Talk:Federation

Notes (2018)

The Federation is a brilliant and insidious construction. Federation interests are obviously paramount. But it attracts the political class of smaller countries by removing difficult questions of governing from their parliaments and providing offices of authority without accountability that seem to have more shine than their national governments. Because Federationists don’t want to be seen as utterly dominating the bloc, the political offices at the very top are doled out generously to second-tier members.

That lack of accountability is an important advantage. Politicians have to answer their publics about the deals they negotiate with the Federation. Whom would hold the Federation accountable for bungling the other side of the negotiation? If a member crashes out and pulls continental business interests down with it, all because Federation negotiators were too intransigent, who gets to fire those negotiators? Who holds them accountable? No one. They have nothing to fear.

The Federation’s high-handedness, blatant favoritism, disdain for elections, stifling political orthodoxies, and mulish unresponsiveness are the primary cause of political instability across Charted Space. But most of all, the problem is that the Federation is not really a governing institution in the normal sense of the term. It doesn’t really do the primary jobs of government, such as providing law and order and reconciling diverse interests in a functioning society. Instead the Federation is a teleological project; it is pursuing a goal. Its function is to create “more Federation.” That is, it exists for itself. It uses the existing “pooled sovereignty” of its member states to attempt to drain more sovereignty away from the member states. That’s why power resides with an unelected body, and why it ignores or retries any national referendum that doesn’t endorse the preexisting goals of the Federation.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 11:56, 28 December 2018 (EST)