The status of the Federation in 2399

[Grendelsbayne]

Yes, and secondary material has said they helped found the Federation for decades but it was only confirmed in the animated show.

This feels far too hair-splitting-y to me.

Like acting like the states who signed off on the Declaration of Independence couldn't be viewed as founding states of the USA until you've also seen the signing of the US Constitution, despite the fact that all of it is in the past and you know for a fact that none of those states backed out of being part of the US (at least not successfully).

 

[YouAreDooomed]

It's interesting to note that the Federation seems to have thousands of member species by 2399, at least that's what Clancy's statement implies. "Thousands of other species depend on us for unity, for cohesion."
Yet, she possibly includes closely associated ones.

(Old) Treaties - such as Algeron - with the Romulan Free State continue, so most likely still no cloaking devices for Starfleet.

* The Federation feels very post-DS9 and is a lot less idealistic in its politics but I don't think it was badly shown either. The "14 world's withdrawl" is a helluva argument as is the fact that they only decided not to help the Romulans after all of their attempts to help the Romulans were destroyed. They fully intended to evacuate 900 million people, it's just the fleet blew up.

I don't see how it is a lot less idealistic, a comparable situation had never occurred before. Also, keep in mind that 14 species had threatened to leave BEFORE the calamity on Mars, and they still intended to to evacuate those people. After the attack, probably more worlds joined the protest.

The novels presented Mars as the first world to join the Federation after its founding. Whereas in Picard it’s an important colony but not even has a million people on it?

Its an important production site, but a population figure was never given, those giant circular facilities on Mars may be mostly automated.

Of course the opposite could also true, and the Earth still has sovereign states/countries in the 24th century and beyond.

According to the TNG ep. "Attached":

CRUSHER: Well, think about Earth. What if one of the old nation states, say Australia, had decided not to join the World Government in twenty one fifty? Would that have disqualified us as a Federation member?

Weirdly, Lower Decks is canonizing a crap ton of Star Trek: Expanded Universe stuff left and right.

Not really. Even if it did, it would be nothing out of the ordinary, Sulu's first name was introduced by the novel "The Entropy Effect" in 1981 and not canonized until ST VI: TUC.

Didn't ENT already canonize this?

Yes, it did.

Nope, it ended before they could make the Federation.

The founding is briefly shown in ENT "Zero Hour." When Daniels takes Archer to the year 2161 he says,...

DANIELS: I work with some people who are going to be pretty angry with me for telling you this, but you're going to be an integral part of forming that Federation. You're down there, right now, with Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites, getting ready to sign the Charter.

 

[Sci]

Of course the opposite could also true, and the Earth still has sovereign states/countries in the 24th century and beyond.

They literally refer to last of the "the old nation-states" as joining the "world government" in 2150 in TNG "Attachment," so I have no idea how you could have a government that isn't sovereign and or the idea that nation-states are still sovereign with the idea that nation-states are referred to as a thing of the past.

I've never felt that the federation was some kind of interstellar state,

A stance which defies canonical evidence. Sovereign states are generally defined by possessing a distinct territory over which they exercise sovereignty, often possessing a constitution and statutory law that is binding upon all people within that territory; they possess a government capable of making law and which holds the legal monopoly on the use of force, and the government commands a military force and often an internal security force. The government usually possesses an extensive bureaucracy. A sovereign state conducts relations with foreign powers. A sovereign state possesses a system of courts that enforce law within their territory, and often the head of state possesses the power to pardon convicted criminals. A sovereign state has people who hold citizenship with it, and citizens who betray the sovereign state of which they are a citizen are usually considered to be guilty of a specific crime called treason. Sovereign states have the legal capacity to suspend some civil rights and liberties in times of crisis.

The Federation meets all the criteria for a sovereign state. The Federation possesses distinct territory (TNG "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I") over which it is sovereign and in which the Federation Constitution applies to all persons (TNG "The Perfect Mate"). The Federation Constitution enumerates certain civil rights and liberties that are guaranteed to all persons within Federation territory and aboard Federation starships (TNG "The Perfect Mate").

The Federation possesses its own military in the form of Starfleet (TOS "Court-Martial," TOS "Errand of Mercy"), and Starfleet's full formal name is indeed the Federation Starfleet (DS9 "Tribunal"). There is an internal police force called Federation Security with legal authority to place people under arrest (TSFS).

Members of the Federation's population are citizens of the Federation (DS9 "Tribunal," DS9 "A Call to Arms," DS9 "Inquisition," DS9 "Heart of Stone"). Citizens of the Federation who betray it by attempting to launch coups d'etat or by giving classified military deployment information to a hostile foreign state are considered to have committed treason (DS9 "Paradise Lost," DS9 "Statistical Probabilities").

There is a Federation government capable of passing statutes that are legally binding upon all persons within Federation territory (TNG "Force of Nature"). The Federation has a system of courts that enforce Federation law, including Federation grand juries ("The Ascent") and a Federation Supreme Court with the power of judicial review over statutory laws (DS9 "Dr. Bashir, I Presume?"). The Federation President possesses the legal authority to grant a pardon to convicted criminals (DIS "Will You Take My Hand?") and the legal authority to declare a state of emergency within Federation territory that suspends certain civil rights and liberties (DS9 "Homefront").

The Federation government conducts relations with foreign states directly, without consultation from member governments (TUC) and has the legal authority to declare war upon foreign states (TOS "Errand of Mercy," DS9 Dominion War arc et al).

The Federation government also possesses an extensive bureaucracy (every episode with a Federation Department of miscellaneous bullshit). It also possesses specialized security agencies that investigate allegations of specific types of criminal offenses (DS9 "Trials and Tribble-ations") and its own intelligence agency in Starfleet Intelligence (TNG "Chain of Command," et al).

The United Federation of Planets, simply put, possesses all of the traits of a sovereign state. And it is important to note that it is not any one or two of these traits, but all of them together as a whole, that define it as such.

He also stood when an American flag was brought into the room, most people wouldn't do the same if it was just their local state flag being walked in.

Kirk was explicitly established throughout TOS as being a history buff, though. There's no indication that most people in the Federation as nearly so attached to the identities associated with "the old nation-states" (as Crusher calls them in "Attached).

Would the average person from Earth stand if the federation flag (if there is one) were brought in?

In DS9 "Take Me Out to the Holosuite," all of the characters stand at attention and place their hands over their hearts while facing the Flag of the United Federation of Planets as the Federation Anthem plays.

Weirdly, Lower Decks is canonizing a crap ton of Star Trek: Expanded Universe stuff left and right.

Andorians, Vulcans, and Tellarites are now the founders of the Federation. Training also takes place for humans on Vulcan.

And so on and so on.

Nope, it ended before they could make the Federation.

Yes, and secondary material has said they helped found the Federation for decades but it was only confirmed in the animated show.

To be clear, it was Daniels's dialgoue in ENT "Zero Hour" that first established that Humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites founded the Federation, not an episode of LD.

In the novels and other non-canonical tie-in works, the formal states are listed as United Earth, the Confederacy of Vulcan, the Andorian Empire, and the United Planets of Tellar. They often incorporate a fifth founding member, Alpha Centauri (the Alpha Centauri Concordium as its formal name); Alpha Centauri is usually depicted as a former Earth colony that had gained its independence prior to the UFP being founded, thus lumping them in with Humans in the list of founding canonical species. This is consistent with the canon as of, well, yesterday, but I haven't seen the most recent episode of LD yet so something in it might have contradicted this.

This feels far too hair-splitting-y to me.

Like acting like the states who signed off on the Declaration of Independence couldn't be viewed as founding states of the USA until you've also seen the signing of the US Constitution, despite the fact that all of it is in the past and you know for a fact that none of those states backed out of being part of the US (at least not successfully).

I think drawing that distinction with regards to the U.S. is actually perfectly reasonable. If you look at the text of the Declaration of Independence, it specifically says that the Thirteen Colonies are all separate independent states -- in other words, they're not one sovereign state called the United States of America, they're thirteen separate sovereign states called New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, etc. Those thirteen separate sovereign states then formed an alliance under the Articles of Confederation, but that alliance did not possess sovereignty; it was more akin to the European Union today, insofar as its powers were delegated to it by the states, it had no power of taxation, and real sovereignty lay with its member states. Only with the passage of the United States Constitution did those polities unite to create a sovereign state called "the United States of America."

 

[Sci]

It's interesting to note that the Federation seems to have thousands of member species by 2399, at least that's what Clancy's statement implies. "Thousands of other species depend on us for unity, for cohesion."
Yet, she possibly includes closely associated ones.

The idea that the Federation has gone from 150 Member States circa 2373 to a minimum of 2,000 Member States only 27 years later seems implausible to me. I'm more inclined to assume that she's including worlds in that number which are independent but rely on the Federation to maintain political stability throughout local space.

 

[Charles Phipps]

The idea that the Federation has gone from 150 Member States circa 2373 to a minimum of 2,000 Member States only 27 years later seems implausible to me. I'm more inclined to assume that she's including worlds in that number which are independent but rely on the Federation to maintain political stability throughout local space.

Ehhhhh.....not really? I mean, are we counting colonies? Because then human territory has at LEAST a hundred individual member worlds.

The 150 refers to species in the Federation.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

I think drawing that distinction with regards to the U.S. is actually perfectly reasonable. If you look at the text of the Declaration of Independence, it specifically says that the Thirteen Colonies are all separate independent states -- in other words, they're not one sovereign state called the United States of America, they're thirteen separate sovereign states called New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, etc. Those thirteen separate sovereign states then formed an alliance under the Articles of Confederation, but that alliance did not possess sovereignty; it was more akin to the European Union today, insofar as its powers were delegated to it by the states, it had no power of taxation, and real sovereignty lay with its member states. Only with the passage of the United States Constitution did those polities unite to create a sovereign state called "the United States of America."

No, that's still splitting the same hair.

If we were sitting in the year 1778 wondering what the future might bring, then, sure. But we already know from a historical perspective that the Declaration of Independence led to the Constitution (via the Articles of Confederation) and we already know that all the states the signed the Declaration are still part of the US today. We don't need a head count of what states were represented at the Constitutional Convention to understand that the states which founded the US and the ones which signed the Declaration are the same states. Because the Declaration is, in retrospect, the foundation of the USA, even if it theoretically could have not been that (had the founding fathers stuck with their more decentralized initial approach).

 

[Sci]

Ehhhhh.....not really? I mean, are we counting colonies? Because then human territory has at LEAST a hundred individual member worlds.

The 150 refers to species in the Federation.

Okay, so we gotta get some of our terminology straight here, because we're using language that confuses species, worlds, and polities. The first is a question of population; the second a question of geography (or, I suppose, astrography); the third is a question of politics.

Sovereign states' territories may encompass elements of geography, and their populations may be defined by a given identity group. But ultimately, sovereign states are organized on the basis of polity, not the other two. For instance: Long Island may be a large geographic entity, but it is politically part of the State of New York, not a state in its own right. The State of New York, meanwhile, is comprised of citizens and residents with numerous different ethnic and racial identities.

We already know that Federation Members can have more than one planet under their jurisdiction; Vulcan, for instance, has P'Jem and Vulcanis Lunar Colony. And Earth has many different colony words; one would infer, based upon their designation as "Earth colonies," that they're constituent parts of United Earth, and that their residents receive their representation on the Federation Council through the Federation Councillor for United Earth. So by that standard, yeah, there are probably thousands of planets -- and even more planetoid and asteroid settlements and autonomous space stations -- who are part of the Federation. But most of them are probably considered to be legally part of a constituent polity of the Federation.

It is probably a bad idea to talk about "species" being a part of the Federation. We know, for instance, that there are numerous human population centers throughout the galaxy that aren't comprised of Federation citizens, since they were abducted from Earth before First Contact, and because we have seen large Human populations on worlds that are not part of the Federation, like Farius Prime (DS9 "Honor Among Thieves") or Freecloud (PIC "Stardust City Rag"). There's an entire population of biological Vulcans out there -- the Romulans -- who are mostly not part of the Federation. (It is biologically impossible for the Romulans to have become a separate species from the Vulcans in less than 2,000 years.)

That's why I prefer to talk in terms of Federation Member State, and why I generally assume that a character is using the other terms inaccurately to refer to Member States whenever possible.

But, Admiral Clancy specifically referred to "thousands of species." Since it seems unlikely that the Federation has gone from 150 Member States to 2,000 in 27 years, and since a colony is clearly not a species, I can only interpret this statement as referring to more than just those worlds who are part of the Federation; the concept of thousands of "species" being part of the UFP just doesn't make sense given prior canonical evidence.

 

[Sci]

No, that's still splitting the same hair.

No, it's perfectly reasonable. They were separate sovereign states that were all separately independent of both the Kingdom of Great Britain and of each other. Legally, the United States of America as a sovereign state did not exist before the Constitution.

If we were sitting in the year 1778 wondering what the future might bring, then, sure. But we already know from a historical perspective that the Declaration of Independence led to the Constitution (via the Articles of Confederation) and we already know that all the states the signed the Declaration are still part of the US today. We don't need a head count of what states were represented at the Constitutional Convention to understand that the states which founded the US and the ones which signed the Declaration are the same states.

Except we do! Because, amongst other things, the place we now call Vermont was part of the State of New York when the Declaration of Independence was signed... but then they went and declared themselves independent of New York a year later, forming an independent sovereign state called the Vermont Republic! The Vermont Republic joined the Union under the Constitution as the 14th state in 1791.

The point is, while it may be convenient shorthand to equate the Declaration of Independence with the founding of the United States of America, it's not actually historically accurate. It wasn't pre-determined; the early states could easily have, and very nearly did, not unite after declaring independence.

Because the Declaration is, in retrospect, the foundation of the USA, even if it theoretically could have not been that (had the founding fathers stuck with their more decentralized initial approach).

Except, again, it's really not. It's certainly an important part of the background of the Founding of the USA. But the USA itself wasn't really founded until the Constitution came into effect.

 

[Charles Phipps]

While non-canon, Picard: The Last Best Hope establishes that the 14 member states that are going to secede and are mixture of races that have been threatened by the Romulans as well as human colony worlds. They also have a number of other worlds ready to follow suit post-Utopia disaster.

 

[dupersuper]

While non-canon, Picard: The Last Best Hope establishes that the 14 member states that are going to secede and are mixture of races that have been threatened by the Romulans as well as human colony worlds. They also have a number of other worlds ready to follow suit post-Utopia disaster.

Do you remember which worlds? I figured they would've been worlds who have history with the Romulans and/or are close to the neutral zone, but the human colony worlds are surprising.

 

[Charles Phipps]

Do you remember which worlds? I figured they would've been worlds who have history with the Romulans and/or are close to the neutral zone, but the human colony worlds are surprising.

I think they were all original.

In any case, the human colony worlds are described as being outraged because they were having their own support from the Federation halted in making their worlds more livable. The primary "villain" notes that they were supposed to have a civilian star base built for them and other promises put on hold for five years. Also, in what's probably a much more direct reference to Brexit than anything in the show, are horrified at the possibility of Romulan refugees being resettled on their world.

 

[dupersuper]

I think they were all original.

In any case, the human colony worlds are described as being outraged because they were having their own support from the Federation halted in making their worlds more livable. The primary "villain" notes that they were supposed to have a civilian star base built for them and other promises put on hold for five years. Also, in what's probably a much more direct reference to Brexit than anything in the show, are horrified at the possibility of Romulan refugees being resettled on their world.

Picard continues to depress me.

 

[Charles Phipps]

Picard continues to depress me.

Easily one of the best Star Trek books ever written in my mind because the story has no "villain" really other than the massive logistical problem. I think they should have adapted it to 2 episodes.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

Easily one of the best Star Trek books ever written in my mind because the story has no "villain" really other than the massive logistical problem. I think they should have adapted it to 2 episodes.

"Picard continues to depress me" would be a great title for a book about disgruntled Trek fandom

 

[Charles Phipps]

"Picard continues to depress me" would be a great title for a book about disgruntled Trek fandom

Well, it's the start of the story. You don't expect to be happy with the fall of the Republic and death of the Jedi.

But yes, watching everything go up in flames is terrible. Dramatic and fascinating but terrible.

 

[Llywela]

Easily one of the best Star Trek books ever written in my mind because the story has no "villain" really other than the massive logistical problem. I think they should have adapted it to 2 episodes.

Antagonist is probably a better word for her than villain. Her aims are directly opposed to Picard, but she is given a valid perspective and a lot of her complaints are not unreasonable, on the surface of things, even if she does lack compassion for the plight of others less fortunate than herself and allows her ambition to blinker her.

 

[Charles Phipps]

Antagonist is probably a better word for her than villain. Her aims are directly opposed to Picard, but she is given a valid perspective and a lot of her complaints are not unreasonable, on the surface of things, even if she does lack compassion for the plight of others less fortunate than herself and allows her ambition to blinker her.

Very true, though I like how her badness is in willful blindness. "Romulan Space for Romulans" implies there's a place for the refugees to go in their own territory.

 

[Sci]

Picard continues to depress me.

As others have said, it's the beginning of the story. I mean, does the fact that "The Doomsday Machine" begins with the deaths of the entire crew of the USS Constellation depress you? Does the fact that "The Best of Both Worlds" starts with the destruction of an entire Federation colony and a starship depress you? Does the fact that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine begins with the death of Benjamin Sisko's wife and destruction of the USS Saragota, along with every other ship at Wolf 359, or the fact that its backstory is the brutal occupation and mass murder of the planet Bajor by the Cardassian Union, depress you? Does the fact that Star Trek: First Contact's 21st Century B-plot backstory is a nuclear war that killed 600 million people and its A-plot begins with the destruction of a Federation colony world and dozens ships, depress you? Does the fact that Star Trek: Voyager begins with half of the crew of the USS Voyager dead and the ship stranded on the other side of the galaxy depress you? Does the fact that Data's and Worf's backstories both start with tens or hundreds of thousands of their fellow colonists brutally murdered as a result of betrayal from amongst their own number depress you? Does the fact that Captain Kirk as a child witnessed the brutal mass murder of thousands of colonists by Kodos the Executioner depress you? Etc.?

Horrible, depressing things routinely happen in fiction so that the protagonist can overcome the pain those events caused, and overcome the things that caused the horrible depressing things. The Romulan supernova backstory on PIC is no different from the deaths of the Constellation crew in "The Doomsday Machine" or of the fleet at Wolf 359 in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in terms of its narrative function: it's the bad thing that happened in the past which the protagonist overcomes.

 

[Charles Phipps]

It's the same issue with DISCO in that it is very dark at the start but ends with the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP solving everything.

 

[Sci]

It's the same issue with DISCO in that it is very dark at the start but ends with the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP solving everything.

Yep. Star Trek is often a comedy in the classic sense of the word: A story that begins in darkness and ends in light.