I could see that, it would also be useful for physical mailing addresses, and "phone" books.
United Earth
- Thread starter Jax
- Start date
First off, your comparison doesn't work; World War II had several industrial empires consisting of a dominant nation which had conquered other nations, fighting against several other industrial empires consisting of dominant nations which had conquered other nations.
The Romulan War, on the other hand, would under your scenario need to feature an interstellar empire, the Romulan Star Empire (consisting of multiple planets conquered by a single unified planet in Romulus), being defeated by numerous dis-united nations of a single planet -- NONE of whom in ENT were ever depicted as having the capacity to project national force on an interstellar scale.
A better comparison would not so much be "Allies vs. Axis in World War II" as, say, the United States of America gradually conquering the disunited First Nations peoples of North America one by one.
I mean, amongst other things, they would have to find a way to acquire the necessary infrastructure and resources to project national power on an interstellar scale, and fast. Which is something the individual nations of Earth are NEVER seen or implied to have throughout ENT -- where the ONLY Earth power capable of projecting force on an interstellar scale is United Earth through its United Earth Starfleet.
The problem is that this contradicts the plain meaning of the exchange between Picard and Crusher in "Attached:"
CRUSHER: Are you worried about this mission with the Kes?
PICARD: Not worried exactly. This notion of admitting half of their planet to the Federation while leaving the other half out…
CRUSHER: First of all, the Kes are not half the planet, they're nearly three quarters of it. And the Prytt are not being left out. They themselves simply don't want to have contact with anyone from the outside. not the Federation or anyone else.
PICARD: Every member of the Federation entered as a unified world, and that unity said something about them. That they had resolved certain social and political differences and they were now ready to become part a larger community.
CRUSHER: By all indications, the Kes are a very unified, very progressive people.
PICARD: But the Prytt are not. They are reclusive to the point of xenophobia.
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?
PICARD: That analogy is not exactly--
RIKER [CO]: Riker to Captain.
PICARD: Go ahead, Number One.
These lines are pretty clear in their meaning. "The old nation-states" are no longer sovereign; if they were, they would not be referred to as though they are historical artifacts rather than active sovereigns in Beverly's present. They joined a world government -- not a United Nations-style international organization which does not actually unite its members under a common sovereignty. That world government meant that Earth was united, not merely a set of nations in alliance with each other. And Federation members are themselves united in world governments, a precedent the Kes wish to break by entering as a single nation rather than as a planetary state.
There is simply no other reasonable interpretation of Star Trek than that the nations of Earth yielded their sovereignty to a single, sovereign planetary state called United Earth in the mid-2100s, and that United Earth itself (along with its interstellar neighbors) yielded its sovereignty in 2161 to create the United Federation of Planets, a sovereign interstellar federal republic.
You are only trying to distort the plain meaning of the text to indicate something else, because you are a nationalist who is hostile to the idea of a planetary state.
And if it does not have the power to overrule the wishes of its member states, then it cannot actually resolve international disputes, and it will be no more effective in creating international peace than the United Nations organization has been, or than the League of Nations organization was before it.
This is so implausible as to be ridiculous. There is no way a sovereign nation-state would surrender its right to control its foreign policy towards alien powers while still being sovereign. It just wouldn't happen. A sovereign China is not going to let itself get embroiled in an interstellar crisis every time a sovereign Japan irritates the Cardassian Union. The only way the nations of the world agree to allow United Earth to control foreign policy towards alien powers is if they have all agreed to mutually surrender their sovereignty to United Earth and join it as co-equal sub-polities.
Furthermore, you are suggesting that the sovereign nations of the Earth would allow not only a non-sovereign United Earth, but a non-sovereign UFP, to determine their interstellar foreign policy? So a sovereign Russia will just go along with the UFP wanting it to declare war on the Dominion, and risk its national security, even though a sovereign Russia may have no particular interest in whether the Dominion conquers Betazed and may well prefer to sign a treaty of neutrality with the Dominion?
Do you really think it is a realistic option to imagine you can coordinate roughly 200 sovereign states' foreign policies to align with the foreign policies of over one hundred other Federation members (who themselves may have, under your scenario, hundreds of hypothetically sovereign nations), and to get them all to agree to a single common foreign policy towards non-Federation powers? Do you really think it is realistic to coordinate what may well be thousands of hypothetically sovereign states' foreign policies at an interstellar level?
Do you consider the states of the United States to be only administrative districts? Do you consider the provinces of Canada to be only administrative districts? Do you consider the Länder of the Federal Republic of Germany to be only administrative districts?
Federalism is a thing, you know.
Yes. And the Ohio Naval Militia still exists today in real life. This does not mean that the United States of America is not the sovereign power.
Weeeeeell. Not unless you're 167 going on 168 years old.
But, yes, point taken -- that LaForge was born in the African Confederation no more means the United Federation of Planets is not sovereign, than does the fact that John F. Kennedy was born in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts mean that the United States of America is not sovereign.Not really. It just depends on which story you're reading.
Now you're over-simplifying. Babylon 5 featured the Earth Alliance, a planetary state consisting of all but a couple of hold-out nations unified under a single sovereign state which was liberal democratic in nature. The Earth Alliance's government, often referred to as EarthGov, consisted of a democratically-elected Earth Alliance Senate, an Earth Alliance Supreme Court with the power of judicial review, a cabinet of ministers, and a democratically-elected President of the Earth Alliance and Vice President of the Earth Alliance. Its space military was known as EarthForce. Its government functioned according to the Constitution of the Earth Alliance, and its capital city was Geneva, Switzerland.
Shortly after Earth Alliance President Luis Santiago won re-election, he was assassinated in 2258 when his ship, EarthForce One, was destroyed by a bomb planted by a hostile alien race called the Shadows at the behest of Vice President Morgan Clark. Clark then became President, and used an atmosphere of growing xenophobia and Earth nationalism to transform EarthGov into a dictatorship. When evidence was presented to the Senate that Clark had had President Santiago assassinated, Clark declared martial law, suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Senate, stormed the major news media such as ISN, and placed EarthForce troops on every street corner. In retaliation, EarthForce Captain John Sheridan, military governor of EarthForce station Babylon 5, declared Babylon 5 to be an independent state, and raised a fleet of defecting EarthForce ships and alien ships to invade Earth Alliance territory and overthrow Clark in what came to be known as the Earth Alliance Civil War. After Clark was overthrown, the Earth Alliance Constitution was restored, Earth Alliance democracy resumed, Earth Alliance colonies such as Mars were given their independence if they wanted it, and the Earth Alliance itself became part of the Interstellar Alliance.
Throughout that entire time, the Psi Corps remained a separate area of concern. The Psi Corps were founded in the wake of the revelation that telepaths existed, as a way to monitor and control telepaths to protect non-telepathic humans. Over time, however, the Corps became a sort of state-inside-a-state, a power answering to itself and posing an eventual threat to Earth Alliance democracy. The Psi Corps mostly stayed neutral in the Earth Alliance Civil War, but eventually tried to seize power afterwards; it lost and was disbanded, and Earth telepaths ceased to be forced into any organization (though they remained subject to laws designed to prevent them from violating non-telepaths' privacy).
Throughout that entire time, the Psi Corps remained a separate area of concern. The Psi Corps were founded in the wake of the revelation that telepaths existed, as a way to monitor and control telepaths to protect non-telepathic humans. Over time, however, the Corps became a sort of state-inside-a-state, a power answering to itself and posing an eventual threat to Earth Alliance democracy. The Psi Corps mostly stayed neutral in the Earth Alliance Civil War, but eventually tried to seize power afterwards; it lost and was disbanded, and Earth telepaths ceased to be forced into any organization (though they remained subject to laws designed to prevent them from violating non-telepaths' privacy).
So it is not that the Earth Alliance was inherently tyrannical -- it is that it suffered from a coup d’état. Which is something that can happen at any level of government. Hell, in the United States, we've even had local coups d’état. So the issue is not that a planetary state is inherently tyrannical, but that any level of government can be subject to anti-democratic forces if pro-democratic forces are insufficiently vigilant and if the political culture is itself anti-democratic.
Not if those off-world colonies are granted independence as their own sovereign planetary states. Hello, independent Republic of Mars! How ya doin', People's Republic of Alpha Centauri? Let's find out our common interests, Commonwealth of Vega!
A planetary state could easily become tyrranical or result in increased tension. For example the Islamic world and China would exert far to much influence at any earth senate in my opinion.
It also could easily grow distant from the citizenry.
As it is the previous poster is right-all the nation's have ceded their sovereignty to the UE which in turn ceded its sovereignty to the UFP.
I mean do you really want the complication of Brazil doing business with the Klingons who are at war with the romulans while the Chinese sell arms to them.
Seriously how would that look to the interstellar community? How would it make humanity look?
It also could easily grow distant from the citizenry.
As it is the previous poster is right-all the nation's have ceded their sovereignty to the UE which in turn ceded its sovereignty to the UFP.
I mean do you really want the complication of Brazil doing business with the Klingons who are at war with the romulans while the Chinese sell arms to them.
Seriously how would that look to the interstellar community? How would it make humanity look?
Like the Ferengi Alliance?
The Ferengi don't have separate nations doing business with warring powers.
Having a united government gives one a united front to any and all alien species it encounters, does business with, makes alliances with and goes to war with.
Having a united government gives one a united front to any and all alien species it encounters, does business with, makes alliances with and goes to war with.
The first thing I would say here is that I object to your characterization of "the Islamic world" as a homogenous entity with an inherently illiberal agenda. The Islamic world is very diverse, and has a progressive tradition well worth respecting. Does it have regressive or reactionary elements that promote oppression? Yes. So do we. We don't get to pretend we're inherently better than them (how many hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims has the U.S. killed since 2001?); we are lucky that at this point in history, we happen to mostly have more-civil-libertarian political structures than them. But the Islamic world is essentially still in the process of recovering from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and from European colonialism, and it would be unfair to think that this particular century in history defines the Islamic world any more than the period in history immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire defines the West for all time, or that the centuries of slavery define the United States for all time.
Secondly: I think it is fair to say that one of the fundamental precepts of Star Trek is the political cultures of the nations of the world are fundamentally changed by the dual experiences of near-extinction in World War III and first contact with the Vulcans in 2063.
Thus, I would argue that it is safe to say that the illiberal, oppressive elements of all human societies -- including the West and the United States, by the way, but also including the Islamic world and political dictatorships like China and Russia -- are cast off before these societies decide to form United Earth.
Social distance is a problem for any level of government, even a small town.
On this, I completely agree.
I think the idea is that it's near-extinction in terms of how close the political situation came to causing the end of human life, not in terms of actual deaths; i.e., how close the leaders of the nations of the world came to just unleashing armageddon.
Though I'm inclined to imagine that even a limited nuclear exchange will end with more than 600 million dead.
One might argue that seeing the leaders (or the followers?) do their worst and still fall short of "success" is rather reassuring...
Would something like this make political unification more likely, or less? Perhaps if there were clear victors, then the leaders (and perhaps populations) of the losing nations could be eliminated in righteous fury, resulting in a giant single leap towards unity, even if multiple small steps back soon followed. But WWIII didn't appear to result in victors and losers that we'd have heard of.
Timo Saloniemi
Would something like this make political unification more likely, or less? Perhaps if there were clear victors, then the leaders (and perhaps populations) of the losing nations could be eliminated in righteous fury, resulting in a giant single leap towards unity, even if multiple small steps back soon followed. But WWIII didn't appear to result in victors and losers that we'd have heard of.
Timo Saloniemi
It's not that there couldn't have been such, it's just that canon information on the war and it's aftermath are spotty, and typical of Star Trek what info we have is in some cases contradictory.
We already have Spock's casualty estimate from "Bread and Circuses" for WWIII: just 37 million dead. His comparable figure for WWI is 6 million, which is low even for the combined military dead from all sides, and his 11 million for WWII is barely half the acknowledged number of military dead. So Spock might well be counting only people killed by weapons on the spot (a minority even in military dead), leaving 563 million or thereabouts to die of secondary effects such as hunger or unrest or poisoning.
Where would Riker draw his line? A fundamental problem here is that mortality rate among humans is 100%. We could say that there had been 600 million "premature" deaths between the beginning of the war and the year 2063 overall - or even that 600 million people had died in that supposed decade, of all causes and including deaths of sheer ripe old age, which is pretty much the figure we got between 2007 and 2017 IRL... The "secondary" death toll of WWIII could have been almost unnoticeable, then.
Timo Saloniemi
Where would Riker draw his line? A fundamental problem here is that mortality rate among humans is 100%. We could say that there had been 600 million "premature" deaths between the beginning of the war and the year 2063 overall - or even that 600 million people had died in that supposed decade, of all causes and including deaths of sheer ripe old age, which is pretty much the figure we got between 2007 and 2017 IRL... The "secondary" death toll of WWIII could have been almost unnoticeable, then.
Timo Saloniemi
I think in Breads and Circuses when Spock used 37 million for WW3 he was confusing the eugenics war and WW3, and the 37 million figure was for the eugenics war. Spock (debatably) confused the eugenics war with WW3 in Space Seed too.
37 million has nothing to do with WW3.
37 million has nothing to do with WW3.
Or in the hundred or so years, they managed to get a better accounting of the loss of life during the war. Spock did mention in Space Seed that records were fragmentary or sort for that time period. With time travel becoming a thing and the Guardian of Forever being usable to study the past as it happened, the records might be repaired and corrected since the 2260s.
The time period Spock was concerned with was quite narrow (the 1990s were only "part" of it, yeah, but Spock had already homed in on "mid-1990s" here), and the records he was referring to appeared to be those revealing the specifics of the spacecraft and her flight schedule. We could interpret Spock more broadly than that, but it doesn't appear as if much else would have gone missing from world history besides the final launch of the Botany Bay...
Since Spock is demonstrably and systematically "wrong" about two of his World War casualty estimates, we should expect him to be "wrong" about the third as well - but probably systematically so. And there's nothing new to be learned about WWI or WWII there between now and "Bread", or "Bread" and ST:FC, unless we plead different universes altogether.
Timo Saloniemi
Since Spock is demonstrably and systematically "wrong" about two of his World War casualty estimates, we should expect him to be "wrong" about the third as well - but probably systematically so. And there's nothing new to be learned about WWI or WWII there between now and "Bread", or "Bread" and ST:FC, unless we plead different universes altogether.
Timo Saloniemi
We really need pre-Trek WW3 novels to flesh out the mid 21st century conflict. This period is pretty critical for the Federation to exist, and humanity to change so drastically when it comes to moral and intellectual fortitude.
I don't know how you do it-Vulcan observers, time travel whatever this period needs a defined Beta Canon.
Someone needs write a space opera where a federation esque government has hundreds upon hundreds of member nations for each species. The reason sci fi doesn't have that is well its ridiculous and bordering on nonsensical. US and Russia go to war-some us states and Russian republics declare peace-how on earth do you handle that sort of foreign policy dilemma.
If someone can write a star wars or star trek level space opera that negates the United Earth trope in total I will eat my own hair.
I don't know how you do it-Vulcan observers, time travel whatever this period needs a defined Beta Canon.
Someone needs write a space opera where a federation esque government has hundreds upon hundreds of member nations for each species. The reason sci fi doesn't have that is well its ridiculous and bordering on nonsensical. US and Russia go to war-some us states and Russian republics declare peace-how on earth do you handle that sort of foreign policy dilemma.
If someone can write a star wars or star trek level space opera that negates the United Earth trope in total I will eat my own hair.
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