NationStates Jolt Archive

Less than a year after the Confederated Peoples had emerged from the Commonwealth of Peoples, Confederals were deeply divided. The catalyst, of course, had been the dismissal of the Confederal Commission because of their advocacy of democratic and constitutional reforms in the form of constitutional amendments. Many Confederals stood staunchly behind the Eaton Government’s decision. They had had an endless succession of change after change for the last fifteen years. Now, they felt, it was time to stop and leave things as they are, at least for now. Citizens of the smaller Members had more substantive concerns. They feared that any independent democratic national constituency would deprive them of a say in Confederal matters and let them be swallowed up by the larger Members or by some amorphous general population. Member legislators worried that a direct democratic mandate for the Confederal Government would end up being seen as a mandate to encroach on their authority. For others, however, the issue was democracy and good governance. Citizens of the larger Members grew to view themselves as living under undemocratic minority rule and to both resent the Congress of the Confederation in practice and to challenge its basic legitimacy in theory. Women, workers and minorities worried that the current system did not give the Confederal Government the power it needed to protect their constitutional and human rights in practice as well as in theory.

Over several months, between February and April, intense feelings on both sides led to greater popular interest in politics at the Confederal level and the organization of Confederal, as opposed to merely Member, political parties, usually by the fusion of more or less identical parties in the various Members but, in some cases, by the expansion of a formerly local party into other Members or even the foundation of an entirely new party. This process did not take place according to the Caucus system then in operation in the Congress and it naturally led to the division of the Caucuses into ten individual parties: The Confederal Action Party under the leadership of the Honourable Magdaleno Echave of Maztlana, the Conservative Democratic Party under the leadership of Mr. Calvin, the Democratic Party under Mr. Eaton, the Federal Party under the Honourable Ailig Shaw of Fireforge, the Labour Party under Mr. Rastel, the Liberal Party under Mr. Abukara, the Green Party under Miss Caddow, the Progressive Democratic Party under the Honourable Anthony Prower of Formont, the Republican Party under the Honourable James Wert and the Socialist Party under the Honourable Jason Maganas of Bilbtoria.

After the formal creation of a Labour Party on the Confederal level, Mr. Rastel immediately resigned from his Cabinet post. The Constitutional Left Caucus formally dissolved the next day and the Constitutional Right Caucus the day after that. To deal with the constitutional crisis, Mr. Eaton immediately met with Mr. Rastel, Mr. Shaw, Miss Caddow, Mr. Prower and Mr. Maganas. None of them were willing to enter a broad coalition. However, they did agree to recognize the Democratic plurality by voting with the Democrats on questions of confidence. In short, Mr. Eaton would have a minority government consisting only of members of his own party.

Three days after the meeting, the other members of Mr. Eaton’s cabinet formally resigned and Mr. Eaton formally presented his new government for the approval of Congress: The Honourable Kathleen Weisenbaum of North Roanoke as Secretary of Foreign Affairs, the Honourable Warren Carver of North Dahkeya as Secretary of State, the Honourable Lloyd Bradford of New Lincolnshire as Secretary of the Treasury, the Honourable Les Allerton of Miskwasin as Attorney General and Mr. Shahar continuing as Secretary of Defense.

The first Member parliamentary election to be held after the organization of political parties on the Confederal level was in Corral where the Baans Government has collapsed due to infighting within the Parliamentary Progressive Democratic Party itself. Most of the Confederal parties were determined to contest every seat and many of them were also aware that the Corral elections might be a test of their viability as a contender for power at the Confederal level. Nonetheless, most analysts expected that either the Progressive Democrats or the Conservative Democrats would win a clear mandate. They were proven wrong. On election day, the Liberal Party under Jacob Bacher won a plurality of seats in part because they promised to appoint Representatives to the Congress of the Confederation who would press for democratic and constitutional reform.

Mr. Bacher, of course, soon received a mandate from the Princess of Corral to form a Government. In attempting to form a Government that could secure the confidence of the House, he explored the possibility of a coalition with both the Progressive Democrats and the Conservative Democrats but found neither receptive. He then endeavored, by stressing his centrism and his commitment to democratic reform, to secure the confidence of the House in a minority Liberal Government to which both of the other large parties were more susceptive.

The most controversial choice in Mr. Bacher’s cabinet was Miss Amina Abdelrashid, one of the more radical members of the party and one sometimes accused of prejudice against people of faith. Miss Abdelrashid became Minister of Justice. It was her influence on the Cabinet that led the Government to begin pursuing a comprehensive anti-smuggling law which would create strong Member penalties and mandate strong Member law enforcement against smugglers. Of course, the Government had little room to maneuver regarding a definition of smuggling as the passage actual laws regarding the foreign trade of the Confederated Peoples belonged to the Congress of the Confederation.

Although the Miss Abdelrashid claimed that the law was well within the competence of the Corral Government, it was hard to disguise its character as an attempt to influence foreign policy. Another party might gave been able to do so, a party with a strong reputation for advocating stronger measures against crime generally or a party with a nationalist orientation hostile to foreign encroachment. However, the Liberals were a party favoring free trade and the core reason which Miss Abdelrashid advanced for the measure was that most existing trade restrictions applied to major human rights abusers and that abusers of human rights should not profit from the free markets of Corral. Implicit in this act was one of the core doctrines of the movement for democratic constitutional reform, the claim that the Confederal Government did not, under the Constitution as it now stood, have power sufficient to enforce the laws of the Congress of the Confederation.

The Corral Government did manage to pass a modified version of the Anti-Smuggling Act, although, as all acts passed by minority governments, it had been greatly influenced by the other major parties. In the weeks that followed its passing, Miss Abdelrashid began to enforce the law quite zealously. Her political opponents began to compare the Anti-Smuggling Act and Miss Abdelrashid’s methods of enforcing it with the scandalous Operation Dinah, derisively referring to her as “Queen Beatrice II.” They claimed that it was another example of liberal overzealousness for individual rights in the abstract leading to a disrespect for the rights and freedoms of real people in practice. Miss Abdelrashid dismissed the criticisms out of hand, saying that there was no violation of human rights involved in arresting and prosecuting people for breaking legitimate laws.

The issue of appointing a new delegation to the Congress of the Confederation was also a difficult one for Mr. Bacher. It was not a decisive issue. He would not swing the balance of power by his actions. However, he did have the opportunity to appoint the first constitutional reformers to the Congress. The Progressive Democrats and the Conservative Democrats were both hesitant to endorse such a course of action, arguing that the program of the reformers would destroy the existence of a distinct Danaan identity above the level of the Member but below that of the Confederation and, more practically, that the interests of a relatively small Member like Corral would be harmed by the reformers’ program and its interested subverted to those of large Members like Farinor and Zeng.

In the end, a compromise was reached. Mr. Bacher was allowed to appoint one outspoken reformer in the person of the Honourable Barber Sanderse. Mrs. Sanderse, however, would be joined by four Liberals who were not outspoken advocated of constitutional reform, two Conservative Democrats and two Progressive Democrats.

Throughout the Confederated Peoples, the constitutional reformers were gearing up for a fight. The Democratic Reform Institute had been founded in Regina by James Minter and soon created a network of Member and local legislators, political activists, celebrities and academics capable of influencing public opinion. The DRI focused on organizing, publishing a newsletter, issuing press releases and arranging speaking tours for its more prominent activists as well as members of the Bacher Government and Mrs. Sanderse. Viscountess Kairis expressed her good wishes privately but was not asked to become publicly involved. Mr. Minter was fairly skilled at reading the popular mind and was quite convinced that at this stage the Viscountess was more useful to his cause as a symbol than as an active participant.

Mr. Minter was a skilled propagandist, a skilled organizer and a well-connected man with the political machines of the major parties and with the civil service. He was, moreover, not overly idealistic. He believed in his goal but he was willing both to compromise and to do the sorts of things that politicians had to do to win. He was the sort of man who would have made an excellent campaign manager but not the sort of man to be a public leader and that was what his movement needed. Viscountess Kairis was, in a sense, too prominent and too historically known to be used as anything other than a symbol at this point. Her silent retirement had more effect on Mr. Eaton’s popularity than her words would have. Mrs. Sanderse and Mr. Bacher, while important, were too new to serve as effective leaders. What Mr. Minter really needed was an elected official who did was previously not well known on the Confederal level but who nonetheless had a laudable record of service and was willing to resign his post and his party and run again as an independent reformer asking for a constitutional reform mandate. It was not an easy standard to meet but Mr. Minter had 129 Member Governments to search. He was confident he could find at least one such man or woman.

The closest Mr. Minter could come to his ideal political champion was the Governor of New Dover, Woodrow White. Dr. White was a man of complex character. He was known to be a devout Presbyterian with strong personal morals. He was known to have been something of a democratic political theorist in his own right before entering politics and was the author of a number of books on the Lanerian political system. He had been a member of the Democratic Republican Party and then the Democratic which it merged into for his entire adult life. He had been Governor of New Dover for the last twelve years and had governed as a progressive. The people of New Dover respected him for his strong character, his intelligence and his policies but they didn’t really love him. He had a self-righteousness that many found a bit off-putting and he didn’t get along very well with the more practically minded party officialdom. In fact, the main role played by Dr. White’s aides, men and women fluent in both the practical and sometimes a bit dirty affairs of partisan politics and the lofty realm of the Governor’s idealism, was that of dealing with the Governor for the party officials and the party officials for the Governor in such a way as to minimize tension.

Mr. Minter discovered that Dr. White had been giving some thought to the issue of reform but that he was not willing to leave the Democratic Party. Dr. White instead promised to openly give his support to the positions of the Democratic Reform Institute, to speak publicly in favor of constitutional reform at events organized by them and to appoint Democrats with reformist views to the Congress of the Confederation. This had not been what Mr. Minter was hoping for but he accepted it gladly.

In this same period, two other Members came out in favor of reform. The Conservative Democratic Government of Bilbtoria did so largely on account of the strong local sense of loyalty the people of Bilbtoria had to Viscountess Kairis, who was, after all, one of their own. The Government of Hipolis, on the other hand, was motivated largely by the desire to make the Confederal Government more democratic and accountable. Both of these decisions were contested locally by politicians and public figures who claimed that the current system protected the equal voice of small Members like Bilbtoria and Hipolis and that they might find themselves subject to the whims of the larger Members if democratic reforms were instituted.

The reform movement was still fairly small, at least in terms of its actual representation in the Congress of the Confederation, but it was growing quickly and Mr. Eaton saw fit to begin actively seeking to counteract its efforts. He first set himself to countering the so-called Kairis factor. In the ongoing controversy around reform, the Confederal people were hearing many names previously unknown to them. The only person seriously involved who the Confederal people had known and respected for years was Viscountess Kairis and that, in and of itself, lent wait to the reform cause which was able to use her as its symbol.

Mr. Eaton began his efforts with Mr. Calvin. Mr. Calvin’s only statement on the matter so far had been his paraphrase of Cicero after Kairis’s dismissal. Most Confederals had been left with the impression that he was a supporter of constitutional reform. Mr. Eaton, reliably informed that the leadership of the Conservative Democrats was opposed to constitutional reform, decided to force Mr. Calvin to give a more precise account of his position. To do so, he simply waited until one of the pro-reform Conservative Democratic Representatives of Bilbtoria made a particularly vehement remark about the unrepresentative character of the Congress. Mr. Eaton then asked Mr. Calvin, who was present, if the Representative spoke for his party and, if not, if Mr. Calvin would care to clarify the position of the Conservative Democratic Party.

Mr. Calvin made several attempts at evasion but, when Mr. Eaton persisted, he gave the view of the Conservative leadership. The Confederated Peoples was too large to be a single, unified polity in the sense that the Members were. He was aware, of course, that there were unitary states much larger but, while he wished them well, he did not consider their example a fit one for a nation like the Confederated Peoples. The Confederated Peoples required the Members as an intermediate polity between the people and the Confederal Government and it was out of these Member polities that the Confederated Peoples arose. It was on them and their free and truly confederal union that the Confederated Peoples’ entire national existence was built. It followed that the constituency for the Congress of the Confederation was the Members and not the individual citizens. Therefore, the confederal principle of equal representation for each Member was the appropriate democratic principle at the Confederal level and the Members, not the voters, were the appropriate selectors of representatives.

Mr. Eaton expressed the Government’s agreement with this position but accused Mr. Calvin of inconsistency on the grounds that he had spoken harshly of the Government’s decision to dismiss the Confederal Commission and had voted against it as had his party. Mr. Calvin answered that there was no contradiction. Constitutional problems, he said, had to be solved within the constitution but that did not give the Government the right to dismiss an independent commission simply because the Government, however rightly, found their report untenable. A Conservative Democratic Government, Mr. Calvin said, would have regarded the report as a challenge to make the unworkable work rather than as an insult. Moreover, the Confederal Commission was formed from a body which previously enjoyed the status of a political executive for the Commonwealth and whose membership included distinguished statesmen and women. If they did not have the prestige to insist that the Government respect their independence successfully, then no independent commission could be expected to and the advice the Government received from such bodies would therefore be biased and less reliable. Indeed, Mr. Calvin said, the whole constitutional role of independent commissions in general and the Confederal Commission in particular had been undermined by Mr. Eaton’s decision to act “more like an affronted tyrant than responsible leader of a modern democracy.”

Mr. Eaton responded that a democratic state could not afford to have unaccountable official bodies which denied the legitimacy of its constitution. He said that it was a basic premise of all constitutional government, especially in societies with a written constitution, that the constitution itself not be considered a matter of mere policy but as prior to ordinary statutory law, embodying the basic public conception of justice. Only the people of every Member combined could change it in the Confederated Peoples. The Confederal Government and the Congress of the Confederation had to take it as a given and commissions created by them certainly should do the same. Viscountess Kairis and her colleagues had not simply delivered an untenable report but had presented an affront to the very foundations of constitutional government which they had refused to rectify when asked by the competent authorities. Mr. Calvin wryly commented that Mr. Eaton had put so much pretty prose in his overblown oratory that he had forgotten to include any meaningful argument. Mr. Eaton dismissed this response as childish name-calling and moved on to other business.

Having thus secured Mr. Calvin’s public opposition to constitutional reform, in spite of his continued criticism of the Government’s actions in the dismissal of the Commission, Mr. Eaton moved on to securing open opposition to the reform proposals from Sarah Sacker, Joseph Billington, Henry Darcy, Ashley Burns, Beatrice Turtledove, Prince Hermann and even Vincenzo Lacau. It could no longer be said that the only person anyone had heard of involved in the controversy was Viscountess Kairis. In fact, most established public figures with national and international reputations seemed now to side with Mr. Eaton.

Mr. Eaton, however, did not stop there. In addition to well-known public figures from the nation’s past, he also sought out a new face for the defense of the constitution as it was, not, as Mr. Minter had done, among established politicians but instead in the smaller Members, many of whom had only achieved devolved government within Nabarro Abarca in the last year. In many cases, these people had struggled for years to achieve a measure of self-government. That self-government, according not only to Mr. Eaton but to many impassioned voices from the small Members themselves, would be swallowed up by the Confederal Government under the system proposed by Mr. Minter.

Mr. Eaton also took the reluctance step of adopting, and convincing leaders to adopt, the term Stalwarts for the supporters of the unamended constitution. As the responsible leader of a political party, Mr. Eaton understood the political dangers to party discipline in his and other parties which arose from defining a conflict between named groups which existed not only within political parties but across party lines. However, he also understood that what was now styled the Stalwart view could not long prevail if his opponents were able to define the dispute as one between Reformers and anti-Reformers. Words, Mr. Eaton understood, were important and such a definition of the conflict would have almost guaranteed the eventual victory of the Reformers precisely because of how it would have affected the very way the public thought about the issue. As unreasonable as it might be, he knew that how the debate was framed could well have as decisive an effect on the outcome as the substance of the debate.

Mr. Eaton’s efforts had substantially slowed the growth of the Reformers. No longer were Members falling under their sway one after the other. Instead, the handful of Members already adhering to the Reformer stood by their Reformer Representatives in the Congress of the Confederation but their presence there was no longer growing. Their presence in the general population was growing but only slowly. Mr. Eaton had arrived at a situation where the Reformers posed no immediate threat and where the best way to remove any long-term threat which they posed was to govern effectively under the Constitution as it now was.

Mr. Minter, for his part, turned his attention to the foundations of a new political party, Democratic Concordance. This party advocated an elected proportional legislature responsible to an independent Confederal constituency, abolition of the federal unions within the Confederation, a proportional executive, an informal rule of political consensus, the introduction of elements of direct democracy, governmental transparency, civic communication, increased public control of civic assets, strengthened protections of the individual from abused by government or corporate bodies, “none of the above” ballot options, term limits, improved voter registration and ballot access, checks on pay raises, improved public oversight of public expenditure, computerizing and making accessible all public records where no compelling reason for secrecy (such as national security or the privacy rights of individual citizens involved) exists, utility company billing as a civic notification process, expanded public access television, strengthened access to the courts, protection for whistleblowers, shareholder protections within public corporations, strengthening school civics curricula as well as centrist positions on issues less directly related to the structures of democratic public life. While Democratic Concordance had branched in almost every Member almost from the beginning, it remained a small outsider party supported by a small minority of Reformers within the major parties. For the moment, the Reformer cause seemed lost.

This was the situation when Mr. Eaton proposed a moderate reform of his own, one which required no amendment of the Constitution. Mr. Eaton proposed the creation of two new Cabinet-level departments, a Department of Commerce and a Department of Special Affairs. The Department of Commerce was an obvious addition and it was accepted by general acclamation. The Honourable Cristobal Galdarres of Aravana was appointed by Mr. Eaton and received the confidence of the Congress. The Department of Special Affairs, on the other hand, was much more controversial. Its avowed purposes were to protect the civil rights and individual liberties of non-human sentients and to apply Confederal anti-discrimination law to their unique case, to control so-called “Future-Tech” technologies, to regulate the use of “Future-Tech,” the paranormal and superhuman abilities in Confederal society, to provide defenses against the disruption caused by the fractal reality and generally to provide for the integration of all the diversity of the multiverse into a democratic society. While Mr. Eaton had conceived this department primarily as an instrument for the protection of the Confederated Peoples’ non-human and post-human citizens, it quickly came under heavy criticism from non-humans and others for simply lumping together things with no logical connection except that they were considered “different,” for placing the protection of their civil rights with a special department whose primary concern was to “deal” with “paranormal” problems and not with the Department of Justice whose duty was to insure the rights of all citizens under the law and for allegedly defining a group of citizens as a problem requiring special attention rather than as individual people.

Mr. Eaton responded gracefully to this criticism, withdrawing his proposal and arranging a trip to Saraben, a Member which dealt extensively with issues of this sort and the only Member with a non-human sentient majority. Mr. Eaton was received by His Most Esteemed Highness Prince Voronwe and met with the Right Honourable Aerae Aelvaraevar, the First Minister of Saraben, and the Right Honourable Katla ni Gwydion, Baroness Mooncastle, the cutely named Minister for the Extraordinary. Mr. Eaton spent some time studying the laws and observing the practices through which the issues he had sought to address in the new department were currently governed in Saraben.

When he returned, Mr. Eaton introduced a new motion for the creation of a Department of Special Affairs. This department, however, would have nothing to do with the classification of persons. Persons of all types were still to be properly directed to the Department of Justice for the protection of their civil rights against all forms of discrimination. Instead, this new department would deal only with actions and objects, the proper subjects for regulation. It would be charged with regulating the entry of advanced technology and mystical materials and artifacts into the Confederated Peoples, seeking to acquire advanced technologies for the Confederated Peoples and providing for the prevention of crimes committed using means which were beyond the scope of ordinary law enforcement regardless of the exact nature of those means or of the nature of the perpetrator. It would do this in coordination with the Order of the Falcon, the Order of Steel, the Special Command, the Confederal Deep Space Agency, the Department of Justice and local and Member law enforcement. The Honourable Tony Standish of New Holland was appointed Secretary of Special Affairs by Mr. Eaton and received the confidence of the Congress.

Mr. Eaton not only successfully handled the controversy surrounding the creation of a Department of Special Affairs within the Constitution but, as he himself noted, he actually used the strengths of the Constitution itself in doing so. Mr. Eaton had relied upon the ability of the Members in a federal system to deal with different issues in a variety of innovative ways, impossible in a unitary state. He had then worked with the Member authorities to put that innovation to use on the Confederal level.

After the scandal regarding the Department of Special Affairs, the Stalwarts enjoyed several weeks of ascendancy and Mr. Eaton’s minority government,. By working now with parties to its left and now with parties to its right, was able to legislate and govern well. Democratic Concordance and the Reformers within each party continued to protest that the system unamended would eventually lead to disaster but their predictions had already been rejected within each major party and within the Confederated Peoples as a whole.

Events, however, soon overtook the optimism of the Stalwarts. It began with a single homicide, a fourteen year-old European-Ambaran girl who fell victim to a particularly grisly rape and murder in Lutherstadt. Reports began to seep out that the murderer was an African-Ambaran man, fueling prejudices which had been suppressed but not truly eliminated in many parts of Marlund. A race riot broke out. European-Ambarans killed three African-Ambaran men whom they suspected (without real evidence) of being involved in the crime and engaged in a spree of violent behavior towards African-Ambarans and their property. Many African-Ambarans retaliated, not only against the rioters but against the European-Ambaran population as a whole. The city was soon engulfed in racial violence as the police struggled to quell the violence and to hold back the rioters.

The Lutherstadt riots were still in full swing when riots also erupted in Beyke. The Beyke riots, which it was widely suspected but not proved were instigated by the Communists, were primarily fueled by anger among Beyke’s overwhelmingly African-Ambaran population over what was being done to their fellow African-Ambarans in Lutherstadt. The police and government were blamed for failing to adequately protect African-Ambaran citizens. The Beyke riot featured only isolated incidents of personal violence but wide-spread destruction of property.

It seemed that disorder spread like wildfire as the inability of local authorities to maintain order and the inability of the Confederal Government under the Constitution to do so became apparent. Wherever there were long-standing grievances between large sections of the population, there was now rioting. Muslims in Selinia rioted over alleged mistreatment by police, economic discrimination and various cultural affronts. African-Vasconians in Hesperia and Indatrion rioted against police violence. Communists in Bilbtoria took advantage of the general sense of disorder to instigate riots on every pretext imaginable. Amory, Fireforge and Shieldcrest experienced sports riots. Maztlana experienced Vasconian Indian riots against alleged economic inequities. Nine Members were wracked by violence in the streets for the greater part of a week as police fought desperately to maintain order. When all was said and done, only 48 people were killed but millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed and, perhaps most importantly, the public’s sense of safety and security was obliterated. There was no way around the fact that their government could not keep order in the streets and the Stalwarts, politically victorious, were now destroyed by events. No argument or political strategy could save them now.

The Government of Bilbtoria, already committed to Reform, only gained strength from the riots. They told the people they had done all that was possible to protect them under the unamended Confederal Constitution and that they would continue to fight hard for Reform. The governments of Marlund, Selinia, Amory, Fireforge and Shieldcrest collapsed almost immediately and Democratic Concordance won control of all five Members in the subsequent elections. Under enormous public pressure, the Confederal Action Party Government of Maztlana came out for Reform as did the Democratic Government of Indatrion. The recall procedures of the Hesperian Constitution were used to remove from office a number of the staunched Stalwarts in the Hesperian legislature and replace them with Democratic Concordance candidates who led the still mostly Republican legislature in the adoption of a Reform position.

While governments did not fall outside of those Members where rioting had actually taken place, public opinion nonetheless underwent a great shift throughout the Confederated Peoples and at every level of political activity many abandoned the Stalwart cause for that of the Reformers. It came as no surprise to anyone when the Congress of the Confederation passed a constructive vote of no confidence in Mr. Eaton, replacing him as President with the Honourable Bokhani Ochiang of Marlund.

Mr. Ochiang formed what he styled a “Country before Party Government” consisting of Reformers of all political parties. It was controversial exactly what separated this Country before Party Government from a traditional National Unity Government. According to Mr. Ochiang, the Government did not simply represent a temporary suspension of partisan politics as the result of an emergency but represented a conscious move towards a concordance system and that was why he had chosen to use a term which embodied the ideal of a concordance democracy. Others said that it was simply a National Unity Government under a different name which they dismissed as rhetoric. Still others argued that the official political parties did not, in practice, serve as the main organizing forces for political tendencies in the Confederated Peoples but that, instead, the Reformers and Stalwarts played the role of parties. According to these analysts, the Country before Party Government was merely a partisan government of the Reformers and the name mere hypocrisy.

The Ochiang Government, whatever its character, had a simple mandate of getting constitutional amendments passed in the general direction of what Reformers had been calling for. Other than this, it was essentially a transition government, designed ultimately only to provide for the creation of a different sort of Confederal Government and then to manage Confederal affairs until such a government would actually be able to take power.