Size and Strength of Empires

[Sci]

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.[/QUOTE]

The Miranda-class ship was the U.S.S. Saratoga (no relation to Sisko's old ship). And we don't know that the Constitution-class ship that became the Enterprise-A was in Spacedock when the Probe hit, because we don't know how long a period of time elapsed between the Bounty Bay returning from the 20th Century and Kirk's assuming command of the Enterprise-A.

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.

Except that you're forgetting something: Before ENT, there was no indication whatsoever that the design element of having saucers was in any way an "Earth" thing. Neither the writers nor the designers nor the fans had any reason to think that Federation starships were primarily or even secondarily influenced by Human designs, because there was no reason to think of those design elements as "Human" design elements; they were just Federation ships.

ENT seems to have established the saucer as a Human design element, but there are numerous other elements that it did not establish to be Human-inspired, so I'm not too worried by that.

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.

For all we know, Starfleet had a major presence in Vulcan orbit and the Narada cut them all down before they could send off a distress call.

"Siesmic disturbances" implies the transmission source was on the planet, which means the Narada entered orbit unnoticed by anyone who might know better.

It does not mean that at all. Hell, for all we know, it was a ground-based Starfleet facility that recording the "seismic disturbances;" we don't know who sent the distress signal.

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.

Excellent point! For all we know, "saucer plus two nacelles" might be a Denobulan innovation that Earth copied.

 

[neozeks]

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.

The UN is HQed in NY. Does that make it an American Empire? The seat of the EU is in Brussels. Does that make it a Belgian Empire?!
The case of Brussels is a good example. The reason why Earth was chosen as the capital of the UFP and HQ of Federation Starfleet is probably exactly that UE was in the founding days of the UFP a minor player, on good terms with other major players, a sort of 'neutral' teritory.
There is a third option: there is a unified UFP-wide force HQed on Earth (for the above reason) of which the Enterprise is a part, and local forces (sort of National Guards) HQed on respective member worlds (including an Earth local force).

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.

Which is probably why there seems to be a general policy of one-species dominated ships with other species thrown in for cultural-excange reasons.

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.

Beacuse a unified force with a single command structure and unified technology and R&D and unified procedures is much more effective than a loose organization of independent forces.

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.

What makes you think those designs are human-only? Just because they look similar on the outside? Who says most of the internal systems aren't Vulcan, Andorian and Tellarite-derived? Maybe the general shape of human ships works best for the specific technology combination.

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?

Like Sci said, in TOS days and still somewhat in TOS-movie days, the UFP was envisioned as an alliance. But the point is it changed by the TNG days.
But an opposite question - does NATO have a President? And is he regarded as commander-in-chief of all NATO forces? I'd say not.

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

Absolutely not. The ICJ is NOTHING like a grand jury. It resolves international law disputes between UN member states and has jurisdiction only if the states in question allow it. Nowhere does it deal with private or criminal law questions or with private individuals. There is an International Criminal Court but it deals just with war crimes - as a matter that is too important to be left to national judiciaries.

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.

Which fits well with an idea of a loosely federated 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.

WHY is it an Earth Empire? Because we mostly see human SF members? That can easily be explained in-universe (a policy of mostly-one-species dominated crews) and out-of-universe (budget, human actors, human show). Because it is dominated by 'human' ideals, like secularism? The very point is - those are not just human ideals, those are joint ideals of all sentient species, the founding principles of the UFP. That's the point. That no matter how different historically, socially, biologically different the species are, they can join and work together.
Why would Bajoran be replaced with English? The Bajorans will still be free to use their language - they'll just have to use the UT and, as a backup, English, when dealing with UFP-level matters. English was probably chosen as a joint language, again, because Earth was so weak and neutral in the beginning.
Who says the Bajoran Calendar will be abolished? Humans still use their own calendar, aside from Stardates which seems to be a UFP-wide joint system.

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.

Ahem, the EU? It is very much heading towards a federation and it was started to counter the threat of the Soviets. Of course, it was also founded to help rebuild and strenghten the member states after WW2. But the same could be said for the UFP. It was founded after the Romulan War, to rebulid and protect the battered Coalition races.

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.

I point you to my rant about ideals upwards.

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... 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.

Worrying about and protecting Earth has nothing to do with 'the homeland'. It's a matter of practicality and strategy in war. Of course you are going to protect the site where you're most important institutions are HQ-ed, you will lose a great deal if it falls into enemy hands. An Alaskan born member of the US military will of course worry foremost about protecting Washington, the Pentagon and the President.

EDIT: I see I have been beaten to some points.

 

[EmperorTiberius]

The entire dilemma about ethnic fleets can be easily solved by one premise:
Humans are the most powerful race in UFP. I think there is too much thought given to "ethnic" fleets. My belief is that they don't exist. We don't see them on screen and from everything we know about Federation they shouldn't exist. Why? Here are some likely facts:

1. Humans are the most powerful race in Federation. We see this not only because they are everywhere, but also because of the mirror universe, where they dominate without the need for diplomacy.

2. It's certainly possible that humans overcame Vulcans and Andorians technologically in a short period of time like U.S. rose to power from nothing to superpower in a space of 200 odd years. Aging empire like the British (Vulcans) and French (Andorians)are still influential, but nothing like they used to be, and certainly nowhere near U.S. (Humans)

3. Since humans are most powerful, most of the Federation members contribute (intellectually that was a great post by someone on page 1) but don't contribute much ethnically for various reasons.

Imagine a Federation between U.S., Poland, Spain, and a few other nations, and they decide to go to Afghanistan. Now you might ask yourself a few questions:

-How many troops are the members Poland going to send compared to U.S.? Not many, US is still going to be a prime mover.

-Why are there no ethnic Polish tanks and destroyers in this Federation? Well, because Abrams tanks and American destroyers are better. The Polish might contribute labor and materials and some crewmen for those, but the design will still be American. A couple of weak destroyers that they might have are only used for local defense, but will still need NATO protection if the Russians invade.

-Speaking of the Abrams tank, Americans use German gun and British style armor.

-You might say, but the British did have their own tanks in significant numbers in Iraq. Yeah, that's only because they are allies, if they united in a Federation, there would only be one army, one tank, one style of rifle etc, it would all be standardized

Speaking of standardized design philosophy, SF ships don't look human to me at all, except those nacelles, the rest, especially the saucer look of alien design.

I think ethnic fleets are nonsense. Like any organization, you need to have a powerful leader or several of them, and we see that in humans and vulcans, with the rest contributing but being inferior technologically or politically. The races that are more powerful than Humans won't join UFP in the first place, and those are the likes of Klingons, Romulans etc. It would be interesting to know what would happen if they wanted to join?

 

[nahuatl]

This is a really cool discussion. I've always taken the UFP to be a nation state just by watching the shows. Sci is right that over the years, especially since TNG and beyond the UFP was portrayed as a loose federalist system. I think the arguments being made against Federation state hood question the fundamental premise of Star Trek: that disparate peoples/cultures can through peace and co-operation unite to create something bigger than themselves. Intimating that the national bond member planets share is due to the fact that the UFP is some sort of Earth empire strikes at the heart of what Star Trek is all about.

(Cheesy but true)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

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

Funny you mention this... I've been hearing alot of complaints lately that the Illinois Air National Guard seems to operate just about everywhere except Illinois. They are becoming a de facto Air Force Unit that just happens to have a base in Peoria. IIRC, they were almost disbanded for this very reason four years ago.

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

It wasn't retconned at all. Just ignored. An alternate explanation, just as fitting, is that Enterprise was conducting Earth business during those early missions and returned to Federation duty later in the year.

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

"Southerners" are not a specific race from a specific ethnic background distinct from the rest of the U.S. It would be a bit like, say, the British Empire having citizens from over forty countries, but that the overwhelming majority of its officers were all native-born Englishmen.

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

I take it you believe the Enterprise is a Klingon vessel?

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.

No it could not, as Tellarite culture and traditions are significantly different and the cultural barriers between them would have to be surmounted every step of the way. The U.T. obscures the issue slightly, but it would be the same as if a multi-national force decides to send units from a Latin American region to handle a conflict involving mostly spanish-speaking parties. Makes less sense to assign, say, a Chinese warship whose crew doesn't speak a word of Spanish.

And that's just for the language barrier, which is far more easily surmounted. Cultural barriers are trickier, and require a degree of patience that (if "Darmok" is any indication) Starfleet officers do not always have.

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.

To wit: they specifically ceased to be English colonies only after they declared independence from the British Empire. That they considered themselves something different is immaterial where legal and social considerations are concerned.

OTOH, this doesn't erase the possibility that Deneva is not a "Federation" colony. It's said to be over a hundred years old, which in TOS timeframe might actually precede the formation of the Federation.

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,

And that it returned there when its missions were completed, that it launched from there three different times in three different movies, and that the only other ship we know much about--the Enterprise-D, specifically--is undeniably home-ported there.

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

Psychology mostly is a function of culture, not biology.

2. ENT never once established that Tellarites use violence as terms of endearment.

I wasn't referring to ENT.

3. I know you aren't talking about operational culture, but I am.

And Tellarite operational culture is bound to be just as different from their human counterparts, having evolved on a different world, developed by different people with a totally different cultural and psychological background. Why would they abandon that for a completely alien system?

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

And I'm saying there's no reason they should HAVE to, unless the Federation is an imperialist system governed primarily by Earth.

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.

Again: why would they want to?

Let's put that another way: if the Klingon Empire HAD joined the Federation, what--other than Worf's fondness for the Enterprise--would be his excuse for not serving on one of their ships?

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.

Except for what is known and respected everywhere but the United States as "international law."

OTOH, the same can be said for the EU, which has the ability to craft actual legislation despite the fact that it is not a formalized nation state in the way you are describing.

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).

Where is the evidence that the Federation is any more effectual?

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.

Incorrect:

Until we can find a way to counteract the warp field effect, the Council feels our best course is to slow the damage as much as possible. Therefore, areas of space found susceptible to warp fields will be restricted to essential travel only, and effective immediately all Federation vessels will be limited to a speed of warp five, except in cases of extreme emergency.

It says nothing at all about non-Federation vessels, nor does it even mention anything at all about Federation space.

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."

"Tracking" is probably a bit generous. They didn't know where it was until it destroyed a freighter, and was later intercepted by (well, actually, moved to intercept) the Enterprise.

We do not know what title or office Sarek held in Star Trek VI.

"The Vulcan ambassador for heaven's sake."

not a legal ability possessed by an alliance.

Except the EU.

As I have explained already, this is untrue.

And I disagree. A week legislature is still a legislature. Just ask the EU.

Probably because the Federation didn't bother to ban it. Murder is not a Federal crime in the United States

Lynching, however, is.

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.

Yep. Pretty much like the U.S. justice department.

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

Why would I seek to prove a negative? My only point is that it is sufficiently federalized that it may not actually amount to a contiguous state as we understand the concept. Besides which, the term "Federation" also applies to things that are not actual states or governments, unless you think the World Wrestling Federation was the precursor to the United Earth Government.

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.

Another bad example since Ohio never existed as an independent country before joining the United States, let alone an independent planet whose history and culture is continuous for thousands of years before the Federation was ever conceived.

The better example would be the European Union, which IS an alliance of independent states despite having a president, a legislature, even its own legal system.

Nationalism is not an inevitable political construct

Nobody said anything about "nationalism." It is obvious that Federation members know the difference between Vulcans and Humans and are not hippy enough to pretend to be racially... er... speciesally colorblind to the extent of "White, black, pointy or blue, we're all Federation citizens." Vulcans make no secret of their antipathy for humans, even in the 24th century; the feeling appears to be mutual.

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

"Put aside their differences and work together" =/= "Forget that we are different species from totally different worlds."

Again, the better analogy is EU, not U.S. Germans still consider themselves Germans first and Europeans second despite the fact that they are members of the EU. That's not nationalism, that's just recognition of the painfully obvious.

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?

That's called "imperialism." It is, as I have stated, a possibility, one I do not happen to endorse.

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.

They didn't CREATE a common political identity, though. If creating one had been an order of business, the revolution would have died in its infancy. Instead, they seized on commonalities they already had and worked from that common ground on a solution all could agree to. Which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for the nations they displaced/massacred/subjugated to expand BEYOND those 13 colonies.

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.

Except for Earth, of course. Which, if you remember, is exactly why Sisko--in a fit of divine inspiration--told them not to join the Federation. Bajor would eventually have to be sacrificed to save other members. Earth, however, would never be sacrificed for any reason.

 

[Sci]

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

Funny you mention this... I've been hearing alot of complaints lately that the Illinois Air National Guard seems to operate just about everywhere except Illinois. They are becoming a de facto Air Force Unit that just happens to have a base in Peoria. IIRC, they were almost disbanded for this very reason four years ago.

And the fact that the Illinois Air National Guard is being used improperly does not change the legal fact that it is not just the Illinois division of the United States Air Force.

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

It wasn't retconned at all. Just ignored.

No, it was retconned every time the ship was called a "Federation starship" and every time the Federation was depicted as having existed in the episodes set prior to "Arena."

"Southerners" are not a specific race from a specific ethnic background distinct from the rest of the U.S.

No, but they are a distinct culture from the rest of the U.S., and if you don't believe me, just try watching a Yankee and a Southerner go at it one day.

It would be a bit like, say, the British Empire having citizens from over forty countries, but that the overwhelming majority of its officers were all native-born Englishmen.

But that's a prime example: The United Kingdom is British, not English.

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

I take it you believe the Enterprise is a Klingon vessel?

No, I think it's a Federation vessel. In much the same way that the current aircraft carrier Enterprise is a United States vessel rather than a Virginian vessel (even though the United States Navy is headquartered in Virginia).

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.

No it could not, as Tellarite culture and traditions are significantly different and the cultural barriers between them would have to be surmounted every step of the way. <SNIP>
And that's just for the language barrier, which is far more easily surmounted. Cultural barriers are trickier, and require a degree of patience that (if "Darmok" is any indication) Starfleet officers do not always have.

You are basing your entire argument on the basis of an unsubstantiated premise (that cultural barriers between Federation Member States would be too large for the Federation to be truly integrated into a functional yet multi-cultural state). But I would contend that there's no evidence that that premise is true or accurate -- and that the fundamental message of all of Star Trek is that different cultures can work together and compromise in spite of their differences.

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.

To wit: they specifically ceased to be English colonies only after they declared independence from the British Empire.

No they did not. They ceased to be English colonies when the Acts of Union 1707 came into force, abolishing the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland and creating in their place the Kingdom of Great Britain. At that point, they became British colonies rather than English colonies, answerable to the Parliament of Great Britain rather than the Parliament of England, and under the protection of the King of Great Britain rather than the King of England.

OTOH, this doesn't erase the possibility that Deneva is not a "Federation" colony. It's said to be over a hundred years old, which in TOS timeframe might actually precede the formation of the Federation.

For whatever it's worth, the novel Losing the Peace establishes that Deneva was originally a colony of United Earth before it became independent of United Earth at an unspecified point, and then became a Federation Member State in its own right. Whether or not Deneva was a totally independent world for a period of time is unestablished.

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,

And that it returned there when its missions were completed,

Actually, with the exception of its missions into Earth's past during TOS, there's no evidence that the Enterprise ever returned to Earth at any point between its launch in 2245 and its refit at the end of Kirk's five-year-mission in 2270.

that it launched from there three different times in three different movies,

I think it's fair enough to conclude that the Enterprise was home ported on Earth during the films, yes.

and that the only other ship we know much about--the Enterprise-D, specifically--is undeniably home-ported there.

I see no evidence that the Enterprise-D even had a home port. It was launched from orbit of Mars, and it only returned to Earth for a refit in the wake of the Borg crisis when it was already in Earth orbit.

2. ENT never once established that Tellarites use violence as terms of endearment.

I wasn't referring to ENT.

To what were you referring, then? "Journey to Babel," the only non-ENT episode I'm aware of in which Tellarites played a significant role, did not establish that Tellarites use violence as a term of endearment. Where does this claim come from?

And Tellarite operational culture is bound to be just as different from their human counterparts, having evolved on a different world, developed by different people with a totally different cultural and psychological background. Why would they abandon that for a completely alien system?

For the same reason that Humans would abandon their normal culture: To create a common operational culture in Starfleet that all Federation species can participate in as equals.

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

And I'm saying there's no reason they should HAVE to, unless the Federation is an imperialist system governed primarily by Earth.

Where do you get this notion that if Tellarites are altering their behavior to get along with non-Tellarites, that Humans aren't altering their behavior to get along with non-Humans, too? What makes you think that EVERYONE isn't altering their behavior in order to get along better?

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.

Again: why would they want to?

Because they all realize that integration is better for everyone than segregation, presumably. Because they recognize that segregation is more likely to create inequality than egalitarian integration. "Separate but equal" is never truly equal.

Let's put that another way: if the Klingon Empire HAD joined the Federation, what--other than Worf's fondness for the Enterprise--would be his excuse for not serving on one of their ships?

What makes you think that the Klingons would have been allowed to maintain their own ships? I'd be more likely to bet that the Federation would require all Klingon Defense Force ships to be recommissioned as Starfleet vessels and that all vessels would have to maintain diversity quotas, with Klingon officers being posted all throughout Starfleet in mixed crews.

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.

Except for what is known and respected everywhere but the United States as "international law."

"International law" is another term for "treaties which the sovereign states of the world have decided to ratify, thereby making them part of domestic law."

The United Nations doesn't have the right to impose treaties on its Member States; it was specifically designed not to have that capacity. That's why the U.N. describes itself as a tool of its Member States, not as a government.

OTOH, the same can be said for the EU, which has the ability to craft actual legislation despite the fact that it is not a formalized nation state in the way you are describing.

1. The European Union is evolving into a state.

2. I'm not describing nation-states, I'm describing states. Specifically, I'm describing the Federation as a multinational state. Sorry, I was a Political Science major, and I hate it when people equate the concept of a "nation-state" with the concept of a "state" in general.

3. The European Union only has the ability to craft legislation for its Member States because those Member States' governments have delegated to it that capacity. They remain "masters of the Treaty" who can withdraw that delegation of authority if they so choose; this sets the E.U. apart from, say, the United States, as does the E.U.'s inability to take solid action without broad consensus from most of its Member States' governments. (Hence the situation in 2003 when some E.U. Member States like the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain supported and participated in the Iraq War, whilst other E.U. Member States like the French Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany objected to and condemned the invasion.)

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).

Where is the evidence that the Federation is any more effectual?

1. Starfleet answers to the Federation President and Council, not the Member worlds' governments.

2. We've seen the President and Council making foreign policy without consulting the Member governments, such as Star Trek VI when the Federation President gets to decide by himself whether or not to engage in an act of war with the Klingon Empire.

3. The Federation President didn't consult the United Earth government before declaring martial law on Earth in "Homefront."

The cumulative effect of these sequences is that it's quite clear who makes the major decisions, and it ain't the Member State governments.

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.

Except the EU.

Pardon me, but I've never heard of the European Union having the authority to place one of its Member States under martial law. To the best of my knowledge, the European Union doesn't even have a military with which to place its Member States under martial law, just a set of E.U. battlegroups that can only operate when all of the E.U. Member State heads of government unanimously agree to a given course of action. Where do you get this piece of info from?

As I have explained already, this is untrue.

And I disagree. A week legislature is still a legislature. Just ask the EU.

This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. Legislatures have absolute authority to make the law and gain that authority directly from the populaces they serve. The United Nations Security Council only has the authority to pass resolutions, not statutes, and only has that authority because the governments of U.N. Member States have agreed to delegate to it that authority; its authority does not inherently exist the way a legislature's does. That's why the U.N. Security Council is considered an organ of the U.N. system of intergovernmental organizations, not a legislature. The U.N. itself wouldn't describe the Security Council as a legislature.

Probably because the Federation didn't bother to ban it. Murder is not a Federal crime in the United States

Lynching, however, is.

Which does not change the fact that murder itself is not a federal crime, and that the lack of a specific criminal statute on the federal level does not mean that a federal state is not a state.

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

Why would I seek to prove a negative?

I don't know, but you have been doing just that.

My only point is that it is sufficiently federalized that it may not actually amount to a contiguous state as we understand the concept.

Except that we've seen it act like a state plenty of times.

Besides which, the term "Federation" also applies to things that are not actual states or governments, unless you think the World Wrestling Federation was the precursor to the United Earth Government.

The World Wrestling Federation doesn't possess any of the legal traits of a state; the UFP possesses all of them. That's a spurious argument.

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.

Another bad example since Ohio never existed as an independent country before joining the United States,

The State of Texas and the State of Vermont did, and both possess governments that handle local affairs and don't answer to the U.S. Congress or anyone outside of Texas and Vermont. That doesn't mean that the U.S. is just an alliance of independent countries; the presence of local governments that handle internal affairs and don't answer to the Federation government is not evidence that the U.F.P. is an alliance of independent worlds.

The better example would be the European Union, which IS an alliance of independent states despite having a president, a legislature, even its own legal system.

The European Union is also in the process of evolving into its own superstate, for those very same reasons. There's a reason that there's an entire anti-E.U. political party in the U.K. calling itself the "Independence Party."

And the European Union does not have a President; it has a President of the European Commission, who is appointed by the Council of the European Union, which makes its selection on the basis of the wills of the heads of government of the Member States.

Nationalism is not an inevitable political construct

Nobody said anything about "nationalism."

Everything you've been claiming about unbridgeable differences between Federation Member State cultures has been pure nationalism.

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?

That's called "imperialism." It is, as I have stated, a possibility, one I do not happen to endorse.

1. I'm not sure if that's "imperialism" so much as it is a demand that one either sit down or get out -- not so much imperialism as a demand that people either create a unified government or stop pretending to be united.

2. Even if that is imperialism, it's not imperialism on Earth's part, but on the Federation's part.

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.

They didn't CREATE a common political identity, though.[/quote]

Of course they did. None of those people considered themselves "Americans." When they said, "My country," they meant Virginia, or New York, or Massachusetts. Hell, the Declaration of Independence doesn't declare the independence of the United States of America -- it declares the independence of the united States of America. In other words, it declares that each individual colony was a free and independent state, and that they all happened to be working together in an alliance.

The United States did not come into existence as a state until the Constitution was ratified. The Founding Fathers built upon commonalities of the different states' cultures to create a new political identity.

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.

Except for Earth, of course.

Earth could be sacrificed if the Federation government was moved -- which, indeed, is exactly what happens in the Myriad Universes novel The Chimes At Midnight.

Earth's need for protection is a function of it being the capital, not a function of Earth itself dominating the Federation. If the Federation capital was moved to Starbase 375, the same thing would apply to Starbase 375 -- because the Federation government is EVERYONE'S government, including (in a theoretical scenario where Bajor joins the UFP) Bajor's.

Which, if you remember, is exactly why Sisko--in a fit of divine inspiration--told them not to join the Federation. Bajor would eventually have to be sacrificed to save other members.

Actually, Sisko just tells them not to join the UFP because if they join, they'd be unable to sign the Non-Aggression Pact with the Dominion and Starfleet would get its ass kicked trying to protect Bajor.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The UN is HQed in NY. Does that make it an American Empire?

Not as such, but it is sometimes used as a convenient platform for American interests. Consider, for example, that all the bruhaha over Iran's nuclear program is largely a result of aggressive threat marketing from the U.S. and Israel, who happen to have longstanding pseudo-grievances against the Iranians. Likewise--and more famously--U.S. finagling of support for the invasion of Iraq. Even with a general consensus that it was a stupid idea that would probably make things worse, the U.N. was pressured into going along with it anyway.

The seat of the EU is in Brussels. Does that make it a Belgian Empire?

Good question. Is the EU represented by a largely Belgian naval force whose officer corps consists of a disproportionate number of Belgian officers, trained in Belgium, whose headquarters also happens to be located in Belgium? Is there, furthermore, a conspicuous preponderance of legal/protocol/historical traditions relevant to this military force that appear to be unique constructs of Belgian culture?

No? That makes the EU different from the Federation... IF Starfleet-as-we've-seen is all there is.

There is a third option: there is a unified UFP-wide force HQed on Earth (for the above reason) of which the Enterprise is a part, and local forces (sort of National Guards) HQed on respective member worlds (including an Earth local force).

Which is entirely possible and even likely. What I object to is the notion that the local forces do not even exist, Or that, if they do, they're just specially assigned Starfleet units headquartered on Earth anyway.

Which is probably why there seems to be a general policy of one-species dominated ships with other species thrown in for cultural-excange reasons.

Right. Now, if you have one-species dominated ships, what would be the point of making different species share the same ship designs, especially in the case where different races have different atmosphere, gravity, lighting and culinary requirements? The Denobulans who require very little sleep would not require very large living quarters and would probably be better off having all their personal affects near their workstations; their quarters would have a different design, undoubtedly being smaller and furnished quite differently.

The problem is compounded dramatically if the Federation is ever joined by a species with VASTLY different biology. Larger and smaller organisms would require totally different ship designs with totally different types of systems; a race of humanoids with an average height of three and a half feet would find most starship designs insufferable, as would any species whose average height was over seven feet. Quadripeds would be miserable aboard the Enterprise, and don't even get me started on aquatics.

But this isn't a point for Federation politics as much as it is lack of imagination by the writers. Starfleet designs we've seen as a one-size-fits-all is only feasible in a Federation populated by generic forehead-aliens. If the diversity of their members is pretty shallow to begin with, then the lack of diversity within Starfleet is perfectly excusable; half the crew might actually be aliens who just happen to look exactly like humans.

What makes you think those designs are human-only? Just because they look similar on the outside? Who says most of the internal systems aren't Vulcan, Andorian and Tellarite-derived?

Because we already know they're HUMAN derived: we've met some of the people responsible for their designs and they have names like Cochrane, Daystrom and Brahms. We know the precursors to phasers and photon torpedoes were first used by Earth Starfleet in the 22nd century; we know the basic shape of Starfleet vessels was established by this point, with a saucer section and cylindrical nacelles with glowing red ramscoops at the tips, and we know this is because the ship was designed by a team of human engineers.

I mean, the only other way it could work is if you also retcon Earth Starfleet as something created by the collective efforts of a dozen good-natured alien visitors to help humans claw their way into the galactic stage, and then bestowed upon humans the honor and responsibility of being their all-purpose proxy in war and science.

Why would Bajoran be replaced with English?

Because unless the universal translator functions like TARDIS, it does not appear that any other language may be used to identify Federation vessels or outposts. English as a WRITTEN language is predominant everywhere in the Federation.

I don't see how the UT could handle this unless it is, in fact, cybernetically implanted into the user's language centers.

Ahem, the EU? It is very much heading towards a federation and it was started to counter the threat of the Soviets.

Yeah, because the Soviets were such a major threat back in 1993...

Worrying about and protecting Earth has nothing to do with 'the homeland'. It's a matter of practicality and strategy in war. Of course you are going to protect the site where you're most important institutions are HQ-ed, you will lose a great deal if it falls into enemy hands. An Alaskan born member of the US military will of course worry foremost about protecting Washington, the Pentagon and the President.

Depends on the Alaskan, but otherwise yes. This is because the sense of identity as Americans is primary over identity as Alaskans.

Do Federation citizens have that sense of identity? That is debatable, but it generally seems they do not. Especially since Council membership is still defined by ethnic representation, not blanket proportionality.

And as I'm forced now to emphasize: the United States does not work as anything close to a modern-day proxy for the Federation, since the United States WAS forged from an imperialist agenda and is multi-ethnic by assimilation, not by ancestry. In other words, if the Federation is anything like the U.S., then all of its current members joined the Federation after a group of humans--either mercenaries or Starfleet soldiers--either conquered them or forcibly displaced them from their own worlds.

A working example would be a nation-state that is actually formed from a union of several hundred smaller nations that existed independently for thousands of years--sometimes even warring with each other--until one day they decided to get together and team up. The only one that fits the bill is the EU... and you notice something about the EU's military in that it IS, in fact, a conglomeration of various elements from different nations with slightly different design standards and military traditions. The French Navy is still the French Navy, even if France is an integral member of the EU. If and when they all disband into the European Navy, all using the same ship/plane/sensor designs, then you might have a workable example.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

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

Funny you mention this... I've been hearing alot of complaints lately that the Illinois Air National Guard seems to operate just about everywhere except Illinois. They are becoming a de facto Air Force Unit that just happens to have a base in Peoria. IIRC, they were almost disbanded for this very reason four years ago.

And the fact that the Illinois Air National Guard is being used improperly does not change the legal fact that it is not just the Illinois division of the United States Air Force.

It could mean, however, that STARFLEET is being used improperly, or at leas being used in a way that differs from the way other world's space forces are used.

Of course, for reasons I've already explained, I cannot consider any U.S. = Federation analogy valid. It's apples and oranges in this case.

No, it was retconned every time the ship was called a "Federation starship"

That's not what "retcon" means, but whatever.

You are basing your entire argument on the basis of an unsubstantiated premise (that cultural barriers between Federation Member States would be too large for the Federation to be truly integrated into a functional yet multi-cultural state).

Far from it. They COULD be integrated into a functional yet multi-cultural state. My point is that such a state could come into existence in the way you imply--blurring cultural barriers almost unto irrelevance, where Federation identity is superior to species identity--could not and in the history of the world has not ever occurred just by virtue of enlightened self interest. It's hard enough just to assimilate new ethnic groups even in the U.S., which IS a multi-ethnic state, far removed from any of their respective homelands. The Federation didn't seem to form that way; it can't be a multi-ethnic state unless the various ethnicities actually live and work together in the same space on a regular basis often enough and closely enough that their shared identity begins to supersede their racial identity, and THIS can only occur if none of their homeworlds are still... well, homeworlds.

So the Federation where six billion Vulcans still live ON VULCAN--and a few thousand elsewhere--isn't a multi-ethnic state. The best you can do is to claim, without a shred of evidence, that all the other Federation members have gone out and emigrated to the point where there are more Andorians living abroad than on Andor, but then you have to figure out what happened to Andor to make them want to move somewhere else.

In the end, the possibilities boil down to this: the multi-ethnic state you describe COULD NOT have formed peacefully. It could only have been forged by conquest, at the very least a form of peaceful conquest, with each Federation world being effectively taken over and colonized by Earth, their populations forced to accept a fundamentally new identity in a new galactic order whether they wanted it or not. This, as I have said, establishes the Federation as a type of Earth Empire.

I do not dispute that Federation-as-Empire is a possibility; it most definitely is. It is not, however, a possibility that I am comfortable with.

the fundamental message of all of Star Trek is that different cultures can work together and compromise in spite of their differences.

Again, there's "working together despite differences" and there's "marginalizing/erasing differences." Diversity is about contribution, not representation, otherwise you could point out a man who owns slaves from fifty different worlds as a shining example of the Star Trek message.

Actually, with the exception of its missions into Earth's past during TOS, there's no evidence that the Enterprise ever returned to Earth at any point between its launch in 2245 and its refit at the end of Kirk's five-year-mission in 2270.

Except for having intentionally returned to Earth after time-warping back into the 23rd century at the end of "Tomorrow is Yesterday." Of course, IIRC it was implied that Enterprise was heading back to Earth anyway before it accidentally passed close to that "dark star" that time warped them into the 1960s.

I see no evidence that the Enterprise-D even had a home port. It was launched from orbit of Mars, and it only returned to Earth for a refit in the wake of the Borg crisis when it was already in Earth orbit.

And also in "Conspiracy," where Picard states it is "quite unusual for a starship to return to Earth." His log entry specifically uses that word "return," implying that most starships are, in fact, FROM Earth.

And then there's Savar's line: "We are always delighted when the Enterprise returns to the nest."

To what were you referring, then? "Journey to Babel," the only non-ENT episode I'm aware of in which Tellarites played a significant role, did not establish that Tellarites use violence as a term of endearment. Where does this claim come from?

I seem to recall Sarek alluding to the fact after being accused of murdering the Tellarite delegate.

For the same reason that Humans would abandon their normal culture

They didn't, though. Much has been made of the fact that Starfleet draws heavily on old-Earth naval memes and traditions for its rank and organizational structure, not to mention its operational culture and regulations. It is naive in the extreme to assume that all races everywhere in the Federation just happen to have the exact same basic rank and command structure as humans do, close enough that the differences between them can be solved just by teaching them a few obscure nautical terms.

Where do you get this notion that if Tellarites are altering their behavior to get along with non-Tellarites, that Humans aren't altering their behavior to get along with non-Humans, too?

From the fact that humans find it so difficult to do so when cultural conflicts DO arise. In most situations they are helped by the fact that their encounters tend to lob them their share of softball problems, situations that can be neatly shoehorned into some subset of Earth cultural taboos. Then every once in a while their Klingon security officer gets hit by a ton of bricks, and the single most experienced officer on the entire ship has to argue down a self-righteous CMO who insists on "forcing him to deal with his disability." And then there's Riker's epic romance fail on the hermaphrodite planet...

What makes you think that EVERYONE isn't altering their behavior in order to get along better?

To summarize greatly: because in the few situations where they HAVE to, they usually fail.

Because they all realize that integration is better for everyone than segregation, presumably.

Assuming that it IS better than segregation, which is not always the case. Forcible segregation as a device for disenfranchisement is just a form of social control; voluntary segregation--especially based on real practical differences, as in men/women's washrooms, smoking/non smoking sections in restaurants, etc--usually serves a pretty specific purpose.

And these are differences between members of the same race. Imagine pushing the values of integration in a world where 60% of the population is allergic to corn syrup.

What makes you think that the Klingons would have been allowed to maintain their own ships?

That wasn't a Klingon ship that approached the Enterprise in "Heart of Glory?"

Of course, the question just supports my objection, doesn't it? What--other than the complete demoralization and conquest of the Klingon race and the forcible abolishment of their warrior mindset--could POSSIBLY compel them to give up the right to maintain their own ships? That would be harder than banning handguns in Texas.

1. The European Union is evolving into a state.

Irrelevant, since until it has become a state, it remains the only precedent we have for how the Federation has supposedly.

3. The European Union only has the ability to craft legislation for its Member States because those Member States' governments have delegated to it that capacity. They remain "masters of the Treaty" who can withdraw that delegation of authority if they so choose; this sets the E.U. apart from, say, the United States, as does the E.U.'s inability to take solid action without broad consensus from most of its Member States' governments.

Which, again, probably makes the EU a better ringer since the United States is not comparable in any significant way to the Federation, historically or culturally. Being a political science major, I'm amazed you hadn't figured that out by now.

3. The Federation President didn't consult the United Earth government before declaring martial law on Earth in "Homefront."

It has been mentioned before that such consultation WAS originally written into the script, though.

This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. Legislatures have absolute authority to make the law and gain that authority directly from the populaces they serve.

And are limited in power to the bylaws and protocols of the countries in which they operate. Countries like the U.S. have built in checks and balances on the powers of the legislature; the EU's checks and balances are more elaborate, and the U.N.'s checks are both expansive and automatic (and sometimes arbitrary, hence the ability of permanent Security Council members to veto any resolution they want for any reason they like).

its authority does not inherently exist the way a legislature's does.

Legislature's authority doesn't inherently exist either, for precisely the same reason. An un-enforced law has no legal power in the same way that an ignored resolution is just as empty. The primary difference here is that states DEPEND on the ability of institutions to enforce the will of the legislature, and when those institutions are unable or unwilling to do so, the usual result is a "failed state." The U.N. has a similar problem with enforcement, and would quickly devolve into a failed state were it not for the willingness of the United States to co-opt the U.N. as a vehicle for its own foreign policy.

I don't know, but you have been doing just that.

That the Federation is a multi-ethnic state is a theoretical proposition that has not been proven logically. My contention is that there are a limited number of ways such a state could have been formed, few of which could be described as peaceful or equitable, and my further contention is that there is room to believe the Federation is NOT a state, but a political and economic union of independent worlds.

The State of Texas and the State of Vermont did

In the case of Texas, only after American immigrants moved into the territory, seized control of the territory from Mexico to form a breakaway republic, then immediately turned around and handed the country and several other territories they didn't even control to the United States. All of this concurrent with the violent conquest of the Comanches, who had been living in the region for centuries even before the Spaniards got there.

Which, all in all, illustrates my point. Texas didn't become a state of the Union because it wanted America. It became a state because America wanted it. The original inhabitants of the region were utterly conquered by military force; they were later integrated into the U.S. armed forces in a notably sparse proportion.

Is that how you think Bolia joined the Federation? A bunch of humans moved there, took it over from the Bolians, appointed a new human-dominated government and then nine years offered to have themselves annexed along with a bunch of other planets they claimed but never really controlled?

The European Union is also in the process of evolving into its own superstate

Once again: let me know when it does, and then we'll be able to compare notes on how it is similar or different from the Federation.

Everything you've been claiming about unbridgeable differences between Federation Member State cultures has been pure nationalism.

Nationalism is a political construct, not a cultural one. Cultural barriers are harder to break down than nationalistic ones, since they are deeply ingrained, and in many cases acculturated at youth. It's part of the reason for, say, the disunity of southeast asian countries. Vietnam and Cambodia remain separate countries for reasons that have very little to do with nationalism.

1. I'm not sure if that's "imperialism" so much as it is a demand that one either sit down or get out -- not so much imperialism as a demand that people either create a unified government or stop pretending to be united.

I don't have a problem with "united." Just that I'm not stupid enough to conflate "united" with "subjugated." Five hundred people can work extremely cooperatively on the same project, but the fact that they're all working cooperatively doesn't magically turn them into a corporation. It depends on the structure of the organization and the history of how they came to be employed on that particular project; they could be volunteers, they could be employees, or they could be slaves.

Of course they did. None of those people considered themselves "Americans." When they said, "My country," they meant Virginia, or New York, or Massachusetts.

You are again conflating culture with nationalism. Common cultural background was well established in the colonies well before the revolution, and they did in fact consider themselves Americans--as opposed to, say, British--long before there was any political body to which "America" could refer.

The United States was NOT formed by a sudden explosion of nationalism, but by the enlightened self-interest of political figures who realized they would be better off handling their own affairs collectively without having to suffer the influence of the British Empire, from whom they were already culturally independent.

Hence my point: "national" unity can be formed by conscious decisions, and can take literally any form a political body wants it to (as in the EU). Cultural unity is harder, and where it does not form organically (as in assimilation by close proximity and isolation as in a city or a neighborhood) it can only be established by dominance (as in conquest).

Actually, Sisko just tells them not to join the UFP because if they join, they'd be unable to sign the Non-Aggression Pact with the Dominion and Starfleet would get its ass kicked trying to protect Bajor.

Exactly. Bajor would eventually be sacrificed rather than defended. Much to the anxiety of the Bajoran people.

 

[Sycho Nosk]

i know the exact answer to your question... but im really buisy and stuff rite now so i cant post it :P

 

[neozeks]

Likewise--and more famously--U.S. finagling of support for the invasion of Iraq. Even with a general consensus that it was a stupid idea that would probably make things worse, the U.N. was pressured into going along with it anyway.

You talk about the UN as if it is truly some kind of independent entity. It is not, it is a tool of the member states. The UN can not form it's own decisions or policies, it completely depends on the concensus of the member states (especially SC members). The US invasion was clearly breaching the UN charter yet the UN had no means to stop it nor even to make a decision to stop it.

Good question. Is the EU represented by a largely Belgian naval force whose officer corps consists of a disproportionate number of Belgian officers, trained in Belgium, whose headquarters also happens to be located in Belgium? Is there, furthermore, a conspicuous preponderance of legal/protocol/historical traditions relevant to this military force that appear to be unique constructs of Belgian culture?

No? That makes the EU different from the Federation... IF Starfleet-as-we've-seen is all there is.

The point is Starfleet-as-we've-seen is NOT all there is. You bring up prepondrance of one race - I explained it already in and out of universe. Why the HQ is on Earth as well. We don't know that everyone is trained on Earth, there is some evidence (and it would be completely logical) that there are other Academy campuses away from Earth. Anyway, it makes sense to place your Academy near your HQ.

Which is entirely possible and even likely. What I object to is the notion that the local forces do not even exist, Or that, if they do, they're just specially assigned Starfleet units headquartered on Earth anyway.

Nobody is really denying that local forces could exist. We are claiming that if they exist, they exist alongside a single Starfleet that is Federation-wide, not just Earth's.

Right. Now, if you have one-species dominated ships, what would be the point of making different species share the same ship designs, especially in the case where different races have different atmosphere, gravity, lighting and culinary requirements?

To promote interspecies integration and dialog, to bring the different skills and knowledge of the various species together so they could be more effective. And if you mean ship designs on the grand scale - I don't see what the shape of the ship or the design of the warp engine or weapons or the deflector has anything to do with atmosphere or gravity? A Galaxy class ship dominated by a species from a weaker-gravity planet could have lower gravity settings and so on.

But this isn't a point for Federation politics as much as it is lack of imagination by the writers. Starfleet designs we've seen as a one-size-fits-all is only feasible in a Federation populated by generic forehead-aliens. If the diversity of their members is pretty shallow to begin with, then the lack of diversity within Starfleet is perfectly excusable; half the crew might actually be aliens who just happen to look exactly like humans.

That's why we had The Chase which explains that most species in fact are very much alike because they were so designed and seeded by an ancient race (presumably exactly to facilitate cooperation).

Because we already know they're HUMAN derived: we've met some of the people responsible for their designs and they have names like Cochrane, Daystrom and Brahms.

Cochrane was just the human inventor of warp drive. Vulcans and other species had it way before that. Who says the later warp engines aren't a mix of human/Vulcan/Andorian and so on technology? Daystrom and Brahms worked in the time when the UFP already existed for a solid number of years - their designs were Federation designs, not human designs. Other inventions were probably brought about by other species. Who says the holodec wasn't invented by a Tellarite?

We know the precursors to phasers and photon torpedoes were first used by Earth Starfleet in the 22nd century;

And you think other species didn't have phasers and photon torpedoes way before humans made their versions of them? Vulcan ships had tractor beams when humans still had grappling hooks.

we know the basic shape of Starfleet vessels was established by this point, with a saucer section and cylindrical nacelles with glowing red ramscoops at the tips, and we know this is because the ship was designed by a team of human engineers.

The basic shape is just one component of the design, and even that doesn't have to be exclusively human.

Because unless the universal translator functions like TARDIS, it does not appear that any other language may be used to identify Federation vessels or outposts. English as a WRITTEN language is predominant everywhere in the Federation.

Yes, well they had to choose one UFP-wide alphabet. It makes sense they would choose the alphabet and language of a weaker, neutral power. Anyway, since we were talking about Bajorans, it doesn't mean they will have to abandon their language and alphabet - just that when dealing on the UFP level and with other species they will use the UT/English/Latin as a common means of communication. I

Yeah, because the Soviets were such a major threat back in 1993...

The project of European integration is much older than the EU. The EU is just it's current stage.

Do Federation citizens have that sense of identity? That is debatable, but it generally seems they do not.

Why? We hear of Federation values and technology just as much and probably more than about exclusivelly human or Vulcan.

Especially since Council membership is still defined by ethnic representation, not blanket proportionality.

And in the USA there is the Senate. You operate in terms of nations/species. The UFP is not made of species, it is made of planetary states. Those states are usually dominated by a single species but that doesn't mean an Andorian living on Bolarus couldn't be elected to represent Bolarus on the Council.

A working example would be a nation-state that is actually formed from a union of several hundred smaller nations that existed independently for thousands of years--sometimes even warring with each other--until one day they decided to get together and team up. The only one that fits the bill is the EU... and you notice something about the EU's military in that it IS, in fact, a conglomeration of various elements from different nations with slightly different design standards and military traditions. The French Navy is still the French Navy, even if France is an integral member of the EU. If and when they all disband into the European Navy, all using the same ship/plane/sensor designs, then you might have a workable example.

You have to remember European integration is only decades old. In it's present state it can only corespond to the earliest days of the UFP. And some of us are willing to accept the Federation was more like you describe in that period. But by the time of TNG, the Federation is TWO CENTURIES old. Imagine the EU in two centuries. They are already now talking about an EU army! (And in fact, much of the weaponry is already European designed.)

P.S.

preponderance of legal/protocol/historical traditions relevant to this military force that appear to be unique constructs of Belgian culture?

Come to think of it, what is so specifically human about Starfleet? Ranks - those could just as well be English translations (and since English seems to be the 'working' language of the Federation, 'official' terms) with appropriate alien translations and equivalents. The naval terms as well. The number of ranks and general organization aren't necessarilly human either - they just seem like logical ways a crew of a certain size would be organized, irrespective of the species (well, unless it is trully different, like the Borg). Klingon and Romulan ships also have XOs and chief engineers. Uniforms look nothing alike human militaries. Insignia is somewhat different. They don't salute. Don't march. There are some human naval traditions (like that whistle-thingie or the change of command ceremony) but I prefer to believe those are informal traditions mantained on mostly-human ships or on ships with human captains.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Likewise--and more famously--U.S. finagling of support for the invasion of Iraq. Even with a general consensus that it was a stupid idea that would probably make things worse, the U.N. was pressured into going along with it anyway.

You talk about the UN as if it is truly some kind of independent entity. It is not, it is a tool of the member states.

Right, but it's supposed to be a neutral platform used by member states to resolve their differences in an organized manner (without degenerating into global wars of imperialism a la WWII). It served that purpose remarkably well during the Cold War, though most Americans think it had more to do with Ronald Reagan smashing the Berlin Wall with his telekinetic powers...

Anyway, as a tool of members' foreign policy its purpose becomes muddied. It isn't supposed to BE used as a tool in that sense, least of all by the most powerful of its member states.

The point is Starfleet-as-we've-seen is NOT all there is.

I agree. And my disagreement is with those who maintain that non-Starfleet space forces either don't exist or don't operate in any meaningful sense outside their own borders and are therefore totally unimportant. I don't believe that for a minute, since it has some pretty foul-smelling implications for the structure of the Federation.

The only question, really, is whether "Starfleet" refers to the organization as a whole, or the bureaucracy through which various fleets receive their orders from the Federation Council (if and when they are acting on behalf of the council and not an individual member state). In either case, UESPA can still assign ships to Starfleet duty, and so can the Andorian Air Force and the Bolian Spacy. They may all call themselves "Starfleet," or they may all ANSWER to Starfleet, or some may call themselves "Starfleet" while others keep their original name and understand they are still part of a unified Federation command.

To promote interspecies integration and dialog, to bring the different skills and knowledge of the various species together so they could be more effective.

Moving the goalposts back now. Either single-crewed ships are used to make it easier for those crews to function, or multi-ethnic crews are used because diversity is necessary for them to function.

Of course, we already know that exchange programs do exist for precisely this purpose, most notably with the Benzites, who apparently prefer to serve aboard their own ships and rarely join "Starfleet." But decreeing that the Benzites MUST serve aboard multi-ethnic ships if they want to operate in space would be troublesome on a number of levels. Not least of which would be comfort: I don't think the average Benzite would want to spend the rest of his starfleet career with a ventilator attached to hi chest if he could more comfortably serve aboard a benzite vessel with a native atmosphere piped through the entire ship.

And if you mean ship designs on the grand scale - I don't see what the shape of the ship or the design of the warp engine or weapons or the deflector has anything to do with atmosphere or gravity? A Galaxy class ship dominated by a species from a weaker-gravity planet could have lower gravity settings and so on.

IF the weaker gravity was the only meaningful difference between them and humans (in which case, variation in ethnicity is irrelevant anyway). Again: even a slight difference in average height can dramatically reduce the productivity of the race that uses that ship; a race of dwarves would barely be able to function on a Galaxy class, and the Xindi Aquatics would have no use for the design at all (and we know from ENT that the Xindi eventually joined the Federation). Even the Xindi insectoids would probably find it a bit uncomfortable.

A Federation member with an average height of four feet would have different deck heights and corridor layouts; correspondingly, they would also use different types of shuttlecraft with different performance ratings and mission types, necessitating a redesign of the shuttlebay. Gliders and avians wouldn't be able to function in anything remotely resembling a starship; most of the interiors would have to resemble the ENT-A's recreation deck with vast open platforms and workstations at various heights.

Again, it only works out nicely if all Federation species are basically humans-with-funny-foreheads. As with the cultural angle I described earlier, the situation becomes untenable if Starfleet is forced to take in something truly alien.

That's why we had The Chase which explains that most species in fact are very much alike because they were so designed and seeded by an ancient race (presumably exactly to facilitate cooperation).

Which is convenient in a way, but doesn't explain distinctly non-humanoid species like the Gorn, the Tholians, the Horta, the Humpbacks, and the various types of shape-shifters we've seen over the years. Chameloids, of course, would be comfortable on just about ANY starship, but if the Gorn and the Tholians along with the Horta one day joined the Federation, how would they be integrated into Starfleet? The Gorn would have to resist the temptation to eat their shipmates, and the Tholians couldn't even be in the same room with their comrades. And how would you deal with the Horta, use the replicators to fill half the ship with a renewable supply of granite, all hazards and disruptions that would involve?

It's just conceit to think that most aliens are similar enough to humans that the Federation can treat them like any other human ethnicity with a handful of small but unimportant cultural quirks and biological tidbits. Realistically, the Federation MUST have a policy that can accommodate races too alien to be easily assimilated, simple hippy-style "We're all brothers, man!" integration isn't going to work in those situations. Something alot more practical would have to be worked out.

Cochrane was just the human inventor of warp drive.

And Starfleet vessels for nearly two hundred years included design elements that first appeared in Cochrane's prototype. This is not a coincidence.

Who says the holodec wasn't invented by a Tellarite?

I thought it was pretty well understood it was invented by the Xyrillians?

Speaking of aliens: try integrating THAT species in Starfleet. "Oath of celibacy" doesn't even scratch the surface.

And you think other species didn't have phasers and photon torpedoes way before humans made their versions of them?

No, because "phaser" is too specific a term for a specific type of weapon. And photon torpedoes we know to be derived from a Klingon design, one that apparently none of the other future Federation members used (unless the Klingons were founding members for a brief period before breaking away).

The project of European integration is much older than the EU. The EU is just it's current stage.

I'm aware of that. I'm also aware the formation of the EU is NOT a reaction to the Soviet threat. If anything, it's a reaction to the LACK of a Soviet threat and the need to reach common ground on some fundamental basis other than NATO.

Why? We hear of Federation values and technology just as much and probably more than about exclusivelly human or Vulcan.

Except even the term "Federation Values" is invariably spoken by humans about other humans. Most famously in "The Maquis" where Nechayev insists that the Maquis should be reminded that they're "still Federation citizens," prompting an angry rant from Sisko, "Earth is paradise! It's easy to be a saint in paradise! But the Maquis do not live in paradise!"

We do get to hear directly from the Maquis that THEIR sense of unity outweighs any species identification, for precisely the reasons I mentioned earlier: they are removed from their homeland and forced to work together day in and day out, side by side, in the same community and environment. In doing so they form a collective culture that supersedes their identification with their homeworlds and--ironically--even supersedes their identification with the Federation. If anything this undermines the notion of blanket Federation identity for all its citizens, and this is reinforced again by the lesson of Turkana IV: most people are more loyal to their global/nearspace community than they are to the Federation, and this is unlikely to be any different on the major Federation worlds.

And in the USA there is the Senate. You operate in terms of nations/species.

Which means the Federation is not a multi-ethnic superstate. It's a plurality of independent ethnicities that have not yet merged into a whole, and therefore must have their various interests represented separately.

You have to remember European integration is only decades old.

Which, for a union of nations that are only about a few centuries old, puts it on the same level as the Federation, which is aunion of worlds and species that are THOUSANDS of years old.

the Federation is TWO CENTURIES old.

Funny you mention this... a Russian colleague of mine has often joked: "America is a funny country. Everyone thinks two hundred years is a long time."

Come to think of it, what is so specifically human about Starfleet?

The fact that there is little identifiably alien about it. For example:

Ranks - those could just as well be English translations

Which assumes that all species have a comparable rank structure that fits neatly into English translations. That still leaves you to wonder, "A Lieutenant, a Captain, Commander, a Sub-Commander walk into a shuttlecraft; which one of them is the ranking officer?"

The number of ranks and general organization aren't necessarilly human either - they just seem like logical ways a crew of a certain size would be organized

While other possibilities, arrived at by different races, would be discarded in favor of the organization that coincidentally happens to resemble the system used by old Earth naval forces.

Which is kind of dumb, considering many Federation members were operating STARSHIPS when humans were still puttering around on steamships. The more logical system, therefore, is the one proven to work most effectively; that is unlikely to be a system derived from or inspired by human naval traditions.

There are some human naval traditions (like that whistle-thingie or the change of command ceremony) but I prefer to believe those are informal traditions mantained on mostly-human ships or on ships with human captains.

As do I. The difference between you and me is that I strongly believe the mostly-human ships are mostly-human ships for a pretty specific reason. To wit, that these ships were designed by humans, primarily for humans, built mostly in Earth shipyards based on Earth designs and technical solutions. This necessarily means that the mostly-Andorian ships would probably be dramatically different in design and structure, looking nothing like their human counterparts and yet, in some important way, still being identified as "Federation starships." Hence the Federation's military may well consist of Starfleet, the Andorian Airforce, the Tellarite/Bolian Spacy, the Uncanny X-Men and the League of Sarcastic Assholes. Even if they all share technology all the time, it's inconceivable that they would use all of the same ships and weapons; even the U.S. Air Force has different planes and even a different rank structure from the U.S. Navy.

And I believe if we were to see the WHOLE Federation actually go to war, it would look like an expanded version of the allied fleet from "United." You'd see a fleet of tens of thousands of vessels, composed of task forces of a few dozen to a few hundred ships, each clearly belonging to a completely different species, yet every one of them united under the banner of the United Federation of Planets. The one thing you wouldn't see, is a sky full of Excelsior's and Mirandas with an occasional Galaxy Class thrown in to break up the scene.

 

[nahuatl]

Post Dominion War is the Dominion still considered a galactic superpower? Or does the Federation now hold that title?

Also I just finished watching the Dominion War saga and have one question: why did the Dominion target the Federation going as far as to politically isolate it with non-aggression treaties with alpha-beta quadrant powers, when the danger to it's exsistance were belligerent empires like the Cardassians, Romulans etc who actually went on a little trip to eliminate the founders a while back? It seems as if the Dominion had a real axe to grind against the Federation.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

For all we know, Starfleet had a major presence in Vulcan orbit

I suddenly recalled TVH, where Kirk and crew opt to return to Earth to stand trial. For some reason they choose to do so aboard the Klingon vessel they captured.

No explanation for this is forthcoming. Vulcan is a major Federation world, so Kirk shouldn't be able to stay there with a stolen Klingon ship for three months without Starfleet finding out about it and sending a ship to collect him. It would have been a simple matter to surrender himself and his stolen ship to the nearest Starfleet base instead of spending three months trying to repair a stolen Klingon ship to make the trip. There aren't alot of plausible reasons why he would not have done so, except that there was no Starfleet presence on Vulcan for hi to surrender to, and no one who was willing or able to safely take possession of his captured vessel.

I'm trying to imagine some hotshot F-14 pilot killing a Soviet pilot in a fist fight, stealing a mig and then landing his captured aircraft at O'Hare Airport, only to have the plane sit on the tarmac for three months being serviced by Chicago engineers while he mulled a decision whether or not to fly to Washington D.C. to stand trial. The image doesn't come easily; seems to me he'd probably be arrested by local police the moment he landed.

 

[neozeks]

I agree. And my disagreement is with those who maintain that non-Starfleet space forces either don't exist or don't operate in any meaningful sense outside their own borders and are therefore totally unimportant. I don't believe that for a minute, since it has some pretty foul-smelling implications for the structure of the Federation.

I agree that local space forces should exist but I wouldn't really say they operate very much outside of their borders. It's simply the fact that in all the 100s of post-ENT episodes we never see them (or hear them undoubtedly mentioned) that makes me conclude they are mostly just planetary/local defence and policing forces.

The only question, really, is whether &quot;Starfleet&quot; refers to the organization as a whole, or the bureaucracy through which various fleets receive their orders from the Federation Council (if and when they are acting on behalf of the council and not an individual member state). In either case, UESPA can still assign ships to Starfleet duty, and so can the Andorian Air Force and the Bolian Spacy. They may all call themselves &quot;Starfleet,&quot; or they may all ANSWER to Starfleet, or some may call themselves &quot;Starfleet&quot; while others keep their original name and understand they are still part of a unified Federation command.

So, essentially, is it a confederation or a federation? I and others believe it was firstly a confederation (with mostly national militaries), and then over time it became a federation (with an unified military+axuilliary national forces). Just like the USA and most confederations over the span of history (that didn't fall apart). Just like the path the EU seems to be going. You seem to think the Federation hasn't changed almost nothing in it's over two centuries of existance.

Moving the goalposts back now. Either single-crewed ships are used to make it easier for those crews to function, or multi-ethnic crews are used because diversity is necessary for them to function.

That's why a posited a middle solution, a compromise - crews where one species is dominant but others are also present (even among senior officers. In fact it seems there is a slew of solutions Starfleet uses - fully one species crews (T'Kumbra) or completely mixed up crews (The Saratoga seemed pretty mixed to me).

Of course, we already know that exchange programs do exist for precisely this purpose, most notably with the Benzites, who apparently prefer to serve aboard their own ships and rarely join &quot;Starfleet.&quot; But decreeing that the Benzites MUST serve aboard multi-ethnic ships if they want to operate in space would be troublesome on a number of levels. Not least of which would be comfort: I don't think the average Benzite would want to spend the rest of his starfleet career with a ventilator attached to hi chest if he could more comfortably serve aboard a benzite vessel with a native atmosphere piped through the entire ship.

Then they could use the T'Kumbra single-species crew solution with Benzites.

Again, it only works out nicely if all Federation species are basically humans-with-funny-foreheads. As with the cultural angle I described earlier, the situation becomes untenable if Starfleet is forced to take in something truly alien.


Which is convenient in a way, but doesn't explain distinctly non-humanoid species like the Gorn, the Tholians, the Horta, the Humpbacks, and the various types of shape-shifters we've seen over the years. Chameloids, of course, would be comfortable on just about ANY starship, but if the Gorn and the Tholians along with the Horta one day joined the Federation, how would they be integrated into Starfleet? The Gorn would have to resist the temptation to eat their shipmates, and the Tholians couldn't even be in the same room with their comrades. And how would you deal with the Horta, use the replicators to fill half the ship with a renewable supply of granite, all hazards and disruptions that would involve?

I doubt the Gorn would be allowed in the Federation if they couldn't resist the temptation to eat others - not hurting others is a principal Federation value. Anyway, it seems that the extreme allienness of these species (and the Sheliak) is exactly what makes the Federation's contact with these species difficult and often adversarial. As advanced as future morals are it seems the humanoid/non-humanoid divide hasn't been really bridged yet. Anyway, it seems most species are (as unfortunate as that scientifically may be) fundamentally human-like.

It's just conceit to think that most aliens are similar enough to humans that the Federation can treat them like any other human ethnicity with a handful of small but unimportant cultural quirks and biological tidbits. Realistically, the Federation MUST have a policy that can accommodate races too alien to be easily assimilated, simple hippy-style &quot;We're all brothers, man!&quot; integration isn't going to work in those situations. Something alot more practical would have to be worked out.

I agree, and the single-species crews (internal design can be changed, SF ships are probably highly modular) or even i'll concede separate fleets could be used in these cases. Maybe there are different levels of membership and integration for these extreme cases? But it still seems most species are 'compatible', so to speak. Why shouldn't they be allowed to unify more tightly? (To use the EU analogy again - there has been talk of a 'two-track' EU, stronger integration for EU-enhusiast nations, weaker for EU-sceptics.)

And Starfleet vessels for nearly two hundred years included design elements that first appeared in Cochrane's prototype. This is not a coincidence.

Who can say they first appeared there? True, that may be a reason, but it doesn't mean it's human-centric. Maybe the design does actually work best in some situations. Maybe humans were so weak that nothing in the early-UFP ships would have been 'human' if they hadn't been given at least the general design.

I thought it was pretty well understood it was invented by the Xyrillians?

Maybe. It's still the same point. There is a whole slew of Federation inventions and technology for which we have no idea who invented them - nothing says it have to be humans.

No, because &quot;phaser&quot; is too specific a term for a specific type of weapon.

Yes, but it just describes a specific type of weapon that works in a specific way. It's not UFP- or human-unique. The Cardassians and Bajorans also had phasers. Do we know what weapons the Vulcans or Andorians used before joining the Federation?

And photon torpedoes we know to be derived from a Klingon design, one that apparently none of the other future Federation members used (unless the Klingons were founding members for a brief period before breaking away).

Still means it isn't specifically human technology.

I'm aware of that. I'm also aware the formation of the EU is NOT a reaction to the Soviet threat. If anything, it's a reaction to the LACK of a Soviet threat and the need to reach common ground on some fundamental basis other than NATO.

And I'm talking about the predecessors of the EU - the European Coal and Steel Community (1951), the European Community(1967). Very much the Cold War era.

Except even the term &quot;Federation Values&quot; is invariably spoken by humans about other humans.

What about Let He Who Is Without Sin...? It was centered about a group made of several species (and lead by a human) proclaiming Federation (not human or Vulcan) values were being undermined.

Most famously in &quot;The Maquis&quot; where Nechayev insists that the Maquis should be reminded that they're &quot;still Federation citizens,&quot; prompting an angry rant from Sisko, &quot;Earth is paradise! It's easy to be a saint in paradise! But the Maquis do not live in paradise!&quot;

Sisko specifically mentioned Earth because the politicians and admirals that were making the decisions were stationed and living on Earth, not because it is the homeworld of humans. He used Earth, the capital, as a symbol for the paradise that is the Federation. If he was talking to a Vulcan and if it was the capital of the UFP he would have mentioned Vulcan.

We do get to hear directly from the Maquis that THEIR sense of unity outweighs any species identification, for precisely the reasons I mentioned earlier: they are removed from their homeland and forced to work together day in and day out, side by side, in the same community and environment.

Interestingly, that's the same environment like on a starship. That's probably why Starfleet is so essential to the Federation and a key foundation of it's unity and identity.

If anything this undermines the notion of blanket Federation identity for all its citizens, and this is reinforced again by the lesson of Turkana IV: most people are more loyal to their global/nearspace community than they are to the Federation, and this is unlikely to be any different on the major Federation worlds.

Turkana was nothing like the major worlds. It was a failed Federation colony/protectorate. Aside from that, even in today's federations there are regions that identify more with their local area than the whole of the federation.

Which means the Federation is not a multi-ethnic superstate. It's a plurality of independent ethnicities that have not yet merged into a whole, and therefore must have their various interests represented separately.

Nope. Even if the EU one day becomes a federation, I have no doubt there will still be a Council of the EU, representing member states (again, mostly dominated by a single nation, but with other nations as well).

Which, for a union of nations that are only about a few centuries old, puts it on the same level as the Federation, which is aunion of worlds and species that are THOUSANDS of years old.

European nation states in their present form may not be thousands of years old, but European culture, politics and national identities are.

Funny you mention this... a Russian colleague of mine has often joked: &quot;America is a funny country. Everyone thinks two hundred years is a long time.&quot;

Well, compare the USA at it's founding and now. You'll see two hundred years is plenty of time for political and cultural change. Especially since the more we get to modern times, the faster the rate of change becomes.

Which assumes that all species have a comparable rank structure that fits neatly into English translations. That still leaves you to wonder, &quot;A Lieutenant, a Captain, Commander, a Sub-Commander walk into a shuttlecraft; which one of them is the ranking officer?&quot;

And why wouldn't they? It has most to do with the size of the unit the person is leading. Why wouldn't different species come independently to the mostly same structure?

That still leaves you to wonder, &quot;A Lieutenant, a Captain, Commander, a Sub-Commander walk into a shuttlecraft; which one of them is the ranking officer?&quot;

Those are terms in different languages - a Sub-Commander is probably equivalent to a human name for a rank - possibly Commander? NATO has a mostly standardized rank structure, though the names in the different languages are not the same.

While other possibilities, arrived at by different races, would be discarded in favor of the organization that coincidentally happens to resemble the system used by old Earth naval forces.

Ok, what other possibilities? All the races have a similar command structure, even the non-Federation ones. it's simply a logical way to organize a military.

Which is kind of dumb, considering many Federation members were operating STARSHIPS when humans were still puttering around on steamships. The more logical system, therefore, is the one proven to work most effectively; that is unlikely to be a system derived from or inspired by human naval traditions.

And in what signifacantly different way were the crews of these other species organized?

Andorian ships would probably be dramatically different in design and structure, looking nothing like their human counterparts and yet, in some important way, still being identified as &quot;Federation starships.&quot; Hence the Federation's military may well consist of Starfleet, the Andorian Airforce, the Tellarite/Bolian Spacy, the Uncanny X-Men and the League of Sarcastic Assholes.

Trouble is, we never see even an incling of these forces, even when you would expect to see them.

Even if they all share technology all the time, it's inconceivable that they would use all of the same ships and weapons; even the U.S. Air Force has different planes and even a different rank structure from the U.S. Navy.

That's because the job (and because of it, it's organization) of the Air Force is different than the job of the Navy. Even so, most AF/Navy ranks have their equivalents.

And I believe if we were to see the WHOLE Federation actually go to war, it would look like an expanded version of the allied fleet from &quot;United.&quot;... The one thing you wouldn't see, is a sky full of Excelsior's and Mirandas with an occasional Galaxy Class thrown in to break up the scene.

Well, that's exactly what we saw in the Dominion War. But lets not get into that again.

 

[Sci]

And the fact that the Illinois Air National Guard is being used improperly does not change the legal fact that it is not just the Illinois division of the United States Air Force.

It could mean, however, that STARFLEET is being used improperly, or at leas being used in a way that differs from the way other world's space forces are used.

But there is no evidence of this.

No, it was retconned every time the ship was called a "Federation starship"

That's not what "retcon" means, but whatever.

Retroactive continuity is the deliberate alteration of background facts within a fictional universe that have previously been established. It was established, quite firmly and explicitly, in "The Corbomite Maneuver" that the Enterprise was a United Earth ship. Then, once the writers invented the Federation in "Arena," the Enterprise was described as a Federation starship, and all subsequent episodes written from a POV that presumed that the Enterprise had always been a Federation starship rather than a United Earth ship and that the Federation had existed prior to "Arena" (even though the TOS episodes prior to "Arena" contained no evidence of its existence).

That's a prime example of changing the established background facts of a fictional world -- of retroactive continuity.

You are basing your entire argument on the basis of an unsubstantiated premise (that cultural barriers between Federation Member States would be too large for the Federation to be truly integrated into a functional yet multi-cultural state).

Far from it. They COULD be integrated into a functional yet multi-cultural state. My point is that such a state could come into existence in the way you imply--blurring cultural barriers almost unto irrelevance, where Federation identity is superior to species identity--could not and in the history of the world has not ever occurred just by virtue of enlightened self interest.

Well of course it hasn't happened in the history of this world. Star Trek is based on the idea that we can transcend history and do something new, something that's never been done before -- have diverse, long-established cultures unite as equals rather than unite through conquest or divide through xenophobia. That's true on a planetary level -- no one's ever established a world government -- and on the interstellar level.

It's hard enough just to assimilate new ethnic groups even in the U.S., which IS a multi-ethnic state, far removed from any of their respective homelands. The Federation didn't seem to form that way; it can't be a multi-ethnic state unless the various ethnicities actually live and work together in the same space on a regular basis often enough and closely enough that their shared identity begins to supersede their racial identity, and THIS can only occur if none of their homeworlds are still... well, homeworlds.

I for one see no particular reason to presume that there hasn't been so much intra-Federation immigration that there are not huge percentages of each founding and early Federation Member States that are comprised of species not native to those Member States' worlds. (And what the hell does "homeworld" even mean apart from "the world the species evolved on?")

So the Federation where six billion Vulcans still live ON VULCAN--and a few thousand elsewhere--isn't a multi-ethnic state.

Writer Bob Orci commented on TrekMovie that he thinks there's a good chance that Spock was speaking out of shock and not accounting for millions of Vulcans who lived off-world.

And bear in mind that we have no idea how many biological non-Vulcans were living on Vulcan -- and, for that matter, whether or not the concept of a Vulcan can sometimes encompass biological non-Vulcans who move to Vulcan and adopt Vulcan culture.

The best you can do is to claim, without a shred of evidence, that all the other Federation members have gone out and emigrated to the point where there are more Andorians living abroad than on Andor, but then you have to figure out what happened to Andor to make them want to move somewhere else.

What, the fact that Andor is fraking cold even though Andorian starships had been previously portrayed in ENT as having similar temperatures to Earth ships, thereby establishing that Andorians and Humans prefer similar temperatures, isn't good enough?

The fact of the matter is, we have no idea of the demographics of the Federation. We have no idea how much intra-Federation immigration there is, and we have no idea under what process the forging of a Federation identity took place. But we do know that a Federation political identity was forged, and we do know that it was forged, because we've seen Humans AND non-Humans talk about it.

In the end, the possibilities boil down to this: the multi-ethnic state you describe COULD NOT have formed peacefully.

Only if you start from a premise that the cultures involved could not have made new political choices that are without historical precedent.

You begin from that premise. Star Trek does not.

the fundamental message of all of Star Trek is that different cultures can work together and compromise in spite of their differences.

Again, there's "working together despite differences" and there's "marginalizing/erasing differences."

And that's fair enough from a cultural POV. Starfleet, however, is a military, and as such, it is inevitably going to marginalize or erase a certain level of diversity in order to ensure discipline and functionality in the face of combat. That's not imperialism, that's a simple necessity for Starfleet to do its job.

Actually, with the exception of its missions into Earth's past during TOS, there's no evidence that the Enterprise ever returned to Earth at any point between its launch in 2245 and its refit at the end of Kirk's five-year-mission in 2270.

Except for having intentionally returned to Earth after time-warping back into the 23rd century at the end of "Tomorrow is Yesterday." Of course, IIRC it was implied that Enterprise was heading back to Earth anyway before it accidentally passed close to that "dark star" that time warped them into the 1960s.

Yes, like I said, "with the exception of its missions into Earth's past."

And also in "Conspiracy," where Picard states it is "quite unusual for a starship to return to Earth." His log entry specifically uses that word "return," implying that most starships are, in fact, FROM Earth.

That's a thoroughly ambiguous line that does not actually establish any damn thing.

And besides, we already know that the Enterprise-D was not from Earth -- it was from Mars.

And then there's Savar's line: "We are always delighted when the Enterprise returns to the nest."

He's speaking metaphorically of Starfleet Headquarters, not the Enterprise's home port (if it even has one).

I seem to recall Sarek alluding to the fact after being accused of murdering the Tellarite delegate.

I just re-watched the scene where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy confront Sarek in his quarters after he returns from meditation and then suffers a heart attack. At no one does anyone claim that Tellarites use violence as an expression of endearment.

For the same reason that Humans would abandon their normal culture

They didn't, though.

Didn't they? Look at how much more peaceable, even pacifist, non-Starfleet Humans have tended to be, sometimes to the point of disapproving of all of Starfleet -- Joseph Sisko and Jake Sisko, for instance, or the Picard family. Quite a few civilian Humans in the Trekverse also seem to be also much more insular -- they seem to prefer living lives built around local communities; presumably it's similar to the difference in lifestyle preferences that exists today between people who prefer big cities and people who prefer rural lifestyles.

If people like Harry Kim's parents, or Julian Bashir's, are any indication, civilian Humans also seem quite unadept at working within strict hierarchies, too.

I would suggest that Human civilian culture is very different than the Starfleet culture we've seen throughout Star Trek, and that that's why Starfleet officers often seem to have conflicts with Human civilians.

Much has been made of the fact that Starfleet draws heavily on old-Earth naval memes and traditions for its rank and organizational structure, not to mention its operational culture and regulations. It is naive in the extreme to assume that all races everywhere in the Federation just happen to have the exact same basic rank and command structure as humans do, close enough that the differences between them can be solved just by teaching them a few obscure nautical terms.

But it's not exactly the same. Starfleet functions fundamentally differently from modern real-life navies in a very important regard: The vast majority of members of Starfleet are officers rather than non-coms.

That's a huge difference whose importance cannot be emphasized enough, and it's utterly without precedent in real-life navies.

Seems to me that that distinctive trait of Starfleet's structure probably came from non-Humans.

From the fact that humans find it so difficult to do so when cultural conflicts DO arise. In most situations they are helped by the fact that their encounters tend to lob them their share of softball problems, situations that can be neatly shoehorned into some subset of Earth cultural taboos. Then every once in a while their Klingon security officer gets hit by a ton of bricks, and the single most experienced officer on the entire ship has to argue down a self-righteous CMO who insists on "forcing him to deal with his disability." And then there's Riker's epic romance fail on the hermaphrodite planet...

All this establishes is that different people have different inter-cultural competencies. And that's always going to be true.

Because they all realize that integration is better for everyone than segregation, presumably.

Assuming that it IS better than segregation, which is not always the case.

Excuse me?

What makes you think that the Klingons would have been allowed to maintain their own ships?

That wasn't a Klingon ship that approached the Enterprise in "Heart of Glory?"

Of course it was. And the Klingon Empire has been retconned into never having joined the Federation.

Of course, the question just supports my objection, doesn't it? What--other than the complete demoralization and conquest of the Klingon race and the forcible abolishment of their warrior mindset--could POSSIBLY compel them to give up the right to maintain their own ships?

A fundamental change in Klingon political culture, wereby they abandon their imperialist beliefs and belief in Klingon superiority and instead embrace the idea of diversity and seek to integrate all or most of the Klingon Defense Force into the Federation Starfleet, integrating non-Klingon Starfleet officers into ships formerly of the Defense Force and integrating Klingon officers into Starfleet ships.

I'm sure that the Federation, when faced with integrating such a large space force with such a divergent technological evolutionary history into Starfleet, would probably fundamentally change a lot of its future Starfleet designs to incorporate Klingon elements into it.

1. The European Union is evolving into a state.

Irrelevant, since until it has become a state,

No, relevant, because if the E.U. is a prime example of an alliance that is delegated some of the authorities of a state and then evolves into a state, that supports the idea that the Federation began as an alliance and developed into a state.

3. The European Union only has the ability to craft legislation for its Member States because those Member States' governments have delegated to it that capacity. They remain "masters of the Treaty" who can withdraw that delegation of authority if they so choose; this sets the E.U. apart from, say, the United States, as does the E.U.'s inability to take solid action without broad consensus from most of its Member States' governments.

Which, again, probably makes the EU a better ringer since the United States is not comparable in any significant way to the Federation, historically or culturally.

Functionally, the Federation is much more equivalent to the United States than the present-day European Union. The Federation Council can pass legislation without getting consensus from Federation Members, and can make important decisions without consulting Member governments.

I'll certainly agree that the Federation's story of pre-existing cultures coming together peaceably as equals and uniting is closer in many respects to the origins of the E.U. than the U.S. But in terms of simply how the Federation works, it's much more akin to a federal state like the U.S. -- or Canada, or Germany, or Australia -- than it is to the European Union.

3. The Federation President didn't consult the United Earth government before declaring martial law on Earth in "Homefront."

It has been mentioned before that such consultation WAS originally written into the script, though.

Yes, and it was cut from the final draft of the script. It is no more evidence of how the Federation works than NEM's cut scene at the end is evidence that Starfleet has begun putting seat belts on its ships.

This is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. Legislatures have absolute authority to make the law and gain that authority directly from the populaces they serve.

And are limited in power to the bylaws and protocols of the countries in which they operate.

And except for the rules set by written Constitutions, legislatures make those bylaws and protocols. Again, the comparison of a legislature, which inherently possesses legislative authority delegated to it by the general populace, and an intergovernmental organization, which only has authorities delegated to it by governments, doesn't work. Governments have their authorities delegated to them directly by the general populace; IGOs have their authorities delegated to them by governments. It's like the difference between a contractor and a subcontractor.

The U.N. has a similar problem with enforcement, and would quickly devolve into a failed state were it not for the willingness of the United States to co-opt the U.N. as a vehicle for its own foreign policy.

The U.N. cannot devolve into a failed state because the U.N. is not a state of any kind. It possesses none of the legal traits of a state. It does not possess territory, it does not have the authority to make legislation, it does not have the ability to over-ride the laws of its Member States. It does not have a military. It does not have the right to use violence to support its decisions. It has been delegated the authority to operate an extremely limited courts system by its Member States, and those Members do not always recognize the authority of those international courts.

In the words of Max Weber, it is that organization that has a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." It thus includes such institutions as the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy, courts, and police..

The United Nations possesses none of these. It possesses Peacekeeping Forces whose members only serve at the pleasure of their states' governments; it possesses a set of IGOs with varying degrees of good relations with the U.N.'s primary bureaucracy, not a civil service; it has a security service in its Headquarters, not a police force. The U.N. is not recognized as a state by any other states -- not by the U.S., not by the U.K., not by the Russian Federation, not by India, not by Afghanistan, not by Australia, not by Brazil, not by Argentina, not by Mexico, not by Saudi Arabia, not by Israel, not by the Palestinian Authority, not by Jordan, not by China, not by Japan, not by itself, not by anybody.

And, most importantly, the United Nations is not recognized by anyone, not even the United Nations, as possessing the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the United Nations is if you think the term "failed state" could in any way be used to describe an organization that is not a state of any kind.

I don't know, but you have been doing just that.

That the Federation is a multi-ethnic state is a theoretical proposition that has not been proven logically.

I have provided numerous examples of legal traits possessed by the Federation that match those of a state. You have attempted to break down those parts of my argument, and I've demonstrated every time where your attempt to claim that the Federation does not possess the authority of a state has failed.

I've provided evidence to support my contention that the Federation is a multinational (not multi-ethnic, though multiple ethnicities are inherently a part of there being multiple nations) federal state. You've not set forth your argument for what the Federation is, other than that you've tried and failed to thwart the argument that it is not a state.

The State of Texas and the State of Vermont did

In the case of Texas, only after American immigrants moved into the territory, seized control of the territory from Mexico to form a breakaway republic, then immediately turned around and handed the country and several other territories they didn't even control to the United States. All of this concurrent with the violent conquest of the Comanches, who had been living in the region for centuries even before the Spaniards got there.

And I completely agree that that's a prime example of American imperialism.

But that's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand. You tried to claim that the existence of a local government handling local issues and not answering to the Federation government was evidence that Federation Member worlds are independent. I pointed out that local governments that handle local affairs and do not answer to the central government exist in federal systems such as the United States, and that therefore their presence in the Federation does not constitute evidence that Federation Members are independent.

You tried to counter by claiming that U.S. states have never been sovereign states -- I pointed out that two (actually, three, now that I think of it -- Hawaii) have been. That they were acquired in systems of imperialism -- and bear in mind that Vermont joined the Union of its own accord after having been an independent state, so not all of the former sovereign states of the U.S. joined as a result of imperialism -- is actually irrelevant, because, again, whatever their origins, the existence of local governments handling local affairs and not answering to the central government is not evidence of independence because such governments exist in federal systems.

 

[Sci]

Is that how you think Bolia joined the Federation?

No, I think Bolarus joined because the Bolian people and government decided that the benefits of joining outweighed the costs and that their rights would be well-protected as Federation Members. But by all means, keep trying to change the topic after I've demonstrated why a piece of evidence (existence of autonomous local governments) you've tried to muster in support of your claim (the Federation is not a state) does not actually support your claim (because autonomous local governments exist within federal states).

Of course they did. None of those people considered themselves "Americans." When they said, "My country," they meant Virginia, or New York, or Massachusetts.

You are again conflating culture with nationalism. Common cultural background was well established in the colonies well before the revolution, and they did in fact consider themselves Americans--as opposed to, say, British--long before there was any political body to which "America" could refer.

The United States was NOT formed by a sudden explosion of nationalism, but by the enlightened self-interest of political figures who realized they would be better off handling their own affairs collectively without having to suffer the influence of the British Empire, from whom they were already culturally independent.

Hence my point: "national" unity can be formed by conscious decisions, and can take literally any form a political body wants it to (as in the EU). Cultural unity is harder, and where it does not form organically (as in assimilation by close proximity and isolation as in a city or a neighborhood) it can only be established by dominance (as in conquest).

1. If you really think that the cultures of the North and the South were, or are, the same? Well, all I can say is, get a Yankee and a Northerner in the same room and watch them go at it. You'll be thoroughly disabused of the notion of the cultural unity of the United States very quickly.

2. Again, you're relying on the premise that cultural unity can only come through peoples organically living together or through imperialism. Star Trek is based on the premise that cultural identity can arise through a deliberate decision on the parts of the cultures involved to build a new cultural identity.

This has never happened in real life (so far). This does not mean it cannot happen. Star Trek is based on the idea that people can make a decision without historical precedent.

You either accept that, or you do not. If you do not, then I would suggest that Star Trek is not for you.

Actually, Sisko just tells them not to join the UFP because if they join, they'd be unable to sign the Non-Aggression Pact with the Dominion and Starfleet would get its ass kicked trying to protect Bajor.

Exactly. Bajor would eventually be sacrificed rather than defended.

No, I didn't say Bajor would be sacrificed -- implying that Starfleet would deliberately disregard its obligation to defend Bajor. I said that Starfleet would get its ass kicked trying to protect Bajor -- meaning, they would try to fulfill their obligation to defend Bajor and be defeated in battle.

Or are you going to equate an honest attempt to defend someone that fails with a deliberate act of surrender?

For all we know, Starfleet had a major presence in Vulcan orbit

I suddenly recalled TVH, where Kirk and crew opt to return to Earth to stand trial. For some reason they choose to do so aboard the Klingon vessel they captured.

No explanation for this is forthcoming. Vulcan is a major Federation world, so Kirk shouldn't be able to stay there with a stolen Klingon ship for three months without Starfleet finding out about it and sending a ship to collect him.

I always took the scene at the end of TSFS as indicating that he'd gotten to Vulcan under cloak. As for the opening of TVH, it had always seemed to me that either Kirk and Co. were staying at a Vulcan monastery whose leaders were concealing their presence from Vulcan and Starfleet authorities, or that Sarek was using his considerable political influence to obstruct a search of the Vulcan monastery where they were staying. And I always figured that Kirk and Company stayed at the monastery until they were convinced that Spock's re-education system was mostly complete and stable and that Spock would be okay, not that they were there struggling to repair the Bounty.

And, yes, I figure Kirk is exactly the sort of guy who would rather fly a captured Klingon vessel straight to the Federation capital (no doubt broadcasting his presence aboard the whole way) rather than just turn it over to, say, Starbase 2 in orbit of Vulcan or whatever.

As for the question of Starfleet ships and the needs of non-humanoids...

newtype_alpha, I suggest that you might enjoy the Star Trek: Titan series of novels. The premise behind it is that Starfleet is a single organization of the sort that I and others have described it in this thread, and that it has in the past mixed the species of its ships' crews, but that it has also tended to segregate on the basis of body type. (Which is fairly realistic -- real organizations often set lofty goals but only partially meet them.)

And Starfleet has now decided that it needs to change that and make a stronger effort to integrate diverse species of officers into a single crew.

The U.S.S. Titan is thus a ship deliberately designed to accommodate numerous non-humanoid species in addition to humanoids, including Choblik, Horta, Pahkwa-thanh, S'ti'ach, Pak'shree, Selkies, Skorr, Betelgeusians, Elaysians, Chelon, Brikarians, Seleneans, Syrath, and Thymerae.

The fundamental premise of the series is how diverse the crew -- and therefore the Federation -- truly is.

 

[Sci]

Because unless the universal translator functions like TARDIS, it does not appear that any other language may be used to identify Federation vessels or outposts. English as a WRITTEN language is predominant everywhere in the Federation.

Yes, well they had to choose one UFP-wide alphabet. It makes sense they would choose the alphabet and language of a weaker, neutral power. Anyway, since we were talking about Bajorans, it doesn't mean they will have to abandon their language and alphabet - just that when dealing on the UFP level and with other species they will use the UT/English/Latin as a common means of communication.

For whatever it's worth, when Bajor joins the Federation in the post-series DS9 novels, it's established in Bajor: Fragments and Omens that Bajor adopts official bilingualism -- signs and public notices are published in Bajoran and in Federation Standard (which seems to be English).

Presumably, Federation Standard is the language used on Federation starship hulls. The implication seems to be that the Federation government itself primarily uses Standard (and probably uses Member languages, too), and that all Federation Member worlds use Standard alongside their native languages.

So, basically, it's a sort of interstellar Canada in that regard -- presumably, if you're looking at a public directory on Vulcan, it will be in both Vulcan and Standard; if you're reading a new law passed on Andor, it will be in both Andorii and Standard; if you're buying a guide map on Efros, it will be in both Efrosian and Standard; etc.

Why? We hear of Federation values and technology just as much and probably more than about exclusivelly human or Vulcan.

Except even the term "Federation Values" is invariably spoken by humans about other humans.

Actually, the New Essentialists seen in "Let He Who Is Without Sin...," who were railing against what they saw as the hedonism of Risa, were ranting about "Federation values" but comprised at least one Bolian. And who knows what other species were members of that movement?

So I think it's safe to say that Humans aren't the only ones who care about Federation values.

Most famously in "The Maquis" where Nechayev insists that the Maquis should be reminded that they're "still Federation citizens," prompting an angry rant from Sisko, "Earth is paradise! It's easy to be a saint in paradise! But the Maquis do not live in paradise!"

I think that's a function of Earth being the Federation capital, not of an identification of the Federation with Earth. Earth is identified with the Federation, not the Federation with Earth. If the Federation capital was Vulcan, Sisko would have said, "Vulcan is a paradise! It's easy to be a saint in paradise! But the Maquis do not live in Paradise!" If it had been Andor, he would have said, "Andor is a paradise!" Tellar? "Tellar is a paradise!" Etc.

We do get to hear directly from the Maquis that THEIR sense of unity outweighs any species identification, for precisely the reasons I mentioned earlier: they are removed from their homeland and forced to work together day in and day out, side by side, in the same community and environment. In doing so they form a collective culture that supersedes their identification with their homeworlds and--ironically--even supersedes their identification with the Federation. If anything this undermines the notion of blanket Federation identity for all its citizens,

Not really. Any culture is inevitably going to have some members that don't identify with it and become alienated from it for some reason -- especially if their government does something they view as betraying them, as the Federation Council did when it handed over the colonies near Cardassian space to Cardassian rule.

And in the USA there is the Senate. You operate in terms of nations/species.

Which means the Federation is not a multi-ethnic superstate. It's a plurality of independent ethnicities that have not yet merged into a whole, and therefore must have their various interests represented separately.

Bad logic. Every state in the U.S. is represented separately; this does not mean that the United States is not a multinational state.

And why do you keep using the word "ethnicity?" We're dealing with different species, not different skin tones.

And I believe if we were to see the WHOLE Federation actually go to war, it would look like an expanded version of the allied fleet from "United." You'd see a fleet of tens of thousands of vessels, composed of task forces of a few dozen to a few hundred ships, each clearly belonging to a completely different species, yet every one of them united under the banner of the United Federation of Planets. The one thing you wouldn't see, is a sky full of Excelsior's and Mirandas with an occasional Galaxy Class thrown in to break up the scene.

The problem with that is that we've seen the whole Federation actually go to war in DS9. It didn't look like the fleet in ENT. It was a collection of Excelsiors and Mirandas and Galaxys and Akiras and Defiants and Intrepids and Nebulas. Including some that were not crewed by Humans.

The logical conclusions is that those ships are not Human ships, but Federation ships.

but if the Gorn and the Tholians along with the Horta one day joined the Federation, how would they be integrated into Starfleet? The Gorn would have to resist the temptation to eat their shipmates, and the Tholians couldn't even be in the same room with their comrades. And how would you deal with the Horta, use the replicators to fill half the ship with a renewable supply of granite, all hazards and disruptions that would involve?

I doubt the Gorn would be allowed in the Federation if they couldn't resist the temptation to eat others - not hurting others is a principal Federation value.

Yep! That seems fairly obvious. The Federation doesn't just allow ANYONE in -- it does demand adherence to certain cultural values, as evidenced by the Federation Charter's ban on caste-based discrimination established in DS9.

Though I don't know why anyone would assume that the Gorn run around eating their shipmates all willy-nilly.

As for the Tholians -- the novels have established that Tholians are capable of interacting with other species in Class-M environments by wearing environmental suits made of materials produced by their own bodies.

 

[neozeks]

Just to return to the original topic...

Post Dominion War is the Dominion still considered a galactic superpower? Or does the Federation now hold that title?

Well, the only true galactic superpower (in the sense that it can project it's power throughout most of the Galaxy) was and still is the Borg.
As for the Doms and the Feds, it seems both are the dominant powers of their quadrants. I guess the Dominion is still essentially a lot stronger than the Federation (having no real rival in the Gama Quadrant, and seeing how an Alliance of which the Federation was just a part barely managed to beat only a portion of the Dominion forces), but I have no doubt that they are weaker than before - they did still lose a lot of ships in Alpha (and the wormhole) and the combined moral blows of the defeat and the Founders' illness could embolden the subjugated species to rebel. Also, Odo's influence could be important.

Also I just finished watching the Dominion War saga and have one question: why did the Dominion target the Federation going as far as to politically isolate it with non-aggression treaties with alpha-beta quadrant powers, when the danger to it's exsistance were belligerent empires like the Cardassians, Romulans etc who actually went on a little trip to eliminate the founders a while back? It seems as if the Dominion had a real axe to grind against the Federation.

I think it was mostly a matter of ideology. The writers have often commented how the Dominion is in a sense an Anti-Federation, so I guess that also means the Founders view the Federation as an Anti-Dominion, a proof that you can bring a great number of different species together peacefully, and not by conquest.

newtype_alpha, I suggest that you might enjoy the Star Trek: Titan series of novels. The premise behind it is that Starfleet is a single organization of the sort that I and others have described it in this thread, and that it has in the past mixed the species of its ships' crews, but that it has also tended to segregate on the basis of body type. (Which is fairly realistic -- real organizations often set lofty goals but only partially meet them.)

And Starfleet has now decided that it needs to change that and make a stronger effort to integrate diverse species of officers into a single crew.

The U.S.S. Titan is thus a ship deliberately designed to accommodate numerous non-humanoid species in addition to humanoids, including Choblik, Horta, Pahkwa-thanh, S'ti'ach, Pak'shree, Selkies, Skorr, Betelgeusians, Elaysians, Chelon, Brikarians, Seleneans, Syrath, and Thymerae.

The fundamental premise of the series is how diverse the crew -- and therefore the Federation -- truly is.

For whatever it's worth, when Bajor joins the Federation in the post-series DS9 novels, it's established in Bajor: Fragments and Omens that Bajor adopts official bilingualism -- signs and public notices are published in Bajoran and in Federation Standard (which seems to be English).

As for the Tholians -- the novels have established that Tholians are capable of interacting with other species in Class-M environments by wearing environmental suits made of materials produced by their own bodies.

I really should accelerate my reading of the novels. I'm still only in the ATT series! Such wonders still await...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Retroactive continuity is the deliberate alteration of background facts within a fictional universe that have previously been established.

And the background facts of early TOS episodes were not deliberately or even implicitly altered. They were simply ignored in subsequent episodes.

A retcon would involve specific mentions to past events in a slightly different way as they were originally portrayed (if, for example, a TNG episode were to depicted the Eugenics Wars as being concurrent with WW-III in the mid 21st century).

Well of course it hasn't happened in the history of this world. Star Trek is based on the idea that we can transcend history and do something new, something that's never been done before -- have diverse, long-established cultures unite as equals rather than unite through conquest or divide through xenophobia. That's true on a planetary level -- no one's ever established a world government -- and on the interstellar level.

Even optimism must give way to logic, Sci. More to the point, if your harping on the idea of "doing something new" then you simply increase the likelihood that the Federation in NO WAY resembles the United States or any previously existing imperial government on Earth. It's possible and likely that multi-cultural assimilation and overarching interplanetary nationalism is neither necessary nor even desired.

I for one see no particular reason to presume that there hasn't been so much intra-Federation immigration

We have Vulcan as our primary datapoint and I am not aware of any counterexamples.

And bear in mind that we have no idea how many biological non-Vulcans were living on Vulcan -- and, for that matter, whether or not the concept of a Vulcan can sometimes encompass biological non-Vulcans who move to Vulcan and adopt Vulcan culture.

Actually, the implication in TOS and the TMP movies is that there are very few if any non-Vulcans living on Vulcan, and that Vulcans are themselves somewhat hostile to outsiders.

The issue of "non-Vulcan Vulcans" is bound to be an issue later, though, once the exact nature of their ancestry with the Romulans is known. But again, the fact that most "Vulcans" still live ON Vulcan has to count for something.

What, the fact that Andor is fraking cold even though Andorian starships had been previously portrayed in ENT as having similar temperatures to Earth ships, thereby establishing that Andorians and Humans prefer similar temperatures, isn't good enough?

Beggin the question of how a species could evolve on a "fraking cold" planet and still not find that planet comfortable.

Likewise, we don't actually know the temperature onboard Andorian ships, only that they don't seem terribly uncomfortable aboard Starfleet ships. Of course, we know even VULCANs find Earth vessels uncomfortable, but don't usually complain about it; Andorians would probably find it tollerable in extremely short periods, much like Trip was able to survive on the Xyrillian ship for a few hours at a time.

Only if you start from a premise that the cultures involved could not have made new political choices that are without historical precedent.

Multiple ethnicities a la the American Melting Pot cannot form from political choices, only cultural ones. All Federation cultures would have to be almost exactly alike with only unimportant differences for this to be the case.

Which, come to think of it, IS a fundamental premise of Star Trek isn't it? "Forehead Aliens" are just modified humans in the first place.

And that's fair enough from a cultural POV. Starfleet, however, is a military, and as such, it is inevitably going to marginalize or erase a certain level of diversity in order to ensure discipline and functionality in the face of combat.

Which necessitates the formation of an alternate military structure to accommodate members who aren't comfortable in Starfleet. If the Federation doesn't create it, they can allow those who want to to do so. If the Federation doesn't ALLOW it, that amounts to an imperialistic policy.

It becomes full blown imperialism if the Federation literally excludes from service--even their OWN service--members "too alien" to reliably adapt the accepted moral/cultural/doctrinal protocols of its military. The British Empire did exactly this in Africa and Arabia, resulting in a number of rebellions and occasional wars. The Federation doesn't seem to be constantly putting down rebellions among its member states, so it probably has a means to include rather than marginalize more diverse members who cannot or will not assimilate into Starfleet.

Yes, like I said, "with the exception of its missions into Earth's past."

They weren't GOING to Earth's past when they encountered the dark star. They were simply going to Earth. The detour into the past was an accident.

That's a thoroughly ambiguous line that does not actually establish any damn thing.

Simple logic: it establishes Earth as "a starship's" point of origin (implicit in the definition of "return"). And it establishes that such a return is unusual. What it doesn't establish is WHY, or whether or not this statement is a blanket description for all starships everywhere or just a specific subset of starships of which Enterprise is a part. But the one thing it definitely establishes is that the Enterprise is from Earth.

And besides, we already know that the Enterprise-D was not from Earth -- it was from Mars.

In "All Good Things" it was launched from a facility in Earth orbit, so no.

He's speaking metaphorically of Starfleet Headquarters

And yet "return to the nest" is a metaphor--once again--for a return to a cherished point of origin.

I just re-watched the scene where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy confront Sarek in his quarters after he returns from meditation and then suffers a heart attack. At no one does anyone claim that Tellarites use violence as an expression of endearment.

I never said they claimed it. I said that SAREK implied Tellaite use of violence is far more casual than it is for humans and Vulcans.

Didn't they? Look at how much more peaceable, even pacifist, non-Starfleet Humans have tended to be

Irrelevant. I'm discussing negative reactions to cultural differences, not simply blind aggress or xenophobia.

But it's not exactly the same. Starfleet functions fundamentally differently from modern real-life navies in a very important regard: The vast majority of members of Starfleet are officers rather than non-coms.

To borrow your favorite objection, this isn't established in fact. In point of fact, it seems not to be the case in TOS or the TMP movies.

OTOH, even the existence of noncoms is a peculiarly Earthlike military tradition, one that is unlikely to extend to civilian astronaut corps, especially of alien worlds. That it still exists even at the end of the 24th century tells you something about Starfleet.

All this establishes is that different people have different inter-cultural competencies. And that's always going to be true.

Right. Which means you're ALWAYS going to need to have partitions for groups that are, on the whole, inter-culturally incompetent. This means that if and when the Klingons join the Federation, they're probably still going to have their own ships and their own fleets, whatever the final dispositional arrangement may be.

Excuse me?

Logically, it isn't. There's a reason schools have special education programs, to accommodate the needs of students with different mental faculties or behavioral problems; integrating them into a regular classroom would be (and as I have seen, usually IS) disastrous. Less explicitly, the seperation in certain activities--athletics, for instance--of age group and talent. Very young athletes with alot of talent are rarely allowed to compete with less talented older ones, despite being at the same ability level; there are physiological and psychological differences to take into account.

Among difference species there are going to be REAL biological and cultural differences that have to be taken into account. Being sensitive and respectful of these differences is NOT equivalent to pretending they don't exist. Hence Kirk gets a pass for violating orders to take Spock back to Vulcan because Vulcans, unlike humans, have some biological needs that must be fulfilled. Fortunately it's a biological need that Enterprise was able to accommodate. For some other needs harder to surmount, this may not be feasible in a mixed-species ship, so segregation of those members from the general population would be more efficient.

It only degenerates into racism when that segregation results in the marginalization of those with those special needs into sub-standard positions, with access to inferior services and inferior responsibilities. When separation is done strictly to protect the dominant cultural/biological system--which is the only remaining motivation for marginalizing "others"--then it becomes an imperialist/racist policy.

A fundamental change in Klingon political culture, wereby they abandon their imperialist beliefs and belief in Klingon superiority and instead embrace the idea of diversity and seek to integrate all or most of the Klingon Defense Force into the Federation Starfleet, integrating non-Klingon Starfleet officers into ships formerly of the Defense Force and integrating Klingon officers into Starfleet ships.

Which would involve the Klingons undoing more than a thousand years of cultural evolution in the space of a few decades. Whether this change is imposed from without or within, it will invariably involve a considerable amount of violence, especially by the armed warrior class opposed the new order.

Such a radical transformation is unlikely to happen just by virtue of an internal movement, unless it happens very VERY slowly (over the course of three or four centuries, for example). Any cultural change that happens that quickly inevitably leads to violence, and the really quick ones can only be TRIGGERED by violence.

To put it very simply: the Klingons could not give up their warrior tradition unless SOMEBODY killed all the warriors (or if not all of them, enough of them so they could be safely marginalized and provided with more productive occupations). Since the Klingon people are unlikely to do this themselves, that is a change that would have to be imposed externally.

The other option for the Federation, of course, is to take the Klingons as they are, warriors and all, and find a place for them in the hierarchy. The only ground rule for membership is that Klingons aren't allowed to conquer and pillage anymore, but that would amount to a POLITICAL change, not a cultural one. As such, I don't believe there would be any reason to neuter the Klingons before letting them join; just get them to agree to the BASIC rules of interstellar law is good enough.

I'm sure that the Federation, when faced with integrating such a large space force with such a divergent technological evolutionary history into Starfleet, would probably fundamentally change a lot of its future Starfleet designs to incorporate Klingon elements into it.

I'm not, and I don't think they should. Klingons have their own style of doing things that could sometimes be more effective than the Starfleet way. I wouldn't want to water that down just so Starfleet officers won't have to learn how to read Klingon.

No, relevant, because if the E.U. is a prime example of an alliance that is delegated some of the authorities of a state and then evolves into a state, that supports the idea that the Federation began as an alliance and developed into a state.

It therefore becomes relevant IF AND WHEN the EU evolves into a state.

Functionally, the Federation is much more equivalent to the United States than the present-day European Union.

Not functionally, no. A big part of what the Federation Council has to deal with is approving new members on a mutual basis. The U.S. Congress does not, as new states typically enter the Union by annexation, and the Federation does not appear to ANNEX new members.

And except for the rules set by written Constitutions, legislatures make those bylaws and protocols.

Backpedaling now. Didn't you say a minute ago that legislatures draw their authority from the people they govern? Now its "they can do whatever they want because they're the legislature?"

The U.N. cannot devolve into a failed state because the U.N. is not a state of any kind. It possesses none of the legal traits of a state.

Since the term "failed state" is not a legal definition, this is irrelevant. The concept is well understood, even if it is not understood by you.

I have provided numerous examples of legal traits possessed by the Federation that match those of a state.

Linguistically, yes. Not legally. And again, those are the laws of a single world, as described through a single human's point of view. It becomes doubly irrelevant for other Federation members who don't even have a concept of "state" and for whom the monopoly on the use of armed force is usually controlled by, say, the most powerful film company.

You have attempted to break down those parts of my argument, and I've demonstrated every time where your attempt to claim that the Federation does not possess the authority of a state has failed.

Possession of authority is not relevant here. "State" is a legal and political concept that describes a type of civil organizational structure. As it is possible to have authority over a vast region without being a state, it is just as possible to be a declared state without having any real authority or recognition as a state (as the Palestinians have done since 1998).

But referring to the CULTURAL implications, a State usually governs some measure of loyalty from its members that can override loyalty to ones local district or ethnic group. I do not think the Federation has THAT kind of cohesion, and wouldn't be classified as a state in this regard, in which case it would not be feasible for member states to require actions of their citizens that would support broader Federation interests in favor of their own. There is, in other words, a limit to how far different species can work cooperatively if they have not fully assimilated into the same cultural umbrella.

But that's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand. You tried to claim that the existence of a local government handling local issues and not answering to the Federation government was evidence that Federation Member worlds are independent.

No. I claimed that the existence of local government being able to CONTRADICT the Federation government is evidence that Federation member worlds are, at least partially, independent. And that furthermore, a lack of contradictory power would amount to imperialism, in the same way that a lack of inalienable civil rights amounts to fascism. It's a simple issue of sovereignty: for Federation members to be partners and not pawns, they would have to retain certain planetary rights, with the power of the Federation Council heavily limited to matters that do not infringe on the privacy and internal affairs of member states.

 

[neozeks]

We have Vulcan as our primary datapoint and I am not aware of any counterexamples.

Vulcan is just one planet, one among 150. That's hardly representative. Earth seems to have a sizable alien population.

OTOH, even the existence of noncoms is a peculiarly Earthlike military tradition, one that is unlikely to extend to civilian astronaut corps, especially of alien worlds. That it still exists even at the end of the 24th century tells you something about Starfleet.

What makes you think noncoms are exclusivelly human? Why couldn't other species independently develop an equivalent position?

It therefore becomes relevant IF AND WHEN the EU evolves into a state.

No, it is relevant now, because the only real world example that corresponds to the Federation (diverse, often adversarial cultures coming together peacefully) seems to be leading into a federated state, implying that the founding and developing process of the Federation should also lead into a federated state.

...and for whom the monopoly on the use of armed force is usually controlled by, say, the most powerful film company.

Such a species could never become a member of the Federation, simply because such an organization would be in contradiction to Federation principles (how could you protect people's rights in such a system?).

No. I claimed that the existence of local government being able to CONTRADICT the Federation government is evidence that Federation member worlds are, at least partially, independent. And that furthermore, a lack of contradictory power would amount to imperialism, in the same way that a lack of inalienable civil rights amounts to fascism. It's a simple issue of sovereignty: for Federation members to be partners and not pawns, they would have to retain certain planetary rights, with the power of the Federation Council heavily limited to matters that do not infringe on the privacy and internal affairs of member states.

Where in Star Trek do you see a member world contradicting the Federation government?
Anyway, the issue of independence/imperialism/state's rights has nothing to do with 'contradicting'. That's not how federations work. Federal law is always going to outweigh member state law. EU law (even if it isn't a federation yet) is above member states' laws. That's not imperialism. You seem to work in only two extremes - an alliance or an unitary state. Planetary rights and internal affairs can be protected just as well in a federation.