming big "hollow" to the upper right - a hollow that extends all the way to Bajor, to the very doorstep of the home system (the canon maps show a distance of about five lightyears)?

Why, because of the old war with the Federation. Starfleet probably had a hands-down victory there, considering how pathetic the pre-Dominion military capabilities of the Union were shown as being. And in Star Charts, I speculate that Earth would lie in the direction from whence the "chomp" came that carved the hollow in the sphere of Union influence.

The war would have torn the Union's alliances in that direction asunder, but the Feds would not have been out to conquer any worlds or systems. They would have pressed towards Cardassia Prime with punitive intent, forcing the Union to either surrender and cease its original aggression, or then suffer damage to its very core. But they would have stopped short of Bajor, because of the same reasons the US stopped short of invading mainland Japan: Cardassian resistance there would have been too vehement, resulting in massive casualties (albeit mostly Cardassian).

So after the war, the Feds would withdraw to their own space. The hollow would remain largely sympathetic to the Cardassian cause, with former allies such as the Klaestron, Kressari and Xepolites now individually and indirectly supporting the Union; Federation colonists would spread there, too, but the UFP would not find enough support to establish a permanent presence or to draft any members in the area.

Thus, a sphere with part of it missing, because another sphere once overlapped on it but then withdrew (as only the UFP would). And Bajor, an old "post-colonial" holding, later annexed for good when postcolonialism no longer was sufficient for exploiting the world, would remain the only Cardassian buffer in the direction of the UFP.

No "doubling back" would be required. Just an expansion policy that at first did not involve outright conquest, either because the CU was not strong enough to do that or then not yet desperate enough. The desperation would grow, though - the talk about famines appeared to refer to the lifetime of Gul Madred, thus probably at most to the final century before the Dominion War, and probably to an even shorter time. Prior to these times, Cardassia would be a relatively benign power without violent ambitions in its expansion program. And its neighbors would either be relatively puny at the time, or then completely disinterested in expansion like the venerable Bajor.

Bajor would be annexed a few decades before the conflict with the Federation, in the strategic sense becoming to Cardassia Prime what Okinawa was to Japan in WWII (although resources-wise probably more like what Manchukuo was to it, or what India was to Great Britain).

I like to speculate that Chin'toka was another "crown jewel" similar to Bajor, conquered and occupied but not yet exhausted by the time of the Dominion conflict. There could have been other similar systems in the direction of the Breen Confederacy, untouched by the war (but possibly touched by the Klingon raids after "Way of the Warrior", much as described in "Return to Grace").

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

That's compelling, Timo. It doesn't, however, explain why the Federation, in a position to dictate terms to Cardassia, permitted colonies to fall into the DMZ.

I've always figured that the Cardassian conflict was like Korea or Vietnam, in the sense that the Federation (the UN or US forces) clearly outclassed the enemy in every respect, and inflicted casualties so high many active genocides haven't reached the same numbers, but did not have the political will to go for the jugular (no nukes in China, no invasion of the PRVN = no orbital bombardment of Cardassia or perhaps no invasion of Union territory proper).

The Cardassians, under this model, completely exhausted themselves in order to "win," with winning defined as "not losing any territory," with Cardie colonies still run by Cardies with Union citizenship. Conversely, the Federation didn't give enough of a crap about the proto-Maquis, who numbered in a few mere millions and were counter-culture anyway to have fled the decadence of the core systems, to really go out of their way to defend the interests of.

I really like the notion of Bajor as a subordinated but not abject partner of Cardassia. It would explain so very much about why any Bajorans are still alive all, given the apparent Cardassian capability of wiping them out. I've also considered a contest for public support between the vestigial democratic organ of the government, a potentially anti-conquest/anti-genocide Detapa Council, and the anything-goes military wing, a potentially kill-them-all-and-let-the-Prophets-sort-it-out Central Command, as a reasonable rationale for Bajoran existence.

The reputation of the Union abroad would also necessarily factor into this. Kind of like how the RAF didn't channel the eternal spirit of Sir Arthur Harris and carpet bomb Buenos Aries to punish Argentina for the unprovoked invasion of the Falklands, or how even Russia didn't just totally obliterate Chechnya (though I suppose ymmv).

I just wish we'd seen a more subtle, more futuristic occupation than "Bajoran slave labor pushing mine carts from one end of a space station to another." Oh well, if you can't let Star Trek paint in broad strokes, you might as well not let Star Trek paint.

Hey, regarding Star Charts--it puts the Tzenkethi and the Talarians (you know, the race of child-abusers--I might have gotten their name wrong, there are a lot like that) on the borders of Cardassia. I wonder how expansionistic they were not to successfully annex those losers, particularly the Talarians; is it presumable that the Dominion occupied them during the war (the Denmark and Norway of the Alpha Quadrant)?

 

[Timo]

It doesn't, however, explain why the Federation, in a position to dictate terms to Cardassia, permitted colonies to fall into the DMZ.

Well, the DMZ was a relatively late construct. The Feds would have been challenged on their borders by the expanding CU, would have retaliated, and would then have largely forgotten about that section of space - but UFP colonies would have kept on forming in the general region. And since the CU refused to accept that it had been beaten, perhaps indeed continuing a guerilla-style action, at one point the Feds would decide that straightening up the border would be necessary, for tactical-logistic reasons alone.

A few dozen colonies here or there would be of no concern to the UFP. Colonies would litter all directions of space anyway, and forcibly relocating a few would be a trivial operation - Kirk did it often enough. The DMZ would be a really "cheap" way to secure peace with Cardassia, and it would be no real loss to the victorious UFP.

I really like the notion of Bajor as a subordinated but not abject partner of Cardassia.

This is pretty much canon. Kira and Kai Opaka both spoke of the Cardassians initially having come bearing gifts and promises. The real occupation only kicked in later on, apparently.

I just wish we'd seen a more subtle, more futuristic occupation than "Bajoran slave labor pushing mine carts from one end of a space station to another."

But we only saw the final stages of the occupation, which was described as squeezing the planet dry and then discarding it. There might have been a more interesting half a century before that - and an even more interesting century before that.

Hey, regarding Star Charts--it puts the Tzenkethi and the Talarians (you know, the race of child-abusers--I might have gotten their name wrong, there are a lot like that) on the borders of Cardassia. I wonder how expansionistic they were not to successfully annex those losers, particularly the Talarians; is it presumable that the Dominion occupied them during the war (the Denmark and Norway of the Alpha Quadrant)?

I used the Talarians and the Tzenkethi as competing, smaller "bubble empires" that defined the limits of Cardassian expansion in directions not covered by the Breen, the solid UFP core, or the Klingons. I knew the Art Department had placed both on the "western half" of the map originally, and there was plot reason to believe that the Tzenkethi lay close to Bajor anyway. But there was no mention of direct conflict between these powers and Cardassia, so I drew no actual contested borders there. The Union simply hadn't gotten that far yet.

I would think that these two powers would have been among those signing non-aggression treaties with the Dominion prior to the war. They would be UFP enemies, but not arch-enemies: too timid to join the Dominion side in the fight, with painful memories of the last time they burned their fingers. And the trick the Dominion tried to play on the Tzenkethi in "The Adversary" would leave them wary of both sides - but still probably thinking that Dominion's star was the ascending one. Thus a "preemptive" occupation by the Dominion would not have been necessary.

Denmark was a vital stepping stone to Norway. I found no evidence that Tzenketh would have been a stepping stone to anywhere. If anything, its location nicely fit where I needed buffers: the canonical Badlands region, and the canonical direction of Ferenginar.

The canon "war maps" never showed expansion in these directions, either. They did show initial massive expansion in the upper left direction, later reversed; this was a nice place for the Breen, then. Perhaps the Union, after allying with the Dominion, initially wanted to settle scores with its old arch-enemy, figuring that expansion in that direction would secure their backs. But it backfired instead.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What makes you think the Bajorans hadn't been in contact with the Federation long before the Occupation?

I assume that they HAD. But Bajor hasn't been a prospective Federation member for that entire time period either; evidently, they never had a reason to until their planet was ransacked by the Cardassians. It's certainly doubtful that Starfleet had the kind of permanent day-to-day presence they had post-occupation, which would be required to build that kind of familiarity. Otherwise, until DS9 goes up, humans are as good as Ferengi, Breen, or any other aliens the Bajorans happen to know: just another group of foreigners.

Or, rather, the Militia's command structure being integrated into Starfleet Command's infrastructure.

Which would mean Bajor gets a new Starfleet office, "Commander in Chief - Bajor Sector," and the Bajoran Militia becomes known to everyone else as "The Bajor Branch of Starfleet." It's doubtful anything else would change in the entire organization.

I think it's pretty clear, actually. Once the writers actually created the Federation in "Arena," we never saw the Enterprise referred to as an Earth ship again, nor did we ever see any of the other crews called Earth crews.

You could say the same thing for early TNG, when the position of the Klingon Empire was not entirely clear; it was vaguely implied that the Klingons had actually JOINED the Federation, and that the ship that arrives in "Heart of Glory" is actually a Klingon Federation vessel; hence Korris tells Worf "I didn't know there were Klingons serving aboard Human Starfleet vessels." Though even back in TOS, we have Kang commenting in "Day of the Dove" that "We need no special reason to hate Earthmen."

Though no longer stated openly, it is still recognized by just about everyone that the Starfleet WE see is the primarily-human force of the Federation.

We don't know this at all. As I noted, we don't even know if those Humans were United Earth citizens...

It doesn't matter. Earth ships have jurisdiction even when they're NOT United Earth citizens. They just have to be humans, not even Federation members. Indeed, it is distinctly implied that Deneva--one of Earth's oldest and most developed colonies--has had "No Federation contact for over a year" until the moment Enterprise arrives in orbit.

Think about that. What could that even mean, for a Federation colony to have no Federation contact?

And there's certainly no evidence that the Enterprise is part of any "Earth branch" of Starfleet.

Except that its home port and primary command base is on Earth. If other ports and command bases exist, Enterprise is not assigned to them, so whatever organization Enterprise is a part of, that organization is headquartered on Earth.

This limits you to two possibilities:
1) There are no other branches except the one whose headquarters is on Earth
2) There are other branches headquartered on other worlds of which we have seen practically nothing.

The first makes Earth an expansionist colonizing force, and the Federation is an Earth Empire. The latter makes the Federation a cooperative of mostly sovereign worlds, united primarily through a central bureaucracy.

Says who? Starfleet culture is naturally going to be a very different kind of operational culture than any of the worlds its officers come from; that's why you get four years of Academy training: To break you of your native culture and rebuild you into the Starfleet operational culture.

I'm not talking about operational culture. Tellarite PSYCHOLOGY is fundamentally different; basic behavior and custom involves the casual trading of insults and sometimes of violence as terms of endearment. Military regulation is one thing, but to expect Tellarite cadets to completely change the entire nature of their interactions with non-tellarites would be to impose incredibly radical restrictions and limitations on their behavior. It would be like banning Muslims from praying more than once a day or requiring Hindu recruits to eat beef.

You could get around this problem by creating an all-Tellarite unit within Starfleet, but since the Tellarites already have their own ships, their own shipyards, their own traditions, history, spaceflight infrastructure, why would you NEED to? Simply have the Tellarites build their own fleet, then have that fleet answer to a unified command structure if and when they need to coordinate with non-Tellarites.

What makes you think the United Earth Starfleet is any more the same organization as the Federation Starfleet than the Pennsylvania State Navy was the same organization as the United States Navy?

Whether they are or aren't is irrelevant. It would mean that the newly formed Federation starfleet completely supplants other larger organizations much older and better organized, with its headquarters established on a planet that (with, in this case, the disbandment of Earth Starfleet) no spaceflight infrastructure of its own.

Again: the fact that most of these worlds have been building starships since humans still thought fixed-wing aircraft were a really clever idea. There isn't alot that humans could do to compel those various worlds to abandon their indigenous space fleet designs and traditions, short of pulling a Hiroshima/Nagaski on every one of them.

There's no particular reason to think that the United Earth Starfleet didn't just cease to exist, with its ships and bases immediately handed over to the new Federation Starfleet -- which I would theorize also happened to the Vulcan Defense Force, Andorian Imperial Guard, and Tellarite space force.

The problem with this is that all of these forces would not move their bases from their original locations, nor would they scrap their existing ship designs and switch to the set of vessels designed by human engineers on Earth and Mars. If they are part of "Starfleet" at all, it's as part of a joint unified command; it's extremely unlikely they even share the same regulations and rank structure, considering the differing laws and social norms these planets are bound to have.

It's a state.

We see the Federation Council pass legislation banning travel above Warp 5 throughout the entire UFP in TNG's "Forces of Nature;" no alliance would have that authority.

The U.N. does.

OTOH, it's not known to what extent those orders are binding on civilian traffic; it apparently only applies to Federation vessels, which would--as already mentioned--exclude civilian vessels operating out of Deneva and a huge number of Earth colonies. It would actually appear that "Federation vessel" means non-civilian vessels under the authority of the Federation Council. If not, the law is already unenforceable due to the lack of adequate enforcement for "warp speed limit." It's not as if half of Starfleet is going to be assigned to handing out speeding tickets.

We see the Federation President making foreign policy for the entire UFP (rather than contacting each individual Member State and gaining their input) in Star Trek VI.

And being consulted by the Vulcan ambassador, no less...

Why does Vulcan have an ambassador and what the hell is he doing in the President's office? Does the President of the United States consult advice from the Texan Embassy?

We see the Federation Starfleet instituting a system of martial law on Earth in DS9's "Homefront/Paradise Lost,"

And we see that this decision went over quite badly, being both unprecedented and extremely controversial. More to the point, it was the leading edge of a militaristic coup de tat that would put Earth directly under Starfleet control.

With these episodes, then, it becomes clear that the Federation Council is a legislature.

Technically, so is the U.N.. The question is how much power the Federation Council actually has. If local jurisdictions have the power to opt out or veto segments of Federation law within their own borders, it isn't a unified superstate.

Murder is legal on Vulcan under special circumstances. Is this because the Federation didn't bother to ban it, or because Vulcan local authority has veto power over Federation law?

The DS9 episode "The Ascent" establishes that Quark has to travel to a Federation world to deliver testimony to a Federation Grand Jury against a suspected member of the Orion Syndicate. Alliances don't operate grand juries

Except the international court of justice... again, the U.N. fits the bill.

But you get the idea. Federal power seems to be limited to interplanetary space and interplanetary dealings; treaties with non-Federation members, interplanetary commerce, deep space exploration and external military policy. It appears to have little or no direct authority over actual Federation members; they are free to conduct their own affairs within their own space, provided they don't disturb other members.

The one time Federation power is imposed over a Federation world is in Homefront/Paradise lost, where Sisko describes this action as the one thing that could permanently destabilize the Federation. If it is a power it theoretically legally has under special circumstances--and not just a legally-questinoable desperation move that Leyton was able to scare Inyo into taking--it's probably considered a Federation "nuclear option," only exercised if something goes TERRIBLY wrong.

Clearly, all relevant bureaucracy is built around the Federation by this point

Correction: the Federation has a bureaucracy to handle all of these matters. But "all relevant bureaucracy" doesn't quite fit the bill, since non-Federation organizations do exist to govern local affairs on Federation and non-Federation worlds which do not seem to answer to the Council or anyone else outside of their own world.

Bottom line: While it's true that the intention of the writers to depict the Federation as a state was not always so when it was first created, as I noted in the link I made to another post of mine above, the vast preponderance of evidence indicates that the Federation is a state.

The important bottom line is that IF the Federation is a state, then that state is necessarily the United Earth Empire. It is not only impossible, but a matter of cultural and historical inevitability that no such state could come into existence in the form depicted unless Earth had either violently or passive-aggressively conquered all of its present members. That would mean adding to the Bajoran "To do" list such errands as "abolishing political activism by the Kai, shutting down the Bajoran arms and space craft industry, drafting a twelve-point education program to change the official language of Bajor to Standard English, abolish the Bajoran Calendar in favor of the Stardate System," etc. When it is finished, Bajor would become a politely-conquered world, and Bajorans would have to book a flight to San Francisco just to join their own militia.

There are plenty of people on this board who have no problem with the Federation behaving in this way, and even more who would actually applaud such a policy. I am not one of them, and I do not think the evidence supports this anyway.

That really depends on the kinds of choices that those worlds make on the basis of their experiences, doesn't it? If they decide that union is better than independence, that they are better about to secure their rights and their safety from external threats, they'd certainly be able to create a common political identity.

Common political identity doesn't come from calculated choices. It comes from common political ORIGIN and similarity of ideology. It is for this reason that the United States allied with Britain and Europe after WWII instead of signing a new expansive alliance with the Soviet Union. Obviously, joining with the Soviets would have guaranteed better safety from external threats (who in the universe would dare threaten such an alliance?). But they didn't, because the matter of "protection from external threats" was vastly overshadowed by "We hate communists." Mutual hatred of communism was strong enough to form alliances between countries that had literally nothing else in common (how else does Don Rumsfeld shake hands with Saddam Hussein, except in the agreement that both of them hate communism and its proxies?).

If the mutual threat facing the Federation was the Romulans and Klingons, then an alliance makes sense in that regard. But a SUPERSTATE cannot be formed organically just from mutual antipathy for an outside force. The only way such a state can be formed is by force of the one and to the extreme chagrin of the other. Thus Poland joins the Warsaw Pact, not because they like communism, not because they are afraid of the Nazis coming back into power, but because the Soviets conquered them and they no longer have a choice. The polish and the Russians had essentially nothing else in common from which to sow the seeds of a superstate.

And neither do Andor, Tellar, Vulcan and Earth.

Political identity is a matter of a culture's choices

No, it's a matter of history. The U.S. rejection of communism was a product of institutional paranoia in the context of Cold War imperialism; prior to this, communism was an open subject even among American politicians. It didn't happen because we made a cultural choice, it happened because a handful of powerful people (most of them, members of the HUAC) made a particular choice and then ramrodded that choice down everyone else's throat.

Is that how you think the Federation was created? That Starfleet roams the galaxy making vague threats and disappearing its political enemies until prospective members decide they're better off joining the Federation than get on its bad side?

All that's implied in "Amok Time" is that there is an organization called Vulcan Space Central...

And that appointment to the Federation Council is NOT a democratic process, and that it is a decision assigned by appointment, probably by the equivalent of Vulcan's foreign ministry (hence T'pau has the option to turn down that appointment and give it to someone else). It is also implied that Vulcan laws and traditions are VASTLY different from Earth laws and traditions, which otherwise tend to reflect Federation laws and traditions.

But back to the T'pau angle: exactly what kind of Empire--even a nominally democratic one--enjoys a system where people can be elected to the legislature without even running for--let alone desiring--the position?

You're right; it's "In the Cards" that establishes that Starfleet (even before the war) is responsible for protecting Vulcan and Andor and Berengaria.

Incorrect. What is actually said is:

SISKO: Even though you're not a member of the Federation, Starfleet is committed to the protection of your world. We're not going to stand idly by and watch the Dominion conquer Bajor.
WINN: Can you promise me that you will not let one Jem'Hadar soldier set foot on Bajor? Can you promise me that you will use your entire fleet to protect our planet, even if it means sacrificing other worlds like Vulcan or Andor or Berengaria, or perhaps Earth itself?
SISKO: I can't make that kind of promise.

Winn's "Your Entire Fleet" is the entire Starfleet, from the smallest runabout to the Enterprise-E. Whether this includes non-human ships from organizations native to those worlds, or simply refers to the charter of Starfleet to reinforce non-Starfleet Federation forces (it doesn't make it clear either way) is pretty much irrelevant, because Winn--who is, let's face it, the LAST person who would know about Starfleet disposition and responsibilities--is asking a rhetorical question: is Bajor as important to you as it is to me?

Sisko is forced to concede that it isn't. Which now puts YOU in the interesting position of having to explain whether or not this would change if Bajor WAS a member of the Federation. If it would change, then "leaving Earth unprotected" is an incredibly silly thing to worry about if Starfleet is the military of the entire Federation. If it would not, then one wonders exactly how Starfleet gets any of its members to go along with such a deal: Disband your local forces, rely entirely on us, and I promise we won't abandon you unless we're really REALLY scared.

So what? Earth is the capital planet of the Federation. That doesn't mean that Starfleet owes any more special loyalty to Earth because it's Earth; they'd react the same way if the Federation capital planet was Vulcan or Andor or Deneva or Delta or Bolarus.

In which case the Federation explicitly is the Earth Empire, where Earth is "the homeland" that cannot be sacrificed, whether you are actually from there or not.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

What are the odds that Nazis or Allies in an average WWII movie would forget to mention Italy, even if in the sense of "they aren't contributing much"? Perhaps 50% or so. But we aren't watching a movie

Haha... what?!

In which case the UFP gives them the finger and tells them to try again in a century or so, when they have learned to behave.

And the incentive for the Tellarites not to build their own fleet independent of Starfleet is WHAT again?

Either possibility separately, or both jointly, would help explain away the obvious bias towards humans in Star Trek. But neither should be used for worsening the problem, by implying that there are even less aliens in the mix than shown. Mixed crews and colonies are portrayed whenever the budgets allow; this effort should be supported, not opposed.

What would undeniably support the effort would be more reference to non-Earth designs serving in Starfleet. If, for example, we got a glimpse of the Intrepid being destroyed by the space amoeba and saw a gigantic cylindrical vessel with a ring-shaped nacelle and an NCC number written in Vulcan text; that would neatly solve the problem, since then it becomes clear exactly what Starfleet is and how it operates.

Problematic, then, that we have "Take me out to the holosuite" which features a crew of Vulcans aboard a Nebula class starship. We are forced to conclude that these Vulcans are either immigrants from Vulcan, or that Vulcan doesn't build ships anymore and has to "buy" them from Earth.

As I said earlier, this kind of puts everyone else in their place in a pretty bad way: Earth is more important than all of them combined, so if something happens that threatens Earth, Starfleet gives them a cosmic "Screw you guys, we're going home." Easy to imagine in, say, a United States of America where some soldiers can see their home towns overrun by the enemy while retreating towards the capital... try explaining this in a similar situation where some crewmen see their entire species face extinction and enslavement while the rest of the fleet retreats back to Earth.

But bases don't tend to have contingents of vessels, from what we see. Even bases at military hot spots are hard pressed to pull together two dozen ships of which half are truly operational. Earth doesn't tend to have contingents of vessels, either.

Yet they have an abundance of weapons, shuttlecraft, personnel and equipment that would be highly useful in repelling an invasion by a few thousand Romulan commandos.

The other possibility that hasn't been considered here, though, is that Earth like Vulcan has become pacifist and is one of those Federation worlds that doesn't have its own fleet (at least, a fleet that answers to their government) just lets Starfleet do all the deep space work for them. The MACOs may or may not still exist even in the 24th century, but only operate in the Sol System. Whatever the explicitly pacifist Vulcan has in the way of planetary defense, it certainly isn't adequate to turn back such a small invasion.

And logically, it is nowhere near what Earth could bring to bear even without an orbiting fleet, hence the Romulans have never tried to sneak an invasion force onto Earth using a similar clandestine maneuver. Unlike on Vulcan, the Romulan troops would be massacred on their way off the boat.

What in STXI would have been different if Starfleet had a major presence at Vulcan?

The distress signal would have been from a Starfleet vessel, making brief reference to an attack from an unknown space craft before being destroyed. "Siesmic disturbances" implies the transmission source was on the planet, which means the Narada entered orbit unnoticed by anyone who might know better.

What in "Gambit" would have been different?

Baran's ship would have been intercepted--or at least challenged--by local defenses. OTOH, with a large Starfleet presence there it's doubtful he would have risked going there in the first place.

If Starfleet were present on Vulcan, they'd have known to stand aside. If Starfleet weren't... Now there we would have had problems, as then Vulcan authorities would not necessarily have known to stand aside.

As Vulcan authorities were not notified of the situation, how would they know to stand aside?

What makes you think he didn't need or have access codes to Vulcan?

He would have to take the extra step of capturing and worm-probing a Vulcan officer who would know those codes. The timeline doesn't really fit for that; it seems he simply pulled up in orbit of Vulcan and started drilling before anyone knew what the hell was going on. Starfleet arrived to provide support, and Nero blew the crap out of them. Then he saw Enteprise, recognized it as Spock's ship, and it occurred to him that Spock once served on a starship commanded by a bigshot like Christopher Pike who would know Earth's access codes.

The idea of a "major Starfleet post" just doesn't seem to exist. There are starbases where dozens of ships temporarily receive maintenance, repair and overhaul, but none is known to lie close to a major UFP planet. And then there are major UFP planets where Starfleet has representatives and surface and orbital installations but no known permanently positioned starships.

All of which seems to be contradicted by the singular example of DS9, especially after the Defiant is deployed there.

And then of course there's the Shroomdocks in TSFS and in 11001001.

 

[Timo]

And the incentive for the Tellarites not to build their own fleet independent of Starfleet is WHAT again?

Why, that they get kicked out of the Federation if they try to do that. No need for a carrot when the stick is big enough. It's only logical that the police would fall down hard on somebody trying to create his own shadow police force...

What would undeniably support the effort would be more reference to non-Earth designs serving in Starfleet.

It could be argued, though, that all the designs we see are non-Earth.

The first time in out-universe chronology when we had to accept that Kirk's ship and her successors might be of Earth design was ENT "Broken Bow", where the saucer plus two nacelles were explicitly shown to be an early Earth design. But we could just as well argue that Earth at the time was too primitive to come up with such stuff on its own, and that the saucer concept would be an alien contribution that would support the notion of later saucer ships also being largely alien in design origin.

Problematic, then, that we have "Take me out to the holosuite" which features a crew of Vulcans aboard a Nebula class starship. We are forced to conclude that these Vulcans are either immigrants from Vulcan, or that Vulcan doesn't build ships anymore and has to "buy" them from Earth.

Or then Earth buys all its Nebulas from Vulcan.

Your "problem" goes away if you stop thinking of humans, Vulcans and Andorians as competing nations and instead consider them citizens of the same nation, working in the same factories and building the same products for the seeming command economy. It's not as if the Opel factories in Spain insisted on building their cars in the traditional shape of fighting bulls, to differentiate them from Opels built in German factories, or anything silly like that. A starship is a starship - and the Feds would be really weird if they built numerous starship types that compete against each other!

...Of course, they seem to do exactly that - Starfleet seems to operate half a dozen types of ship that don't differ in their abilities or size, merely in their appearance. So perhaps the strange diversity of the Fleet is to some degree the result of different builders with different traditions?

Yet they have an abundance of weapons, shuttlecraft, personnel and equipment that would be highly useful in repelling an invasion by a few thousand Romulan commandos.

Apparently, Vulcan had that, too. Which is why the Romulans needed a cunning plan in order to invade, rather than just waltzing in. Mere equipment didn't stop the "Conspiracy" aliens from doing that to Earth, either.

Of course, we only have two statements on what the Romulan invasion plan really was like: the speculation of our heroes (who probably didn't have a clue) and the information divulged by the villains themselves (and we'd be insane to take them for their word). But that's a different story.

Earth like Vulcan has become pacifist

Umm, what is this about Vulcan pacifism that I keep hearing? Vulcans are fierce fighters. Sarek never said they'd be pacifists - he said that a Vulcan would commit murder whenever he felt it was logical. Spock never confessed to pacifist sentiments, either - he was the foremost advocate of offensive operations in "Balance of Terror". And when we finally saw an entire ship crewed by Vulcans, it was a ship of war heroes.

Spock's illusion of Surak in the Excalbian test was our only glimpse of a pacifist Vulcan. But Surak's followers seem to have taken a different tack: prior to the rise of Syrranism in ENT, Surakians seemed happy to run an imperialistic-aggressive shop that took by force what it could not get by threats of force, and there's little evidence that things would have changed much later on. Sure, there was talk of disbanding the High Command - but not of disarming Vulcan. Just organizational reshuffling in evidence there.

And logical Vulcans would be the first to shut down their "ethnic" weapons factories and erect ones producing standardized goods instead. That's a much more effective way to defend the Federation they have pledged themselves to.

The distress signal would have been from a Starfleet vessel, making brief reference to an attack from an unknown space craft before being destroyed. "Siesmic disturbances" implies the transmission source was on the planet, which means the Narada entered orbit unnoticed by anyone who might know better.

We know that starships can be jammed. We don't have any reason to think that they could always squeeze out a short message before being jammed.

However, we have never heard of planets being jammed. Even the Whale Probe didn't manage that one. So it would be perfectly in keeping with other material if the fleet around Vulcan were destroyed by Nero before they got a single word to their superiors, after which the surface installations would send their own panicky messages telling "we don't know what is going on" and only then go silent.

Baran's ship would have been intercepted--or at least challenged--by local defenses. OTOH, with a large Starfleet presence there it's doubtful he would have risked going there in the first place.

Umm, let's remember that Vulcan was informed of Baran's (or now "Galen's"/Picard's) pirate ship and told not to fire. It's not relevant, then, who was guarding the planet: Vulcans, Starfleet, both, or they-are-the-same-thing. The guardians would all have received notification from Riker, so their absence would tell us nothing.

As Vulcan authorities were not notified of the situation, how would they know to stand aside?

In the episode, they were notified. In the scenario where there'd be Starfleet there, they would have been notified, via Starfleet channels. In the scenario where there wouldn't be Starfleet there, they'd hopefully be notified via Vulcan channels, the way Riker notified them in the episode. So the events would be poor evidence for or against the presence of Starfleet or "ethnic" forces in any case.

He would have to take the extra step of capturing and worm-probing a Vulcan officer who would know those codes. The timeline doesn't really fit for that; it seems he simply pulled up in orbit of Vulcan and started drilling before anyone knew what the hell was going on.

There's no limitation on what he would have done before pulling up in orbit of Vulcan, though. Torturing people in the Vulcan know (that is, suitable Starfleet officers) would be an obvious thing for him to do.

We have some clues on what he was up to before the drilling, of course. There was a "space storm" before that. And a "space storm" was associated with the creation of black holes / inter-universe passages on at least two other occasions in the movie: Nero's initial arrival, and Nero's demise. It was not associated simply with Nero's ship, though. So we could speculate that the storm before Vulcan went silent was one of the following: 1) Spock arriving from his own black hole/passage, 2) Nero arriving via a passage he deliberately created for the purpose, or 3) Nero creating a black hole or a dozen for the purposes of defeating the Vulcan fleet or the Starfleet forces at Vulcan or both or they-are-the-same-thing.

..it occurred to him that Spock once served on a starship commanded by a bigshot like Christopher Pike who would know Earth's access codes.

As an aside, one wonders if Pike ever was a bigshot in the original universe. Certainly his promotion to "fleet captain" was still pending in 2258 in that universe. And if "fleet captain" is the same as "captain", as I like to believe, then he'd be more like a littleshot in Nero's records...

All of which seems to be contradicted by the singular example of DS9, especially after the Defiant is deployed there.

Hmh? I wouldn't count the Defiant as a starship worth mentioning - but DS9 is a very special case anyway, involving a potentially unique UFP installation outside UFP space in a strategic hot spot to outshine all strategic hot spots in history, and so forth.

And the ST3 Spacedock doesn't seem to provide Earth with a presence of starships in the usual case. Only in the unusual, it seems; and even then, apparently the only ship they could mobilize or attempt to mobilize in either ST3 or ST4 was the Excelsior.

So the absence of mighty UFP Starfleet armadas certainly doesn't tell that a planet would have to ward for herself as per the UFP Constitution, let alone that the planet would possess "ethnic" armadas of its own.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Well, maybe this is just due to a change in premise. In TOS the implication was that the Federation WAS a Human Empire, that the humans invented Warp Drive and that all the other member races were weaker partners they worked with instead of subjugating like the Klingons or Romulans. They even called it the "Earth Federation" at one point.

By TNG, it was more clear that it's a multi-species group and NOT a benevolent Terran Empire.

 

[Timo]

They even called it the "Earth Federation" at one point.

In the writers' bible, yes. Was it used in any episode dialogue, though?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Yes, in "Friday's Child" the leader of the Tribe they were negotiating with called it the Earth Federation.

 

[Matt4511]

That would fit with the politics of the sixties, where a dominant United States led the Free World, which were friendly, less advanced nations.

But I also think that how aliens perceive the Federation, and what the Federation is, aren't necessarily the same. While traveling with some Canadian troops, we were constantly called Americans by the locals. Doesn't mean we are, just that the guys I was with were white, spoke English, and carried M-16s.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And the incentive for the Tellarites not to build their own fleet independent of Starfleet is WHAT again?

Why, that they get kicked out of the Federation if they try to do that. No need for a carrot when the stick is big enough. It's only logical that the police would fall down hard on somebody trying to create his own shadow police force...

Which forces me to repeat the question: if the cost of membership is never having their own space force that they have any measure of control over, why did they join the Federation in the first place?

OTOH, we know as late as the 23rd century they DID have their own space force, so the real question is why would they have remained in the Federation if this suddenly ceased to be legal.

It could be argued, though, that all the designs we see are non-Earth.

If that were true, they would not be designed, tested and built in the Sol system by mostly-human crews.

But we could just as well argue that Earth at the time was too primitive to come up with such stuff on its own

No we couldn't, because Zephram Cochrane's prototype already established the basic shape for the nacelles, and the saucer-shaped primary hull is implied to be inspired by his brief glimpse of the Enterprise-E. Furthermore, if humans had used alien influence in the design process, Enterprise probably would have gone into space with a ring-shaped nacelle and a pointy cylindrical hull. Or, more likely, they would have attached a ring-nacelle to the drive section of a DY-500 class vessel (which I think is that unidentified Enterprise in the TMP recreation deck. Alternate timeline, maybe?).

Or then Earth buys all its Nebulas from Vulcan.

Doubtful, since the Nebulas have no internal or external features that are of recognizably vulcan origin.

Your "problem" goes away if you stop thinking of humans, Vulcans and Andorians as competing nations and instead consider them citizens of the same nation, working in the same factories and building the same products for the seeming command economy.

Which would require more diversity on every planet in the Federation than we have ever really seen. The concept of "homeworld" would instantly cease to exist, all Federation worlds are "home soil."

Yet in TOS, we see that Vulcan is still considered the home planet of the Vulcan species; it is sovereign enough that it has its own foreign ministry, even an embassy on Earth. In STXI, the destruction of Vulcan results in "a few thousand left" in the entire Federation; Spock considers Earth "the only home I have left" since he still has his human half.

This is not a feature common to nations; that my grandmother was born in Nashville would not cause her much consternation of the population of Tennessee was suddenly killed by a neutron bomb. Same for myself, and most of us here: we are tied to our home town by family/business/historical connections, but if we needed to we could move anywhere else in the country we want to, because it's all America anyway, and adopting a new home town is as easy as adopting a new neighborhood and a new house. It is a much different matter moving to a whole new COUNTRY, though, enough that most people prefer to remain where they are than move overseas unless they have a really good reason to.

Federation citizens more often operate in the latter paradigm than the former.

It's not as if the Opel factories in Spain insisted on building their cars in the traditional shape of fighting bulls, to differentiate them from Opels built in German factories, or anything silly like that. A starship is a starship - and the Feds would be really weird if they built numerous starship types that compete against each other!

You mean like the United States routinely does with its fighter planes?

Of course, they seem to do exactly that - Starfleet seems to operate half a dozen types of ship that don't differ in their abilities or size, merely in their appearance. So perhaps the strange diversity of the Fleet is to some degree the result of different builders with different traditions?

Which would make sense if they actually followed different traditions. But unless every starship since the Ambassador was designed by Bolian engineers (and we know for a fact they weren't) the shipbuilding tradition we do see is, in fact, a carryover from old Earth designs: saucer, nacelles, drive sections, pylons. The elements that were recognizeable in either Vulcan or Andorian ships in the 22nd century are totally absent in the 23rd, EXCEPT when it comes to the Vulcan ships we saw in "Unification" that still used the ring-shaped nacelles (and similarly advanced much like their Starfleet counterparts).

Mere equipment didn't stop the "Conspiracy" aliens from doing that to Earth, either.

Actually, "mere equipment" did. In the end, all it took was a tricorder and two hand phasers to bring their entire plan crashing to a halt.

Umm, what is this about Vulcan pacifism that I keep hearing? Vulcans are fierce fighters. Sarek never said they'd be pacifists - he said that a Vulcan would commit murder whenever he felt it was logical.

And yet he made a pretty dramatic point about Spock's decision to join Starfleet, that Vulcans do not approve of the use of force in the resolution of conflicts. This is probably because of their experience with V'las and his Romulan-controlled puppet government, not to mention the influence of the Syrannites and a rejection of anything resembling Romulan philosophy.

Spock never confessed to pacifist sentiments, either - he was the foremost advocate of offensive operations in "Balance of Terror"

As a Starfleet officer, not as a Vulcan philosopher.

And when we finally saw an entire ship crewed by Vulcans, it was a ship of war heroes.

And how I wish they had been on a natively Vulcan ship. That would have been something to see. Instead they get a stock-footage Nebula class and a baseball game.

We know that starships can be jammed.

Nero's ship was a mining vessel, not a warbird. The closest thing he had to a jamming device was that high-energy drill platform. A major plot device involved the fact that, once the drill was deactivated, Nero couldn't jam their signals anymore.

Umm, let's remember that Vulcan was informed of Baran's (or now "Galen's"/Picard's) pirate ship and told not to fire. It's not relevant, then, who was guarding the planet: Vulcans, Starfleet, both, or they-are-the-same-thing. The guardians would all have received notification from Riker, so their absence would tell us nothing.

Except that Baran's people expected to be able to approach Vulcan without being challenged and therefore didn't think there was anything weird about the lack of scrutiny from whoever was in charge of their airspace.

There's no limitation on what he would have done before pulling up in orbit of Vulcan, though. Torturing people in the Vulcan know

And Nero would have acquired these people where, exactly? Again: the only reason he didn't destroy Enterprise is because he recognized it as a ship with two such "in the know" officers on board. Unless he's memorized the entire history of Starfleet commanders in the 23rd century, he's not likely to get this lucky twice in one day.

And the ST3 Spacedock doesn't seem to provide Earth with a presence of starships in the usual case.

When the whale probe shows up, there are at least three of them in the dock (two if you exclude Excelsior). One is the ship that becomes the Enterprise-A, the other is an unnamed Miranda class.

 

[Anwar]

Plus, Admiral Cartwright said they were "launching everything we have" when the Probe arrived. There were probably more ships inside Spacedock but the Probe deactivated them all.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Yes, in "Friday's Child" the leader of the Tribe they were negotiating with called it the Earth Federation.

I was just thinking about that too. Friday's Child is the only one that does it so explicitly, but TOS is rife with implication insofar as Earth's supremacy either in Starfleet or the Federation or both. TNG is even worse, and both probably reflect the political realities of the time.

That would fit with the politics of the sixties, where a dominant United States led the Free World, which were friendly, less advanced nations.

But I also think that how aliens perceive the Federation, and what the Federation is, aren't necessarily the same. While traveling with some Canadian troops, we were constantly called Americans by the locals. Doesn't mean we are, just that the guys I was with were white, spoke English, and carried M-16s.

Is Canada not in North America?

 

[Timo]

Which forces me to repeat the question: if the cost of membership is never having their own space force that they have any measure of control over, why did they join the Federation in the first place?

You seem to confuse the sign of cost here. Without a national military, Tellarites would end up paying less for their protection - and that alone might be incentive enough to join the UFP.

There are no doubt thousands of other incentives for joining, but being protected through paying taxes rather than lives is probably among the major ones.

NATO countries have already agreed not to have air forces, because NATO gives them USAF protection. Instead, they can have these national things they call "air forces" that contribute to USAF but in practice cannot operate on their own, not against the intended threat of USSR (although with the threat gone, the air forces have regained a degree of worth - they can do stuff in peacetime, although they are unoptimal even for that). The same with navies. It's a positive development, as long as one trusts the master. And why wouldn't one, in the UFP case? If the Romulan War was bad enough, it would sure be a great idea to join for future protection. Klingons might be a nice big bad wolf as well.

Alternately, it may be that there are few if any military threats in the UFP, so locals have little patience for matters of defense, or for fools who equate defense with self-determination.

If that were true, they would not be designed, tested and built in the Sol system by mostly-human crews.

And probably aren't. The only ships we have seen tested or built at Sol have been Kirk's second one, nu-Kirk's first one, Picard's second one, and Janeway's. Doesn't mean that all ships are built there, or that the designs for the ones above would originate from Earth only (or be unavailable to others for silly reason X). And doesn't mean that Sol would be an Earth empire where no alien has business loitering. For all we know, industries are centered at Sol because humans are the industrial whores of the Federation. It's not as if the industrial centers of the US or the Soviet Union ever were the centers of leadership...

No we couldn't, because Zephram Cochrane's prototype already established the basic shape for the nacelles, and the saucer-shaped primary hull is implied to be inspired by his brief glimpse of the Enterprise-E.

That's a circular argument if I ever heard one. Even if the shape of the NX-01 hull was dictated by a UFO sighting (!), that only confirms the shape wasn't of Earth design origin...

Furthermore, if humans had used alien influence in the design process, Enterprise probably would have gone into space with a ring-shaped nacelle and a pointy cylindrical hull.

Quite to the contrary, it seemed Vulcans didn't want to give humans any of that stuff - so NX-01 should have looked like the exact opponent of Vulcan design. Which it did.

Or, more likely, they would have attached a ring-nacelle to the drive section of a DY-500 class vessel (which I think is that unidentified Enterprise in the TMP recreation deck. Alternate timeline, maybe?).

No doubt they tried ring drives. ENT timeline had one of those, too, memorized on the wall of the test pilot booze joint. But apparently that line was no go. Perhaps in their desperation, humans bought designs from Denobula or Trillius?

Doubtful, since the Nebulas have no internal or external features that are of recognizably vulcan origin.

Moot point. They have none of recognizably human origin, either. Or Andorian origin.

Which is only understandable, because they are Federation designs.

You mean like the United States routinely does with its fighter planes?

Huh? Today, the US cannot even afford two parallel engine designs for its sole tactical fighter, let alone a competing airframe design. And it desperately strives to "monolinearize" all other manned aircraft as well, for reasons of cost and maintenance. The UFP is in sharp contrast to that.

There certainly aren't "Texan" or "Californian" or "Hawaiian" fighter designs to be found in USAF service (despite the existence of the Air National Guard system). Why, then, should we expect there to be Vulcan or human ones in UFP SF service?

the shipbuilding tradition we do see is, in fact, a carryover from old Earth designs

Which makes perfect sense, now doesn't it? The design is the one that won the war that founded the UFP. Why give up on the good stuff? The world today operates military hardware based on that which won WWII for the US and the USSR (and which won the first half of it for Germany), and has fortunately forgotten all about the losing design philosophies that doomed, say, Japan and France.

What we see, again, is Federation stuff, with two centuries of traditions on it. That it would be "Earth" stuff is just bias from thinking that it must be. But there is no Earth tradition on saucer-hulled starships. As soon as those emerged, there was Federation, with at most a decade to spare.

And yet he made a pretty dramatic point about Spock's decision to join Starfleet, that Vulcans do not approve of the use of force in the resolution of conflicts.

No, he didn't. Sarek never said anything of the sort. Spock said that Vulcans don't approve of (personal) violence, in a feeble defense of his father when the senior became a prime murder suspect. And then the suspect himself denied this, saying he'd be quite capable of snapping the neck of his personal enemy.

Sarek personally didn't approve of Starfleet. AFAIK, there's no law against a US citizen disapproving of the US military, no matter which state he comes from, and it's been almost half a century since people got shot for that.

This is probably because of their experience with V'las and his Romulan-controlled puppet government, not to mention the influence of the Syrannites and a rejection of anything resembling Romulan philosophy.

We could spin a tale out of that, perhaps involving fateful Vulcan disarmament just before the Romulan War (meaning V'Las actually won that round!) and subsequent lack of Vulcan military influence in the newly founded UFP Starfleet. But such things have not yet been canonically described (although the line of novels is now hitting the shelves).

And how I wish they had been on a natively Vulcan ship. That would have been something to see. Instead they get a stock-footage Nebula class and a baseball game.

Both of which are excellent arguments for the homogenization of the UFP culture, all the way down to (or beginning with?) its Starfleet.

In the 24th century, Nebula and baseball define "natively Vulcan"...

Nero's ship was a mining vessel, not a warbird. The closest thing he had to a jamming device was that high-energy drill platform. A major plot device involved the fact that, once the drill was deactivated, Nero couldn't jam their signals anymore.

So? Jamming is jamming. If Nero's mining rig really had few or no dedicated combat components, then it's all the more likely he would have used his drill for fighting, including jamming the enemy.

But really, drawing conclusions on the intrusion of a ridiculously superior enemy like Nero, V'Ger, the Whale Probe or the Borg is not a good way to estimate the potency of the defender. Especially when the camera is turned away during the most crucial moments!

Except that Baran's people expected to be able to approach Vulcan without being challenged and therefore didn't think there was anything weird about the lack of scrutiny from whoever was in charge of their airspace.

We don't know what Baran's people expected, because their leader was killed before the Vulcan thing arose. Baran might have been intent on going along with Tallera's requests, or then not. What we do know is that he was willing to raid a Galaxy class starship earlier on - so sailing to Vulcan with his stealthy vessel should prove nothing about Vulcan defenses, merely something about Baran's guts (or brains).

And Nero would have acquired these people where, exactly?

Anywhere, in the 30 years he had to spare for the project.

Really, it's highly improbable that only two or three people in the universe would possess this information, or that Pike would happen to be the only one who had the corresponding Earth information. If Pike was good enough, then any starship captain would be. And Nero ate those for breakfast.

Not that Nero would really have needed the information, even regarding Earth. He could win hands down, that much he already knew. But he planned to have complete revenge, and this would work out better if he didn't die a random (and to him otherwise irrelevant) death before the job was completed. So he could and would go for targets of opportunity that smoothed out the path for him.

When the whale probe shows up, there are at least three of them in the dock (two if you exclude Excelsior). One is the ship that becomes the Enterprise-A, the other is an unnamed Miranda class.

And neither is seen powering up. That seems par for the course: if ships are at base, they are in a useless condition, and if they are useful, they aren't at base.

Really, since Starfleet never seems to have enough ships to defend all its assets at the same time, be it peacetime or wartime, it only makes sense that all of its fleets would be as free-roaming as the 3rd and 10th (or the 9th, which handled both Bajor and Chin'toka) are implied to be. Sessile or localized defenses just don't seem to be their style; they'd probably require an order of magnitude more ships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kai Winn]

the lack of planetary defences is puzzling indeed, and suggests that the purpose of the federation is rather conquest than defence. it makes no sense either, one can surely produce a lot more energy on a planet than on a small starship, so much more that a whole fleet of borg cubes is no match. after all, it existed 200 years before ds9. ent had an episode where a stationary phaser on mars hit an asteroid, and a target on earth (was it terra prime?), and that's a way larger distance than in battles between starships. let's not foget that the sf of star trek is sometimes quite absurd. a planet like earth is a solid ball of iron. nothing short of a sun or a massive black hole can wreck it, but certainly not a starship. well, maybe a starship flying at warp 9.9 hitting it. considering this, why don't they ever use kinetic weapons, at those speeds they produce a lot more destruction than beams or explosives. since i am at it, firing a phaser that works with the speed of light from a vessel that moves faster than light is not quite safe.

 

[Sci]

Or, rather, the Militia's command structure being integrated into Starfleet Command's infrastructure.

Which would mean Bajor gets a new Starfleet office, "Commander in Chief - Bajor Sector," and the Bajoran Militia becomes known to everyone else as "The Bajor Branch of Starfleet."

Or, rather, a service that operates within the Bajor system, dealing with local matters, unless called into Federation service by the Federation President, just like state National Guards.

Or are you going to argue that the Ohio Army National Guard is just the "Ohio branch of the United States Army?"

I think it's pretty clear, actually. Once the writers actually created the Federation in "Arena," we never saw the Enterprise referred to as an Earth ship again, nor did we ever see any of the other crews called Earth crews.

You could say the same thing for early TNG, when the position of the Klingon Empire was not entirely clear; it was vaguely implied that the Klingons had actually JOINED the Federation, and that the ship that arrives in "Heart of Glory" is actually a Klingon Federation vessel; hence Korris tells Worf "I didn't know there were Klingons serving aboard Human Starfleet vessels."

But, just like the idea that the Enterprise was a "United Earth starship" (as it was explicitly stated to be so in "The Corbomite Maneuver") was disregarded and the ship was retconned to have always been a Federation Starfleet ship, the idea that the Klingons had joined the Federation was disregarded and the Empire was retconned to have never joined the Federation.

Though no longer stated openly, it is still recognized by just about everyone that the Starfleet WE see is the primarily-human force of the Federation.

Again, I don't buy that. We've only seen a small fraction of the thousands of Starfleet vessels and bases that exist, and unknown numbers of those may have been non-Humans whom Humans resemble, such as Betazoids and Ardanians.

And even if most Starfleet officers are Human, what of it? Southerners make up a larger percentage of U.S. Armed Forces members than Northerners; that doesn't mean that the United States Army is the Southern Army or is a Southern institution.

We don't know this at all. As I noted, we don't even know if those Humans were United Earth citizens...

It doesn't matter. Earth ships have jurisdiction even when they're NOT United Earth citizens. They just have to be humans, not even Federation members.

1. You have not established that those were "Earth" ships.

2. Why? The Federation practices species discrimination now? A Tellarite-crewed Starfleet ship -- say, the U.S.S. Shallash -- could handle settling Human colonists on Cestus III as well as the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Indeed, it is distinctly implied that Deneva--one of Earth's oldest and most developed colonies--has had "No Federation contact for over a year" until the moment Enterprise arrives in orbit.

Think about that. What could that even mean, for a Federation colony to have no Federation contact?

Presumably it just means that it's a really remote colony. The Thirteen Colonies might not have had regular contact with the Kingdom of Great Britain, but that doesn't mean that they were specifically English colonies after the Acts of Union.

And there's certainly no evidence that the Enterprise is part of any "Earth branch" of Starfleet.

Except that its home port and primary command base is on Earth.

Actually, we don't know that the Enterprise's home port was on Earth. We know it was built there and then underwent a refit there, but that doesn't mean that that's where its home port was. Heck, the Enterprise never once visited Earth during TOS (except to travel into its past), but it visited Starbase 11 twice. I'd say there's a stronger case for Starbase 11 being its home port than Earth.

If other ports and command bases exist, Enterprise is not assigned to them, so whatever organization Enterprise is a part of, that organization is headquartered on Earth.

This limits you to two possibilities:
1) There are no other branches except the one whose headquarters is on Earth
2) There are other branches headquartered on other worlds of which we have seen practically nothing.

Considering that we heard the Enterprise receive orders from Starbases on plenty of occasions, I'm inclined to interpret that as evidence that Starfleet assigns the C.O.s of a given starbase authority over an area of space and all ships in that area, and that that is how Starfleet divides itself up, not on the basis of which Member State a given ship is closest to.

Sorta like how the Unified Combatant Commanders have authority over all U.S. forces within their UCC, irrelevant of whether a given unit is, say, based out of Fort Hood, Texas, or a given ship is home ported in Virginia.

Says who? Starfleet culture is naturally going to be a very different kind of operational culture than any of the worlds its officers come from; that's why you get four years of Academy training: To break you of your native culture and rebuild you into the Starfleet operational culture.

I'm not talking about operational culture. Tellarite PSYCHOLOGY is fundamentally different; basic behavior and custom involves the casual trading of insults and sometimes of violence as terms of endearment.

1. You are confusing culture with biology. There is no indication that that is a biological trait, only that it is a cultural trait.

2. ENT never once established that Tellarites use violence as terms of endearment. You are confusing Tellarite culture with Klingon culture.

3. I know you aren't talking about operational culture, but I am. And I'm saying that there's nothing in Tellarite culture that precludes a Tellarite officer from modifying his behavior to function effectively in Starfleet (while still maintaining his cultural identity), just like there's nothing in Vulcan culture that precludes a Vulcan from doing the same, or an Andorian, or a Human, or a Betazoid -- all of whom we have seen compromise their cultural-based behaviors in the name of functioning effectively in the diverse, multicultural organization that is the Federation Starfleet.

Military regulation is one thing, but to expect Tellarite cadets to completely change the entire nature of their interactions with non-tellarites would be to impose incredibly radical restrictions and limitations on their behavior.

What makes you think that would be necessary? A Tellarite should be more than capable of curbing their tendency to engage in insults enough to get along with non-Tellarites, just like a Deltan should be capable of curbing their sexual openness or a Vulcan should be capable of curbing their disapproval of overt emotionalism.

There's no particular reason to think that the United Earth Starfleet didn't just cease to exist, with its ships and bases immediately handed over to the new Federation Starfleet -- which I would theorize also happened to the Vulcan Defense Force, Andorian Imperial Guard, and Tellarite space force.

The problem with this is that all of these forces would not move their bases from their original locations, nor would they scrap their existing ship designs and switch to the set of vessels designed by human engineers on Earth and Mars. If they are part of "Starfleet" at all, it's as part of a joint unified command; it's extremely unlikely they even share the same regulations and rank structure, considering the differing laws and social norms these planets are bound to have.

But there's no evidence that that any of that is true. Hell, for all we know, there were no major differences between the regulations and rank structures of the founding Member States -- for all we know, a Vulcan Starfleet officer's Universal Translator might translate the Starfleet rank of "Commander" as "Sub-Commander" and "Captain" as "Commander."

It's a state.

We see the Federation Council pass legislation banning travel above Warp 5 throughout the entire UFP in TNG's "Forces of Nature;" no alliance would have that authority.

The U.N. does.

No, it does not. The United Nations provides a forum for the launching of cooperative ventures, such as international agreements to operate a certain way, but the United Nations does not have the ability to craft actual legislation.

In legal theory, all United Nations Member States are obligated by treaty to obey the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, but in reality, the U.N.S.C. has no enforcement capacity -- indeed, to have enforcement authority would be a violation of Member States' sovereignty. Member States are only bound to obey it because, in ratifying the U.N. Charter and becoming Member States, they've made the Charter part of their domestic law. They retain the option of repealing those treaties and leaving the U.N. any time they wish, and, in addition, are more than capable of ignoring Security Council resolutions whenever they wish without leaving, because the U.N. has no ability to enforce its own rules -- it relies on the Member States to do that themselves.

In short, the United Nations has no legislative power -- only treaty-mediation power. It lacks any power its Member States choose not to give it (which is why it was so toothless during the Bush Administration).

OTOH, it's not known to what extent those orders are binding on civilian traffic; it apparently only applies to Federation vessels, which would--as already mentioned--exclude civilian vessels operating out of Deneva and a huge number of Earth colonies.

No, "Force of Nature" was very clear:

No ship capable of warp drive was allowed to travel faster than Warp 5 anywhere in Federation space. At all. There was no ambiguity about it.

It's not as if half of Starfleet is going to be assigned to handing out speeding tickets.

Why not? Starfleet already maintains an internal Federation sensor system to track interstellar traffic within Federation space, as indicated by its ability to track the movements of the Borg cube through Federation territory in "The Beast of Both Worlds." There's no particular reason Starfleet can't record ships traveling faster than Warp 5 within UFP territory and then alert local authorities.

We see the Federation President making foreign policy for the entire UFP (rather than contacting each individual Member State and gaining their input) in Star Trek VI.

And being consulted by the Vulcan ambassador, no less...

We do not know what title or office Sarek held in Star Trek VI. For all we know, he could have been serving as President Ra-ghoratreii's chief foreign policy advisor.

We see the Federation Starfleet instituting a system of martial law on Earth in DS9's "Homefront/Paradise Lost,"

And we see that this decision went over quite badly, being both unprecedented and extremely controversial.

Patently false.

1. "Homefront" established quite clearly that the Federation government had instituted martial law on Earth before -- once during the Borg incident of 2366-67 ("Best of Both Worlds"), and, apparently, "over a century" before 2372 (which implies that it was declared during TMP's V'Ger incident, which was about 100 years before "Homefront," set in 2372).

In other words, "Homefront" established quite thoroughly that the Federation has, and has always had, the power to institute martial law on Earth, and that it had used that power before -- not a legal ability possessed by an alliance.

2. The decision was not controversial after the power went out. Joseph Sisko was depicted as being the exception to the rule there. Only once it was determined that the declaration of martial law was part of Leyton's attempt to overthrow the Federation government -- and, by the way, Sisko referred to other Federation worlds as "not being willing to accept seeing their president replaced with a military dictatorship," meaning that it was a government, not an alliance, and that they felt that the Federation President was as much their President as Earth's -- did the decision become controversial.

With these episodes, then, it becomes clear that the Federation Council is a legislature.

Technically, so is the U.N.

As I have explained already, this is untrue.

The question is how much power the Federation Council actually has. If local jurisdictions have the power to opt out or veto segments of Federation law within their own borders, it isn't a unified superstate.

Murder is legal on Vulcan under special circumstances. Is this because the Federation didn't bother to ban it, or because Vulcan local authority has veto power over Federation law?

Probably because the Federation didn't bother to ban it. Murder is not a Federal crime in the United States, for instance; it's up to each state in the Union to individually ban it.

Besides, Federation law probably allows for consensual homicide -- assisted suicide, for instance, is probably protected. I'm sure that anyone who agrees to enter the pon farr duel-to-the-death is regarded as legally consenting to his or her own possible homicide, and it is therefore not illegal.

And we do know from ST3 that the Federation maintains a domestic police force called Federation Security with powers of arrest -- seemingly the equivalent of the FBI or Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The DS9 episode "The Ascent" establishes that Quark has to travel to a Federation world to deliver testimony to a Federation Grand Jury against a suspected member of the Orion Syndicate. Alliances don't operate grand juries

Except the international court of justice...

The International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) is only capable of acting when its chief prosecutor can show that someone has committed gross violations of international human rights treaty laws and that national courts have not begun to act against them. The I.C.C. has no authority to nab someone for something as mundane as basic organized crime. And it has, again, no enforcement power of its own -- there's no U.N. police that can arrest anyone for defying the I.C.C. the way there's a Federation Security for the UFP. The I.C.C. relies upon the governments of the states that have chosen to opt into it to enforce its decisions -- which is why, for instance, the I.C.C.-indicted President of the Sudan is still at large.

But you get the idea. Federal power seems to be limited to interplanetary space and interplanetary dealings; treaties with non-Federation members, interplanetary commerce, deep space exploration and external military policy. It appears to have little or no direct authority over actual Federation members; they are free to conduct their own affairs within their own space, provided they don't disturb other members.

I don't think you've established very well that this is the case, but even if you had, that only proves that the Federation practices federalism -- which is what its name implies, anyway. It certainly doesn't prove that the Federation is not a state in its own right, and there's a vast preponderance of evidence in favor of the idea that it's a state.

If it is a power it theoretically legally has under special circumstances--and not just a legally-questinoable desperation move that Leyton was able to scare Inyo into taking--it's probably considered a Federation "nuclear option," only exercised if something goes TERRIBLY wrong.

Which, even then, would make the Federation a federal state, not an alliance of independent worlds. NATO does not have the right to place Belgium under martial law, even in the most dire of circumstances.

Clearly, all relevant bureaucracy is built around the Federation by this point

Correction: the Federation has a bureaucracy to handle all of these matters. But "all relevant bureaucracy" doesn't quite fit the bill, since non-Federation organizations do exist to govern local affairs on Federation and non-Federation worlds which do not seem to answer to the Council or anyone else outside of their own world.

Yes, and the State of Ohio exists and governs its local affairs and does not answer to the Congress or anyone else outside of Ohio to do it. Doesn't mean that the United States is just an alliance of independent countries.

Bottom line: While it's true that the intention of the writers to depict the Federation as a state was not always so when it was first created, as I noted in the link I made to another post of mine above, the vast preponderance of evidence indicates that the Federation is a state.

The important bottom line is that IF the Federation is a state, then that state is necessarily the United Earth Empire. It is not only impossible, but a matter of cultural and historical inevitability that no such state could come into existence in the form depicted unless Earth had either violently or passive-aggressively conquered all of its present members.

Nationalism is not an inevitable political construct, and the idea that Humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites could not put aside their differences and learn to work together as one Federation people is not impossible -- especially if the Federation practices federalism and protects substantial autonomy for each Member State. Bay Staters and Virginians hated each other during and before the American Revolution, but that doesn't mean they didn't come together and form the United States.

And you're also forgetting a third option: What if Federation Member States did regard themselves as more independent than not for the first century or so of the UFP's lifespan, but then the UFP itself -- acting on its own accord, in defiance of the Member States -- made it clear that it regarded itself as a state and enforced that view on the Members? Hell, what if Earth itself tried to establish itself as being independent of the UFP, and the UFP slapped Earth down? What if the UFP made it very clear that the only two options were complete secession from the Federation or complete obedience to Federation law -- or even that no Member world could secede?

Certainly the United States evolved that way; it was dominated by Virginia for the first part of its existence, but when Virginia and its Southern neighbors tried to secede, the U.S. government itself, not any particular Northern or Western state, stopped them.

It's entirely possible that the Federation established its own authority independently of any of its Member States, including Earth.

 

[Sci]

That would mean adding to the Bajoran "To do" list such errands as "abolishing political activism by the Kai, shutting down the Bajoran arms and space craft industry, drafting a twelve-point education program to change the official language of Bajor to Standard English, abolish the Bajoran Calendar in favor of the Stardate System," etc.

What, federalism doesn't exist in your world? Everyone is either independent or subordinate to a unitary state?

That really depends on the kinds of choices that those worlds make on the basis of their experiences, doesn't it? If they decide that union is better than independence, that they are better about to secure their rights and their safety from external threats, they'd certainly be able to create a common political identity.

Common political identity doesn't come from calculated choices.

Of course it does. There's a reason that we have the United States of America instead of the State of New York and the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Republic of Vermont: Because the Founding Fathers, who came from rival colonies who hated each other, agreed to set their differences aside and create a common political identity.

It comes from common political ORIGIN and similarity of ideology.

If that were true, Latin America countries would have been unified centuries ago, as would have European countries. And meanwhile, England and Scotland would never have signed the Acts of Union.

And "similarity of ideology" is part of making the choice to create a common political identity, obviously.

But a SUPERSTATE cannot be formed organically just from mutual antipathy for an outside force. The only way such a state can be formed is by force of the one and to the extreme chagrin of the other.

Don't be absurd. History is full of states being formed successfully from diverse groups, some with histories of mutual antipathy, on the basis of an understanding that unity better serves them than division. Multinational states do not inevitably require imperialism -- especially when you're dealing with societies that have already learned to peacefully and egalitarianly unify entire worlds with their own histories of division, as Earth, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar have.

Is that how you think the Federation was created? That Starfleet roams the galaxy making vague threats and disappearing its political enemies until prospective members decide they're better off joining the Federation than get on its bad side?

No. I think that Earth probably almost lost the Romulan War until the allies helped it (or perhaps vice versa), and that as a result of that experience, the cultures of Earth, Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar (and the independent Alpha Centauri) all realized that they all benefitted more from unity than from division. I think that as a result of that, and as a result of a fundamental cultural change that had already occurred long before then that sets their cultures apart from ours -- a decision to embrace unity in diversity over division and strife; a decision to learn to disregard national divisions as the artificial constructs that they are -- they realized that they'd all be much better off building, together, a common political identity as Federates. And I think that the people who came to support this view peacefully and democratically persuaded their fellow Humans, fellow Vulcans, fellow Andorians, and fellow Tellarites, that they'd all be better off united than divided. And I think that the decision was made democratically, and that subsequent worlds joined the Federation upon seeing how much better off, and how much more well-protected people's rights were, as equal partners in the Federation rather than as foreign states.

All that's implied in "Amok Time" is that there is an organization called Vulcan Space Central...

And that appointment to the Federation Council is NOT a democratic process, and that it is a decision assigned by appointment, probably by the equivalent of Vulcan's foreign ministry (hence T'pau has the option to turn down that appointment and give it to someone else).

No such thing is implied. That's one valid interpretation of the line in "Amok Time" establishing that T'Pau was the only person to have ever turned down a seat on the Federation Council, but that line is exceedingly vague. It could just as easily mean that T'Pau was so popular that someone started a "draft T'Pau" movement and that she easily could have won an election to the Council, but instead chose not to run.

For whatever it's worth, the novels establish that every Federation Member gets one Federation Councillor, and that every Federation Councillor is determined by whatever policy that Member State so chooses. Most seem to be selected via popular election (Betazed's, for instance), but others might be determined by which party holds a majority in the Member State's parliament (as with Andor and the Parliament Andoria) or have their Councillor be nominated by the executive and then confirmed by the legislature (as with Bajor). The novels also clearly establish that the Federation President is popularly elected, and that the Federation is a state that practices a strong tradition of federalism.

It is also implied that Vulcan laws and traditions are VASTLY different from Earth laws and traditions,

And Louisiana is based on French common law rather than English common law. Doesn't mean that the U.S. is not a state in its own right.

But back to the T'pau angle: exactly what kind of Empire--even a nominally democratic one--enjoys a system where people can be elected to the legislature without even running for--let alone desiring--the position?

What makes you think she actually ran? Again, maybe it was that she was so popular that everyone knew she'd be elected if she ran, and she decided not to run. That could easily be remembered as being the only person to "turn down a seat on the Federation Council."

You're right; it's "In the Cards" that establishes that Starfleet (even before the war) is responsible for protecting Vulcan and Andor and Berengaria.

Incorrect. What is actually said is:

SISKO: Even though you're not a member of the Federation, Starfleet is committed to the protection of your world. We're not going to stand idly by and watch the Dominion conquer Bajor.
WINN: Can you promise me that you will not let one Jem'Hadar soldier set foot on Bajor? Can you promise me that you will use your entire fleet to protect our planet, even if it means sacrificing other worlds like Vulcan or Andor or Berengaria, or perhaps Earth itself?
SISKO: I can't make that kind of promise.

Winn's "Your Entire Fleet" is the entire Starfleet, from the smallest runabout to the Enterprise-E. Whether this includes non-human ships from organizations native to those worlds, or simply refers to the charter of Starfleet to reinforce non-Starfleet Federation forces (it doesn't make it clear either way) is pretty much irrelevant, because Winn--who is, let's face it, the LAST person who would know about Starfleet disposition and responsibilities--is asking a rhetorical question: is Bajor as important to you as it is to me?

Sisko is forced to concede that it isn't. Which now puts YOU in the interesting position of having to explain whether or not this would change if Bajor WAS a member of the Federation.

Of course it would. The reason that Starfleet would not be as dedicated to protecting Bajor as a Federation world at that point was that Bajor had turned down Membership in an earlier episode. Had Bajor accepted, Starfleet would have been as dedicated to protecting Bajor as any other Federation Member State.

If it would change, then "leaving Earth unprotected" is an incredibly silly thing to worry about if Starfleet is the military of the entire Federation.

Hardly. Bajor cannot be well-protected in the long run if its federal capital, Earth, is taken and its federal government disbanded. The State of Texas is just as important as any other state in the Union, but that doesn't mean that more resources won't be dedicated to protecting Washington, D.C., than any other location in the U.S.

So what? Earth is the capital planet of the Federation. That doesn't mean that Starfleet owes any more special loyalty to Earth because it's Earth; they'd react the same way if the Federation capital planet was Vulcan or Andor or Deneva or Delta or Bolarus.

In which case the Federation explicitly is the Earth Empire, where Earth is "the homeland" that cannot be sacrificed, whether you are actually from there or not.

Pardon me, but are you going to therefore argue that if the capital of the Federation were moved to Berengaria, and Starfleet to therefore have a concomitant obligation to protect Berengaria, that this would mean the Federation would have been transformed into a Berengarian Empire? If the Federation government were to move to Starbase 375, would that make the Federation a Starbase 375 empire because of the subsequent need to protect Starbase 375 above other locations?

The need to protect a capital above other locations in a polity is a natural consequence of having any capital whatsoever. Are you going to, in effect, argue that any state of any form is an empire with its capital as its imperial center, simply because a capital is inherently going to be more important than other constituents due to the necessity of protecting the government housed in that capital?

Because you have a very, very liberal definition of the word "empire" if that is the case.

And the incentive for the Tellarites not to build their own fleet independent of Starfleet is WHAT again?

Why, that they get kicked out of the Federation if they try to do that. No need for a carrot when the stick is big enough. It's only logical that the police would fall down hard on somebody trying to create his own shadow police force...

Which forces me to repeat the question: if the cost of membership is never having their own space force that they have any measure of control over, why did they join the Federation in the first place?

Presumably because they were willing to accept that they would have no less influence over the Federation than any of the other Member States, including Earth; no doubt they all get an equal vote in the Federation Council, and all citizens of all Member States have equally valuable votes for the Federation President.

You're still presuming that there's some fundamental sense of separation between the Federation and Tellarites (or Vulcans, or Andorians, or whatever); there isn't. They're all Federates now. Sure, they might affectionately rib each other a bit or be irritated by their cultural idiosyncrasies, but it's no different than a New Yorker being occasionally irritated by a Texan.

OTOH, we know as late as the 23rd century they DID have their own space force,

What makes you say that?

s

It could be argued, though, that all the designs we see are non-Earth.

If that were true, they would not be designed, tested and built in the Sol system by mostly-human crews.

What makes you think that the location of the design facility determines its creators' origins or the vessel's political allegiance? The Federation has numerous design, construction, and maintenance facilities all over its space, including the 40 Eridani A Starfleet Construction Yards (40 Eridani A being commonly presumed to be the location of Vulcan) where the Starfleet ships U.S.S. Brattain and U.S.S. Phoenix were built; the in the Bajor Sector whence were launched the U.S.S. Defiant and U.S.S. Valiant; the [url="http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Beta_Antares_Ship_Yards"]Beta Antares Ship Yards whence was launched the U.S.S. Prometheus; the Proxima Maintenance Yards, where Sisko and Company were supposed to meet with Admiral Drazman in "Past Tense;" [url="http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Starbase_74"]Starbase 74 in the Tarsas system; Starbase 133, located near Delta Rana IV; Starbase 375, located near the Federation-Cardassian border; numerous other starbases; and, of course, Federation Starbase Deep Space 9 in the Bajor system.

No we couldn't, because Zephram Cochrane's prototype already established the basic shape for the nacelles, and the saucer-shaped primary hull is implied to be inspired by his brief glimpse of the Enterprise-E.

That's a valid interpretation, but no such thing was ever implied.

Furthermore, if humans had used alien influence in the design process, Enterprise probably would have gone into space with a ring-shaped nacelle and a pointy cylindrical hull.

They do have a pointy cylindrical hull in the engineering section!

And who's to say what sorts of internal components were influenced by non-Human technology?

Or then Earth buys all its Nebulas from Vulcan.

Doubtful, since the Nebulas have no internal or external features that are of recognizably vulcan origin.

I agree completely. Which makes the fact that the Nebula-class U.S.S. Phoenix was launched from shipyards in Vulcan -- and that the Nebula-class U.S.S. T'Kumbra has an all-Vulcan crew -- stronger evidence that Starfleet is the Federation defensive agency and that there are no Member State fleets that operate outside of their home systems.

Your "problem" goes away if you stop thinking of humans, Vulcans and Andorians as competing nations and instead consider them citizens of the same nation, working in the same factories and building the same products for the seeming command economy.

Which would require more diversity on every planet in the Federation than we have ever really seen. The concept of "homeworld" would instantly cease to exist,

The concept of "homeworld" is only meaningful in a biological sense; it's certainly not meaningful in a political sense. A Vuclan family that moves to Earth may not have Earth as their "homeworld," but to any Vulcan child born on Earth, Earth would be home and would be the world to which they have citizenship, just like any Ohio family that moves to Massachusetts and gives birth to a child there will have a child with Massachusetts citizenship.

all Federation worlds are "home soil."

Yup!

Yet in TOS, we see that Vulcan is still considered the home planet of the Vulcan species; it is sovereign enough that it has its own foreign ministry, even an embassy on Earth.

We don't know that. We know that Sarek is referred to in "Journey to Babel" as "the Vulcan Ambassador," but "Journey to Babel" also makes it clear that the Babel Conference is an extraordinary situation and that the UFP is on the brink of civil war over the issue of admitting Coridan as a Member. So "Journey to Babel" doesn't tell us anything useful about how the Federation normally functions.

In STXI, the destruction of Vulcan results in "a few thousand left" in the entire Federation; Spock considers Earth "the only home I have left" since he still has his human half.

So?

This is not a feature common to nations; that my grandmother was born in Nashville would not cause her much consternation of the population of Tennessee was suddenly killed by a neutron bomb.

No, but I promise you that most Texans would be far more perturbed at the thought of being amongst the last few Texans in the world. The strength of regional affiliations can vary greatly; this doesn't mean that Texas is any less a state of the Union than Tennessee, though. (Nor, for that matter, is one man's emotion an indicator of political statuses.)

Same for myself, and most of us here: we are tied to our home town by family/business/historical connections, but if we needed to we could move anywhere else in the country we want to, because it's all America anyway, and adopting a new home town is as easy as adopting a new neighborhood and a new house. It is a much different matter moving to a whole new COUNTRY,

Speak for yourself. I for one would feel much more at home in Canada or Great Britain than I would in Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas.

Which would make sense if they actually followed different traditions. But unless every starship since the Ambassador was designed by Bolian engineers (and we know for a fact they weren't) the shipbuilding tradition we do see is, in fact, a carryover from old Earth designs: saucer, nacelles, drive sections, pylons. The elements that were recognizeable in either Vulcan or Andorian ships in the 22nd century are totally absent in the 23rd, EXCEPT when it comes to the Vulcan ships we saw in "Unification" that still used the ring-shaped nacelles (and similarly advanced much like their Starfleet counterparts).

Not really. None of the United Earth designs we saw in ENT had anything akin to the dedicated engineering sections of later starships; it's entirely possible that this is an artifact of non-Human designers.

Mere equipment didn't stop the "Conspiracy" aliens from doing that to Earth, either.

Actually, "mere equipment" did. In the end, all it took was a tricorder and two hand phasers to bring their entire plan crashing to a halt.

Which does not affect Timo's larger point that security was shockingly lax in Starfleet Headquarters on Earth (where, you might recall, one of the admirals in charge of it all was Vulcan). Lax security does not tell us anything about Starfleet's organizational structure the way you keep insisting it does.

Umm, what is this about Vulcan pacifism that I keep hearing? Vulcans are fierce fighters. Sarek never said they'd be pacifists - he said that a Vulcan would commit murder whenever he felt it was logical.

And yet he made a pretty dramatic point about Spock's decision to join Starfleet, that Vulcans do not approve of the use of force in the resolution of conflicts.

"Journey to Babel" contains no such reference. It only establishes that Sarek and Spock had not spoken for 18 years as father and son because Sarek had wanted Spock to enter the Vulcan Science Academy, which Spock turned down in favor of Starfleet. (And ST09 provides a wonderful dramatization of that scene -- most probably, Spock Prime's behavior was no different than his alternate timeline counterpart, and Sarek was so embarrassed by that display of anger at Vulcan prejudice that he refused to speak to him.)

And when we finally saw an entire ship crewed by Vulcans, it was a ship of war heroes.

And how I wish they had been on a natively Vulcan ship.

But they were not. They were on a Federation Starfleet vessel -- strong evidence against your hypothesis that there are Member State fleets that operate outside of their home systems and that Starfleet makes any sort of distinction between "Human" and "non-Human" vessels.