NationStates Jolt Archive

For what was now the Commonwealth of Peoples, the last seventeen years had been years of radical, complex, confusing and in some ways unprecedented change. In a manner which twenty years ago would have seemed more like a work of popular fiction than the real history of a nation, shock had followed shock. Outsiders often had difficulty keeping up. Some didn’t see the need, noting only that the Resurgent Dream and later the Commonwealth seemed to have a relatively constant and unthreatening foreign policy and fairly liberal rules regarding commerce with foreign nations. That, after all, was enough for a friendly and mutually beneficial relationship.

However, for the people of the Commonwealth themselves, the changes of the last couple of decades could not be so easily written off. The Resurgent Dream, always the undeniable core of the Commonwealth, had perhaps changed the most. In1990, the Resurgent Dream had been an isolated loose confederation of six sovereign kingdoms containing five million people between them. Nearly half of those people had been Fae. For most purposes, Draocht, the special power of the Fae to manipulate dream energies, had been used in place of modern technology. It was not even legal to import handguns or automobiles without special permission. Parliament was an advisory body and the franchise was extremely limited. Most people had no real vote for their representative in a Parliament which had little real power anyway.

All of that changed in 1990, when Agwene ni Gwydion became High Queen of the Resurgent Dream following the death of her mother, High Queen Corrina. Agwene ushered in sweeping reforms in a relatively short period, drastically expanding the power of the Danaan Monarchy over the various kingdoms as she did so. These reforms included universal suffrage, the abolition of feudal obligations for the rural poor, responsible government, freedom of speech and equality before the law regardless of race, religion, or national origin. She was assisted in this endeavor by the two Prime Ministers who served during Agwene’s fifteen year reign. For the first few months she. Agwene worked with Lady Juliet ni Gwydion, the leader of the Modernist Government which was slowly making moderate reforms when Agwene inherited the throne. For most of her reign, she worked with Vincenzo Lacau, the first Prime Minister who came to power as a result of universal suffrage and a much more radical Modernist reformer.

Resistance to these changes soon prompted an attempted military coup led by Duke Emeril ap Eiluned. The coup was carried out in coordination with an attempt on the throne of Garman by Grand Duchess Aoife and resulted in a bloody, if brief, civil war. The insurgents showed themselves capable of all manner of crimes against civilians and against dissidents in areas they controlled. The Duke of Tasat and the Duke of Algha, the fathers of the current High King and the current Prine of Holista, both lost their lives in the line of duty fighting for democracy and the High Queen. A number of other prominent figures served with honor during the war. Viscountess Kairis’s husband, Colonel Konstantinos Karamanlis, commanded loyal troops as did General Aigeas Bakirdzis, her father. Marshall Henry Darcy served the queen as a Lieutenant Colonel. The current Governor-General of Marlund, Abraham Goldfarb, served as an ordinary sergeant under Colonel Karamanlis’s command. Even those future leaders not in the military were in some way involved. Sarah Sacker and Beatrice Wake both saw beatings, light torture and imprisonment as leaders of student protests in insurgent held Tarana. The civil war was when Danaan democracy was really created, not by High Queen Agwene’s edicts, but by the blood and sacrifice of the Danaan people who fought for it tooth and nail against better trained and better armed insurgent forces.

It was only following the civil war that the Resurgent Dream became a country. Agwene issued an official edict declaring the Danaan High Kingdom to be a single sovereign polity, albeit one with a federal constitution, and reducing the status of the kingdoms to that of principalities within a larger state. This act of unification did not come as one merely uniting a single ethnic nation previously divided by factions and the claims of rival nobility. It was a political act bringing together many peoples (even many nations, albeit small ones) into a created political state. They were bound together not by ties of blood or culture or even territory but by a shared struggle and shared hopes for the future, by bonds of ideals and of history

It was only shortly after the civil war that the Resurgent Dream suffered the largest foreign terrorist attack of its soil in all of Danaan history. Members of an ultra-conservative Catholic terrorist organization known as the Sword of God managed to take control of a Pantocratorian natural gas liner heading in to Armonvale Harbor without being detected. Upon docking, the terrorists ignited the ship’s massive store of natural gas, causing an enormous explosion which in turn detonated a number of fuel and munitions deposits, creating subsequent smaller explosions and raging fires through most of Armonvale. Civilian deaths from the attack numbered in the tens of thousands, including not only Danaans but Pantocratorians, Menelmacari, Weyreans, Excalbians, Knootians and Dominion subjects there for commerce and tourism.

It was soon discovered that the Sword of God received funding from Marlund, a racialist, theocratic dictatorship on the continent of Ambara. Marlund considered itself a radically Protestant state and thus there was some confusion as to why exactly they were tied in with the Sword of God. However, whatever their motives, Marlund had in fact funded the attack even while another Marlund based terrorist group known as the Sons of the Reformation purchased custody of the kidnapped Pantocratorian Princess Theodora from kidnappers hired by the government of Vegana.

The Resurgent Dream responded to this information by declaring that a state of war existed between the Danaan High Kingdom and Marlund. This declaration was followed up by the immediate deployment of Danaan military forces to smash Marlund’s armed forces and occupy the country, abolishing slavery and setting up a new democratic regime resting upon the rule of law. While official statements about the war stressed that the Resurgent Dream only took military action in response to a direct attack on her own territory, the expansion of democracy, human rights, religious freedom and racial equality within Marlund itself rapidly became the center of interest, both military and political.

The aftermath of the war in Marlund saw Pantocratoria, Adoki and Excalbia helping with peacekeeping operations in the new democracy. The peace was much harder fought than the war. The Sons of the Reformation, loyalists to the old regime and a newly formed communist movement all posed armed threats to the country’s new government. The racial and religious policies of the past had created deep wounds which could not be healed with a simple regime change.

The war in Marlund dragged on endlessly for year after year. The victors, however, were not totally without spoils. The collapse of Marlund’s extremist regime opened up the possibility of settling previously unclaimed lands in Ambara. The Resurgent Dream fairly quickly established seven new principalities there as well as a number of others on Atlantic Islands and within the rest of Mists. Within a few years, the Resurgent Dream had twenty-five rather than six principalities. Because of settlement patterns and the large number of foreign immigrants settling directly in the new lands, the additional principalities did not form a sort of melting pot for the different peoples of the Resurgent Dream but simply as so many more diverse parts of a multinational mosaic.

The Resurgent Dream had been in Marlund for nearly fifteen years when it was struck by the worst tragedy in its history, the Shattering. The exact causes of the Shattering are still unknown. In fact, it remains unclear exactly what actually happened. However, Fae throughout the world suddenly felt an incredible pressure upon them. Millions, even billions, of Fae were driven from their homes back into the Dreaming. Thousands were killed. At least one, Marian ni Eiluned, found herself given a human form. Contact with the Dreaming was largely cut off and those Danaans who remained were left with no knowledge of where billions of their compatriots had gone or how they now fared. They were left without their queen. They were left with countless workers, officials, clerics, police and soldiers missing. The Church of Dana was left essentially deprived of adherents in the Resurgent Dream. A huge portion of the Danaan population, the only portion which displayed relative cultural unity across the entirety of the nation, was simply gone and, apart from the immense tragedy for those who had been forced away, those Fae left behind and their friends, family and neighbors, there was also now a gaping whole in Danaan national identity and national life. There was a huge question as to whether there even remained a Danaan nation, not to mention more specific constitutional questions about the fate of the monarchy. The Shattering was a tragedy in itself but it also forced an identity crisis upon what remained of the Resurgent Dream.

This identity crisis led to the rise of one of the most dangerous demagogues in Danaan history, Thomas Baxter of the Nationalist Party. Baxter sought to forge a Danaan identity on a purely negative basis. He blamed the political liberalism of High Queen Agwene, feminism, the spread of homosexuality and especially increased contact with the outside world for the Shattering. However, even while playing upon the Danaan people’s genuine experience of the Shattering as a tragedy, he also blamed the entire period during which the Fae thrived for the confused state the Resurgent Dream was in now. Although Baxter’s principles were far from those Danaans normally embraced, he won a plurality in the first post-Shattering election, one based upon the deep-seated fear and uncertainty produced by such recent and severe tragedy.

Because of his extremism, Baxter was not able to form a Government. Instead, the Labor, Liberal and Patriot Parties formed a very broad coalition under the leadership of Liberal Leader Minerva Karamanlis. Because mainstream Danaan politicians of all stripes considered Baxter’s extremism to be illegitimate as a participant in liberal democratic politics, the Karamanlis Government was and still is considered a National Unity Government, even though it could not technically be described as one from according to the ordinary rules of parliamentary politics.

As time passed and the political situation became less dangerous, the Nationalist Party replaced Thomas Baxter as its leader, choosing instead Henri Calvin, a fairly moderate voice from Zutern, one of the Danaan Principalities established in Ambara only fifteen years ago. Calvin came forward with a new program for the nationalists. It was, in truth, a program of moderate social and economic conservatism. It involved lower taxes, more traditional family laws, a conception of freedom of religion as an affirmative rather than a negative freedom, armed democracy, a weakening of government economic regulations and a measure of privatization. However, the heart of Calvin’s appeal was his theory of the nation. Although Calvin has never led a Danaan Government, he has largely met silence from his political opponents regarding the nature of the nation itself and in that silence his theory has come to dominate.

Calvin’s doctrine of the nation was fairly simple. He began with what the nation wasn’t. A nation was not simply a territorial polity governed by universal, or at least exchangeable, political principles. Such a view of the nation rendered national boundaries and even national citizenship entirely arbitrary. A person might as happily be the citizen of any country as of his own or at least any liberal democratic country. Not only did this seem intuitively undesirable, but it also stood in sharp contrast to what people, even people who were politically and theoretically committed to the liberal theory of the state, actually felt. It rendered the bonds of community which arose from a shared identity untenable. It left a void in people’s personal identities which were often filled with what Calvin styled “factional identities” of race, gender or class in place of nationality. For Calvin, the territorial state could not in and of itself provide any basis for a national community for the simple reason that it had no basis which could not just as easily exist between any group or groups in any territory or group of scattered territories. The logic could only be circular. People are organized into this polity because this is the polity in which they are all organized.

According to Calvin, the liberal conception of the territorial state only functioned in many nations because they already had a conception of their own national identity which was presupposed by all political discussions. This conception might be hereditary, cultural, mythological, religious, territorial (in a certain very specific sense, not generally speaking), economic or historical. Ultimately, what defined a nation was an integral part of how that nation functioned, how it came to be a community with which its members identified. Without such an identity, no nation was a viable polity.

Calvin proposed that the Resurgent Dream with the varied but deep cultural and religious traditions of its different peoples was what he called an emergent integral federation. Simply put, higher levels of political identity emerged from lower ones. Individuals formed families. Families formed communities. Communities formed principalities with all their attendant and powerful cultural roots and traditions. These different principalities rooted in their own strong traditions came together through a shared history and a shared future and even by a popular identification with the balance and variety of the nation’s roots to form the Resurgent Dream. Seeing the first hints of the emergent Commonwealth, Calvin even suggested that this identity might grow beyond the current twenty-five principalities. However, he remained adamant that, by its nature, the Danaan nation was federal, religiously diverse yet also religiously devout, populist, democratic, traditional, monarchist, armed, friendly towards other free peoples and rooted culturally in the family and the local community and politically in the voluntary union of the principalities. However, Calvin’s theory was not that these traits were or should be universal human values but merely that they were integral to the Danaan nation. It was up to each nation to express its own integral nature through appropriate constitutional, political and cultural forms. What Calvin supported at home, he did not support everywhere.

While Calvin’s theory was not unproblematic and was, in fact, emphatically rejected by many on the left, it was at least a viable conservative platform within the context of a pluralistic democracy. The Nationalist Party regained its political legitimacy and, as a result, was able to form a coalition with its natural partner, the Patriot Party. This reduced the governing coalition to the Liberals and Labor and destroyed the Karamanlis Government’s majority, leading to an election.

The Progressive Coalition as the Liberal-Labor coalition now styled itself, won a narrow majority over the Conservative Coalition of the Nationalists and the Patriots. However, the balance of power within the Coalition had shifted and it was not Karamanlis but Labor Leader Adair Scott who became Prime Minister as a result of that election. Scott immediately began pressing for a consolidation of the constitutional and democratic reforms of the last fifteen years and soon helped to forge the first attempt at a written Danaan Constitution. However, the radical change created by the Constitution spawned yet another election. This time, the two coalitions became parties, the Progressive Democrats and the Conservative Democrats. The Progressives gave the leadership of their new party to Sarah Sacker, the former Culture Minister and leader of the Equity Party, a tiny minor party attached to the original coalition. By elevating Sacker, Karamanlis (now Viscountess Kairis) and Scott hoped to prevent either the Liberals or Labor from feeling like they had been taken over by the other party. The Progressives won again and Sacker became the next Prime Minister.

The other states which were to join together to form the Commonwealth had also seen radical change. In Marlund’s case, it is almost too obvious to mention. The extinction of the male line of the imperial house had brought about Adoki’s transformation from a monarch to a republic, just as the last several decades had brought slow liberalization, demilitarization and democratization. Laneria’s integration with fractal reality brought unprecedented natural disasters and sudden exposure to all sorts of alien and paranormal phenomenon. Hipolis had recently suffered a devastating attack by Daleks. Gandara, Jagiella and Sahor had just been founded. Finara had suffered from serious terrorist attacks, sectarian strife and foreign threats. Everyone was ready for a great break from the past but everyone was also feeling insecure about how up in the air everything seemed to be. They longed for a return to stability.

The Commonwealth’s formation was hotly contested in every Member. However, the Danaan High Kingdom already had a multinational federal structure formed in similar circumstances. Gandara, Sahor and Jagiella had no strong history of independence and remained closely tied to the Danaan High Kingdom. Nabarro Abarca was already a multinational state forced into a unitary constitution in which many of the different national communities felt repressed and unrepresented. Finara also suffered from a comparable problem in relation to Deasrargle. In Marlund and Adoki, nationalism was associated with past horrors. Only in Laneria and Hipolis did staunch, principled, democratically and morally legitimate opposition to the Commonwealth as such exist, but there it was powerful.

It was clear that the Commonwealth as it was created in the Treaty of New Amsterdam had little long-term viability. However, that did not mean it had no future. Once it came to its first crisis, it could either dissolve or it could adapt and grow in order to be a more legitimate polity. As things turned out, the Commonwealth was able to follow the latter path.

Three events created the crisis. The first was a passing comment made by one bureaucrat to another during the state visit of the Prime Minister of Xirnium to New Amsterdam. The comment was a little harsh but innocent and emanating from a person of no importance. However, the rumor mill amplified events enormously. It was reported in the media that foreign officials had suggested that President Billington should be given an inferior place in the order of precedence to the President of the Commonwealth Commission. Lanerian conservatives protested loudly.

The second event was the attempt by the Danaans to create electronic networks for intelligence purpose which would directly link Commonwealth intelligence with some of the Resurgent Dream’s partners in the Intelligence Pact of VERITAS. Finara, Laneria, Hipolis and Gandara complained that only the Resurgent Dream, not the Commonwealth or any other individual Members, were members of VERITAS and that their information should not go directly to VERITAS. This claim would have been more legitimate if the Resurgent Dream hadn’t already, with the knowledge and blessing of the other Members, been sending information originally obtained by other Members through VERITAS networks. The difference, the opponents of the network legalistically intoned, was that intelligence from other Members was only given to the Resurgent Dream and then intelligence from the Resurgent Dream was after that given to the other VERITAS members.

The third event was a speech given by Commission President Kairis in Victoria, the capital of the Danaan Principality of Amory. In her speech, Kairis spoke of the Commonwealth as an emerging polity in rather explicit terms, comparing it to the United States of Laneria or the Resurgent Dream at the time they were first forming their federations. This speech, which the Lanerians and the Hiplitans viewed as an attempt to declare an unelected and undemocratic Commonwealth wide government as opposed to merely a political organ of supranational union, proved to be the straw which broke the camel’s back. The Lanerian House of Representatives refused to pay their Commonwealth financial assessment. Hipolis followed suit. Marlund, Jagiella and Finara, refusing to pay for other’s bad faith, choose to underpay. The Resurgent Dream and Nabarro Abarca refused to make up the difference. The budget was a mess and the Commonwealth looked doomed before it had really begun.

To resolve the crisis, the Commonwealth Interministerial Council, collectively possessing the sovereign powers of every Commonwealth Member, met in an emergency session. They set themselves to addressing three questions: Viability, legitimacy and accountability. The solution they managed to agree on, suggested, surprisingly, by the Lanerians, was the formation of the Confederated Peoples of the Resurgent Dream, the creation of a Congress in which each Member had one vote, the delegation to this Congress of all those powers and only those powers already delegated to the Commonwealth as a whole, Membership for the Danaan Principalities and the Lanerian and Sahori States and the establishment of the existing federal governments as intermediate governments, the public proclamation of the Confederated Peoples as the successor state to the original Resurgent Dream and the original Commonwealth and the unqualified acceptance of all treaties formerly signed by either power, the creation of an appropriate constitutional document giving effect to all this to take effect when it was ratified by three fourths of the Members and to apply to each subsequent Member as they ratified it, sovereignty to remain with the Members in accordance with international laws regarding true confederations and ultimately guaranteed by a right of secession and the ability of nations within Nabarro Abarca to apply for independent Membership as the Nabarran Government devolved powers upon them. This was the most radical and the most sudden even in the Commonwealth’s history, pressed primarily by those who had until then seemed most against further consolidation. There was a lot of confusion and uncertainty at first but the idea caught on fairly rapidly. Exactly why and how this solution was arrived upon and accepted was largely a mystery, a historical event enacted behind closed doors. However, what was certain was that it was both monumental and unexpected and that the Commonwealth, even as this weak confederation, now had a real chance.

The formation of the Congress likely seemed sudden and even shocking to any foreign observers interested in the Commonwealth. However, nothing seemed more natural to the Commonwealth’s own people who largely saw it as an inevitable result of recent events. Ratification was nowhere hotly contested. After all, no polity surrendered any new domestic power which it had not already surrendered to the Commonwealth. The rooting of Membership in States, Territories and Principalities made it seem like a genuine expansion of the Lanerian, Sahori and Danaan federations. The Head of the Commonwealth, while still the most powerful monarch in the Commonwealth and still a symbol of her unity, was no longer even the symbolic or former font of the Commonwealth’s sovereignty and he no longer accredited or accepted ambassadors. This allowed monarchists to point to the Head of the Commonwealth as the monarch of many individual Members, as a symbol of constitutional unity and as the monarch who most carried the prestige of the Commonwealth in his relations with other dynasties and claim that the Commonwealth was a mixed government compatible with monarchy within their own Members and possessing a de facto crowned head who could take a place of prominence among the monarchs of the world. However, the Lanerians, who had considered the possibility that there might be a Commonwealth monarch one of the strongest objections to further consolidation, could likewise point out that the Commonwealth’s Chief of State and Government was the President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled and that the Head of the Commonwealth, whatever symbolic position he might hold and whatever power he might hold in the individual Members where he was Head of State, had neither formal nor real power over the Commonwealth’s general government. Furthermore, the creation of a real general government, however marginal its actual enumerated powers, and the formal proclamation of continuity, allowed the Commonwealth to interact as a state with other states on the international scene without sacrificed its confederate character. The use of the name ‘the Resurgent Dream’ was the most controversial part of the Constitution of the Confederated Peoples but it had an important role to play in projecting continuity to the international community. To put it bluntly, this seemed to the people of the Commonwealth not as the revolutionary step towards unity it seemed obvious to others it would turn out to be but merely as the consolidation of present arrangements in a more viable and practicable form.

The big winner in the new arrangement was Laneria. Laneria’s republican sensitivities had been catered to and, moreover, many of the terms used in the Constitution came from Laneria’s own early history as a confederation, a time still regarded with patriotic reverence by many Lanerians. Although the United States of Laneria as such did not even have one representative in the Congress and although the Lanerian delegations were sent by distinct state and territorial governments with different interests and policies, it remained the case that there would be fifty-six Lanerian delegations as compared to twenty-five Danaan delegations, nine Sahori delegations and one delegation from each of the other seven original Commonwealth Members.

The big loser was Nabarro Abarca. The Nabarrans constituted one and a half billion of the Commonwealth’s roughly six billion people and yet they were initially to receive only a single vote in Congress. In order to secure anything approaching fair representation, Nabarro Abarca would be more or less forced to institute devolution, creating governments capable of applying for distinct Membership for the various nations within the larger Nabarran nation. Obviously, the Nabarrans had largely been strong-armed into this by the other Members and by their need to remain in the Commonwealth. However, even so, their agreement to such a disadvantageous system requires further explanation. It was generally believed that the Imperial Action Party had agreed to this, however grudgingly, because, while important parts of their base continued to see Nabarro Abarca as one state for one undivided people, the many diverse peoples of the Empire were beginning to insist on their national self-expression. The Government had found itself increasingly forced to choose between allowing devolution and thus forfeiting the IAP’s eighty-seven year monopoly on political power or continuing to force peoples to be parts of a unitary state against their will and thus creating difficult and possibly violent national tensions within the Empire. Now that a need for devolution was forced upon them by Commonwealth-wide political considerations, the IAP could avoid being blamed for the problems of devolution while taking credit for its benefits. They were, after all, politicians and they were very good at playing both sides of any issue.

Despite the problems of Lanerian overrepresentation and Nabarran under representation, both of which were explained by the fact that the delegations represented governments and not people directly, a mood of optimism prevailed at the first meeting of the Congress of the Confederated Peoples. The peoples of the Commonwealth had decisively moved past the tentative arrangements on which they had so far relied, had clarified continuity and their place under international law and had formed a general government, albeit one possessed, in domestic affairs, with only a handful of the most necessary powers, strictly enumerated and subject to expansion only by a rigorous (almost impossible) amendment process.

The Congress was convened in Unity Hall, a historic New Amsterdam building which had seen New Holland’s declaration of independence from Knootoss, New Holland’s decision to join Nabarro Abarca and Laneria’s declaration of independence from Nabarro Abarca. It had, of course, been updated and expanded countless times over the centuries and the Chamber of the Peoples, the room in which Congress actually met, was itself a new addition. Tables for each Member’s delegation were arranged in a semi-circle in alphabetical order. Each table seated five and was marked by a tasteful placard bearing the Member’s name. Facing the tables was a podium where a speaker could stand and behind that was a bench where the officers of the Congress were to sit. The officers of the Congress did not refer to the entirety of a future general government but to three specific officers: The President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled, the Secretary of the Congress and the Clerk of the Congress. All three officers could be elected or removed from their positions by a simple majority vote at any time. However, beyond that, there was little similarity. The President was the Chief of State and Government of the Resurgent Dream, the presiding officer of the legislature and the leader of the majority faction. He was to be selected only from among the Representatives. The other two officers were almost completely non-political and had largely technical functions. Therefore, while the Interministerial Council had left the selection of the first President to the delegations, they had pre-selected two distinguished and fairly apolitical civil servants for the offices of Secretary and Clerk. Respectively, they were Jacobo Henarez of Nabarro Abarca and Karen Holbeck of Gandara. It was the Clerk’s duty to help orient the arriving delegations, call the roster, verify the legitimacy of the delegations and preside over the Congress until a President was selected.

Perhaps nothing indicated the fundamental sense of new beginning which pervaded at the opening of the Congress as much as the actual roster which Miss Holbeck called. Unusually for a legislature, there were many more Representatives than there were votes. This was the result of the rather unusual and indirect way that Representatives were selected. Each Member legislature appointed a delegation consisting of an odd number of Representatives between three and fifteen. However many Representatives a Member sent, the collectively possessed one vote. If a single delegation was divided, the majority of the delegation would determine the vote of the delegation as a whole. There were no set terms of office. Representatives could be appointed and recalled by the democratically elected Member legislatures at any time. Moreover, almost all the individual names on the rather long list were not well-known to most citizens. This seemed to be a new body with new people and new ideas capable of really launching a new polity. The only names on the official roster which would be largely recognized were those of Henri Calvin and Beatrice Wake, who had resigned their seats in the Danaan Parliament in order to accept the appointments of Zutern and Gandara respectively.

It was just a few minutes after the roster had been called that the Representatives were given an unpleasant reminder that the baggage of the past could not be gotten rid of quite so easily. The Honourable Joscelin Mably of Selinia formally moved that the Right Honourable Beatrice Wake of Gandara not be accepted as a Representative from that Member. Mr. Mably stated that Miss Wake had already been disgraced by a vote of no confidence in the Danaan Parliament which removed her from her previous post as Minister for Justice. Moreover, Mr. Mably stated that she was suspected of constitutional irregularities and possible criminal offenses during her time as Minister for Justice and that Gandara, a Member in which Miss Wake has never resided and in whose service Miss Wake has never been employed, insulted the Danaan High Kingdom by going needlessly out of its way to select a politician who had such a history with the Danaan people.

Mr. Mably’s official objection was seconded by the Honourable Rea Vacarri of Nerise and that was when the Representatives stopped being polite. At least a dozen of them, with the passive or active acquiescence of most of the others, began vehemently protesting at the presence of Miss Wake, to the Clerk, to her personally and to one another. Coarse language and uncivil manners were resorted to as were a few crude remarks about Miss Wake’s well-known sexual preferences. It was only with some effort that Miss Holbeck brought the house to order, sternly telling Mr. Mably and Miss Vacarri that the Gandaran Parliament and only the Gandaran Parliament had the right to determine who was included in the Gandaran delegation and telling the other protesting Representatives that they were out of order.

Once order was restored, Mr. Calvin, who had simply been silent throughout the disputation of Miss Wake’s presence, moved that Congress recess for an hour in order to that the different delegations might discuss matters relating to the formation of caucuses and the election of the President and of the other officers of the Government. Miss Wake seconded this motion and it was passed with unanimous consent.

For the most part, the Representatives either personally belonged or were sent by Governments which belonged to a wide variety of political parties which were already affiliated with one another through a variety of Commonwealth organizations. Naturally, these organizations seemed like the best basis for caucusing. They did, after all, consist of politically and even philosophically fraternal member parties. Thus, after the hour’s recess, Congress reconvened divided into a number of distinct and organized factions. The Progressives under the leadership of the Honourable Michael Eaton of North Roanoke and the Conservatives under the Honourable Henri Calvin of Zutern clearly dominated. The only major caucus aside from the Progressives and the Conservatives was the Social Democrats under the Honourable Kevin Rastel of Kingsland and consisting of all eight Sahori delegations. There were the Greens under the leadership of the Honourable Helen Caddow of Gandara and consisting, in fact, only of the Gandaran delegation. Likewise, the Liberals under Saburo Abukara consisted only of the Adoki delegation and the delegation for the Southern Pauline Islands. The Independents, under the leadership of the Honourable Kali Kaklamanakis, consisted of the Marlund and Hipolitan delegations.

This division was quite comfortable and seemed perfectly natural to the Representatives themselves. However, it was not likely to be sustainable for more than a few weeks if that long and then they would have harder choices to make in coming to form some sort of new party system. The problem was simply that the shared ideas around which the Leagues were organized were ideas which primarily applied to the functioning of the Member Governments. The General Government, on the other hand, could only deal with certain specific areas: Foreign policy, the common defense, relations between different Members and monetary policy for those Members which choose to accept the Commonwealth dollar. The disagreement between the parties within each League on those issues was as strong if not stronger than their agreement on issues of taxation, social services, environmental regulation, distribution, labour laws and other issues which remained almost entirely the province of the Member Governments. How long could the Leagues remain united when they disagreed on all the issues which they were actually expected to address and agreed only on those questions with regard to which they had no power?

Nonetheless, the party system was now determined at least for the short term. The Progressives controlled forty-two delegations and the Conservatives controlled forty out of a total of ninety-five. Any candidate for the office of President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled would require the support of forty-eight delegations. Confident in the support of the Social Democrats and the Greens who would naturally be sympathetic to Progressive goals and were unable make any serious contention of their own, the Honourable Mamo Zagwe of Carasia, one of the Progressive Representatives, moved that Mr. Eaton be elected to the presidency.

Mr. Zagwe’s plans were soon frustrated, however. The Honourable Stephen Baldwin of Maria, a Social Democrat, moved that Congress recess once more so that the caucuses could make arrangements necessary for the conduction of the vote. The motion was grudgingly seconded by the Honourable Anthony Bardolph of Amory, a Progressive. The motion received the support of the nearly all the Progressives, all the Social Democrats, both the Liberal delegations and the one Green delegation. The Independents and the Conservatives voted against it. Nonetheless, the motion carried and the Representatives recessed again only a few minutes after the end of their last recess.

During the recess, negotiations commenced between the Progressives and the Social Democrats. At first, Mr. Rastel was adamantly opposed to the idea of a coalition government. He considered them to be intrinsically lacking in democratic responsibility and compromising to the integrity of the Social Democrats. It was a policy similar to that of the Sahori Labor Party to which he belonged and he found it applied just as well in the present situation.

Another point of view was, however, represented by Mr. Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin pointed out that the situation was fundamentally different. There was no confederal party system as such. Instead, very different party systems operated in the different Members, each one informed by the local political climate. The conclusion Mr. Baldwin drew from this was simply that Congress, if it was to be organized in a reasonable fashion, should be divided not primarily according to the Leagues but according to two other broad political organizations: The Constitutional Left Union and the Constitutional Right Union. These two organizations, like the Leagues, the Association of Opposition Parties and the Association of Parliamentarians, had been organized to facilitate political cooperation throughout the old Commonwealth of Peoples. However, unlike the Leagues which had been formed around specific ideological and philosophical political positions, the Unions merely linked the mainstream parties on both the left and the right. The Sahori Labor Party was a fraternal party of all the parties included among the Progressives through the Constitutional Left Union.

Mr. Baldwin’s argument swayed most of the Sahori delegates and Mr. Rastel reluctantly gave in to the wishes of his caucus. Mr. Baldwin then suggested that the Social Democrats should demand that Mr. Eaton also include the Independents in any potential government. Mr. Baldwin pointed out that the Marlund delegation represented a mixed Social Democratic and Christian Democratic Government in Marlund and that the Hipolitan system had no political parties. For this reason, Mr. Baldwin claimed that they could not easily caucus. Mr. Rastel responded that the Social Democratic members of the Marlund delegation were welcome to join with the Social Democrats. He pointed out that although each delegation had one vote which was cast as the majority of the Representatives voted, there was no rule saying delegations must be undivided in caucusing. On this issue, Mr. Rastel’s arguments were accepted by the other Social Democrats. It was with these instructions that Mr. Rastel sat down to talk with Mr. Eaton.

Mr. Eaton initially intended simply to form a coalition. However, Mr. Rastel’s view was a little more complicated. He stressed that the Social Democrats had not necessarily accepted the idea of government by coalition. He thought that such governments tended to be undemocratic because they did not give the voters a clear choice. Mr. Rastel admitted that it seemed somewhat odd to be speaking of democracy in an indirectly elected legislature but that the people did vote for their Member Governments and that the political composition of the Member Governments was reflected in the Congress. He further pointed out that the majority of Members were very pluralistic societies with two (or at most three) broadly organized, mainstream political parties. For the most part, except when some especially specific local issue became of great importance, voters voted for either the right or the left. It followed that the best way to reflect the clear choices of the electorate and to make politics transparent and accountable was to caucus not along specific ideological lines but in fairly broad, pluralistic caucuses. In fact, almost all the parties within the various Leagues were themselves similarly structured and governed by pluralistic consensus politics rather than by ideological rigidity. There was nothing sacred about the current caucus system. It wasn’t a system of parties created by their members. It had no tradition. It had been arrived at an hour or so ago. The Representatives were still free to reject a system of caucuses which would lead to coalition politics in the sense that it existed in Knootoss and other many states and to form new caucuses which offered the people a clear choice (or rather reflected the clear choice they made when the voted for their Member legislatures). Mr. Eaton said he would have to discuss it with the rest of the current Progressive caucus and with Mrs. Caddow.

After further consultations, the Progressives, Social Democrats and Greens decided to disband their respective caucuses and to form the Constitutional Left Caucus. Mr. Eaton politely notified Mr. Calvin that he was doing so. Mr. Calvin found the idea to be of some interest and initiated brief talks with Mr. Abukara regarding the possibility of a similar arrangement on the right. Mr. Abukara agreed easily and the Constitutional Right Caucus was formed. This left the Independents even more isolated and, because the precarious position of the Independents seemed, at least for now, to flow from the very nature of existing political conventions in Hipolis and current circumstances in Marlund, Mr. Eaton was inclined to come to an understanding with them, even though he did not need them to form a majority. Mr. Eaton therefore sat down to talk with Miss Kaklamanakis about the position of the Independents with regard to any left government.

Mr. Eaton had fairly simple instructions from his caucus. He was to seek to include two individual Representatives who belonged to the Independent Caucus in a proposed Constitutional Left Government provided that they be Representatives who, while caucusing with their independent delegations, were individually inclined to the program of the Government. Miss Kaklamanakis found this a reasonable proposition but added that the formation of the Government should not be a simple vote on caucus lines but should be proceeded by a formal statement of principles by both major caucuses, their proposed course of action upon forming a Government and the qualifications of their leadership. Mr. Eaton was somewhat taken aback at this demand as he was essentially meeting with her as a courtesy to the special needs of Hipolis and Marlund and she, on her part, had very little to bargain with as the Constitutional Left Caucus had a majority in its own right. Miss Kaklamanakis withdrew her request in the face of Mr. Eaton’s resistance and suggested the Honourable Falk Madler of Marlund, a member of the Social Democratic Party, and the Honourable Gillian Palamas of Hipolis, a woman known to be sympathetic to progressive ideas, as the Independent members of the Government.

After Congress reconvened, the Honourable Janet Nares of Aravana made a motion that Michael Eaton be elected President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled. The motion was seconded by the Honourable Morris Inman of New Camalad. The motion passed along caucus lines and Congress then adjourned until the next day to give the newly elected President time to form a Government capable of securing the confidence of a body which so far seemed to have a very fluid political composition and to prepare an official Government policy statement for said Government.

The next day, Mr. Eaton presented his Government to Congress. Mr. Rastel was Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Mrs. Caddow was Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Madler was Secretary of State, Miss Palamas was Attorney General and the Honourable Eben Shahar of New Holland was the Secretary of Defense. This Government received the confidence of the Congress along caucus lines with the Independents voting with the Government.

Mr. Eaton then rose and read the Government policy statement to Congress. According to Mr. Eaton, the first task before the Government was to rationalize the existing institutions of the Commonwealth in order to form a reasonably organized civil service for the Confederation. In light of the traditional independence of the Commonwealth Commission and of the great contributions Viscountess Kairis had made to the Resurgent Dream, the Government wished to work with her as much as possible in arranging the transition, although ultimately all Commonwealth organs had to be brought under the General Government, responsible to Congress.

More sensitive than the Commonwealth Commission was the issue of the Head of the Commonwealth. However, Mr. Eaton argued, if Congress addressed the status of the Head of the Commonwealth clearly and confidently, there was no reason for any trouble to arise. The Head of the Commonwealth, as a constitutional symbol of confederal unity who was not also a symbolic fount of sovereignty, occupied something of a unique position in the world. According to Mr. Eaton, the Confederation could not fail to acknowledge the person in whom the crowns of a large number of its Members were united in a special way but that there could be no question of turning the Head of the Commonwealth into a sort of High King of the Confederation. The Government, correspondingly, would draft protocols and official statements clarifying the Head of the Commonwealth’s symbolic position for the Confederation as well as the legal and protocolary positions of the queens of Finara and Hipolis. The Foreign Affairs department would support and assist all three royal houses in their dealings with foreign royal dynasties and seek to prevent any decline in their international prestige because of their Member’s position in the Confederation. However, all official statements would make clear that the Head of State of the Confederation was the President of Congress and that all royal titles in the Confederation has constitutional significance only for the governments of the Members in which they were sovereign. In short, the Government recognized the Head of the Commonwealth as an important symbolic institution, denied it a real role in the constitutional functioning of the General Government, claimed the position of Chief of State and Government without qualification for the President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled, fully recognized the monarchs of the monarchies which were Members of the Confederation as sovereigns of their Members, agreed to facilitate the relations between confederal royals and foreign royal dynasties, agreed to stand behind and lend its prestige to confederal royals in their dealings with foreign dynasties and considered the protocolary status of the monarchs of the Members unchanged by membership in a Confederation

The Government’s plans for the military were modest. Mr. Eaton began by saying that the purpose of all confederal armed forces was the protection of the Confederated Peoples and their allies. Emphasis should therefore be shifted from projection to defense. The General Government would only maintain a general staff, the Special Command and the Space Force under its direct authority during time of peace. Other armed forces would be under the command of Member governments, the governments of federal unions within the confederation and, in the case of militias, duly constituted local officials. All military and civil defense forces in the nation would come under the control of the General Government in time of war, emergency or national danger. During such times, Congress would elect from the officer corps a Grand Marshall of the Confederation to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Confederal Armed Forces until such time as Congress should declare the danger at an end and relieve him of such responsibilities. The General Government’s Department of Defense reserved the right to issue commissions to officers exceeding the rank of Colonel or Commodore. Commissions to officers of lower rank were to be issued by the various Members and by the three federal unions within the confederation. The General Government, however, intended to honour all commissions for ranks higher than those of Colonel and Commodore prior to the formation of the Confederated Peoples by authorities previously competent to issue such commissions. The Space Force would no longer simply be kept waiting for a military need and would now be refitted as a largely scientific fleet to be used for research and well as for the facilitation of commerce and diplomacy with space powers. The Force would retain its armaments for self-defense in international space and so that it could immediately resume a defense function in the event of war or national danger. The Special Command would also be used for research into “paranormal” matters as well as into advanced technology. Ranking officers from Amestria, Excalbia, Pantocratoria and Xirnium would be invited to the Confederated Peoples to witness maneuvers. The officer exchange programs with Pantocratoria and Excalbia would be continued. The Government would also seek to establish such programs with Amestria and Xirnium. Peacekeeping commitments to Kaitan-Leagran would be maintained under the authority of the General Staff. However, these commitments did not require the election of a Grand Marshall.

Mr. Eaton then said that his Government considered it to be simple common sense that all nuclear weaponry in the Confederated Peoples should be under the control of the General Government. Nuclear arms were so dangerous and so potentially destructive that the entire nation had to be involved in any decisions about their potential use, their development and the security of all nuclear facilities. He admitted that, while such a policy was simple common sense, the enumerated powers of the Congress did not provide a simple constitutional means for the General Government to obtain control of nuclear arms. Mr. Eaton promised that he and Mr. Shahar would work within the existing constitutional framework and in cooperation with the Members and the federal unions within the confederation in order to seek control of nuclear armaments now controlled by the Danaan High Kingdom and Laneria. He predicted that as long as the Government acted with tact and in good faith, there would be no significant constitutional resistance to the measure from the Members.

The Government would not build any new nuclear weapons and would retain existing nuclear armaments for deterrent purposes only. It would not assist any power not currently possessing nuclear capabilities to obtain them. It would participate in multilateral non-proliferation agreements. It would judge any multilateral arrangements for partial or complete nuclear disarmament on their merits with particular attention being paid to whether they actually eliminated potential nuclear threats to the Resurgent Dream. The Government regarded the actual use of nuclear weapons to be abhorrent and regarded the only justification for their possession to be that hostile powers possessed them and that the threat of mutually assured destruction if they to be used rendered their actual use nearly impossible when they might otherwise be used on the Resurgent Dream and her allies. Mr. Eaton specified that the Confederal nuclear deterrent covered not only the Resurgent Dream itself but also the entirety of the Western Atlantic as well as Amestria and Xirnium. He then went on to say that it followed from the Government’s policy of regarding nuclear weapons purely as a deterrent for their use and not as a legitimate of war that the Government was, on principle, hesitant to undertake any project which seemed to presuppose that a nuclear war was something which could actually be fought and won such as a missile defense shield. However, Mr. Eaton also noted that disturbing recent events indicated that the ability of nuclear arms to serve as a deterrent might not be what it once was. The recklessness of certain potentially hostile powers and the development of effective missile defense shields by others meant that there was a real possibility the Resurgent Dream might find herself in a war where her enemies initiated a nuclear exchange. Because of this, the Government was, quite reluctantly, asking the General Staff to compile a report on the matter. The Government, based upon extensive study and expert advice, would then decide whether or not it was essential for the safety of the Confederation to prepare for such an eventuality.

The Commonwealth International Court would be renamed the Confederal Supreme Court and a system of inferior confederal courts would be established to deal with those cases where the Confederation had original jurisdiction, including crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, involvement in child sex tourism, involvement in trafficking in persons, piracy, treason, perjury in confederal cases and civil cases arising between citizens of different Members in which neither Member can claim clear jurisdiction. Judges for these inferior courts, like the Justices of the Supreme Court, would be appointed by the President at the suggestion of the Attorney General and with the consent of Congress. Cases could be appealed from local to confederal courts if the grounds of the appeal are that the rights of the accused guaranteed by the confederal constitution were violated by the Member courts. There were to be no confederal capital crimes except for crimes against humanity, crimes against peace and war crimes in which cases the death penalty was not mandatory, could only be sought before the Supreme Court and required the death warrant to be signed by both the President and the Attorney General, both of whom were to be at total liberty to refuse.

The Pantocratorian Imperial Chancellor, Thibault Drapeur, called President Eaton on the evening of his election by the Congress to congratulate him on his election as President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled. Dr Drapeur assured Mr Eaton that Pantocratoria would remain a steadfast ally of the Resurgent Dream in its latest constitutional iteration, and talked with him briefly about the shared interests of Pantocratoria and the Confederation in the Western Atlantic region and in the world at large. He invited the President to visit Pantocratoria at some mutually convenient time in the future to be agreed, and concluded the call by wishing Eaton and his government all the best.

Mr. Eaton then drew attention to the fact that most of the great challenges facing the Confederation now were challenges for the Members. He discussed in some detail the familiar problems of Marlund and Finara and the efforts both Members were making to reconcile different elements of their diverse populations. He also spoke of how Nabarro Abarca now faced the challenge of devolution, a task implied in the sections of the Constitution regarding future admission for devolved governments in the Empire as full Members of the Confederated Peoples. Mr. Eaton praised the efforts of these Members in particular in addressing these problems and more generally praised the work of the Members in innovatively dealing with local problems in a way suited to the needs of local communities. He promised that his Government would assist, rather than hinder, the Members in seeking and implementing creative and constructive solutions to particular local problems.

According to Mr. Eaton, the greatest challenge of Confederation was that of defining the proper role and the constitutional status of the various federal unions within the Confederation. As a case in point, Mr. Eaton pointed to problems arising between the industrial relations laws of the Commonwealth of Sahor and of the various Sahori States. While it was hardly uncommon for a federal union and its component parts to have different regulations regarding industrial relations, with the laws being cumulative and federal laws taking precedent, the situation in Sahor presented more serious problems because the differences created ambiguity as to the legal personalities of labour unions and employer organizations. Sahori and State laws, in some cases, considered different sets of people to be members of or represented by the same organization. This created fundamental problems of legal personality, created bitter demarcation disputes between organizations and sometimes resulted in separate claimants to leadership, one set supported by State and the other by Commonwealth law. Laneria and the Danaan High Kingdom confronted similar constitutional problems with regard to other issues.

Another important constitutional issue, even more pressing than conflicts between Member laws and laws of federal unions within the Confederation, was the status of the unincorporated Lanerian Territories. Mr. Eaton drew attention to the fact that these Territories were full Members of the Confederated Peoples in their own right. He pointed out that they were, at present, under the jurisdiction of a federal union within the Confederation which they never willingly joined and in whose legislative processes they had no meaningful representation. The benefits of integration and security which supporters of Lanerian territorial policy pointed to as recompense for this status were now provided directly by the Confederated Peoples. The Government, therefore, understood the Constitution’s guarantee of the integrity of every Member as assuring the right of any or all of the Territories to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Lanerian Government with or without Lanerian consent. Confderal constitutional guarantees applied only to Members and not to unions within the Confederation, which legally existed only through the delegation of power by the Members, either now or in the past. The Territories had never delegated any such power and could count on the unqualified support of the Confederated Peoples if they wished to withdraw from Lanerian jurisdiction. It was not only the policy of the Eaton Government but the legally binding constitutional obligation of any Confederal Government to do so.

Having emphasized the authority of the Members at the expense of the General Government and especially at the extent of the federal unions within the Confederation, Eaton proceeded to outline his Government’s policy on education. Education was and of necessity would remain the affair of the Members and of local governments. However, certain Confederal programs could be established to help enrich the educational opportunities of the Confederation’s children. These included an expanded foreign exchange program in cooperation with the Members, the creation of Confederal museums open to the public free of charge in New Amsterdam, the creation of programs facilitating school groups in touring different parts of the Confederation and special equity funding to Members struggling to provide their students with a good education. Mr. Eaton summed up by reminding Congress that the Confederal role in education was extremely limited and that it was essentially a Member responsibility. However, in addition to the Government’s modest specific programs, he would use the bully pulpit provided by his position to urge the Member Governments to use their resources in order to guarantee expansive and equitable education to all children, especially children with special needs or from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The Confederation, using its total legislative sovereignty over the Sovereign Confederal Territory, would establish a small local school system providing free daycare, pre-school, grade school and university education to all residents of the Territory and to the children of all Confederal personnel from building staff to Government Secretaries. The schools would be secular. They would seek not only to provide students with knowledge in the core areas of the curriculum but also to provide them with critical thinking skills and with a sense of civic duty. The schools would actively celebrate their inevitable diversity of race, religion, national origin and political opinion. Instruction would be carried on primarily in English but all the major languages of the Confederation would be taught. Teaching methods were to be humanistic and an emphasis was to be placed on participatory learning and on participation in the classroom. Wages, hours and conditions for teachers, administrators and staff were to be competitive so as to attract the best staff possible.

The University of the Confederation, in addition to offering a free university education to residents of the Sovereign Confederal Territory and the offspring of all Confederal employees, would also accept applications from other potential students, although these were not guaranteed free tuition. The standards would be high but admissions officers would be given the discretion to consider the students background and to judge applications with the interests of promoting equal opportunity in mind. Complete scholarships would be offered to students in need of financial aid, students willing to commit to pursuing a public service career after graduation and students capable of special contributions to the Confederation. Other special scholarship programs might also be created in the interests of cultural understanding, multiculturalism, equality of opportunity or the national interest in accordance with the principles of education to which the Government was committed.

The Confederal Government intended to relate to its own employees in a manner consistent with the best practices of the Members and the private sector and fully consistent with the Constitutional Left concern for the needs and rights of workers. In addition to progressive policies with regard to wages, hours and conditions, this included policies to ensure that the Confederal civil service was representative of the great diversity of the Confederated Peoples. This included aggressive recruiting in every part of the Confederation to make sure that all Members, religions and racial groups were represented. It also included policies designed to encourage the equal participation of women in Confederal public service. To this end, the Government would not mandate a strict policy of non-discrimination in hiring but would also implement a no tolerance policy with regard to sexual harassment. The Government would draft clear and specific policies regarding sexual harassment to be posted in a place where they would be clearly visible to all employees. Reported violations of these policies would be investigated thoroughly and violators punished, usually through termination. These same standards would also be law for private employers operating within the Confederal Sovereign Territory.

Mr. Eaton next turned to the issue of foreign policy. The Government still considered the Resurgent Dream’s alliances with Excalbia, Pantocratorian Ambara and Pantocratoria to be vital to the security of the Western Atlantic. It intended to continue to fulfill its role as a guarantor of the sovereignty of Abt and, moreover, intended to seek closer relations with Abt as well as with Upper Virginia, the Confederation of Sovereign States and Xirnium. The Government hoped to maintain a strong relationship with the newly emerging democracy in Kaitan-Leagran and to help ensure that the new monarchy was thoroughly democratic and constitutional in character and that the emerging government structures continued to move towards that of a national, democratic and non-sectarian federal system of governance.

Beyond the Western Atlantic, the Confederated Peoples considered itself the natural friend of liberal and social democratic nations. The Government would continue to consider Knootoss one of the Resurgent Dream’s most important allies and, specifically, would seek a direct bilateral understanding to supplement the relations that already existed through the North Atlantic Comprehensive Treaty, VERITAS and KIST. The Government would seek a rapprochement with Midlonia and closer relations with Amestria and Taraskovya. The Government would seek not only diplomatic contact but commerce, navigation treaties, extradition treaties, cultural exchange agreements and even defensive alliances with many or all of these powers and with other liberal and social democracies.

More generally, the Confederated Peoples desired diplomatic relations with all nations whether they were friendly, neutral or hostile. The Government did not accept the idea that the mere existence of diplomatic contact represented some form of friendship or alliance. Therefore, the Government would continue to guarantee an exchange of ambassadors with any recognized state which acknowledged traditional diplomatic norms, including extraterritoriality and diplomatic immunity, and which requested the contact. The Government would also seek an exchange of ambassadors with other nations when it determined that doing so would pose no undue risk to the Confederation or its diplomats and would not insult the dignity and sovereignty of the Confederation. The only circumstances in which the Government would refuse any state to state contact with those which, by their nature, made diplomatic relations as such untenable, such as a real or de facto state of war or situations such as arose from the current official Allanean position with regards to Finara.

Mr. Eaton then went on to explain why the Allanean question was special. It was fairly simple, really. Sovereignty in the Confederated Peoples was vested in the Members. Finara was one of those Members. Therefore, by denying the sovereignty of the Finaran people, Allanea denied the sovereignty of the Confederated Peoples taken as a complete whole. Recognition in the proper sense of the term did not exist between the two states. Correspondingly, any sort of state to state contact or any of the commercial and personal contact which requires at least minimal state-to-state contact, would have to remain dependent upon Allana formally revoking its statements during the Finara crisis.

Normal relations, according to Mr. Eaton, did not necessarily include extradition treaties. The Government intended to be conservative in the extradition treaties it agreed to. Most such treaties would be list treaties and only a few would be treaties based upon standards of dual criminality. Both sorts of treaties would have human rights conditions attached to all extraditions. Extradition treaties would generally only be signed with nations where the rule of law as the Confederals understood it prevailed.

Trade was another issue where the Government intended to be conservative in the sort of agreements it signed with foreign powers. While the moves towards liberalizing trade with Iesus Christi would not be reversed, they would not be significantly expanded nor would they be extended to other Reich nations. Trade with Allanea or with any nation where slavery was legal would continue to be strictly forbidden. The Government would use discretion in opening trade relations with other powers and would stress regulations which ensured “fair trade.” However, free trade agreements were to be sought with other social and liberal democracies and the free trade relationships now existing within VERITAS, KIST and the North Atlantic Comprehensive Treaty were to be maintained.

Mr. Eaton stated that his Government’s essential approach to foreign policy were those of principled pursuit of the national interest, critical engagement with foreign powers, the expansion and consolidation of the “Pacific Union” or “Democratic Peace,” the reservation of military force for self-defense, defense of allied powers and peace-keeping (when invited), fair trade which brought prosperity to the nation without undermining the moral or economic position of the nation and involvement with international humanitarian organizations.

The only other major issue the Confederal Government would have to deal with was the Confederal Declaration of Rights contained in the Confederal Constitution. Mr. Eaton was emphatic that these had the force of law in every Member, not only with respect to the Confederal Government but also with respect to the Government of that Member. This included not only the so-called negative rights (freedom of worship, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, right to bear arms, right to privacy, etc.) but also the procedural rights (right to a fair trial, right to due process, right to equal treatment, right to a proportional punishment, right to be tried by a jury of one’s peers, etc.) and the social rights (education, health care, etc.). It followed that the Confederal Government had the right to take such action as was required to assure that all of these rights were guaranteed each individual Confederal citizen and Mr. Eaton’s Government intended to do just that, at first merely through creating Confederal remedies for situations where these rights had been violated and, in time, as the relationship between the Confederal and Member Governments developed and as it became necessary, through more direct measures.

Mr. Eaton concluded by stating his Government’s appreciation of what a radical new start this was for all the people who were now Confederal citizens but that they also appreciated how much historical, political and diplomatic continuity there was with the past. They intended to proceed with building the Confederation while respecting the traditions of the past and nurturing the hopes of the future.

After the Government policy statement, Mr. Eaton received a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle, although his own caucus was naturally much more enthusiastic. Congress then adjourned for lunch and there were many informal conversations about the content and the style of the statement. While there was some debate, it did not seem that anything Mr. Eaton had said so far would be subject to any intense partisan contention.

When Congress reconvened after lunch, Mr. Calvin was officially recognized as the Leader of the Opposition and presented his Shadow Cabinet. Mr. Abukara was, not surprisingly, made the Shadow Secretary of Foreign Affairs. The Honourable Daig Cadden of Finara became Shadow Secretary of State. The Honourable Daniel Gadi of Selinia was Shadow Secretary of Defense. The Honourable Jefferson Sampson of Koasati was made Shadow Attorney General. The Honourable Charles Hooke of Nubosya was made Shadow Secretary of the Treasury.

Mr. Calvin then spoke briefly about the role of the Opposition. He promised Mr. Eaton that he intended to lead a vibrant Opposition, presenting a vigorous democratic challenge to the Government. He also promised to lead a constructive Opposition, working within the committees to improve and moderate Government bills. Mr. Calvin also briefly spoke of his commitment to maintaining and strengthening the prestige of Confederal royal families in relation to foreign dynasties, protecting the sovereignty of the Members, keeping the economy strong and free and providing for effective national defense. The only thing he said which seemed to conflict directly with the Government policy statement was that he intended to try and restrain the Government from using broadly worded rights like that of privacy to justify legislating on issues such as abortion, birth control and family and marriage laws which were issues of legitimate contention best decided by democratic Member legislatures.

The Congress then adjourned for the day. The next day, Mr. Eaton began by proposing that a bipartisan commission be charged with drafting a Declaration of Principles which made clear the public conception of justice which characterized the Confederated Peoples, the shared ideas and practical causes which had led them to join together their destinies in a common national destiny and, in general, to make clear the shared social, political, judicial and philosophical principles which provided a framework in which differences between political parties, individuals and other social groups took place and according to which such differences were to be settled peacefully. The Honourable Thomas Jay of Regina was appointed to the chair.

Congress then moved to the business of creating committees and assigning various Representatives to them. The first to be created was the Rules Committee, chaired by the Secretary of State and including the Shadow Secretary of State as well as three other Constitutional Left Representatives, three from the Constitutional Right and one Independent. Because the Independents were also in the Government, this arrangement constituted a Government majority while preventing the Committee’s deliberations from being too completely controlled by the Constitutional Left.

Congress then created committees on Foreign Affairs, the Judiciary, Defense and the Treasury. Each of these had the same basic composition as the Rules Committee. The Honourable John Carter of Sonora then moved that an Ethics Committee be created under the leadership of an opposition backbencher. Mr. Calvin seconded. His Lordship the Honourable Baron Bampfylde of Amory rose to speak against the motion, maintaining that such a committee would inevitably be used for nothing more than scandal mongering for the purpose of debilitating the Government. Mr. Carter responded that a committee whose primary purpose was to hold the Government accountable could hardly be entrusted to a Government Representative. The Honourable Basila Balanos of Hipolis then moved that the Ethics Committee instead consist of three backbenchers from each side of the aisle, that it be co-chaired by one Representative from each side and that the Caucuses be restrained from disciplining any Representative for their conduct on the Ethics Committee. Mr. Eaton interjected that this might constitute an undue interference with the rights of the Caucuses to manage their internal affairs and moved that the question be submitted to the newly formed Rules Committee. Mrs. Balanos then asked if the Caucus leaders would freely to refrain from penalizing Representatives for their actions in the Ethics Committee. Mr. Eaton, Mr. Calvin and Miss Kaklamanakis all agreed. The motion was then put to a vote and passed by a margin of 87-8.

The Rule Committee was charged with creating formal rules of order for the Congress, based on the Common Law of Parliamentary Procedure and taking into account the particular needs of the Congress of the Confederation. The Special Commission for the Declaration of Principles had its draft to produce. The other committees were each charged with producing a preliminary report regarding their respective areas of concern. Most of the rest of the day was spent with the committees meeting among themselves, most of the Representatives tending to their own affairs and a steady string of backbenchers reading statements about issues of especial interest to them into the record in a mostly empty chamber.

The next day the Government tabled a number of bills to be read that day. They were fairly basic and were designed to create the groundwork for a functional Confederal state. They included the Confederal Defense Services Act, the Bank of the Confederation Act, the Head of the Commonwealth Act, the Confederal Commission Act, the Civil Service Act, the Confederal Courts Act and the Confederal Sovereign Territory Act. Mr. Eaton announced that, although the Government’s legislative agenda was comprehensive, he thought it best to begin by creating the basic institutional framework which would make Confederal governance possible in the first place.

The Confederal Defense Services Act was the first bill to be read. The Act, if passed, would create a uniform system of ranks throughout the Confederated Peoples, reserving to the Secretary of Defense or his representative the sole right to confer commissions of rank of or superior to that of a Colonel in the land or air forces or of a Captain in the naval forces. The Act recognized all such ranks established legitimately prior to the Act. The Act converted the Commonwealth Defense Force, Commonwealth Special Command, Commonwealth Space Force and Commonwealth Defense Council into a Confederal General Staff, a Confederal Special Command and a Confederal Deep Space Agency (which was from here on out to be a joint military/scientific organization). All officers of the rank of Colonel/Captain or higher were automatically part of the General Staff. The Member militaries and militias and those military forces consisting of unions of members within the Confederation would operate under local command unless a Grand Marshal of the Confederation were elected to take command of all armed forces or unless they volunteered for a peacetime overseas deployment. The Act officially styled the Member military forces collectively as the Civil Defense Forces and the combined military forces of the Confederated Peoples when united under the command of a Grand Marshal of the Confederation as the Armed Forces of the Confederated Peoples. In both cases, they were divided into the Confederal Army, the Confederal Navy, the Confederal Air Forces, the Confederal Marines, the Confederal Coast Guard and the Confederal Militia. The Act stipulated that volunteers from these force could be stationed overseas at the invitation of the foreign state involved as part of an exchange program, for purposes of security cooperation or for purposes of peace-keeping. However, members of these forces could not be ordered to deploy overseas or deployed in any nation against its will unless a Grand Marshal of the Confederation has been elected and a State of War declared to exist by the Congress. In addition, all nuclear weaponry within the Confederated Peoples would be purchased by the Confederal Government and placed under the jurisdiction of the Confederal General Staff. The bill passed after the first reading with a vote of 81-5 with 9 abstentions.

The Bank of the Confederation Act sought to create a Bank of the Confederation charged with implementing monetary policy, issuing banknotes, issuing loans to the Government and to private banks, managing the foreign exchange, managing the gold reserves, regulating and supervising the banking industry in accordance with the law and setting the official interest rate, all within the limits prescribed by law and by the nature of an open economy. Objection to this bill during debate was strong enough that it was sent to the Committee on the Treasury and scheduled to be discussed again at such time as that committee should reintroduce it.

The Head of the Commonwealth Act acknowledged the role of the Head of the Commonwealth as the living symbol of the free union between the Confederal Members. It recognized that the office was joined with the combined throne of most monarchist Members in a single person, a person who, while not the Head of State for the Confederated Peoples as such, was the Head of State for a great many of the individual Members. It recognized that this person was primarily a monarch and acknowledged that the title of Head of the Commonwealth did not simply co-exist with but was fundamentally united with his monarchical position and it placed the full prestige of the Confederated Peoples behind him in dealing with foreign dynasties. It acknowledged the Head of the Commonwealth as having the right to make formal state visits and made Confederal funds available to him for this purpose. Objection to this bill was fairly strong but it nonetheless passed on the first reading after heated debate. The vote was 61-20 with 14 abstentions.

The Confederal Commission Act renamed the Commonwealth Commission the Confederal Commission. More significantly, it made the Commission Secretaries into the permanent apolitical heads of the branches of the civil service and made the commission as a whole a policy advisory body charged with providing the Government with expert opinion on matters too comprehensive to be handled by experts in any specific field. The President of the Commission was now to be styled the chair and was made the permanent head of the department of the President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled and therefore the unofficial head of the civil service as such. Appointments to the Commission were to be made by the President with the approval of the Congress. This bill passed on the first reading by a vote of 81-2 with 12 abstentions.

The Civil Service Act was fairly straightforward. It defined as civil servants all appointed positions of trust under the Confederated Peoples excepting positions in the uniformed services and positions reserved by law to the direct appointive power of the President exercised with the advice and consent of the Congress. It created stringent equal opportunity requirements for civil service hiring and promotion practices and established an Office of Personnel Management to ensure that they were enforced and that hiring and promotion were based on testing, previous experience and (in the case of promotions) job performance. An appeals process was put in place to challenge demotions and dismissals. Demotions and dismissals required thirty days advanced written notice including a statement of the reasons for the decision. Certain specific national security and diplomatic branches of the civil services were exempt from the equal opportunity standards set out in the law and from the authority of the Office of Personnel management. While these agencies would also carry out hiring and promotions based largely on merit, they would be allowed to create their own hiring and promotion system based on criteria appropriate to their special needs. Particularly, there was no appealing their decisions.

The Confederal Courts Act moved the Confederal Supreme Court to New Amsterdam and established a series of inferior Confederal Courts. It included district courts to hear cases on matters where the Confederal judiciary had original jurisdiction and appeals courts to hear appeals from the district courts and appeals from Member courts where the appeal was based upon a Confederal constitutional question. The Supreme Court had appellate jurisdiction over all cases arising in the Confederal judiciary and original jurisdiction over all cases involving ambassadors and other diplomats and cases to which one or more Members or foreign governments are parties. All Confederal judges, including Supreme Court justices, were to be appointed by the President with the consent of the Congress and were to hold their office during good behavior. The number of Supreme Court justices was set at seven.

The Confederal Sovereign Territory Act established a democratically elected local executive for the Confederal Sovereign Territory and mandated that it be consulted regarding any legislation Congress was considering in its role as local legislature for the Confederal Sovereign Territory. It sought to expand the borders of the Confederal Sovereign Territory to make it a viable city in its own right. It would do so by purchasing much of New Amsterdam from New Holland and also by purchasing part of New Dover. The Act also authorized the purchase of the city of Selinia from Selinia and its renaming as Arteme. The grounds of all Confederal embassies in states which recognized the extraterritoriality of embassies were also to be considered Confederal Sovereign Territory as was any other land which came into the possession of the Confederated Peoples as such but not the possession of any Member. The sections of the Act regarding New Holland, New Dover and Selinia could only be put into effect with the consent of those Members. The Act passed on caucus lines.

The next few days were mostly devoted to the work of the committees. The new laws passed by the Congress were in the process of being implemented but all of them required a great deal of work. The Confederal Commission was drafting its more general constitutional report. The Confederal and Danaan embassies in Pantocratoria were being merged. The Government realized that it was best to wait for the reports to come in and for the foundational laws to create the Confederal state apparatus to take effect before undertaking in other major action.

President Eaton took this time to make his first trip out of the country as President of the Confederated Peoples in Congress Assembled. He accepted invitations to visit Pantocratoria and Xirnium. In Pantocratoria, he would merely consult with his colleagues on various particular matters, make an address to Parliament and reaffirm the friendship and goodwill between the CPRD and Pantocratoria. In Xirnium, however, the President had a much more substantive agenda. While Mr. Eaton would consult with the Xirniumites on various particular and contingent matters, familiarize himself with their leadership and perform and accept a great many largely ceremonial acts of good will, he would also sign with Prime Minister Heather Gílda a comprehensive treaty of friendship and cooperation including strong provisions on extradition, free trade and collective security.

However, even as the committees and the Commission prepared reports, the civil service built its organization and the President met with foreign leaders, pivotal events in the ongoing development of the Confederated Peoples were taking place not on the floor of the Congress of the Confederation but on the floor of the Nabarran Cortes. It was here that devolved governments were being created to exercise limited self-government and to exercise independent Membership in the Confederated Peoples.

The composition of the Cortes had, perhaps, never been better suited to devolution. For the first time in almost a century, the Imperial Action Party had lost their majority, although they still held a plurality of seats. Although some of those seats had been lost to the Nabarran Socialist Party, many others had been lost to so-called minor parties which had never before been seated in the Cortes. Specifically, the Conservative Party, the Forward Party, the Federal Party and the Social Democratic Party now held seats in the Cortes. The Imperial Action Party was able to form a government of the right in coalition with the Conservatives and the Federals. Nonetheless, the IAP’s position as the only party of government had been fundamentally undermined.

The nature of the Congress of the Confederation and the wishes of the other Members had led most of the IAP leadership to accept eventual devolution as a practical necessity. However, there were huge impediments to devolution under an IAP Government. The IAP was traditionally opposed to any sort of devolution and a devolutionary policy had the potential to create high level defections from the party or even a backbench rebellion. Many IAP voters were also staunchly opposed to devolution and might abandon the party if it moved too quickly. The IAP was also in an embarrassing position. It would be quite difficult to abandon a traditional staple of IAP policy without either admitting serious past fault, seeming to be unprincipled and inconstant or seeming to allow other Members to dictate its policy.

The Coalition Government did not necessarily face the same impediments. The Leader of the Conservative Party, the Right Honourable Joceline Vachon of Trois Rivières, was made Minister for Democratic Reform. The Leader of the Federal Party, the Right Honourable Tindur Gudmunsson of Thule, was made Minister for Education, Science and Culture. Both parties were committed as a matter of principle to devolution and both leaders were placed in a position where they could advance devolutionary policies. The Imperial Action Party grudgingly supported these policies, casting their decision to do so as the cost of their inability to win a majority in their own right in the election and having to govern by coalition. While the policy did alienate some IAP voters and cause some defections from the party, there was no major political disaster.

The first devolved governments to be created were those of Thule, Donnocona, the Melian Islands, Gade and Maztlana. Local constitutions were created, elections were held, governments were formed and delegations were appointed to the Congress of the Confederation. The creation of the first five devolved governments benefited the left more than the right in the Congress. Three of the new delegations joined the Constitutional Left Causus and only two joined the Constitutional Right Caucus. Although overall Nabarran representation was increased, it was at the cost of the partisan interests of the right-wing Nabarran Government.

The next series of devolution bills were to be more beneficial for the Constitutional Right Caucus. The Nabarran Government created devolved local governments for Bolatrea, Del León, Iximché, Higueras and Anguille. Those five new governments all sent delegations to the Congress of the Confederation which joined the Constitutional Right Caucus. The Honourable the Leader of the Opposition Abel Abarca of Chapala accused the government of abusing the devolution process for political advantage on the Confederal level. Mrs. Vachon, in particular, denied the charged vehemently, pointing to the three left-leaning governments devolved in the early stages of devolution and claiming that the schedule for devolution was based upon local political maturity, local sentiments and other social, political, historical, geographical, demographic and linguistic factors which had nothing to do with narrow partisan interests. Mr. Abarca claimed that Mrs. Vachon had listed criteria so broad that she could claim to have made any decision based upon them and that she was merely covering for her partisan misuse of the devolution process.

Whatever Mrs. Vachon’s actual motivations, the next set of devolution bills was substantially more balanced. Devolved governments were created for Costa Del Oro, Managua, Ocampo, Quisqueya and Achi. When these devolved governments sent their delegations to the Congress of the Confederation, all five joined the Constitutional Left Caucus.

After the first fifteen devolutions, the Nabarran Government saw fit to hold for a time and return its attention to other concerns. Nabarran representation in the Congress of the Confederation was now at least relatively equitable and while a number of territories remained which had a reasonable claim to devolved self-government, most of them were small and relatively immature politically. Perhaps more importantly, none of them had the votes to significantly influence Nabarran imperial elections.

Mr. Eaton found the Congress of the Confederation substantially larger than before but not much different in political composition. It was to this expanded Congress that the Rules Committee submitted its relatively non-controversial rules proposals. The Rules of Order of the Congress of the Confederation was a fairly thick document and one which was, in places, highly technical. However, it was based upon fairly standard rules of parliamentary procedure and was comparable in almost every respect to the rules used by legislative bodies in other liberal democratic states and by the Member legislatures. The rules were accepted by acclamation.

The Special Commission for the Declaration of Principles then introduced its first draft. It read as though each section had been put together by a different group. The section explaining why the Declaration of Principles was being written was unclear and failed either to identify a theme for the Declaration as a whole or to explain to the world exactly why the Confederated Peoples had come together in a nation. As the document went on, it seemed to be a list of pet theories, overstated and contradictory. There was a section on industrial democracy which gave a more or less overtly socialist position and another section on individual liberty which was essentially libertarian in outlook. Other sections covered armed democracy, principled neutrality, religious liberty, civic duty, personal responsibility, political democracy, family values, multiculturalism and the rule of law. The different sections directly contradicted one another in at least ten places. It was hard to see that any coherent public theory of justice was contained in the Draft. It was rejected by the Congress and the Special Commission asked to try again, this time seeking to work together on a common theme instead of merely arranging for one section to express one set of ideals, another a different one. Mr. Eaton, in particular, stressed that every part of the Declaration should express common public ideals which were not the subject of legitimate contention between reasonable parties and the underlying principle should be the clear expression of the theory of justice adhered to by the Confederal people on which the Confederated Peoples was to be grounded.

The next report to be heard was that of the Foreign Affairs Committee. This report was relatively upbeat. The nation’s basic continuity with past constitutional arrangements was generally accepted in the world. The formation of the Confederated Peoples had nowhere become an issue of international controversy and had nowhere forced the Confederated Peoples to renegotiate any treaty on less favorable terms. Moreover, the Confederated Peoples was at peace with the world and, in general, enjoyed a reputation for peaceable, diplomatic behavior, challenged by some foreign criticism of Confederal policy towards Freethinkers but seriously threatened nowhere. The Western Atlantic was fast becoming a democratic Community of Peace despite the best attempts of the International Maoist Movement and the Sons of the Reformation to prevent it. Calm and reserved but pragmatic diplomacy prevailed in relations with traditionally hostile powers such as Iesus Christi. Pantocratoria remained the Confederated Peoples closest international partner. Traditional friendships with Menelmacar, Knootoss and the Necrontyr were still strong and new ones were being formed with Xirnium and Amestria. In short, Mr. Rastel gladly reported, the Confederated Peoples enjoyed the sort of external peace, security and good-will which would allow them to focus their energy on the internal process of building the new Confederation.

Miss Palamas then read the report of the Judiciary Committee. The Committee was cautiously optimistic about the judiciary. Recent legislation created a Confederal court system capable of providing legal recourse to any Confederal citizen with regard to the rights guaranteed in the Constitution as well as with regard to other principles of legitimate Confederal law. The work regarding the judiciary was not so much legislative now as it was appointive. The Government needed to appoint qualified, respectable, tactful Confederal judges at all levels in order to more firmly establish the priority of Confederal law and the legitimacy of the Confederal judiciary and to ensure that the rights of Confederal citizens were always and everywhere protected.

Mr. Shahar then delivered the report of the Defense Committee. This report was also optimistic. The Confederated Peoples, while not possessing military power sufficient to compete with the largest nations in the world in projection, it did have power which coupled with the logistical advantaged of fighting in ones home territory, allowed the Confederal people to consider themselves effectively defended at home from any conventional military threat. The Confederated Peoples also possessed a significant nuclear deterrent and extensive security cooperation relationships which added to this general security from conventional attack. Terrorism was more of a problem but even there things were looking up. There had only been one terrorist attack since the formation of the Confederated Peoples despite endemic terrorism in some Members in the recent past. The greatest security threat was the Sons of the Reformation still operating out of Abt. The security of the Confederated Peoples required Abt to be victorious in its war against the Sons.

The other committees gave fairly scanty reports. The Ethics Committee hardly had much to do when no Representatives had had any time to engage in ethics violations. Likewise, the Treasury Committee had nothing to report but the use of the last Commonwealth budget for the transition. It was an important matter but also a highly technical and relatively apolitical one.

On Monday when they reconvened, the Congress of the Confederation was still waiting on the rewrite of the Declaration of Principles and on the report of the Confederal Commission. However, as neither was yet completed, they moved on to the business of appointing judicial officers. Acting on the advice of Miss Palamas, Mr. Eaton first nominated the Honourable Judge Jules Cabennaes to the Confederal Appellate Court for Achi.

The hearing on Judge Cabennaes fitness for the position before the Judiciary Committee was brief. He showed a moderate understanding of the scope of the recently passed Confederal laws and, more importantly, of Confederal constitutional law. His record was one of personal integrity, impartiality and duty. Most of the questions asked of him by the Committee related to what sorts of issues constituted Confederal legal issues. Judge Cabennaes answer was simple and somewhat obvious. Confederal issues existed where there was a reasonable argument to be heard that the ruling being appealed violated the Confederal Constitution or any legitimate statute of the Congress of the Confederation.

Congress approved Judge Cabennaes by acclamation. Mr. Eaton, who had planned to spend the entire day on the appointment, rapidly made several more of the appointments he had planned to make over the next two weeks. He appointed the Honourable Judge Naganori Sada to the Confederal Appellate Court for Adoki, the Honourable Judge William Langmore to the Confederal Appellate Court for Aldensylvania, the Honourable Judge Abdu Eborolossy to the Confederal Appellate Court for Alekthos, the Honourable Judge Nadia Fetieh to the Confederal Appellate Court for Amalad and the Honourable Sir Igor Jay to the Confederal Appellate Court for Amory. All of these nominations received congressional approval before Congress adjourned for the day.

On Tuesday, Mr. Eaton decided to take more systematic advantage of the lack of opposition to his judicial appointments and move for an officially expedited process. The Congress agreed and Mr. Eaton secured the approval of his remaining judicial appointments en masse. While the President’s nominations were being considered by the committee, the floor of Congress was taken up with speeches on current events by backbenchers from all factions. These speeches resulted in no significant actions on the part of the Congress of the Confederation.

On Wednesday, a revised and much weaker version of the Bank of the Confederation Act was tabled. The act was, of course, highly technical and rather long but, in essence, it established a minimal monetary authority capable of controlling the introduction of currency into the market and charged with proactively seeking the replacement of the pre-Confederal currency still in circulation with Confederal dollars in accordance with fixed rates. The Bank of the Confederation would also serve as the Government’s bank and had minimal power to perform a number of other technical functions required of a monetary authority. The same act also established the official schedule for the complete phase-out of all pre-Confederal currencies, although it promised to redeem pre-Confederal currency held by foreign governments indefinitely and to mandated the preservation of a set number of physical banknotes and coins of each denomination from each of the pre-Confederal currency for the historical curiosity of posterity.

On Thursday, Viscountess Kairis presented the report of the Confederal Commission on basic constitutional issues. The floor and the galleries were filled. Unauthorized recordings were not allowed in the Congress but an official video recording was made of all Congressional proceedings, copies of which were available upon request for a small service fee. Every major network had requested such a copy of Kairis’s presentation.

She began by speaking about what the Confederated Peoples represented. She said that it was a momentous occasion when so many formerly independent peoples choose freely to come together into one nation founded not upon race or religion or culture but upon exalted principles of liberty, equality and human dignity. She said there could be no more decisive rejection of the historical evils which had plagued many Members than the formation of the Confederated Peoples.

Kairis then went on to speak of the advantages which came with the current constitution. Supranational legal complexities had been replaced with one nation able to claim without legal ambiguity its independent and equal station among the nations of the world. There was one Confederal Government, reasonably transparent in its proceedings. The groundwork had been laid by that Government for the formation of strong national institutions. A central bank, a civil service, a military and a judiciary had all been provided for.

However, Kairis said, the work was not complete. It would never truly be complete as human beings and their institutions were by nature imperfect. It would not be appropriate ever to eternally bind posterity to ideas of institutions upon which they might find cause to improve. Therefore, the idea that the many recent radical changes in the Resurgent Dream should now result in a completely petrified constitution so as to guarantee stability was a foolish one.

Change, Kairis conceded, should normally take place gradually within a framework of orderly constitutional governance. However, she maintained, there were basic constitutional changes needed in the Confederated Peoples before the more gradual work of ordinary legislative and social progress could begin. The “federations within the Confederation” created constitutional ambiguity and undermined the basic constitutional relationship between the Members and the Confederated Peoples and in doing so undermined the essential character of the national union. Likewise, the current Congress of the Confederation did not have the democratic mandate necessary to truly fulfill its role, being, as it was, indirectly elected and based only upon the representation of Members and not people. Likewise, the fluidity of that body made it near impossible for a Government to live out its natural term and would inevitably result in a rapid succession of different governments. Radical social changes had had such a result in the Danaan High Kingdom in recent years. The current set-up of the Congress of the Confederation would have such a result as long as it remained unamended. It was intrinsic to its current structure.

Kairis said that she understood the natural hesitation the Congress and the Confederal people were likely to have towards further changes. The last fifteen years had been years of drastic change and many people simply wanted a break. Kairis said, however, that change for the better should not be feared and that an essentially stable constitutional order only required a few amendments, not a radical replacement of the current constitution with another. She said that she had high hopes that the Confederal people would continue to built their polity and that their Government would adequately address these constitutional issues.

Mr. Eaton, visibly agitated, asked Viscountess Kairis if her views were shared by the entire Confederal Commission. The Viscountess replied that the report had been unanimously endorsed by the Commission. Mr. Eaton then said that it overstepped the bounds of the task the Commission had been charged with and threatened one of the basic premises behind the organization of the General Government, that it was a Government of Members and not of an independent national constituency. He asked Viscountess Kairis to take the report back to the Commission and present another one. Viscountess Kairis replied that the report was the considered judgment of the Commission and that they could not in good conscience endorse a conflicting report. After the Viscountess had been dismissed and had left the chamber, Mr. Eaton moved that the current Confederal Commission be dissolved and a new one appointed.

There was some heated debate on the issue. Miss Wake and Mr. Calvin both argued fiercely against Mr. Eaton’s motion as did several dozen other Representatives, especially those from Ganadara, Jagiella and the Sahori State and Territories. However, in the end the motion passed by a vote of 81-22 with seven abstentions. Mr. Calvin paraphrased Cicero and commented on the vote that “the mark of a great people is their ingratitude to their great leaders.”

When she was informed of the decision, Viscountess Kairis merely thanked Mr. Eaton and the Congress for the opportunity to have served and departed with her family for her home in Bilbtoria. Miss Wake was withdrawn from the Congress by the Gandaran Parliament that same day, in belated response to pressure from the other Members. The effect was somber on the Confederal people. Conflict and dissension had, as they were inevitably bound to do, undermined the somewhat naïve sense of optimism and unity which had surrounded the creation of the Congress of the Confederation.

End Part 1