Requiem 2095 [OOC]

[Reverend Norv]

We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims. Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organisation to be known as the United Nations. Charter of the United Nations, 26th June 1945 Some of us tried, kiddo. Through all the plagues and famines and civil wars, bound to a dying Earth that cooked us alive, some of us still remembered the old hope. Even when it was all nearly over anyway: some of us remembered, and some of us fought like hell. United States President Priya Varna, 2089 ☉ ☉ ☉ REQUIEM 2☉95 ~ A roleplay by NORV, inspired by the work of PLZEN ~ IC / / / DISCORD ONE HUNDRED YEARS have passed since the downfall of the Soviet Union. A century and a half has passed since the defeat of Nazi Germany. But the triumph of the liberal world order was short-lived, and in its refusal to curb its own reliance on fossil fuels, that brief golden age nurtured the seeds of its own destruction. The twenty-first century has been defined by the slow creep of the climate crisis: a crisis that reached irreversible proportions in the 2040s, and that has only worsened since. By 2095, its effects are beyond number and almost beyond endurance. For half a century, our globalized world has suffered lethal pandemics that kill millions every winter. Megatsunamis and hurricanes batter coastlines; drought and desertification hollow out fertile grasslands. As resources tighten, great-power war returns to world affairs: war over oil, over arable land, over water. The pace of technological advancement slows; the challenges facing our species accelerate. The rich hoard their wealth and genetically customize their children and retreat to estates in Greenland, while the rest of us struggle for bread. To be a man in such times is to live within sight of a new dark age: a collapse of all the systems that make modern civilization possible. Every day, every headline, brings that collapse inexorably closer. But some of us still defy fate, and dare to hope for a better tomorrow. Nationalists and communists try to wall off their people from foreign ways or foreign capital, and survive through revolutionary solidarity. Others - led by China, the world's greatest power - put their faith in centralized management and surveillance and authority, seeking to tame human passions and appetites and to maximize efficiency and control. Some countries have embraced the blighted earth, willingly turning their back on traditional industry and business, and seeking ways to live in harmony with nature. And a few nations, led by an America still reeling from its second civil war, cling with fierce ardor to the old ways of liberal democracy and mixed markets. Even at the threshold of apocalypse, there is still no escaping the human willingness to kill other humans over ideology. If we can kill, though, we can also build. We can dream with unprecedented audacity in the face of unprecedented threats. We can risk all, for the stakes of this hour are already life-and-death, and few of us have anything left to lose. If these years are to be our REQUIEM, let them be a music of defiance. We choose to rage against the dying of the light. WELCOME, ALL, TO REQUIEM 2095: a geopolitical roleplay set in the late 21st Century. In this semi-dystopian, pessimistic - indeed, pre-apocalyptic - vision of our collective future, each player will represent a sovereign power that administers some territory. You may play as a country, or as any of those challenges to traditional governments that flourish in an era of state weakness: rebel organizations, sovereign religious institutions, independent corporations, and the like. Together, you will face the seemingly insurmountable challenges of days that certainly seem like the end times for industrial civilization. And you will discover how, even in the midst of utter crisis, traditional rivalries and ideologies can still make cooperation perilously near to impossible. In drafting your application, please note that the point of divergence is 2020. Events after 2020 can be adjusted to make your application work; events before 2020 must be held constant as a shared historical foundation for all players. (Contact me directly to request an exemption.) Try to make your application a natural, plausible outgrowth of real-world events in the period between 1945 and 2020; the twenty-first century should follow logically from the defining events of the twentieth - like the Western victory in the Cold War, the Communist takeover of China, and the global reliance on fossil fuels. The details of the setting will largely be up to the players to determine, as we build the world one application at a time. But for general information, please consult the following notes. These notes deal with the challenges that every application will have to discuss. Above all, remember that the last century has not been a story of prosperity. Rather, for every country in the world, it has brought decline: some combination of economic collapse, civil war, or - at best - mere stagnation. In this world, being a global power means only that you are failing more slowly than everybody else. The great irony of the Climate Crisis – the defining fact of the late 21st Century, the threat that stands to unravel all of modern globalized civilization – is that its roots lie back in the 20th and 19th centuries: a time when men did not know any better, and a time too far gone for their mistakes to be corrected now. Men in those days looked at coal and oil, and saw an unlimited source of energy and prosperity. They mortgaged their children’s future, and now the debt has come due. For nearly 150 years, scientists have warned of the devastating, final consequences of anthropogenic climate change. And for nearly as long, they have been entirely ignored: answered with superstitious quibbling, or the equivocating nitpicking of economists, or the self-indulgent silence of voters. And so Europe and America continued burning oil and gas, until the world supply finally ran dry in the ‘70s and ‘80s; Africa and India continued burning coal, until the annus horribilis of 2081 persuaded even those countries to join the Seoul Agreement of 2089 forbidding its use. By then, fourth-generation nuclear power and innovative renewable energy systems had provided an economically efficient replacement for fossil fuels. But the shift came far too late. From 1945 to 2095, the world has experienced three degrees centigrade of warming and almost two meters of sea level rise. Coastal cities around the globe have been inundated by megatsunamis. Even in a good year, storm surge swamps sewer systems and subway tunnels and paralyzes urban life. Worse – far worse – the world’s tropical belt of rain forests, from the Amazon to the Congo to Southeast Asia, has been bleached into savannah. Billions of people have been abandoned in wastelands where the heat alone can kill in minutes. That great dying – the transformation of the middle of the world from green to brown – has in turn devastated neighboring regions: the Great Plains of America and the Great Steppe of Eurasia are rapidly turning into desert, kicking up dust storms visible from orbit. The world’s most traditionally productive agriculture regions are inexorably becoming barren, and permanent food insecurity has become a fact of life for billions, spurring the largest refugee migrations ever seen in human history. Even in powerful, relatively stable countries, the rationing of food is a part of everyday life for all but the superrich. For much of the twenty-first century, countries tried to survive the crisis by skirting environmental regulations and boosting production – no matter the cost. Now that bill, too, has come due. Every corner of the biosphere is corrupted by centuries of industrial debris: soils filled with microplastics, water tainted by fertilizer runoff, wild animals contaminated by pharmaceutical waste. Pollution eats away at our health from the moment of our birth, and so formerly old-age diseases like cancer and stroke take ever younger, weaker victims. In many countries, including the United States, the prevalence of pollution has become fodder for conspiracy theories about a genocidal cabal of global elites; industrial waste has poisoned not just the human body, but the body politic. In all this, some still insist on seeing opportunity rather than disaster. Countries still able to produce food can command an economic premium for their crops. The thawing of the Arctic and Antarctic have revealed new resource deposits, for countries with the capacity to access them. New routes are now available for trade across the top of the world. These are likely to be the flashpoints of global conflict. In an era of ever-deeper scarcity, what resources remain represent a prize worth oceans of blood. Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. A century ago, many foresaw a race between the climate crisis on the one hand, and technological progress on the other; it was hoped that we could innovate our way out of destruction, before the countdown to ecological catastrophe reached its end. We failed. The twenty-first century, like the late twentieth, has been dominated by software and not hardware; information technology and not industrial technology. Science, while unable to halt our civilization’s decline, has proved adept at distracting us from it: augmented and virtual reality grow ever more advanced, blurring the boundary between life online and the much-maligned “real world,” and powerful synthetic drugs have produced the worst addiction crisis in history. The internet is everywhere: in rich countries and poor ones, connected to our cars and our homes and our phones and our cybernetic implants, the inescapable warp of life’s fabric. Artificial intelligence, while never able to replace human labor entirely, has become an essential aide to human productivity in fields from medicine to construction to education. The result has been a seventy-year crisis in labor markets: as countries develop economically, the increased efficiency of AI creates a permanently unemployed and unemployable underclass. What jobs remain, precisely because they require such close coordination with AI, demand a high level of technological sophistication and cognitive flexibility. In consequence, the richest countries face simultaneous overemployment and underemployment: they have too many workers seeking jobs that no longer exist, and too few workers qualified for the jobs that remain. One solution – the most expensive, but by far the most popular solution for the rich – is genetic engineering and genetic medicine. The children of the global elite are guaranteed employment not just by their family money, but because they were genetically modified in the womb to be healthy, beautiful, and brilliant enough to succeed in the knowledge economy of 2095. Even “baseline” humans can benefit from genetic medicine through gene therapies that approach magic: curing cancer, slowing the aging process, reversing cognitive decline. Many of the most powerful people in the world are at least ninety, preserved at their full capacities long past the point of ordinary human decrepitude. Some have begun to speculate that genetic tinkering has even become a speciation event: that the genetically-modified wealthy are evolving into an entirely different human subspecies from the unmodified masses, a biologically superior master race. For those who cannot afford to design their children in a lab – and this group represents at least 999 out of every thousand humans – there is the cruder refuge of cybernetics. Cybernetic implants let humans interface directly with the AI systems that shape every area of economic life in the developed world; they can also increase human physical strength and endurance to compete with industrial robots, squeezing another few years of economic viability out of a frail physical body. But they come at a price: cybernetic implants are associated with chronic physical pain, body dysmorphia and depression, and decreased life expectancy. They are also expensive, so expensive that implants are typically provided by employers or by the state, and are not owned by individuals themselves. If you had the money to buy your own implants, you would just get genetic medicine instead. As for energy technology, sustainable power has finally replaced fossil fuels – far too late for the world climate, and only after the planet’s last major crude oil reserves were exhausted in the 2070s. In the developed world, “fourth generation” nuclear reactors have rendered nuclear power safe and sustainable. But this comes at the cost of expensive infrastructure, which has driven the cost of energy higher than at any time since the industrial revolution. Biofuels and hydrogen power cells have mostly replaced gasoline in the transportation sector, but as the world’s arable land area shrinks, the cost of biofuel has risen accordingly: most nations have to strike a balance between growing crops for food, and growing crops for biofuel. (This is true even though most biofuels are produced from algae; in many countries, algae protein is a crucial building block of the low-income diet.) In the developing world, which lacks the funds to sustain a nuclear power grid, electrical generation tends to be decentralized: based on local or household solar panels, windmills, and the like. This produces electricity at a lower cost, but also at a lower efficiency; much of the world remains plagued by power shortages when local measures fail. The last century has been a bloody one: rich countries have invaded poor ones, poor countries have invaded each other, rich countries have returned to high-intensity warfighting, and both rich and poor countries have suffered devastating civil war. Military technology has evolved accordingly, but there have been few true technical revolutions. Rifles still propel bullets using gunpowder, though most are now caseless; railguns have come into limited service with wealthy nations, as tank guns and naval artillery; aircraft design remains defined by the old race between ever-more-powerful radars and ever-more-sophisticated stealth technology. Information technology has had the biggest impact: many military vehicles are self-driving, AI-guided munitions are common down to the level of ordinary anti-tank missiles, and autonomous reconnaissance and combat drones are an essential part of most military operations. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are more sophisticated and dangerous than ever, and the new arms race is defined by the struggle to build an AI guidance system that can defeat your enemy’s missile defense software and defensive hackers. For this reason, cyberspace has emerged as a decisive field of operations: the ability to cripple an enemy’s battlespace network deprives him of the ability to wage modern war altogether, and leaves him open to nuclear annihilation. But it should be remembered that, in much of the devastated, desertifying world, cyber operations are almost irrelevant: there, war remains a familiar struggle of militias equipped with small arms, fighting over the remaining scraps of arable land. Soon, much of humanity may live under exactly those conditions. Under such circumstances, it is no surprise that many look with longing to the stars, hoping to escape the seemingly inevitable collapse of terrestrial civilization. The United States established a moon base in 2039, followed shortly thereafter by Europe and China; space exploration remains a source of prestige and scientific advances. But space has failed, so far, to answer the world’s shortages of food and energy and raw materials; asteroid mining is in its infancy, and countries that have invested in it have yet to see consistent profits. The transportation and logistical costs associated with extraterrestrial mining are, quite literally, astronomical. Moreover, despite repeated efforts to establish truly self-sustaining bases in orbit or on the moon, all human installations in space remain reliant on regular resupply from Earth; there is no refuge among the stars if civilization collapses here. We remain, as we have been for our whole history as a species, bound to the Earth. Here our fate will be decided. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. The economic history of the twenty-first century has been dominated by the Middle Income Trap. Countries rise from low-income to middle-income status by exploiting an abundance of cheap, unskilled labor. They transition from middle-income to high-income status by transforming those workers into highly-skilled, knowledge-based employees. But the increasing prevalence of AI – and the correspondingly increasing cost of education and training for highly-skilled workers – drove up the cost of entry to these knowledge-based industries. It became more and more expensive to turn a middle-income economy into a high-income economy. For countries suffering from food and energy shortages, the investment usually proved impossible. Thus the Middle Income Trap: countries developed too much to go on relying on their cheap labor, but could not develop enough to compete with the established economic powers. China was the last major economy to weather the Middle Income Trap, using the sheer size of its economy to force its way through decades of stagnation and finally to produce a world-class modern workforce. But after about the 2060s, the investment required to become a developed nation had passed the ability of any developing country to pay. Existing middle-income countries, caught between developed-world prices and developing-world budgets, are mostly gripped by economic and political instability: unable to find jobs and unwilling to accept their former poverty wages, workers frequently resort to revolutionary violence. Low-income countries, aware that they have no hope of a wealthier future, rely upon natural resources alone for whatever prosperity they can manage. In the developed world, the gap between rich and poor continues to grow in most countries. Artificial intelligence is essential for prosperity, but it is exceedingly expensive; and to be a valuable worker in an AI-dominated economy requires skills and smarts that only decades of education (and, ideally, genetic engineering) can provide. An ever-smaller group of economic winners reaps most of the rewards, while an ever-larger group of economic losers searches for menial jobs that have not yet been automated. Generational wealth confers access to the genetic therapies and educational opportunities upon which success now relies. In some countries, the genetically-enhanced elite leads megacorporations, which exercise more power than the state itself; in others, the economic elite dominates the government, which directs economic activity itself. It can be challenging to tell the difference between a government run like a corporation and a corporation that acts like a government. In either case, though, the elite’s need for competent middle-managers has protected a small surviving middle class. In most of the developed world, this class is confined to the public sector: the bureaucracy, the education and public health systems, the armed forces. Here, a ferociously competitive meritocracy offers at least the hope of advancement for children who otherwise face a lifetime of economic insecurity culminating in ultimate unemployability. For those who could not follow the public sector’s narrow path to economic stability, there remained the underworld: nearly every developed country has struggled to contain an illicit economy of drugs, prostitutes, and weapons. That shadow economy offers some hope of prosperity to millions of unemployable, economically superfluous souls in every developed country. And for those uninclined toward crime, there is always entertainment: the internet, “recreational” cybernetics, cheap narcotics, and the possibility of drowning one’s sorrows in hyper-real virtual reality more fulfilling than anything real life could ever offer. Finally, the unemployed millions of the developed world can console themselves that their lives are still infinitely preferable to those of the billions of refugees who pour toward their borders, seeking escape from climate catastrophe and civil war and starvation. Those innumerable, truly destitute people - and not the etherized jobless of the world’s wealthy countries - have seen the true horror of a new dark age. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The sovereign nation-state has been in decline for almost 150 years. From its emergence in the nineteenth century, its golden age last scarcely a century before it was supplanted by the Soviet and American blocs, with their global ambitions and supranational institutions. For a time, it seemed that worldwide markets and worldwide ideological contests – between capitalism and communism, secularism and Islamism, cosmopolitanism and nationalism – would consign territorial states to gradual irrelevance. That was before the global market buckled under the pressure of the climate crisis. Faced with shortages of nearly everything – fuel, food, energy, water – companies shortened their supply chains. More and more of the global economy retreated behind the safety of the developed world’s national borders, where the supply of food and electricity was more reliable, and the risk of having investments destroyed by war or natural disaster was lower. Global trade dwindled; governments (sometimes themselves the puppets of reshored corporations) reasserted control of national industrial policy. In middle-income and poor countries, where the ebb of globalization proved economically devastating, governments that survived the resulting chaos seized even more power: they were the only alternative to foreign invasion and domestic chaos. In an era of cascading global instability, the state’s oldest, simplest promise powered its return to prominence all over the world: a national government, whatever its other faults, could be relied upon to protect its own. It is not a coincidence that the world’s two remaining superpowers – the United States and China – are both genuinely sovereign states, not the puppets of corporations or religious groups. For pure power on a large scale, the state is still the most successful form of political organization. The primary alternative to the state is the sovereign corporation. Often a multinational entity, controlled by transnational economic elites in the developed world, the sovereign corporation of 2095 is a straightforwardly neocolonial entity characterized by ruthless pragmatism. The world is defined by shortages of everything that make human life worth living, or even biologically possible at all. Corporations are the mediators of that scarcity: their access to capital (and, through capital, to political influence and military might) allows them to buy and sell the prerequisites of life itself: food, water, fuel, clean air. In much of the developing world, where all economic activity relies upon resource extraction, corporations have overtaken the state as the dominant form of political organization, and swathes of the earth are governed as corporate private property. In some parts of the developed world, corporations have become so essential to national life that they have instead coopted the state, and the decisions that really matter are made in boardrooms rather than legislative chambers. While states and corporations are the most common forms of political organization, they are not the only ones. Religious institutions have assumed an important political role in many areas of the world. Exemplified by the repeated efforts to establish a caliphate in the Arab world, religious governance is distinguished by its inherently global character: while religious institutions may control an area of land where they operate in state-like ways, these organizations also claim dogmatic authority over all their coreligionists around the world. (This is what distinguishes a sovereign religious institution, in the strict sense, from a state that happens to have a religious affiliation.) Religious sovereignty usually has a revolutionary character, framing itself as the vanguard of a global or semi-global government that will unite humanity and usher in a new golden age. Sovereign religious bodies have little respect for such outdated traditions as borders and diplomacy. Rather, they tend to be millenarian or even eco-apocalyptic: they believe that the world of states and corporations is perishing, and that humanity must transition to a radically new kind of civilization. It is increasingly hard to argue with their logic. The last major form of sovereignty, in 2095, is seemingly paradoxical: the rebellion. Nearly a quarter of mankind is governed by rebel groups. Rebels often have legitimate grievances with rapacious corporations and oppressive states, and advance radical alternative visions of political organization: communitarian anarchism is popular among more idealistic groups, while other rebellions are organized as cults worshiping deified warlords. What unites them is that rebellion is, inherently, a transitional and contested form of sovereignty: a rebellion is always growing or shrinking, controlling more territory or less, as it struggles for power against more traditional polities (or, in the world’s most chaotic regions, against other rebellions.) Like a sovereign religious organization, a rebellion is a movement as much as it is an institution: it promises a different and better future, and its members are supporters and not merely citizens. For this reason, too, a rebellion is inherently unstable. It will either prevail, and become a state or some kind of sovereign religion (or, rarely, a new corporation) – or it will fail, and disappear from history. Much of mankind lives in the liminal territory of rebels whose fate – victory or defeat, consolidation or collapse – has not yet been decided. All polities – state, corporation, religion, or rebellion – face global challenges. But those crises have not been equally distributed. In the desertifying regions around the Equator – already some of the poorest in the world – lethal heat and thirst and famine and civil war have made life nearly unbearable. The consequence has been the greatest refugee crisis in human history: billions of souls fleeing the pitiless sun in search of a better life – or, indeed, any life at all. Every country in the world – whether it seeks to accommodate climate refugees or to exclude them, whether it is a destination or a source of migration or simply a waystation along the long road to safety – is implicated by the refugee crisis. We live, as never before, in a world on the move. Around the globe, nationalist and racist movements have drawn new strength from the very real fear that the influx of desperate foreigners will overwhelm the economic, cultural, and political systems of their hosts. Terrorism, too, remains a challenge for all the world’s varied regimes. The obvious breakdown of order between and within most states has created a violent world; and in a violent world, any group, however small or extreme, can plausibly hope to achieve its goals by violence. Pirates on the high seas, hackers in cyberspace, chemists with labs full of homemade nerve gas – the scope of terrorism is nearly limitless. Religious fanatics, often armed and trained at bases in territory controlled by religious sovereigns, are a constant threat to the world’s secular powers; the most extreme of these groups have reached the understandable conclusion that God is already bringing about the End Times, and that they are the instrument of His final judgment. In much of the world, political extremists of every persuasion have likewise declared war upon the state. Communists seek to tear down the educated elites that have made a success of the late-21st century knowledge economy, and to redistribute their wealth; fascists seek to destroy those same elites for the crime of having placed their own prosperity ahead of national purity; anarchists blame the state system for the madness of the times, and hope to restore sanity in a world of autonomous communes or individuals. And everywhere, ecoterrorism has become a major, consistent threat to most regimes: for these extremists, it has become clear that the collapse of human civilization is a positive good, which must be completed before human civilization kills the planet. Beset by mass migration and by terrorism, states have themselves resorted to increasingly ruthless measures. Maintaining a modern standard of living requires seizing an ever-larger share of increasingly scarce global resources. Consequently, we live in an era of widespread conventional and unconventional war. Tanks and air forces clash over control of the world’s remaining aquifers and rivers; spies and special operators train and arm rebel groups, ensuring that key mines and farmland remain controlled by reliable proxies. Among the world’s most powerful nations, the fear of mutually assured destruction has so far prevented an exchange of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons: no country can be entirely sure that its missile-defense AI is superior to the enemy’s guidance AI. But as more and more of the Earth edges toward uninhabitability, scarcity may overcome even this last taboo. Despite all the changes of the last century, world affairs remain dominated – as they have been since the 2020s – by tensions between the United States and China. These two powers, however, have exchanged roles: where once China was the rising force fraying the fabric of the American global order, now China is the established world leader – militarily, diplomatically, and economically preeminent. The United States, having emerged from civil war less than a generation ago, has lost much of its former power but regained youth and idealism and energy; now, the U.S. is the major revisionist power, picking at loose threads of the Chinese global order with their “American model” of technocratic liberalism. Secondary powers – Japan, Korea, Russia, Europe, India, Brazil, and South Africa foremost among them – must negotiate their role in a world increasingly divided between Chinese legalism and American-backed revolutions. Even as deserts overtake the tropics and terrorists unravel states and refugees flood the world’s roads, the old Great Game of geopolitics refuses to die quite yet. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. JOIN THE REQUIEM: Your applications will be judged on the quality of your writing and the creativity of your ideas, and not necessarily on encyclopedic completeness. For this reason, I’ve left the application largely unformatted: you should simply tell me, in the way that makes the most sense to you, everything that I need to understand your concept and to imagine its global role in our shared story. After reading your application, I should know why/how your concept exists, what territory it covers, and roughly how much regional/global influence it has. An application that achieves that goal may take the form of a Wikipedia-style entry, a set of letters or interviews, a traveler’s journal, or any other format that demonstrates your ability as a writer. I will not be requesting an RP sample, since I will be judging your writing from the application itself. As you develop your application, please try to ground your concept in history before 2020: this should be a natural, if perhaps an unexpected, evolution from the world we know. Also, please be sure to answer the following two questions: what kind of regime are you applying for, and what is its ideological outlook? In 2095, the state has lost its monopoly on territorial sovereignty (see “THE STATE AND ITS ALTERNATIVES,” above). Therefore, you may apply as any organization that exercises de facto control of territory: a national government, a corporation, a rebel group, or a self-governing religious movement. It is important for you to explain what type of regime you are applying for. In 2095, a much broader range of ideological positions and worldviews have achieved power. Increasingly, ideologies function as proposed solutions to the life-and-death crisis facing global human civilization: how do we prevent a new dark age? Consider framing your application in terms of the following outlooks, or explain why your concept does not fit into any of these categories. Legalist Outlook: states with a legalist outlook are defined by broad pessimism about human capabilities and the value of human life. They treat human beings mostly as cogs in a machine, which are useful for certain limited purposes and require certain resources in order to function. To legalists, the crisis of 2095 is, above all, a problem of efficiency: the goal is to maximize human outputs while minimizing human resource-consumption. This can be achieved only through central control and technological advances, without regard for cultural traditions, quality of life, or human rights. Legalist regimes run the gamut from techno-totalitarian governments to transhumanist corporations; what they share is a belief in the power of impersonal, rational, absolute control to overcome the “essential problem” of human nature. Legalism is associated primarily with China (though this can be discussed with the China player, when we get one). Liberal Outlook: states with an liberal outlook are essentially backward-looking; they remain committed to the post-1945 Western consensus around human rights, representative democracy, rule of law, and free markets. More significantly, they are united by a stubborn individualism: a belief in the value of the individual human life, mind, and conscience. Most liberal sovereigns have been obliged, to some extent, to compromise their ideals; but the liberal outlook is uniquely flexible, capable of hybridizing with Arcadian or technocratic or communist ideologies without losing its core belief in the centrality of the individual. They are the great institutionalists of 2095, in the sense that they anchor their ideals in institutions rather than in abstractions: liberals believe in “the rule of law,” not just in raw power, and in “collective defense,” not just in transactional alliances. Liberal regimes range from traditional multiparty democracies, to hybrid technocratic democracies like the United States, to corporate “shareholder republics,” to self-governing democratic rebel movements. Revolutionary Outlook: states with a revolutionary outlook broadly represent the extremes of the 20th century political spectrum: the nationalist right and the anticapitalist left. For these regimes, the impending collapse of modern civilization is not merely a crisis, but a crime: it is the fault of the global capitalist elite, who either turned their backs on their people (in the nationalist formulation) or doomed the global proletariat to destitution (in the communist paradigm). Defined by this common enemy, revolutionary regimes seek to save a portion of humankind (their ethnic group, the working classes, or perhaps only the working classes of their own ethnic group) from extinction, by overthrowing the global elite and establishing a single-party regime. They are distinguished from liberals by their commitment to the group rather than individuals, and from legalists by their belief in mass movements rather than top-down managerial control. Ranging from neofascist dictatorships in Eastern Europe to eco-apocalyptic cults in Central America to multiethnic worker uprisings in the corporate-controlled Congo, revolutionary regimes are normally hostile both to the established powers in Beijing and Washington, and – given their varied ideological foundations – to each other. Arcadian Outlook: states with an arcadian outlook reject not only the idea that traditional industrial civilization can be saved, but also the idea that it should be saved. They trace the crisis of 2095 to a fundamental error in worldview: humanity is a part of the Earth and must live in harmony with it, rather than seeking to transcend it. Arcadian regimes accept natural limits on growth, population, development, urbanization, and all the other escalatory trends that 21st-century society has taken for granted. Sustainable, responsible stagnation is their goal, not expansion or success; they would rather have a livable today than a “better tomorrow.” Arcadian regimes may be democratic in their governance structure, but they do not share the traditional individualism of liberals; they may be authoritarian, but they do not share the rationalist and managerial values of legalism. Catholic communes building a faithful society from the soil up – eco-rebels waging war against Canadian mining companies – nonprofit agricultural corporations trying to re-green the Central Asian salt flats – all of these, in different ways, are Arcadian regimes. Neutral Outlook: some sovereigns do not claim to have an answer for the crisis that has engulfed humanity; they do not claim that they have found a solution through central control or human rights or group solidarity or environmental harmony. They simply claim that they are better than the available alternatives. These neutral regimes are frequently rooted in local cults of personality around strong leaders, or simply in the naked threat of force. But they also include many traditional elites who do not offer a totalizing worldview: the retreat of the state has left tribal chiefs and local police commanders and even professional associations in charge in much of the world. Many liberal or arcadian states have neutral institutions, dominated by technocrats who don’t believe in much of anything except expertise itself; the self-governing “Establishment” of the United States is the most prominent example. Truly neutral regimes, though, tend to flourish in small or poor territories where the promise of momentary stability is more attractive than a grand dream of human renewal. Please delete and replace all material in parentheses. Code: Select all [size=150][b](the English name of your regime in all-caps)[/b][/size] [i](the name of your organization in your organization’s primary language(s), each language on a separate line - delete this line if your organization’s sole primary language is English)[/i] (de-jure regime type – a republic? Monarchy? Corporation? Religious group? Army? Etc.) with a (outlook). [hr][/hr] (a brief overview of your organization’s post-1945 history, politics, territory, economy, demographics, and military/diplomacy; minimum 1,000 words) [hr][/hr] [i]REQUIEM 2095; an application[/i] The reservation format is as below. Reservations last three days. It is intended that you put up a reservation when you start writing your application, to avoid having someone else put up an application for the same territory first while you were hard at work researching for your application. A WIP application will be treated as replacing the reservation, and reserving the territory in question on an indefinite basis. Code: Select all [size=150][b]RESERVATION[/b][/size] Name of Regime: Territory Reserved: THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAPITAL: WASHINGTON, DOUGLASS COMMONWEALTH | REVEREND NORV | OUTLOOK: LIBERAL | APPLICATION (Part 1 / Part 2) Systemic tensions, as old as the legacy of slavery and as recent as online conspiracy theories, led to a half-century of American decline and spelled the end of the liberal world order. That decline reached its nadir with the Reckoning, America's terrible four-way civil war. The country has emerged from that crucible weakened in body, but annealed in spirit: reduced in wealth and prestige, but strengthened in the efficiency of its institutions and the power of its social solidarity. Americans, united as rarely before, have rediscovered their purpose - and the United States steps forth once again onto the global stage as a rejuvenated champion of free trade, free elections, and free human beings. THE UNITED STATES OF POLARIS CAPITAL: NOVO VOLGOGRAD, MAUD GOVERNATE | G-TECH CORPORATION | OUTLOOK: LEGALIST| APPLICATION In a world riven by divisions and desperate for resources, old ecological qualms were cast aside and the capitalist systems of the world eagerly devoured Antarctica. On the Astral Continent heedless industrialization and human suffering combined with wanton profits to form the hideous amalgamation state that is Polaris, a corporate fiefdom of competition and deregulation of hitherto undreamt proportions. In her undercities sheltered from the dire conditions of the turbulent continent the huddled masses who came seeking a better life are exploited by landed gentry and fabulously wealthy overlords, Great Houses alongside corporations competing for power and influence in the Imperial Senate even as unscrupulous arms dealers sell the wealth of the continent to the most dangerous factions of the fractured world. And yet the masses still come, for in Polaris one can rise as in few other places, even though most are trampled underfoot by the uncaring machine. RESERVATION Name of Regime: Brazilian People’s State (People’s state in shorthand) Territory Reserved: The current borders of Brazil RESERVATION Name of Regime: Union of England, Scotland and Wales Territory Reserved: England, Scotland and Wales RESERVATION Name of Regime: The State of Israel Territory Reserved: Israel including the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza RESERVATION Name of Regime: The Empire of Japan Territory Reserved: The Mainland Islands of Japan, and other territories to be discussed RESERVATION Name of Regime: People's Republic of China Territory Reserved: China, Arunachal Pradesh, Taiwan, Mongolia (Outer Manchuria?) RESERVATION Name of Regime: Arctic System Territory Reserved: The Nordic States in their 1945 boundaries, the Baltic States in their 1991 boundaries, plus West Karelia and Salla. RESERVATION Name of Regime: The Sixth French Republic Territory Reserved: Metropolitan France, perhaps more. RESERVATION Name of Regime: The Federation of Free Europa Territory Reserved: Western Continental Europe, as a federation in which other players can assume the role of constituent states. RESERVATION Name of Regime: Mining Facility of Anderson Corporation on Vesta Territory Reserved: Vesta RESERVATION Name of Regime: Seraph Industries: a corporate dictatorship, albeit benevolent, outwardly liberal in outlook. Territory Reserved: Acapulco, Dubai, Congo, much of the Sahel.

[Reverend Norv]

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Federal Presidential Constitutional Republic with a Liberal Outlook
[with some Neutral-Outlook institutions]

---

History Since 1945

"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
Abraham Lincoln, 1838

It was only with a century of hindsight that historians would recognize the seventy years after 1945 as the Pax Americana. Despite the tensions of the Cold War and then the War on Terror, despite the varied and frequently unsuccessful military adventures of the United States, those seventy years witnessed an extraordinary triumph: for the first and last time in history, most of the world's nations were mixed-market democracies. American media was more globally dominant than any cultural product in history. Norms of human rights and self-determination forged - if not always respected - in the United States were the explicit foundation of every global institution. Even as China began its rise, the US remained the wealthiest society in human history - a prosperity purchased at the price of global climate change, one of the two forces that would ultimately bring the Pax Americana to an end. The other force that proved deadly to the American Century was, ironically, the ultimate incarnation of American power and American values: the free and open internet.

The peril of this new technology first became apparent in 2016, with the election of Donald Trump. Historians agree that the four years of the Trump Administration were among the most significant in American history. Trump shattered American prestige abroad, and undermined an entire global order predicated on American security guarantees and support for democratic governments. And at home, Trump's unprecedented undermining of the legitimacy of American democratic institutions paved the way for the next fifty years of deepening chaos - and, ultimately, for the Reckoning.

Trump's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic sealed his fate in the 2020 elections. After the Supreme Court refused to halt the counting of mail-in ballots in four states, Joseph Biden was inaugurated as president. Although Trump never accepted Biden's legitimacy and continued to amplify damaging misinformation through the Trump News Network, Biden was fairly effective: he passed major climate and infrastructure bills - neither of which would prove sufficient to the coming crisis - and admitted the District of Columbia as the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. But white supremacist terrorism continued to dog the country, and the Biden Administration struggled to spur recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic - a struggle made harder by the refusal of millions of Americans to accept the COVID vaccine.

As a result, Biden was defeated in the 2024 elections by none other than Donald Trump, who remained the overwhelming choice of the Republican Party. To Biden's credit, this would be the last presidential election for fifty years in which the loser accepted the result without reservation. Trump's second term marked the complete collapse of the global position of the US. After Polish forces engaged in a series of firefights with Russian troops, Trump refused to guarantee American support for the U.S.'s allies in Eastern Europe; NATO collapsed by 2027. At home, thwarted in his most authoritarian ambitions by an already-conservative Supreme Court, Trump expanded the court with five new justices of his own choosing. Governors in New York, California, and Illinois began openly discussing their potential authority to nullify federal law.

The true danger in which the US found itself was revealed for the first time in the Crisis of 2028. With the president in ailing health but resistant to all expert advice, the US did even less to contain the SARS-28 pandemic than it had eight years earlier in responding to COVID-19. Half a million Americans died. The East Coast experienced its first true megatsunami, causing $200 billion in property damage and all but annihilating Atlantic City, New Jersey. And the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, Jr., was assassinated in Raleigh, North Carolina: setting off a wave of political violence in North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona that left thousands dead.

In the end, moderates within both parties secured a desperate but successful response: they overrode the normal primary process by changing nominating rules at the conventions, and selected a "unity ticket" of Democrat Steve Bullock and Republican Larry Hogan. Bullock would serve as Hogan's vice president for the ticket's first term, and then they would switch roles before running for reelection. Activists in both parties denounced the arrangement as an elitist sham, and threatened to reject the result. But the unity ticket won an overwhelming Electoral College landslide, and violence petered out.

The Bullock-Hogan government, strange as it was, served adequately for eight years - easily winning reelection in 2032. It briefly restored a minimum of comity and functionality to Washington, albeit that this feeling was not shared among political partisans outside the Beltway. It orchestrated a major shift toward natural gas and nuclear power in American energy production, and successfully deterred Chinese aggression in Vietnam. Its most consequential achievements were the Armstrong Project - which would culminate in Armstrong Station, the first permanent human settlement on the Moon - and the 28th Amendment, which ended court-packing by fixing the size of the Supreme Court at fifteen justices: five chosen by each of the two largest parties in Congress, with the remaining five serving shorter terms and chosen by unanimous vote of the existing members, so as to be acceptable to both parties. The "Buttigieg Plan," named after Bullock's Secretary of State, survived intact until the 2070 Constitution.

The plan also helped make Pete Buttigieg the next President of the United States in 2036, sixteen years after his first run. While Buttigieg ran as a Democrat, he was widely regarded as a successor to the Bullock-Hogan unity government; as such, he was opposed by strong partisans on both sides but supported by a decisive majority of the country. His election was denounced as a corrupt bargain, and greeted with protests but not with serious violence. Buttigieg's one-term presidency proved a catastrophic failure, though largely due to circumstances beyond his control. A Chinese-backed coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo provoked an escalating American response that ended with sixty thousand troops committed to a bloody jungle war. Desertification in Mexico and northern Central America provoked crop failure and an unprecedented influx of migrants: roughly one million in eighteen months. White nationalist groups warned of an irreversible invasion, and began firing on migrants at the border. The same desertification created a long-foreseen calamity: the Colorado River finally ran dry, cutting off water to much of the American Southwest. As Los Angeles struggled to ration what water remained, agriculture across California ground to a halt. For the first time since the 1930s, thousands of Americans starved to death in what could only be described as a famine.

The result was the collapse of the bipartisan "government of national unity" that had held since the Crisis of 2028. In 2040, both parties reverted to grassroots primary processes dominated by committed partisans: men and women who had spent the last twelve years exposed to online extremism rather than to the Bullock-Hogan-Buttigieg Beltway consensus. By requiring the governor of Pennsylvania to count 15,000 absentee ballots, the Supreme Court handed the election to Democrat Rachel Harkins: the first female president of the United States, and a far more committed progressive than President Buttigieg.

But Harkins' tenure, like Buttigieg's, was overwhelmed by America's accelerating slide toward the Reckoning. Millions of conservative voters rejected the result of the election, and registered their outrage by refusing to file their taxes. The outbreak of the Persian Gulf Conflict drew the U.S. into a proxy war with Iran that absorbed steadily more and more money. And when the nation's largest chemical plant suffered a catastrophic leak, the most lethal conspiracy theory in human history emerged: "Styrenocide," the idea that America's rising rates of chemical pollution and early-onset cancer were a deliberate attempt at white genocide by globalist elites. Styrenocide believers, united by an extensive online infrastructure, orchestrated attacks on minority neighborhoods in dozens of mid-sized cities, provoking the most intense racial unrest since 2020 and requiring the deployment of the National Guard across the nation. Harkins' reelection in 2044 - again litigated at the Supreme Court - provoked such intense conspiracist unrest that most Americans experienced martial law at some point during 2045. Harkins' repeated attempts to address America's calamitous income inequality all failed to win congressional support, leaving the country more economically stratified than any other developed nation. After eight years, her only major achievements were a successful bill granting statehood to Puerto Rico, and a desalinization initiative that restored California's agricultural sector to viability by providing enough purified seawater to replace the Colorado River.

In 2048, the American nationalist-conservative movement - exiled to the political wilderness since the Crisis of '28 - swept back into power. Like the Democrats, the Republicans had returned to a grassroots primary process, and the grassroots picked Billy Clark: an internet media star and former Trump campaign youth leader. Clark amplified, if never quite endorsed, Styrenocide and other conspiracy theories. He ran and governed on a simple platform: the country was clearly in rapid decline, and it was the fault of subversive elements at home, whose loyalty was to a globalist elite rather than to "true Americans." As desertification continued to drive refugee flows from Mexico and central America, Clark first deployed the military to the southern border - ignoring a Supreme Court order to desist - and then sent a hundred thousand troops into northern Mexico on "push-back" operations with orders to displace any "vagrants" from within 25 miles of the border. As the Border War raged on, Clark reopened dozens of American coal mines - closed since the Bullock-Hogan nuclearization initiative in the '30s - as a political stunt to outrage the environmentalist left. The environmentalists responded, for the first time, with violent terrorism: the reconstituted Earth Liberation Front bombed coal mines and company offices. Clark was reelected in 2052, but international observers declared the election essentially unfree: in swing states, most liberal areas had 80 percent fewer polling places than conservative precincts, and crowds of people waiting to vote were attacked by riot police. Clark's second term witnessed soaring inequality and corruption - Americans began to joke that BMV stood for "bribes for motor vehicles" - and Clark himself famously bought a mansion in Iceland as a backup plan in case the U.S. collapsed. At the same time, though, he set about a determined effort to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which would allow him to run for a third term. In the end, a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans defeated the repeal effort, though not before six opposition members of Congress were jailed on various alleged drug crimes.

The repeal campaign led directly to the event that is often considered to mark the beginning of the Reckoning: the Year of the Three Presidents. In 2056, Democrat Julian Baxter ran against Republican Clara Grey. Billy Clark broke away from the Republican Party to found the America First Party, or AFP, and ran illegally for president as well. Federal courts barred Clark from the ballot in most states, which provoked AFP-led state legislatures to reject the official vote counts and certify their own results to the Electoral College. The result was that more than a dozen states submitted two, and sometimes three, competing electoral vote counts. All three candidates declared themselves duly elected, while Congress met in joint session for eight months and failed five times to pass a resolution certifying which set of electors was legitimate. Government ground to a halt; the food aid on which many Americans had relied since the Harkins administration evaporated; thousands starved in a man-made famine. Finally, on Congress's sixth attempted resolution, Baxter and Grey reached a compromise that swung enough Republican representatives behind the Democrat to establish an outcome: a Democratic-Republican Congress certified Julian Baxter as the winner of five key states, and the next President. The entire America First Party caucus in both the Senate and the House responded by walking out, renouncing the authority of the federal government.

Baxter was a victim of events. He had already lost almost a year of his term to the Year of the Three Presidents. Now he was obliged to govern with a Congress in which a third of the seats were empty. Dozens of special elections to replace the absent Clarkists were met with active violence: right-wing radicals and conspiracist militias threatened that anyone who voted to fill the empty seats would be shot. Congress would not sit at full strength again until 2088, more than two decades and half a million deaths later. Stymied, Baxter resorted increasingly to brute force. Billy Clark was indicted for corruption and died in prison, leading most nationalists to assume that he had been murdered. The rump Congress passed an act banning armed political militias, which merely provoked a frenzy of arms-stockpiling by both America First and the Earth Liberation Front. In 2060, North America suffered its worst year of drought ever - known to this day as the Red Summer, due to wildfires that turned skies over much of the country crimson - and Baxter imposed the U.S.'s first nationwide rationing scheme for food. Styrenocide believers pointed to the rationing as the globalists' final system for gradual white extermination. Conditions were even worse south of the border, whence millions of refugees poured north in unprecedented numbers. In an act that would later win him the Nobel Peace Prize, Baxter temporarily opened the border. The conspiracists regarded this as confirmation of their worst fears.

Julian Baxter was driven from power in November 2060, though historians generally don't consider the transition an election. The America First Party - now led by Eric Wexler, a former Clark spokesman, open Styrenocide believer, and self-described "man of the people, not the law" - staged seven coups d'état in swing states where it controlled the governorships, jailing Democratic-Republican state legislators and replacing them with unelected nationalists who certified an America First victory to the electoral college. To this day, the legitimate vote totals of the 2060 election are unknown. Desperate to avoid another Year of the Three Presidents, and the looming likelihood of open civil war, Congress accepted the fraudulent count and Wexler was inaugurated.

Wexler immediately proved his critics' worst fears justified; his inauguration is another popular date for the beginning of the Reckoning. He imposed a loyalty test for key military officers, federal law enforcement officials, and civil servants - firing hundreds and replacing them with regime loyalists. When the dismissed officials appealed to the Supreme Court, Wexler arrested nine out of the fifteen justices on ludicrous charges of child sex trafficking. He then arrested Julian Baxter and sixty-four Democratic and Republican members of Congress on treason charges. Rachel Harkins, now in her seventies, fled to Canada. New sedition laws gave the FBI extensive latitude to punish any kind of "disloyal expression." Forced-labor camps appeared in the southern Nebraska badlands, and began steadily to fill with academics, journalists, activists, and former civil servants. The Earth Liberation Front stepped up its attacks, and in 2064 - after a near-miss bombing of a nuclear power plant that many suspect was a Wexlerite false flag - Wexler declared that the "critical" security situation required the indefinite postponement of the 2064 election. More than a hundred million Americans boiled into the streets in protest, to be met by federal troops firing live ammunition, and eventually by helicopter gunship strafing runs. Protesters armed themselves with whatever weapons they could find, as sympathetic mayors and governors opened National Guard armories to the crowds. Under a plethora of revolutionary symbolism - from the Betsy Ross flag to the hammer-and-sickle - and an equivalent plethora of ideologies, the Resistance emerged. The Reckoning had finally arrived.

By 2067, the breakdown of order was nearly complete. Close to half the National Guard defected to the Resistance. Wexler instituted a draft and replaced the mutineers with conspiracist militias, which began staging pogroms in minority neighborhoods. Most of the professional army remained loyal to the regime, and swiftly drove the Resistance underground in most urban areas, but then found itself mired in an insurgency of bomb and sniper attacks that killed dozens of troops per day. Some Army units responded with a systematic campaign of abduction and torture, trying to terrorize communities into submission. Checkpoints and lockdowns so disrupted interstate commerce that most of the nation soon began to experience critical shortages of food and medicine. The Earth Liberation Front, which never quite assimilated to the mainstream Resistance, continued attacks on energy infrastructure, cutting power to hundreds of millions of Americans. While most Americans steered clear of the war and tried to go on with their day-to-day lives, society was crumbling around them.

In October 2067, a group of senior military officers known as the Cincinnatus Association staged a coup in Washington, D.C., and removed Wexler from power. Most were not constitutionalists or democrats - those officers had long since been purged - but they were pragmatic professionals. They were appalled by Wexler's continued purges of the Army's most talented officers, and they were aware that the regime was suffering mounting casualties without any sign of success in subduing the Resistance. Rather than continue in this futile endeavor, they arrested Wexler and his entire government, including most of the top civilian and military administration. The Cincinnati then established their own provisional government, composed of military officers, technocrats, and former leaders from both the Republican and Democratic parties - many of whom first had to be released, grey and emaciated, from Badlands work camps.

In 2070, the Provisional Government held a Second Constitutional Convention in Detroit. The 2070 Convention ratified six amendments, which collectively served to empower technocrats of various kinds as a check on elected populists. Congress could authorize a state of emergency that gave expanded domestic powers to the military, it could merge states and place them under federal administration, and it could impose military government on areas in insurrection. But neither Congress nor the president would any longer be allowed to appoint or remove military officers, civilian administrators, or judges. The elected branches would have power over spending, but not over personnel. The military, administration, and judiciary - the so-called Establishment - would be effectively self-governing and insulated from political control, and so no politician would ever again have enough raw power to do what Wexler had done.

The coup, and then the 2070 Convention, achieved their initial goals: Wexler's fall largely pacified the Resistance. Most of the ordinary men and women who had taken up arms against Wexler were prepared to give the Provisional Government a chance; whatever its other flaws, it cracked down hard on right-wing militias and protected minority communities, and it was effective in restoring power and food stability - albeit through draconian rationing of both. The new Constitution confirmed the public's optimism: it promised a return to civilian rule, at least of a kind, with elections in 2074. But not all of the Resistance was so easily pacified: many liberal and libertarian activists remained in rebellion, declaring themselves the Army of the Constitution. The Constitutionalist movement - calling for an return to the pre-2070 constitution - was stronger politically than militarily; in addition to attacks on government and Wexlerite forces, it mounted a public campaign in defense of popular sovereignty and civil liberties through marches, demonstrations, boycotts, and online activism.

Between 2070 and 2074, the Reckoning developed into a bitter three-way insurgency, with America First, Earth Liberation Front, and Constitutionalist groups fighting each other and the Provisional Government. Atrocities were common on all sides: the ELF successfully destroyed a nuclear power plant in Colorado, creating the Pueblo Dead Zone. The Provisional army, for its part, gunned down two hundred unarmed Constitutionalist demonstrators in Philadelphia. America First militias systematically assassinated members of the Cincinnatus Association, whom they considered race traitors, and massacred ethnic minorities; a particularly horrific pogrom in Memphis even caused a temporary and unofficial alliance of government troops and Constitutionalist militia, who cooperated in hunting down the Wexlerites to a man.

By 2074, while violence remained widespread and brutal, it was clear that the Union was no longer at risk of dissolution by force: the Provisional Government was in control more or less everywhere, and was beginning to restore services like education and administration that had frequently collapsed in the chaos of the early fighting. Insurgent activity was often intense, but the various rebels could not seize or hold territory; they had to operate underground. As a result, the promised elections went forward - not without violence, but without catastrophe. The America First Party boycotted the process, continuing to advance its cause by force; the Greens participated, and won twelve seats in Congress, but refused to disband the Earth Liberation Front. But most of the power went to two brand-new parties: the Constitutional Party - which did disband the Army of the Constitution and commit to a political settlement - and the National Union Party, or NUP. Both were mostly composed of pre-Reckoning, middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans. The Constitutionalists still broadly supported the repeal or rollback of the 2070 Convention, while the NUP backed the new, more technocratic Constitution as necessary to political stability. But they fundamentally agreed on settling that question by political compromise, not by military force.

When the votes were counted - the 2070 Constitution had abolished the Electoral College and replaced it with a runoff system - no presidential candidate had a majority. The NUP and Constitutionalists agreed a compromise to avoid a runoff: the NUP's Elizabeth Perez would be President, with the Constitutionalists' Rev. William Booker as her Vice President, and with the Constitutionalists promised a key role in the budget - the main lever of power left in elected rather than technocratic hands. The first woman of color to occupy the White House, Perez would serve two terms, and is revered today as the "Savior of Her Country." She took full advantage of the expanded federal powers granted her under the 2070 Constitution. When the 2077 East Coast Megatsunami destroyed much of New York City, Perez removed the Boston-to-Washington urban corridor from state authority and placed it under the Acela Emergency Management Administration, with orders to stormproof the urban East Coast. That enormous undertaking turned into a national jobs guarantee: anyone who needed work could report to an AEMA office, take the next bus to the East, and labor alongside tens of millions of others to build the gigantic seawalls that would hold back the next tsunami. Likewise, most of the former Great Plains were reorganized under the Heartland Recovery Administration, which funded (and mandated) drip irrigation and water reuse systems that let the desert grow dates, melons, sorghum, and other drought-resistant crops.

Even as Perez began America's rebuilding, she was guiding the Reckoning to its bloody close. While the Constitutionalists had traded the bullet for the ballot, America First and Earth Liberation Front forces remained extremely active in 2075. Perez prioritized the Wexlerites, an act that would have long repercussions. State governments in the South and Mountain West, where America First attacks continued to kill dozens per day, were dissolved, and Perez placed the regions under five military districts. The rag-tag federal forces - Constitutionalist militias who had rallied in '74, Resistance militias and National Guard who had rallied in '67, and regular troops who had served the government both before and after the '67 coup - began finally to cohere into integrated, battle-hardened divisions. Invoking the 2070 Constitution's state of emergency, Perez created the Federal Internal Security Taskforce, or FIST: a new agency composed of military intelligence officers, agents of the federal intelligence agencies and FBI, and former Resistance and Constitutionalist militia leaders. The agency's unaccountable and ruthless operations cost Perez the support of the Constitutionalist Party, and her majority in Congress. But in a sign that the Reckoning was waning, the Constitutionalists went into political opposition and not back into armed resistance, and they accepted Perez's reelection in 2078 - a landslide secured by the success of the recovery administrations in the Midwest and the Acela Corridor.

By halfway through her second term, Perez had brought the Reckoning to a close at last. FIST made tens of thousands of arrests, disrupting America First's underground network so badly that the nationalists resorted to pitched battle in an effort to secure safe havens in Texas and Arkansas. They failed; federal forces inflicted thousands of casualties in 2079, killing most of the key America First leaders and seizing crucial supply and arms depots. By the end of 2080, nationalist attacks had declined to one or two per month, with casualties for the year under 100. Perez declared a general amnesty, which an overwhelming majority of America First fighters accepted. Only the Earth Liberation Front remained in active insurgency, and its operations dwindled away under pressure from the Green Party not to discredit the environmentalist cause with violence. As a shaky peace returned, Perez leveraged her close and cooperative relationships with the autonomous military, administration, and judiciary: she convinced the Establishment to establish meritocratic recruitment policies that aligned with Perez's new guarantee of tuition-free higher education. America's new technocratic elite would be far more open to talent than its old socioeconomic elite.

In 2082, Elizabeth Perez, like George Washington before her, relinquished power at the height of her popularity and retired to her North Carolina hometown. William Booker, her former Vice President and the leading Constitutionalist, was elected in a process carefully monitored by the new Establishment civil service. As the NUP willingly handed over power to the Constitutionalists, the Republic celebrated its first genuinely successful election in almost a century: free, peaceful, and accepted as legitimate by all parties.

Booker, if less revered than Perez, would go on to become even better loved. The central theme of his two terms was national reconciliation and rebuilding. He continued the recovery administrations in the Midwest and East Coast, with their massive agricultural and stormproofing public works. He directed billions in federal funds to public universities. Income inequality began to shrink, albeit only slightly, for the first time since the 1990s - though Booker failed to regulate genetic therapies and modification, with the result that health inequality continued to expand.

Most importantly - and with key support from the Establishment - Booker founded the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission solicited testimony and documented wrongdoing not just from the Reckoning, but from the centuries that had preceded it: through this process, the U.S. finally came to a collective consensus about its history of slavery, Jim Crow, and native genocide. After a century of online conspiracy theories, the Truth and Reconciliation process restored a shared reality, a common belief in certain vital truths and historical facts, that was essential for democratic government. On the Commission's recommendation, Congress finally approved reparations for slavery; for the first time in U.S. history, the racial wealth gap began to shrink substantially. The Commission approved reparations, too, for the tens of millions who had died of causes related to chemical pollution: an olive branch to Styrenocide conspiracists. In the 2082 midterms, for the first time, the America First Party ran a slate of candidates, and won a modest number of House seats in Appalachian districts. The nationalists' decision to lay down their arms and reenter the political process marked the final end of the Reckoning.

In a myriad of crucial ways, Booker also rebuilt American prestige abroad. China, having been the world's sole true superpower during the twenty years of the Reckoning, was suddenly confronted by an America that seemed young again: ambitious, idealistic, energetic, creative. Booker admitted two hundred thousand refugees per year, from all over the world, each year of his presidency. He deployed the U.S. Navy to piracy hotspots around the world, restoring its role as a guarantor of world trade. He even completed the Guam Arcology: a state-of-the-art fortress in the West Pacific that Eric Wexler had founded as a vanity project and stronghold against China. Booker noted how appropriate it was that the Arcology would finally be finished by a black pastor whom Wexler once had tortured.

William Booker died in office in 2088. All of America mourned; even the nationalists who had bitterly protested his Truth and Reconciliation Commission acknowledged, in retrospect, that the Reverend Booker had made it possible for Americans to trust each other again - for the first time in generations. Booker was succeeded by his Vice President, Priya Varna: a former Constitutionalist militia commander who maintained deep ties to the Establishment even as she sought to roll back its independence. Varna's two-year term was consumed by a single, ultimately successful defense project: the redirection of resources from the massive army that had been required during the Reckoning, toward air, naval, space, and cyber innovation. As more than half a million veterans of the Reckoning finally demobilized, they found jobs waiting for them in factories producing cutting-edge aircraft, warships, avionics, radars, and munitions. Varna rebuilt American high-tech military power while simultaneously demilitarizing American society. Abroad, she put that smaller, high-tech military to work: she reestablished U.S. bases in East Africa in exchange for food aid supplied by the Heartland Recovery Administration, and successfully faced down the Chinese Navy in the 2089 Zanzibar Crisis, confirming the return of the United States as a global superpower. A few months later, she was among the first signatories to the Seoul Agreement prohibiting the use of coal worldwide.

Varna did make one major misstep: in the face of low-level but persistent terrorism by the Earth Liberation Front, she demanded that the Green Party disband its armed wing. The Greens refused, and for a few months before Election Day in 2090, the nation held its breath to see whether large-scale fighting would return. In the end, Varna suffered a heavy defeat at the polls by the National Union Party's Miriam Spinoza. Varna immediately accepted the result, and the nation celebrated its second peaceful transfer of power since the Reckoning. Spinoza - a former political prisoner who had served in the Provisional Government and the Perez cabinet - reached a compromise with the Greens: the Earth Liberation Front would be incorporated into the state police forces of states - Washington, Oregon, and Vermont - where the Green Party controlled the governorship. A hardline wing of the ELF rejected the Seattle Compromise, but environmentalist terrorism fell to an even lower level than before.

Spinoza enjoyed the most successful first term of any president since the Pax Americana. The 2092 Megatsunami struck the Acela Emergency Management Administration with full force, and for the first time the seawall prevented any catastrophic flooding or mass loss of life. Power was restored and life returned to normal within a few weeks: the national job guarantee, and its labor of fifteen years and seventy million workers, had finally borne fruit. When renewed crop failures in Central America threatened a major refugee influx - post-Reckoning America once again being an appealing place to which to flee - Spinoza deployed U.S. Marines to stabilize local conditions and distribute food, dealing with the refugee crisis at its source. At home, amid stabilizing crop yields and the growth of Priya Varna's military-industrial complex, Spinoza launched a major new initiative: the Federal Health Service, America's first true national healthcare system. Millions maimed or poisoned during the Reckoning flocked to the new clinics.

Spinoza survived a nationalist assassination attempt in 2093; the shooter's only justification was that she was a Jew. In a historic first, the America First Party leadership in Congress disavowed the attack. Sporadic attacks by hardline ELF supporters were met by FIST retaliation, in which - for the first time - Green Party state governors and formerly-ELF state police assisted. In a third sign that the scars of the Reckoning were beginning to fade, Spinoza abolished the First, Second, and Fourth Military Districts - restoring six states to the Union and leaving only Alabama, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Idaho under martial law. She decisively won reelection in 2094, and will be inaugurated in a few weeks. Like her country, she has stared into the abyss of totalitarianism and civil war, suffered torture and starvation - and returned stronger, clear-eyed and fire-hardened, to the world stage.

---

Economy

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

The United States remains in economic recovery, with all that this entails. Economic growth is steady, and much higher than the rest of the developed world - though it is now beginning to slow. American business has adapted to the new global economy: less multinational and less stable, more oriented toward the immediate needs of domestic agriculture and industrial production. But recovery comes only after collapse, and the scars of that collapse are very real. Between 2040 and 2080, the U.S. suffered decades of depression, devastating natural disasters, prolonged double-digit unemployment, the consequences of a national-debt default, and finally civil war. If the American economy is rising swiftly, it is only because it had fallen far.

In many ways, the U.S. fundamentally remains a war economy, organized for maximum efficiency by a permanent civil service largely insulated from political pressure. That centralized economic planning was originally necessary to achieve food stability, a credible response to natural disasters, and victory in the Reckoning. It has continued, in large part, because the growing American economy is predicated upon the structure and support provided by the federal bureaucracy. The National Production Board (NPB) offers contracts for the megaprojects on the East Coast and Midwest that continue to employ millions, as well as for the military-industrial complex that generates almost thirty percent of U.S. GDP. This means that Board contract requirements for efficiency, reliability, and cost are de facto industry standards. The NPB also oversees a sophisticated rationing system for resources ranging from water to uranium, ensuring that diminishing stocks of raw materials are distributed in the public interest across the economy; no major company can exceed its acquisition ceiling for a particular resource. Likewise, the Office of Price Control regulates maximum and minimum prices of household goods to control inflation and protect living standards; the Emergency Manpower Commission regulates labor availability by expanding or contracting available jobs in public works projects; and the Financial Stabilization Bureau sets ceilings on stock dividends in order to incentivize investment in certain areas of the economy. Perhaps most crucially, the Emergency Labor Board regulates labor relations: the ELB allows (and, indeed, promotes) unionization of a workplace by a card-check without notifying the employer, and thereafter uses "maintenance-of-membership" rules to enroll any new workers into the union. As a result, the U.S. private sector is more than forty percent unionized.

It is much easier for big companies to afford the high labor costs of a unionized workforce and the administrative costs of complying with so much bureaucracy, and so the U.S. economy is dominated by a relatively small number of large corporations. But the careful regulatory framework of the Establishment offers those companies an exceptionally stable and predictable business environment. American capitalism may not be as creative or dynamic as once it was, but it is more socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable: the country's largest companies still make modestly more money each year than they did the last.

The public sector also plays a key role in the U.S. economy. The most obvious examples of this are America's two economic megaprojects, the Heartland Recovery Administration (HRA) and the Acela Emergency Management Administration (AEMA). The HRA directly owns all the water between the Mississippi River and the Continental Divide. It has used this power to set up public drip-irrigation and water reuse systems across the deserts and badlands that were once the Great Plains. It also provides seeds, loans, training, and equipment to any homesteader seeking to start a farm in the desert. In return for the HRA's water, all crops produced using that water must be sold at market value to the National Food Bureau. While some farmers grumble about 21st-century feudalism, the HRA has been extremely effective both at providing agricultural jobs and at stabilizing the food supply.

Likewise, the Acela Emergency Management Administration was founded at the end of the Reckoning to construct a gigantic floodwall around the Acela Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C., with the goal of protecting 190 million Americans from megatsunamis. The floodwall became a national jobs guarantee: anyone looking for work could join AEMA and make minimum wage, plus free room and board, building the wall. Over fifteen years, AEMA employed seventy million workers and constructed a reinforced-concrete wall 70 feet high, 25 feet thick, and almost 700 miles long. Today, AEMA still employs about seven to ten million Americans at any moment in maintaining, expanding, repairing, and administering the Perez Wall, and it continues to offer a guarantee of work to any American who needs it, up to a cap set by the Emergency Manpower Commission.

The U.S. government also involves itself in the economy through the direct provision of public goods. The National Food Bureau provides a weekly food supply to every American, sourced out of the crops of the HRA. This Universal Basic Nutrition is (barely) sufficient to live on, but it's mostly sorghum grits and imitation beef, and most Americans heavily supplement it by shopping at grocery stores. But the system has reduced food insecurity in the U.S. below even the level of the Pax Americana. Likewise, the Emergency Housing Administration provides a "sweat equity" guarantee of housing: the government will build a house for anyone willing to contribute twenty hours of labor per week to its construction. When the house is finished, the recipient owns it (though not the land beneath it, which remains public property). Both programs, founded in order to address the mass starvation and displacement of the Reckoning, have since become essential to America's political and economic stability. They have made the U.S. substantially less economically unequal than most other nations: although the gap between rich and poor is vast, even the poorest Americans can own their own homes and put food on the table every night. And since 2083, reparations for slavery have provided every Black American with a small but important monthly basic income, with the result that the racial wealth gap has meaningfully shrunk for the first time in U.S. history.

The engine of the U.S. private sector is the military-industrial complex. As President Priya Varna gradually demobilized the vast numbers of troops who had fought in the Reckoning, she reinvested the defense budget into a sweeping campaign of military modernization - a campaign that also served to generate millions of jobs in the arms industry. Most major U.S. manufacturers now produce military as well as civilian goods, because the National Production Board's defense contracts are a reliable source of income whatever the state of consumer demand. Thus appliance companies produce microwaves and rifles, automakers produce electric sedans and armored fighting vehicles, aircraft companies produce airliners and fighter jets, and tech companies offer smartphones and cyberweapons. Since the National Production Board expects cutting-edge products, most major companies have invested heavily in research and development, which makes the U.S. economy more technologically innovative than its heavily regulated structure would suggest. Fed by first-rate universities, coordinated by the Office of Scientific Progress, and fueled by defense contracts, the U.S. technological sector is once again a powerhouse.

The high levels of public spending on which the U.S. economy relies are funded substantially by highly progressive income taxation. Among high earners, tax evasion is socially taboo after the Reckoning; many American elites spent time as refugees or political prisoners, and they understand the importance of contributing to a functioning society. Rates of individual and corporate tax compliance are thus quite high. But taxation covers only a portion of the nation's myriad recovery programs; the remainder is funded by debt. And since the U.S. default in 2065 destroyed the nation's international credit, the overwhelming majority of U.S. creditors are ordinary Americans, who have spent thirty-one years buying war bonds and then recovery bonds in order to fund their nation's future and their own retirement. This model of public debt has become essential to American culture and politics: to be an American citizen is to be a part-owner of the nation in a quite literal way, with one's own savings invested in its fortunes. As Elizabeth Perez put it, "Now we all sink or swim with the Republic."

---

Military

"Our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other."
George C. Marshall, 1942

Once the most powerful armed force in human history, by 2070 the U.S. military had fallen far indeed. Technological stagnation, budget cuts, and foreign wars of attrition afflicted it from the 2040s on, leaving it less battle-ready than its Chinese competitor. Then Eric Wexler's political purges of the officer corps dealt a heavy blow to institutional memory, and the bloodshed of the Reckoning left little of the old military behind: too many old comrades took up arms against each other. What emerged from the Reckoning was something new: an enormous army of popular mobilization, composed of pro-democracy militias as much as of soldiers. That new American military had learned to fight without qualitative advantages of technology and training, and it had earned through heavy losses a level of combat experience unsurpassed in the 21st century. It never assumed its own superiority, or pretended that technology could substitute for fighting spirit and a willingness to accept casualties; it was an army not of career professionals, but of citizens fighting for their homes. For the U.S. military, the fifteen years since the Reckoning have witnessed a delicate and still unfinished transformation: the transition back to a smaller, more technologically advanced, more professional force - without losing the battlefield lessons and spirit of the citizen-army that saved the Republic.

That transformation has been most fraught for the U.S. ground forces - the Army and Marine Corps. Though greatly assisted by the revival of the cutting-edge American military-industrial complex, the transition remains only partially complete. Most senior officers remain veterans of the Reckoning, and the two services are divided by political animosity: while much of the modern Army is descended from Resistance militias or rebellious National Guard units, the Marines remained loyal to the Wexler regime until the 2067 military coup, when most of them transferred their loyalty to the Cincinnati and the Provisional Government. Army officers therefore regard the Marines' loyalty to the Constitution as suspect. These divisions are mirrored among career NCOs, many of whom are also battle-hardened veterans of the Reckoning who chose to stay in uniform after the transition to an all-volunteer force. But more junior officers and enlisted personnel mostly entered the service since that transition, and so hold fewer grudges. The upside of having so many senior leaders and NCOs who survived the Reckoning is that, while they may be mutually suspicious, the Army and Marines both retain an extraordinary depth of institutional knowledge about actual combat. They are veteran fighting forces who know their business.

That business has changed, though, as the mass army of the Reckoning has been replaced by a smaller and more advanced force. U.S. troops have grown more specialized and more highly-trained. Gone are the huge infantry divisions mounted in old JLTVs; they have been replaced by smaller, integrated combat teams that emphasize combined-arms tactics. At the battalion and even company level, new technology has been integrated: armed drones, self-driving and self-targeting infantry fighting vehicles, railgun-armed battle tanks. Training and equipment both emphasize instantaneous wireless communications between every battlefield asset, constructing a three-dimensional battlespace map that "clears the fog of war" - allowing every unit to see everything that every other unit can see. While this basic approach is common to all U.S. ground forces, the Army and Marines each retain some peculiarities. The Army has invested substantial resources in the study of irregular warfare; many of its generals, after all, got their start as insurgent militia leaders. Army Special Forces remain expert both in organizing and in combating insurgency. And the Marines have returned to their amphibious roots, reorganizing entirely into small, combined-arms, self-contained expeditionary forces that can be rapidly deployed to crises anywhere in the world.

The revival of the U.S. Navy and Air Force has been another major project of the last 25 years, and in some ways a more daunting one; those services were largely spared the crucible of the Reckoning, and so do not have the same vast reservoir of recent combat experience from which to learn. Their reconstruction after years of neglect has been the single greatest objective of the reborn U.S. military-industrial complex. The results have been uneven. Because they have been rebuilt almost from scratch with cutting-edge ships, aircraft, avionics, computers, and munitions, the U.S. Navy and Air Force are substantially more technologically advanced than their Chinese counterparts. But because this rebuilding is a gradual and expensive process that has yet to reach completion, the Air Force and Navy are also much smaller than their Chinese equivalents; the Navy is at two-thirds of its planned final size, and the Air Force is at closer to half. The U.S. also has not fought a true naval or air battle since the 2040s; while naval and air thinkers have innovated new doctrines, those ideas remain untested by combat. Much of the Air Force and Navy officer corps is deeply inexperienced, and not all personnel fully understand the capabilities of the new technology with which they have been entrusted. Despite all of this, the reach of the U.S. Navy remains global, with bases scattered across all five oceans and dozens of active antipiracy operations. And the qualitative edge of U.S. naval and air technology, even hampered by untested doctrine and inexperienced personnel, was enough to convince a Chinese fleet to back down at the Zanzibar Crisis of 2089.

Finally, the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Cyber Force have emerged from the post-Reckoning military reforms as unqualified success stories. Cyber operations were an important part of the Reckoning, with forces on all sides relying on propaganda operations and direct cyberattacks. The modern Cyber Force thus has its own vast body of real-world experience on which to draw, and it is a success story of political integration: senior officers once fought for the Wexler regime, the Resistance, the Provisional Government, Constitutionalist militias, and even America First and the Earth Liberation Front. Today, it recruits directly from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the National Technological University, and it is widely acknowledged as a world-class cyberoperations outfit. Likewise, the Space Force has benefitted from lavish congressional funding and close ties to key universities. It has been entrusted with all U.S. space operations, including exploration and resource extraction; as National Production Board industrial rationing becomes gradually stricter year by year, the U.S. has wagered much on the Space Force's race to innovate new cost-effective asteroid mining operations. Because ICBMs travel through space, the Space Force is also responsible for most of the U.S. nuclear deterrent: a far smaller arsenal than that of China, but mounted on brand-new hypersonic, AI-guided missiles that may be superior to Chinese missile-defense AI. In 2094, the Space Force demonstrated the ability to destroy an asteroid with such a missile from 3 million miles away: a rare bit of good news for humanity, meaning that for the first time the planet need not fear a catastrophic impact event.

---

REQUIEM 2095; an application

[Reverend Norv]

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Federal Presidential Constitutional Republic with a Liberal Outlook
[with some Neutral-Outlook institutions]

---

Government

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Edmund Burke, 1774

Nearly three centuries of American democracy burned to the ground between 2060 and 2080: destroyed by Wexler's prison camps and purges, by famine and flood, by a brutal four-way armed conflict. The legacy of populism was ashes. What emerged from the Reckoning was the 2070 Constitution: a compromise between the liberal-democratic idealism of centuries past, and the technocratic efficiency required to survive social collapse, environmental catastrophe, and civil war. Henceforth, elected policymakers would set policy priorities and allocate funding, but unelected and unremovable experts in the courts, civil service, and military would be responsible for achieving the goals set by those representatives. As Elizabeth Perez put it, "Congress and the President decide where we are going, but not how we get there. The Establishment decides how we get there, but not where we are going."

This dynamic inheres at every level of government. The U.S. remains, for example, a federal system: states are responsible for the day-to-day administration of schools, police, most public utilities, and other local services. They set their own policies and make their own laws across a wide range of issues. But the 2070 Constitution also authorizes the President, in case of insurrection, to suspend state governments and replace them with military districts: special zones in which the armed forces assume all the functions of government, and military tribunals replace civilian courts. President Perez used this power extensively during the Reckoning, but most of these military districts have since been abolished. The two that remain are the Third Military District (covering Alabama and Mississippi) and the Fifth Military District (covering Wyoming and Idaho); both remain hotbeds of simmering nationalist sentiment. Finally, the 2070 Constitution allows Congress to remove territory from states and place it under special administrative authority, usually in order to coordinate projects too large for any state government to handle on its own. There are currently two such special administrative districts: the Heartland Recovery Administration (which covers most of the former Great Plains and supervises the enormous desert-farming, water-recycling, and homesteading project in those badlands), and the Acela Emergency Management Administration (which covers the East Coast megacity stretching from Boston to Washington D.C., and manages the gigantic floodwalls and public engineering systems necessary to stave off the Atlantic megatsunamis). As a result, while states remain the basic building blocks of American federalism, more than a third of Americans live in military or administrative districts run by technocrats rather than by elected state governments.

The elected side of the U.S. federal government would be largely familiar to any American of the last several centuries. It consists of a bicameral legislature and the President. The lower house is the House of Representatives, comprised of 435 members elected from equipopulational single-member districts across the country. Under the 2070 Constitution, House districts are no longer apportioned among the several states or drawn by state legislatures, but are instead set by the United States Electoral Commission, a part of the Establishment. The new districts often cross state lines in order to reflect communities of interest like metropolitan areas. The Senate consists of two directly elected senators from each state, plus six elected by the homesteaders of the Heartland Recovery Administration and twenty elected from the Acela Emergency Management Administration; military districts are denied representation in the Senate until martial law is lifted. Finally, the President is directly elected by popular vote, using a two-stage runoff system until one candidate secures an absolute majority. The Electoral College, blamed by many for the collapse of American democracy, was abolished in 2070. The President has primary responsibility for setting foreign policy objectives, while congressional legislation is required to set domestic policy objectives or appropriate funds for a particular purpose.

But in practice, neither Congress nor the President can specify exactly how their policy objectives are to be carried out. That is because the actual execution of government policy is entrusted to the Establishment: a catch-all term for the civil service, professional administrators, military officers, and federal judges whom the 2070 Constitution insulates from political control. Neither Congress nor the President can hire or fire any civil servant, military officer, or judge; personnel decisions are made internally by the various government departments, by the various armed forces, and by the Judicial Conference of the United States (which is composed of all sitting federal judges). Establishment technocrats can be removed only by impeachment, which requires a two-thirds vote of both houses and presidential approval - and even then, the political branches do not get to select a replacement. The Establishment's autonomy extends to the very top of the hierarchy: the Secretary of State is chosen by the State Department itself through a vote of undersecretaries, for example, and Supreme Court justices are appointed by a vote of the Judicial Conference. This sets up a careful balance of power: Congress can veto the Establishment by refusing to fund its priorities, but the technocrats can also veto Congress by refusing to use those funds as Congress desires. The system is designed to check populism without creating a dictatorship of the experts. The federal courts - which are technically part of the Establishment but consider themselves neutral umpires - police that balance, resolving disputes between elected and permanent officials by reference to the overarching principle that policy objectives are the realm of Congress and the President, while policy implementation belongs to the Establishment.

The Establishment has both virtues and vices. It is genuinely meritocratic, the natural home of America's best and brightest. Before the Reckoning was even over, the new U.S. government guaranteed tuition-free higher education at any university to any student who qualified academically. Academic success in university, in turn, is the most important qualification to pass the rigorous entrance exams for the civil service, military officer corps, or legal profession, and thereby to join the Establishment. Because it draws from this egalitarian educational system, the Establishment is a fairly representative cross-section of America: evenly divided between men and women, and with most racial groups represented in proportion to their share of the population. But in other ways, the Establishment remains a distinct caste, with a powerful professional culture imprinted upon all its members. These experts see themselves as both saviors and servants of their country, called to the sacred vocation of protecting America from climate catastrophe, foreign threats, and the worst impulses of its own people. They value pragmatism, competence, self-effacement, cooperation, compromise, efficiency, data, and results. They are allergic to extreme ideologies, conspiracy theories, ignorance, naivete, self-aggrandizement, and cruelty. They are more prosperous than most Americans but far from wealthy, and they are scrupulously nonpartisan; it violates professional norms even to vote. They are, above all else, public servants.

The Establishment also has certain vices. While it is remarkably resistant to traditional corruption - to take a bribe would be the ultimate betrayal of one's identity as a public servant - it is starkly vulnerable to influence from the private sector. The "revolving door" between major American companies and Establishment strongholds like the National Production Board means that available resources are often assigned based on senior civil servants' loyalty to particular corporations. Many officials leave public service to find that loyalty rewarded with richly compensated corporate board positions. Conversely, the Establishment's deep commitment to its role as the nation's guide and guardian often veers into sanctimonious arrogance: after all, if America needs technocrats in order to save it from Americans, then what does the Establishment have to learn from anyone outside its ranks?

The political branches have their own difficulties. America has two major, centrist political parties: the National Union Party, or NUP, and the Constitutionalist Party. These do not fit easily on the left-right spectrum. They emerged out of the debate over the 2070 Constitution itself: the NUP supported the new system, and is broadly sympathetic to greater technocratic influence, while the Constitutionalists supported the 1787 Constitution and a more traditional democratic system. Both parties are just 21 years old, and they are still developing their identities and platforms. The Constitutionalists include both a libertarian wing and a strongly progressive faction committed to racial justice; the NUP is an odd coalition of pragmatic militarists with little sympathy for democracy, and idealistic environmentalists determined to build a more sustainable America.

But both parties are fully, unquestionably committed to the political process and the peaceful transfer of power. The same cannot be said of the two smaller U.S. parties: the Green Party and the America First Party. Both are regional parties: the Greens are strong in the Pacific Northwest and some areas of New England, while America First dominates in Appalachia and the Rockies. Neither accepted the 2070 Constitution by choice; during the Reckoning, both fought to overthrow constitutional government and establish a one-party state, whether along far-left Arcadian lines or far-right nationalist lines. While both parties have since accommodated themselves to the democratic process, it is an open question how sincere or durable their participation is. Though they are too small to wield much power, their presence in Congress is a reminder of the fragility of the new democratic consensus. Many fear that the Greens and America First are one major crisis away from turning back from the ballot to the bullet.

Even now, though, the American government retains some inspiring features. One is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a body run by the Establishment but staffed by people of all races, colors, creeds, genders, and sexual orientations, who fought for all four major factions during the Reckoning. Since the return of peace, it has achieved the seemingly impossible: negotiating a rough public consensus around America's agonizingly complex history of idealism and oppression. It was the Commission that recommended reparations for slavery, and it was the Commission's enormous prestige that convinced Congress to make that recommendation a reality. As President Spinoza once put it, "the Truth and Reconciliation Commission saved truth in America. It made truth possible again. It let us share the same reality."

The other remarkably idealistic element of the U.S. government is the 2070 Constitution itself - and specifically Article I, "Rights and Duties." The U.S. remains committed to an extraordinarily broad vision of free speech and free expression - hence the presence in Congress of parties that still, in principle, call for the overthrow of the government. The Constitution's antidiscrimination provisions are expansive and uncompromising, and Article I extends robust rights to criminal defendants even in the special tribunals of military districts. But perhaps most importantly, Article I enumerates positive rights as well as negative rights: every American has the right to an education, food, housing, a livable environment, and a job. Many of the post-Reckoning government's most dramatic and successful initiatives were launched precisely in order to satisfy those obligations, from Guaranteed Minimum Nutrition to the Emergency Manpower Commission. The Constitution's idealistic spirit of audacious progress in the midst of crisis is perhaps best expressed in its opening sentence. Written at a time when thousands of Americans were dying each day from starvation, violence, and disease, it reads: "We are still seeking a more perfect Union."

---

Geography, Demographics, Culture

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1861

The geography of America in 2095 would likely be relatively familiar to a visitor from a century ago. It has required an almost unimaginable expenditure of treasure and labor to maintain this continuity. The demographics and culture of America would also likely be familiar to a visitor from 1995, and that continuity has cost the nation decades of dysfunction and hundreds of thousands of lives. As the U.S. looks forward from the Reckoning, it is a new common culture - forged in fire, and defined by a common purpose - that provides its unity. The United States seeks to transcend and not to recapitulate its bloody past.

Geographically, the United States is defined by eight regions.

• The Acela Corridor covers the region from Washington, D.C., to Boston: a single titanic megacity of 190 million people, encompassing virtually all of the coastal Northeast. Today, the Acela Corridor has been removed from state jurisdiction and placed under the authority of the Acela Emergency Management Administration, or AEMA. It is an urban landscape defined by central planning - a zone of endless housing blocks and elevated bullet trains and glowing neon, a landscape from the cyberpunk fantasies of a century ago - over which the Acela Seawall looms as a constant presence: 70 feet high, 25 feet thick, and almost 700 miles long. It is visible for miles from everywhere in coastal Acela, and is the only thing that keeps the region habitable in the face of annual megatsunamis. Seven million otherwise jobless Americans work on maintaining the wall every year.
  
  
• The Southeast has suffered in the last century. Its coastal areas have been ravaged by hurricanes and tsunamis to the point of uninhabitability - New Orleans was abandoned in 2066, and the Everglades have been flooded so many times that they have reverted to a lawless swamp. Inland cities have thrived, though summer temperatures are now high enough to kill dozens per year from heatstroke alone. The region was also devastated by most of the Reckoning's fiercest fighting, which saw cities like Atlanta and Charlotte besieged for years and shelled into moonscapes. Southerners remember exactly which side their neighbors were on, and tit-for-tat revenge killings continue occasionally to this day. In the former states of Alabama and Mississippi, the war is not even exactly over: those states are still subsumed within the Third Military District, and federal agents and soldiers hunt down the few remaining nationalist gangs.
  
  
• Appalachia is the poorest region of America, as it has been for nearly a century, but its fortunes are on the mend. Climate change has turned the mountains into the last truly comfortable and safe area of the eastern U.S.: they are too far inland for megatsunamis, too mountainous for drought, too high in elevation for lethal heat. Much of Appalachia has, in fact, become strikingly beautiful as the local climate warms: a zone of temperate rain forests and waterfalls. After almost a century of economic decline following the closure of its coal mines, Appalachia has seen an influx of educated climate migrants, who have established important high-tech centers in Asheville, Pittsburgh, Chattanooga, and Binghamton. This has elevated cultural and political tensions between the wealthy newcomers and the still-poor natives, who mostly fought for America First during the Reckoning.
  
  
• The Great Lakes states have dodged the worst effects of climate change: far from rising sea levels, sheltered from desertification by their hillier topography, and located near one of the world's largest reserves of fresh water, these states have reclaimed their old status as the industrial heart of the nation. If anything, climate change has been a boon: the famously cold winters of Michigan and Wisconsin have turned mild, and farmers in southern Ohio and Indiana can now grow oranges and lemons. The great industrial cities - Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis - are linked by high-speed rail and are the site of most of America's most innovative and advanced manufacturing. The Great Lakes region saw fierce fighting during the early Reckoning, but mostly rallied behind the Cincinnati after the Provisional Government's coup, and so has been at peace since 2067. The scars of war have mostly faded.
  
  
• The Great Plains no longer exist, though Americans still use the name as an ironic shorthand for the vast flat dryland at the center of their continent. Today, that region is an enormous expanse of badlands stretching from Tulsa to Fargo: a landscape of bare baked earth, dry wadis and parched rock outcroppings, to which stunted ironwood trees and tumbleweeds still cling. The entire region is governed by the Heartland Recovery Administration, which directly owns all the water remaining beneath the desert: in return for the right to use this water, farmers must adopt the HRA's strict desert-farming systems, and then sell their crops directly back to the Administration. Sorghum, alfalfa, dates, and other drought-resistant crops have become essential to the American diet, and the desert homesteader - clawing a living from the dust - has become a potent symbol of American resilience. The Great Plains are the one place left in America where a man with no employable skills can find free land and a chance at self-sufficiency, if only he will labor to make the desert bloom.
  
  
• The Southwest states faced water shortages as early as the 2020s, well before the full climate crisis arrived; today, decades after the Colorado River ran dry, they are largely reliant upon desalinated seawater pumped from the West Coast. They have become the most Arcadian region of the country, a desert landscape of homes with their own rain catchment systems and solar panels and windmills, where people live in harmony with the parched landscape. The Southwest remains defined by its Mexican heritage and by the problem of the Mexican border, which is still a magnet for climate migrants fleeing chaos in Equatorial America; nevertheless, it is a majority Latino region where Spanish is used as commonly as English in every field of life. Its major industry is energy: massive solar farms produce much of the electricity that powers the industrial Great Lakes.
  
  
• The Rocky Mountains are still the most sparsely populated region of the Continental U.S., and their elevation means that they have been spared the worst effects of climate change. Here, on the high plateaus and ridges, is the last good grazing land in America; here is where most of the country's remaining livestock are raised. The population has swelled with refugees from the Great Plains and the West Coast, but the vastness of the mountains still dwarfs the human presence; only Denver, the "Mile High City," is a real urban center. The region mostly supported America First during the Reckoning, though Denver was the regional headquarters of the Resistance and remains the national headquarters of the Constitutionalist Party. By contrast, the states of Wyoming and Idaho are still under martial law, replaced by the Fifth Military District - albeit that actual violence in that district is less common than armed tax evasion and utilities fraud.
  
  
• The West Coast has suffered grievously in the last century. Compared to the Northeast, extreme megatsunamis have remained relatively rare, and so no giant seawall protects the cities of the Pacific Coast; the result is that when storms do slam the West Coast, as happens about twice per decade, the devastation can be terrible. Freshwater shortages that crippled California agriculture at midcentury have been addressed by the nation's largest desalination infrastructure, which has kept California the breadbasket of the country. Further north, Washington and Oregon even retain substantial areas of temperate forest and grasslands, which allows them to maintain logging and livestock industries. And Los Angeles remains the center of American media. The largest industry on the West Coast, however, has become the military: it is from the West Coast that the United States prepares to challenge Chinese global dominance, and most of its military buildup is concentrated there.
  
  
• The last major American region is OCONUS: regions Outside the CONtinental U.S. The two OCONUS states are Alaska and Hawaii, both of which have survived the century quite well. Alaska weathered the exhaustion of its oil wealth by turning itself into a breadbasket of wheat and rye as its climate warmed. Hawaiians elected a series of Green Party leaders, retreated from coastal cities that could not be protected from rising sea levels, and resettled toward the center of their islands in beautiful eco-cities that merged with the surrounding jungle. Hawaii remains a major tourist destination for the American upper and middle classes. Other islands have been less fortunate: Puerto Rico, hammered by hurricanes and by refugees from Central America, is a dystopian martial-law zone described by some journalists as a giant open-air prison. And most of America's Pacific islands have simply ceased to exist, swallowed by rising sea levels; the exception is the Guam Arcology, a man-made fortress island that stands as the furthest outpost of American influence in the Chinese Pacific.

Beyond these regional divisions, Americans remain divided by race, religion, income, education, and health - as well as by their cultural values. Crucially, no racial group in America now commands a majority, or even a secure plurality. Of the country's 571 million people, 34 percent are non-Hispanic white; 27 percent are Hispanic; 18 percent are Asian; 17 percent are Black. Framed differently, mixed-race people are by far the largest "race" in America: accounting for almost 40 percent of the population. Especially in the aftermath of the Reckoning, which in many parts of the country was essentially a race war, the country's long tradition of racial separation has begun to break down.

A similar dynamic pertains to religion. Roughly 35 percent of Americans have no religion at all; another 15 percent describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. But half of Americans still identify with a faith tradition. The largest group are Roman Catholics, and Catholicism is strongly correlated with Latino identity. But Protestants remain a significant minority, and the Protestant religion has become an important source of interracial solidarity among whites, Blacks, and Asians. A similar process has affected other religions: the blurring of America's ethnic boundaries has made religious communities more open and diverse. While most Hindus remain ethnically Indian, for example, there are now many second-generation white or Chinese Hindus; while most Jews are of European or Middle Eastern descent, Black and Latino Jews are far from uncommon; while most Muslims are of Middle Eastern or African extraction, more than a third of American Muslims are white. In each religion, there is an extreme fringe - often a violent fringe - that resists the cultural pluralization of America's faith communities. But as a general rule, religious communities have become more tolerant and inclusive in proportion to the increasing racial and cultural diversity of their membership.

Barriers of class have proved more resilient. America remains a society stratified by socioeconomic status - though perhaps no more than it was in the 2020s. About sixty percent of Americans are working-class. The majority of these cycle through various dead-end jobs in the service industry, racing the rising tide of automation from store to bar to cafe. But some work in agriculture: the Heartland Recovery Administration has midwifed a new class of desert homesteaders, who work the land directly and sell their crops to the government. Others serve in the enlisted ranks of the armed forces, which provide a rigidly structured but nevertheless secure standard of living. Thirty percent of Americans are middle-class. They include the highly skilled engineers who dominate the industrial workforce; the military officer corps; the legions of administrators and schoolteachers who staff state and local governments; and most traditional professionals like doctors, lawyers, and clergy. More than half of middle-class Americans work in the public sector, and while their standard of living is far from luxurious, it is blessedly secure. Finally, ten percent of Americans belong to the upper classes. This American elite is mostly a managerial class of senior civil servants and corporate executives and attorneys; its members are divided more or less evenly between the public sector and the private sector, and they move frequently from positions in government to roles in private business and back.

Class in America is correlated with income, but the U.S. is less economically polarized than many developed countries: high income taxes and strong welfare programs serve to prevent extremes of wealth and poverty, and most American elites regard this redistribution as a fair price to pay for social stability. Rather, class is correlated with stark inequalities in education and health. Educational success is the single best predictor of class, and while American universities are tuition-free, they accept only a limited number of students - selected through a grueling applications process. In consequence, while the middle and upper classes are diverse in their origins, they are united by the intensity of their educational experience: they have all learned to conform to the model of academic success in modern America. That acculturation gives America's economic "winners" a shared class identity, grounded in the hoary cliches of the Protestant work ethic: they work hard, live modestly, save money rather than spending it, prefer study and travel, and avoid overt displays of emotion. This self-disciplined rationality, it turns out, is ideal for people who spend most of their workday interfacing with AI. America's working class, by contrast, consists almost entirely of those who washed out of the university application process. They derive meaning and value not from education or from employment, but from a variety of other sources. Some leave for the Great Plains, and claim the self-respect of a homesteader; others define themselves through their service in the Reckoning, which still earns honor from Americans of all classes. Relatively few working-class Americans are truly destitute, but they live in a society that connects honor with education; for Americans without that education, the search for respect and recognition remains a pressing concern.

Class is also correlated with health inequalities. For two generations, America's educated elite has invested in genetic medicine for themselves and for their unborn children, customizing the genome of their offspring to maximize intellect, good looks, and health. That genetic modification has been minimally available to the middle class, and unavailable entirely to the lower classes. As a result, while America has few extremes of wealth and poverty, class inequality has sunk its claws into Americans' literal DNA. The richest ten percent of Americans are taller, better-looking, more athletic, and more intelligent than all but a few of the poorest fifty percent. Genetic engineering gives the children of the elite the ultimate head start in the "meritocratic" competition for education and economic opportunities. For the American middle class, the experience of competing against people who were genetically designed to be superior has bred both a deep sense of inferiority, and a ferocious belief that hard work can overcome mere inborn talent. Hollywood holos and vids are full of underdog stories that reflect this very idea. For America's working classes, by contrast, genetic medicine is far out of reach and cybernetics are an ordinary part of life: sometimes necessary for employment, sometimes compensating for health problems resulting from polluted environments or unbearable heat. Despite strong public healthcare and welfare systems, the U.S. displays a widening gap in the life expectancy of the rich and the poor - simply because the wealthy have been designed in the womb to avoid cancer and heart disease, and the poor have not been.

Notwithstanding this stark divide between rich and poor, the deepest divisions in American society are still regional - not economic. The country remains more a federation of different cultures than a single nation. America's cultures and subcultures overlap in complex ways; some are associated with areas of the country, for example, while others are associated with urban or rural traditions. Atlanta, Georgia is both a deeply Southern city - with the greater religiosity and the tradition of politeness that characterize Southern culture - and a deeply urban society, with the competitive spirit and the welcoming attitude toward diversity that characterize American cities. Americans can still usually place each other's areas of origin, based on cultural cues, within a few minutes of meeting one another. This cultural diversity reflects some real and very meaningful disagreements among Americans over what constitutes a good life, and about what values government should reflect. There are still many Christians who feel that government policy, at least at the state or local level, should reflect Christian doctrine; there are still many rural Americans who feel that the federal government should simply avoid meddling in their lives at all.

In most of the country, cultural and political conflicts are deeply informed by the painful memory of the Reckoning. Most adult Americans lived through the Reckoning; many fought in it. The country is composed almost entirely of people who were bitter enemies twenty years ago, and who are still learning to be neighbors again. Several states are governed by parties - America First and the Greens - that were recently in open rebellion, and whose loyalty to the Union remains open to reasonable question. All of this means that cultural divisions have obvious, life-and-death stakes. The memory of the Reckoning tends to keep cultural resentments tamped down, simmering below the surface, because nobody wants to reopen old wounds; there are strong social pressures to keep one's mouth shut about sensitive disagreements, to live and let live. When those pressure fail, and cultural conflicts boil into the open, they become viscerally painful - because for every American, these are questions over which their friends and family members fought and died. There are no abstract disagreements, no disputes "in principle." Everything is personal.

Despite those cultural scars, though, the Reckoning actually created a more unified American society - perhaps than ever before. This is not necessarily a single American culture, in the traditional sense; but it is a single American common life, defined by broadly shared institutions and priorities. The old media ecosystem, designed to amplify cultural and political divisions rather than to transcend them, died with Wexler's purges and the iron control of the Provisional Government. It has been replaced by a much more civic-minded system of broadcast and online news. News and entertainment figures can now be held civilly liable for "stochastic terrorism": if they indirectly incite violence, the victims of that violence can sue them for billions of dollars. The result has been a largely self-regulating media ecosystem, in which inflammatory figures either moderate their rhetoric or go bankrupt. Other national institutions also play key roles in instilling a sense of common purpose. For example, America's top universities create class stratification but bridge cultural divides, instilling a common set of professional values. And the American military, heir to forces that fought on all four sides of the Reckoning, instills in all its members a deep commitment to resolving the country's differences by the ballot rather than the bullet.

Ultimately, paradoxically, it is the shared experience of the Reckoning itself that gives American society its shared foundation. Though that experience makes the country's divisions deeply personal, it also instills in most Americans an equally personal commitment to peaceful coexistence. Nobody, no matter which side they fought on, wants to go back to the horrors of civil war. The experience of those horrors gives all Americans a shared sense of self: they are a people forged in fire, who have survived atrocities and starvation and come back together anyway. They have suffered enough that they now fear little, and they face the world with a confident appreciation of their own capacity for sacrifice and endurance. Americans, in short, know that they are tough as nails. And for all their remaining disagreements, they share something else, too: a commitment to making the future better than the past, a belief that all the killing should not have been for nothing. Americans understand that their nation has, in some sense, been reborn; that it is young again; that it can be rebuilt from the ashes. The Reckoning, for all its horrors, was a great and terrible cultural catharsis: a violent exorcism of demons that have stalked the nation since its founding. Now, in the aftermath of that exorcism, it is easy to believe that all things are possible.

Americans are united, then, by the rarest of values in the world of 2095: as they face a civilization on the brink of collapse, they find their unity in hope.

---

2095: REQUIEM 2095; an application

[Union Princes]

Tag, considering apping as either France that fallen to far right nationalism and Euroskepticism or a rump state South Africa

[Reverend Norv]

Tag, considering apping as either France that fallen to far right nationalism and Euroskepticism or a rump state South Africa

Either would be an interesting addition. Glad to have you!

[Sao Nova Europa]

RESERVATION
Name of Regime: Mining Facility of Anderson Corporation on Vesta
Territory Reserved: Vesta

[Catalaonia]

RESERVATION
Name of Regime: Union of England, Scotland and Wales
Territory Reserved: England, Scotland and Wales

Although I was gonna go for a libertarian England, I think I'm gonna change to an eco-Syndicalist union between England, Scotland and Wales.

[Reverend Norv]

RESERVATION
Name of Regime: Mining Facility of Anderson Corporation on Vesta
Territory Reserved: Vesta

Reservation noted. We've discussed this beforehand, but I want to make clear for other players that applications in space will not generally be allowed, and even this one will be limited to just a few hundred people.

RESERVATION
Name of Regime: Union of England, Scotland and Wales
Territory Reserved: England, Scotland and Wales

Although I was gonna go for a libertarian England, I think I'm gonna change to an eco-Syndicalist union between England, Scotland and Wales.

Reservation noted! You might end up with an interesting neighbor if UP's France idea comes to fruition.

[G-Tech Corporation]

Finally, some good fucking food.

RESERVATION
Name of Regime: The Freehold of Polaris
Territory Reserved: Antarctica, suboceanic territories south of Tristan da Cunha, the Kerguelen Islands, and Tubuai

[Reverend Norv]

Finally, some good fucking food.

RESERVATION
Name of Regime: The Freehold of Polaris
Territory Reserved: Antarctica, suboceanic territories south of Tristan da Cunha, the Kerguelen Islands, and Tubuai

You are most welcome. Reservation noted; I look forward to seeing the return of this concept.

[Wheath]

G-Tech's applying and California is militarizing? This'll make a fun read!

How long did it take for you (Norv) to draft this? It looks so cool, definitely way over my level.

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Tag, considering apping as either France that fallen to far right nationalism and Euroskepticism or a rump state South Africa

I was gunning for a united (western) European federation that has gone fully into far-right ethno-nationalism. That would claim a lot of territory, of course, so it is a bit greedy of me.

[Reverend Norv]

Tag, considering apping as either France that fallen to far right nationalism and Euroskepticism or a rump state South Africa

I was gunning for a united (western) European federation that has gone fully into far-right ethno-nationalism. That would claim a lot of territory, of course, so it is a bit greedy of me.

Well, perhaps UP would be willing to run his South African idea instead? Alternatively, if your notion was a federation and UP's vision of France is compatible with your vision of that federation, then perhaps he could assume the role of the French state within that larger federation. In RPs like this, it is often interesting to have players interacting as different types of overlapping sovereigns. In either case, we can make sure there is a place for you.

[Reverend Norv]

G-Tech's applying and California is militarizing? This'll make a fun read!

How long did it take for you (Norv) to draft this? It looks so cool, definitely way over my level.

About a week, though I should note - as does the OP itself - that it's heavily inspired by two previous RPs run by Plzen. My app is lifted almost wholesale from the first of those, back in 2020 - I could not possibly have written that entire encyclopedia entry in a single week. Still - I appreciate the compliment!

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

I was gunning for a united (western) European federation that has gone fully into far-right ethno-nationalism. That would claim a lot of territory, of course, so it is a bit greedy of me.

Well, perhaps UP would be willing to run his South African idea instead? Alternatively, if your notion was a federation and UP's vision of France is compatible with your vision of that federation, then perhaps he could assume the role of the French state within that larger federation. In RPs like this, it is often interesting to have players interacting as different types of overlapping sovereigns. In either case, we can make sure there is a place for you.

I was indeed looking at a federation. I am happy either way, because the world you created allows for so many options. But wanting to write about what I know (and fear, and hope) has drawn me to Europe.

[Reverend Norv]

Well, perhaps UP would be willing to run his South African idea instead? Alternatively, if your notion was a federation and UP's vision of France is compatible with your vision of that federation, then perhaps he could assume the role of the French state within that larger federation. In RPs like this, it is often interesting to have players interacting as different types of overlapping sovereigns. In either case, we can make sure there is a place for you.

I was indeed looking at a federation. I am happy either way, because the world you created allows for so many options. But wanting to write about what I know (and fear, and hope) has drawn me to Europe.

I certainly understand that impulse; the US serves a similar psychodramatic role for me, in this RP. The history I envisioned is a way for me to take a hard look at where my country sometimes seems to be headed, and to imagine some frail hope on the far side of it - or, at least, a measure of redemption. We'll figure out a way for you to take on Europe.

[Union Princes]

So far for France, I have imagined that the failure of US democratic system and the dissolution of NATO, that the French National Front made a resurgence in popularity among the conservative and far right. Although, France didn't suffer a Reckoning like the US, France degenerated into a One Party Authoritarian Democracy where the French National People's Party enjoyed a 50 year political domination.

A platform of anti-Muslim, ethnonationalism, militarism and catholic fascism, corporatism, and withdrawing from the EU. Despite it's autocratic democracy, Paris will still maintain relations with the US Federal government

[Reverend Norv]

So far for France, I have imagined that the failure of US democratic system and the dissolution of NATO, that the French National Front made a resurgence in popularity among the conservative and far right. Although, France didn't suffer a Reckoning like the US, France degenerated into a One Party Authoritarian Democracy where the French National People's Party enjoyed a 50 year political domination.

A platform of anti-Muslim, ethnonationalism, militarism and catholic fascism, corporatism, and withdrawing from the EU. Despite it's autocratic democracy, Paris will still maintain relations with the US Federal government

Would it make sense to imagine a France of that sort remaining in - or rejoining - some sort of federation of Western European countries based on the same or similar ideas? In other words, do you think your concept can be aligned with GCCS' idea?

[Monfrox]

What about a mercenary outlaw state doing shady shit to make a living while sowing seeds of dissent to ensure future business propositions

[Union Princes]

Would it make sense to imagine a France of that sort remaining in - or rejoining - some sort of federation of Western European countries based on the same or similar ideas? In other words, do you think your concept can be aligned with GCCS' idea?

Most likely, since I imagine it would be difficult to withdraw from the EU after being integrated for so long. France can be negotiated to stay with some compromises, especially when it comes to maintaining cultural independence and military autonomy

[Reverend Norv]

What about a mercenary outlaw state doing shady shit to make a living while sowing seeds of dissent to ensure future business propositions

Sounds entirely plausible, given the setting. Take a read-through of the OP and my app - your state/corporation would likely have had a role in the Reckoning - and have at it.

Would it make sense to imagine a France of that sort remaining in - or rejoining - some sort of federation of Western European countries based on the same or similar ideas? In other words, do you think your concept can be aligned with GCCS' idea?

Most likely, since I imagine it would be difficult to withdraw from the EU after being integrated for so long. France can be negotiated to stay with some compromises, especially when it comes to maintaining cultural independence and military autonomy

Excellent. Let's you, me, and GCCS work out the details, as long as that works for James.

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

THE FEDERATION OF FREE EUROPA
Foederatio Liberae Europae
Der Bund des Freien Europa
La Fédération de l'Europa Libre
La Federación de la Europa libre
De Bond van het Vrije Europa
La Federazione dell'Europa Libera

Single-party Federative Unicameral Republic with a Legalist outlook
[With some Revolutionary-outlook institutions]

---

A history of Europe after 1945
Europe in 1945 smells like smouldering wood, cordite and the deep stench of human decomposition. Over the span of twelve years and two months, to the day, Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP turned Germany from an uneasy experiment in liberal democracy into a burning heap of rubble and ash, scrubbed clean of much of the potential it had just two decades prior. A thousand different threads of history were woven together into a single tapestry dyed red with the blood of innocents and murderers alike. Their mutual silence marking the disappearance of millions of lives as well as the accountibility for those losses. And when the dust settled, a new struggle grabbed the continent by the throat so fast that it had no time to take stock, to fully appreciate the monumentality of the past events. For those who had built the rockets bound for London now had to build rockets bound for the Moon and Moscow. Those who made jets for the Luftwaffe now made jets for the RAF. Those who had manned the guard towers at the concentration camps now had to man the guard towards at the Iron Curtain. Only a few ever saw their date in court; only the most unrepentant Nazis were turned into examples. Others, like Adolf Heusinger, were given NATO tanks to defend Europe against the Sovjet Union.

Europe, of course, was no stranger to crimes, and certainly not to them being washed from history. The rehabilitation of Europe relied on the quick rehabilitation of their own conduct on what they called their 'colonial possessions'. With significant US prodding, it dawned on the continent that maintaining order at bayonet point in the colonies was financially unsustainable, and that it had been for quite some time. Companies that relied on colonial exploitation had already made the calculation: free trade with former colonies, with governments that were made to rely on foreign aid, was just as beneficial as direct intervention from the home country, while allowing the tax burden of maintaining a colonial empire to be dropped; a burden that was projected to grow ever-bigger if colonial possessions were to take the anti-imperialist propaganda of the Second World War to heart and brought it into practice. Thus, colonial ties developed into strong economic ties, with little changing for many of the companies that had benefited from those colonial possessions in the first place. And when independence was actually effecuated, like it was in Iran, it was easy for the new western alliance to apply just enough pressure to bring them back in line.

Of course, Europe had its own projects ongoing. Apart from the strong moral imperative to avoid a future war, the realities were also economic. Europe could not carry the burden of another war, or face the threat that internal instability might lead to more influence from the Soviet Union. Thus, a strong economic union was created, which would both through economic cooperation limit the threat of a new European war while also ensuring that the ties between former colonies and their former overlords were beneficial to the whole continent, not just the nations that had partaken in colonialism in the first place. As it grew unto its own during the late cold war, collecting more and more powers and capabilities for itself, it also became embroiled in the regular politics of its member states. The EU in this era, between 1990 and 2030, can be described as 'hopefully idealistic', concerning itself mostly with the expansion of democratic institutions and liberal ideals, which in their view meant protecting workers' rights and expanding other progressive human rights.

However, as much as it saw itself as elevated above national politics, and inherently a more liberal democratic institution than many countries, the EU was not shielded from national politics; only shielded from public scrutiny by the byzantine structure of its bureaucracy. As the early 21st century progressed, national politics and its idealistic consensus-based constitutional order, came under great stress. The triumvirate of Czechia, Poland, and Hungary blocked much of its teeth, and while publicly opposed to such blatant abuses of power, neoliberal European governments could use such principled opposition when pushing their own agendas, leading for instance to the creation of Frontex and Fortress Europe. During the 2030s, this alliance between the neoliberal and far right governments, as well as their collaboration with corporate power, would signal the beginning of the end for European democracy. How that happened is best explained through the evolution of various European institutions.

Institutions

Protecting Europa
The government of Europa sees itself as a defender of the white identity that, according to them, all Europeans share. They are the Spartans at Thermopalae, holding back the hordes of barbarians trying to destroy European culture and history. This self-made mythology undoubdetly clashes with historical reality, but it informs the language with which Europa clothes itself. It protects European heritage, both from without (through spies and inluence from abroad, through the Great Replacement of the European race by foreign incursion, through economic warfare wrought by lesser nations) and within (through emasculating education, sinister plotting elites, communists and self-hating whites). To understand Europa, and to understand its strict laws on interracial marriage, the strong position of the Catholic Church, the militarised border force and police, one must understand how the government views itself and as a part of what revolution it envisions itself.

Directorate for Trade, Commerce and Employment

Four freedoms underpin the foundation of the European Union: freedom of movement of people, capital, goods and services. While the freedom of movement for people falls strictly under the purview of PHALANX and EFALE and the freedom of movement for capital is the charge of the People's Bank of Europa, the freedom of movement of goods and services is the sole domain of the Directorate for Trade, Commerce and Employment, also known as D-TCE. The Directorate, like most directorates, is a creation under the Federative system, but it traces back a lineage to the European Commission, which had a duty to enforce the four fundamental freedoms. The European Commissions of the 2020s and 2030s were still committed to fighting climate change, although they faced stiff opposition from national governments. With companies like Shell, AirFrance and Vattenfal on the chopping block, not many countries would risk potential financial downturn for something as idealistic as the fight against climate change. Still, the Commission pushed forward, with increasingly byzantine systems with had the task of both reducing fossil fuel use while also ensuring that companies remained as profitable as if they had not done that. The result was a system, in the form of carbon credits, that was both hard and expensive to use while not limiting growth of fossil companies at all. The Commission attempted to fund alternative energy sources, but even all their funds could not outcompete fossil capital.

In 2031, in an attempt to get business leaders on board, the European Commission created the European Business Board; a forum via which the Commission could negotiate directly with important players in the business world. And vice versa, it created a direct line between various business interests and the European Commission. What started out as a plan to bring European business to heel would result in European lobbying gaining direct avenues of access, something civil society organisations could only dream of. In immediate terms, it indeed made EU regulation more 'effective' in a sense. By including European businesses in the deliberation, new legislation could count on the approval of the private sector, thus making enforcement easier. In fact, the EU throughout the forties transitioned to a system wherein it would not legislate as such, but through the threat of regulation forced business to self-regulate, thus smoothing the process. Of course, this came at the price that regulation that was unacceptable to businesses was not passed or faced enormous public criticism and thus became unpractical. This became the undoing of EU climate policy, as reduction in CO2-emissions were redlined in 2038.

Another nail in the coffin of EU climate policy was, paradoxically, peak oil; oil prices reaching their maximum after extraction could not keep up with the growth in demand. While this had been seen by green economists as the point at which renewable energy could compete with non-renewables, and preparations could have been made for this eventuality, this change did not occur. Instead, immediate calls rose for the EU to compensate for inflation in the most direct way possible, which according to the Business Board was simple: subsidies to keep companies most affected by the inflation above water. In what was then a crisis, the EU created a temporary Inflation Reduction Fund that would, in the short term, keep businesses afloat while an economic transition plan was agreed on. That plan never materialised, however, and the Inflation Reduction Fund slowly morphed into the European Economic Welfare Capital to keep businesses afloat indefinitely; a justification being that jobs in those industries had to be protected. In effect, the EEWC made it impossible for renwables to compete. It also made some business too big to fail, even if they had no market reason to exist anymore; their social capital with the EU keeping them going. The EEWC was soon propping up the entire fossil sector.

Apart from propping up fossil capital, the EEWC also kept the European economy afloat throughout the fourties and early fifties. This could be seen as good, were it not that it was only postponing the inevitable. The EEWC ensured that production kept expanding, even if demand was lessening. This bubble was kept intact until 2056, the disaster year. Documents had leaked that oil producer Total earned a majority of its profits from the EEWC. Under public pressure, the EU announced that it would 'review' all EEWC grants, not intending to actually put any pressure on companies. But that did not matter. Total stock collapsed, and the European Central Bank declined to bail out the company on account of their now-public finance sheet. Total collapsed, and as it did the whole EEWC bubble collapsed with it. Royal Dutch Shell, which had come back to Amsterdam for the EEWC fund, toppled too, leading to a collapse of a string of fossil companies and associated banks. With the collapse of the energy sector, inflation skyrocketed too. The EU had purposefully declined to cheapen renewable energy in order to keep its EEWC expenditure as low as possible. With no alternative, energy prices increased tenfold over four months. The climate cost finally caught up with Europe.

The recession itself would last until 2063, but the consequences were felt long after, being one of the movers behind the 2070s move to the Federation model. It led to massive unemployment, inflation, decreased tax income and other economic knock-on effects. After two years of member state incapacity, the European Union acted in 2059 with force. It insituted a Pricing Directive that would limit the rise in prices to a few percentage points per year. At the same time, it limited wages, and introduced the Office of the Labour Mediator, who could make binding decisions in labour disagreements. The directive also banned strike action during the validity of a collective labour agreement, thus in fact giving the Labour Mediator the power to unilaterally ban strike action. This brought the labour unions to heel, and increased the influence of Catholic politicians, who introduced a form of corporatism to the European Union. In essence, however, the Business Board had the most direct access to the Labour Mediator, and thus wages were kept stagnant while prices slowly increased; this increased profits, and would eventually lead to the official end of the recession, but it would do little to curb inflation poverty, and in fact it made it worse.

When the European Federation was formed, the Office of the Labour Mediator, what remianed of the EEWC, and the European Central Bank were combined into one Directorate concerned with economic and labour affairs, and placed under Catholic influence. Much to its chagrin, the national-liberals managed to keep the newly-founded European Confederation of Trade Organisations independent and under their own control. However, it was happy the ECB was included, the government desperately trying to prevent the same debacle as during the Total crisis. Since then, the Directorate has mostly concerned itself with keeping the Federation of Free Europa competitive in the world market by keeping wages low. Together with EFALE it cracks down on illegal trade union activity. While it technically still has the power to set prices, however, this power has been practically abandoned to give room to the market, the power only really being used as a stick to make uncompliant businesses heal and as a protectionist measure against foreign goods.

High Representative Office for Candidate Membership

A subsidiary of the Office of the High Representative, in essence the foreign minister of the Federation, the Office for Candidate Membership deals with so-called 'candidate members'. This concerns mostly the countries that at one point left the European Union and came back, or that joined the EU after 2040. This means that it mostly concerns Eastern Europe and the Balkan States, which have been candidate members for almost half a century. What was once an institution meant to prepare countries for actual membership now exists to keep them in perpetual candicacy. Every candidate member is assigned a Representative, who has to review laws and policy for 'European suitability'.

This can mean anything from budgeting decisions to climate policy or even racial legislation. While not technically being empowered to veto these laws, the Representative can limit investments from the European Federation. Since candidate members are forced to hand over part of their tax income to the Federation, this practically means the Representative can force a country to default, in essence gaining a veto. Some countries have even enshrined this position in law, turning Representatives into de facto colonial governors. This is also their policy goal: the Balkans are seen as a source for extraction, their wealth being poured into Central and Western Europe.

In their endeavors, the Representatives are helped (and some would say guided) by armed PHALANX operatives. In a legalistic way, the European border runs throughout the whole economy of these countries, being partially European and partially not. Many of these countries have had their national militaries demoted to militias or small protection squads, numerically incapable of going toe-to-toe with PHALANX. As the armed wing, however, PHALANX has considerable control over what laws they do and do not enforce, which begs the question whether the High Representative or PHALANX really determines the policy regarding these regions. While it depends per country, PHALANX units in especially Bosnia have been suspected of committing atrocities and operating extermination camps of political prisoners, as well as running black sites outside of EUROPOL jurisdiction, but such reports remain unsubstantiated, if only because the dead don't speak.

Directorate for Data Protection

The Directorate for Data Protection, also known as D-DP, is one of the largest suppositories of personal data in the world. Borne in the 2070s restructuring as a combination between the EU Data Protection Agency, various intelligence gathering bureaus and some EU-funded private AI development firms, its public goal was to combine all knowledge on personal data protection into one agency in order to draft better legislation. In fact, the result was a Directorate that had both the task of creating a central database of available info, and the task of checking whether that info was rightly stored and gathered. Unsurprisingly, the result is a largely unaccountable body that houses an almost complete database of biometric data, financial history and location data of every European citizen, compiled with information freely given by various European companies, including data harvesters, trying to remain on its good side. The surveillance is total and greatly helped by various AI systems that are so complicated that not even their initial designers completely understand how they work; how they scour the internet for data and compile profiles on people from various sources. They only know it works, and that it has been a great benefit to European law enforcement and border control; as the D-DP knows a refugee is planning for the dangerous sea crossing often before that refugee has come to that conclusion themselves.

The data is also shared both ways. Through various public-private partnerships, data mining companies have gained access to the aggregate of data collected by the Directorate, for which they pay handsomely. These companies are usually owned by Templar loyalists and make a lot of money turning over this data to the rest of the private sector. Companies with most interest in data are marketing companies, along with insurance companies, banks, but some private investigation companies are also part of the data sharing scheme. Of course, the most prolific government user of the service is EFALE, which uses especially location data to find people connected to various crimes. The second most prolific user is the Directorate for Media and Information, which uses it to fine-tune propaganda to its consumers. The prevalence of data harvesting is so common as to be normalised, especially in media, where the total and complete surveillance is framed as one of the highest achievements of technology.

PHALANX - European Border Control Agency

The organisation known as FRONTEX, what was once a simple administrative border policing force of the EU, would grow out to become one of its most important and venerated, as well as feared, armed insitutions. From their start in 2004, it was always the intention that FRONTEX would keep unwanted foreigners out of the EU sphere, so that her internal borders could remain unguarded. What would change over time, however, was who was 'unwanted', and who would be counted as 'foreign'. Following the migrant crises of the 2010s and 2020s, FRONTEX became a uniformed policing force, and subsequently an armed border patrol force with its own ships and smallarms. Towards the end of the 2020s, in order to solve the growing 'migrant problem' from Africa and Asia, European nations finally abolished the Dublin System and exchanged it for what would become known as the Budapest System: a unified European migration system that distributed refugees and migrants 'evenly' across member states. FRONTEX would be massively expanded to not only deal with border control, but also to take on new responsibilities as migrantion law enforcers, moddled at least partially on US-ICE.

FRONTEX set up a system of migrant processing facilities throughout Europe that would house migrants for as long as their migration status could not be determined. These same facilities would house migrants that were designated for deportation, and were places throughout Europe, mostly in old surplus prison facilities transferred from national governments. This meant that national governments still had a lot of indirect say in terms of what capacity they would allocate and where that capacity would be located. Both Poland and Hungary transferred old prison facilities far outside population centres in order to keep refugees away from popular perception. As part of the Budapest deal, refugee transportation would happen as clandestinely as possible, using unmarked black and white vehicles for personal transport. On top of that, national governments were given a stiphend for housing refugee populations, which created a whole new avenue for fraud as governments began limiting resources allocated to migrants in order to use the cash influx elsewhere in their national budgets.

It was FRONTEX that would become a focal point of European politics in the 2040s and 2050s, mostly due to an increase in refugees from Asia and Africa. It started with the desertification of Africa and the Levant, moving on when Mesopotamia became almost unlivable and the Sahara desert migrated south at incredible rates. Seasonal famines turned into generational famines as whole countries became incapable of supporting their own populations. And then came the flooding of Bangladesh in the 2050s, which displaced even more people, many of whom travelled to Europe to seek refuge. The response to their arrival was mixed. Communists saw in their arrival 'the hand of capital', which had 'made parts of the world unlivable in order to attract cheap labour' and decided they would not 'play along'. Anarchists welcomed the refugees, sometimes in their own homes. In the right wing camp, large industrialists were happy to have an extra source of cheap labour, but the far right saw in their arrival a threat to European culture. It was here that we see the first beginnings of a pan-European cultural ideology take root beyond internet memes: based on European education that traced a European democratic heritage from ancient Athens to the French revolution, turned into a racial ideology of divine providence.

It would be long, however, before such views would truly enter the political mainstream. The neoliberal parties and the far right could agree on policy, however. Strict immigration rules were beneficial for companies, who could use the threat of deporation to coerce refugees and other migrants. The far right lauded them as a protection of their own ideals. The blame for worsening climate change was put squarely at the feet of China by these groups, who extended that blame to all developing countries. In their view, Europe had tried to avert climate change (a view at odds with reality) and this was what had earned them the bounties of the continent. While social democratic parties disagreed, they were unable to mount much of a counter offensive, partially because this issue was not earning them the votes they thought they needed to combat the right. As such, immigration laws were tightened and the Mediterranean was militarised, with ships under orders to push back migrants trying to get into Europe by boat.

Despite this policy, more and more migrants were still finding their way into Europe. In the 2050s and early 2060s, this resulted in new policy designed to make the best use of migrant labour even before and after they had been processed. The migrant detention facilities were equipped with working facilities. Migrants had to work to earn pocket money, which they could use to file the necessary paperwork to expedite parts of the process. The labour performed in those camps was of a kind that was not really economically viable in Europe, which was made viable by the presence of cheap labour. In order not to upset the free market, companies were called in to have their own facilities, starting a public-private partnership that would last until this day.

This was essentially the status quo until the 2070s, when the European Federation was created. At first, very little actually changed, until the Templar grandmaster Jürgen Karlshoven was appointed to head the organisation. He reformed it, essentially turning it into the armed wing of his Order, placing subordinates into positions of power within FRONTEX, which was remaned PHALANX. By cleverly misusing the way that suspected illegal immigrants were classified within the immigration system, Karlshoven managed to legally open up the migrant camps for regular detention for people 'suspected of migrant status'. This allowed Karlshoven to basically detain anyone and bring them in for questioning. To expedite the process, the regular judicial system had in the 2050s been replaced by a purely administrative system, run by EUROPOL. This administrative system had long turned a blind eye to certain forms of non-direct torture, and when these methods were applied to suspected migrants, the new EFALE hardly bat an eye. The wide-ranging powers to surveil suspected immigrants and their experience came in handy when finding political prisoners, which turned PHALANX into a de facto secret police force; a role it fulfills under the current Federative system.

EFALE - European Federative Agency for Law Enforcement

Once known as 'EUROPOL', the European Federative Agency for Law Enforcement EFALE grew out of what was once a cooperation of European police forces.In the 2020s and 2030s, the cooperation was expanded to deal with cross-border terrorism and drug trade. In this reorganisation a lot of inspiration was taken from the early FBI. Legally, crimes with a cross-border element were designated 'community crimes' over which both national and European investigators had jurisdiction. European investigators, granted a set of their own investigative powers grounded in EU law, would work together with national police without having to worry about national borders or a change in police powers. For countries with low bars to investigative police powers, like the Netherlands, this was perfectly acceptable, while other nations complained. However, with a majority in the European Parliament and the Council, the International Crimes Directive went through without a hitch.

This body slowly accrued more and more powers. Paradoxically, especially in countries that traditionally had very high bars for police investigations, European investigators were more and more used for crimes that only barely met the threshold that crimes be cross-border. Especially for online trafficking, the fact that foreign nationals had access to a service, even if they did not use it, became enough to unlock the powers of the 'European Police' as it was more and more commonly called. This was met with popular approval when this expansion was used to dole out punishment against sex traffickers and pedophiles, as well as local drugs gangs. As soon as this newly-empowered police force became celebrated by centrist liberals, however, they started looking further. The 2030s were rocked by terrorist attacks both by the far right and by eco-terrorist targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. Since most fossil fuel trade was cross-border, and many energy networks had been interlinked, any attack against power grids was automatically seen as a transnational crime. Right-wing attacks, however, even if they had foreign victims, were more easily designated as local crimes, partially because the EU did not want to be seen investigating local political sensitivities; something they apparently did not apply to climate change activists.

This would eventually lead in European lawmakers amending the transnational criterium by adding a list of crimes that fell within EU jurisdiction, regardless of cross-border context. Or, as the lawmakers put it: by expanding EU jurisdiction over crimes that by their nature had an international character, even if that international character was not immediately apparent. The list of course included terrorism and drug trade, but also other crimes that 'threatened the unity of the European community'. Tax and banking fraud were added, for instance, as were certain political crimes that threatened the political stability of a member state. Lawmakers went to far as to design whole new areas of crime, that had before not been part of any national criminal code, especially targeting 'threats to the common market' such as creating monopolies and oligopolies but extending further to possible blockades and strike actions, enthousiastically supported by right wing governments.

Like so many other things, the crisis of the 2070s would speed up the development of EFALE as well. After peak oil and the exhaustion of oil resources in the 60s and 70s, fuel prices began to peak. While this made more sustainable power sources economically viable, it did so by simply making oil so expensive that it no longer was an alternative. Thus, energy prices skyrocketed, and as they did, so did all other prices, creating runaway inflation. The energy prices also caused a series of 'cold winters', during which heating was too expensive for many. The resulting political upheavel reinvigorated support for various anti-establishment parties; in parliament this meant communist parties as well as fascist parties, and outside it meant the growth of anarchist terrorist organisations. The growth in left-wing support in some countries would inform their decision to take measures to alleviate the worst of the recession, often by nationalising key industries. In fear that this development would spread, right-wing European governments formed an anti-leftist coalition in the European Council and the Council of the EU. Both through voter intimidation and suppression, and by changing the system by which their citizens could vote, the European Parliament was fully captured by right-wing parties, who formed a broad coalition with far-right parties in order to stem the tide of socialisation and nationalisation.

What was then still EUROPOL stood at the forefront of this struggle. The Directive for Responsible Government in one fell swoop removed the immunity of government officials from European prosecution in the execution of their functions. In practice, this meant that national policy in violation of European law could trigger criminal prosecution. This was arguably illegal, but any attempt to address that illegality was met with additional prosecution for threatening European unity. The 2070s were a decade of struggle, but over the cause of a few years any leftist influence was removed from the EU. However, the neoliberals that had wielded fascists like a sword were next on the chopping block, and it took only a year for them to be totally removed from power in the European sphere. What was left was basically a junta of high officials, including the EUROPOL executive, which reformed the EU into a 'federation for the defence of the European people and their heritage'.

ECTO - European Confederation of Trade Organisations

A relatively new organisation, ECTO was founded shortly before the founding of the Federation in order to remove opposition to the act. The European trade unions had been the primary enemy of the EU neoliberal order from the beginning, posing more of a threat than social-democratic parties ever could. As such, they were slowly withered down over time. First, their strike actions with international trade effects were limited, limiting their usefulness when dealing with the largest companies. When the EEWC was created, any strike action that would have the result of increasing EEWC aid payments were banned, thus essentially banning strikes in the fossil sector. Without access to their primary weapon, unions either lost more and more membership, of engaged in illegal strikes, which would lead to heavy reprisals from the EU and push them out of business. When it became clear that the EU government would fall to fascist influences, the remaining European trade unions confederated into the ETUC, the European Trade Union Confederation, and threatened strike action. Swiftly, however, the EU retaliated, forcing the ETUC into a few high-profile liability cases. In return for dropping these cases, the ETUC agreed to accept EU-appointed leadership. The ETUC eventually agreed to dissolve as a private entity and have its assets taken over by the newly created ECTO, with a board of directors appointed by a combination of votes by members, votes by the Business Board, and a controlling interest of government representatives. Of course, Templar membership is an important factor.

With a more nationalist-liberal leaning, ECTO is in constant conflict with the more corporatist-Catholic Directorate for Trade, Commerce and Employment. As liberals, ECTO leadership is even more opposed to wage increases than the corporatists. ECTO is also more engrained in worker life, providing cheap European vacations and other leasure activities, as well as providing a part of the unofficial semi-voluntary forced labour force of the Federation. Primarily, ECTO functions as a lightning rod for criticism: the Federation can deflect any cries of 'dictatorship' by pointing at a free and independent union, while it can also blame the union for 'not working hard enough' if citizens feel that their wages are stagnant.

Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon - Knights Templar

The Knights Templar resemble their medieval counterparts in nothing but name. Chosen mainly for aesthetic reasons, the new Templar Order used to be nothing more an a semi-secret social club of far-right intellectuals. They chose the name because, in their view, the Templar Order had been protecting Europe from the scourge of Islam, which ran them afoul of the French king who wanted to ally to the Muslims for his own financial gain. While totally unfounded, this is part of the Forbidden History which forms the foundational belief of the self-proclaimed Knights. The Templars formed out of a collection of various national and international non-parliamentary political groups, all with similar views on history: European greatness was at its zenith under the Roman Empire, which combined its own martial prowess with the wisdom and philosophy of the Greeks and the compassion of the teachings of the Christ. With this combination, the Roman Empire was slated to become a world-conquering superpower, surpassing all other nations. However, outside immigration would eventually dilute the wisdom of the Emperors, who let in more migrants and eventually tore the Empire asunder. And after more than a thousand years of stagnation, when Europe was rising to its greatness again and had truly conquered the whole world, again a series of 'European civil wars' tore it down.

It is no surprise that this group was founded in the 2060s, when xenophobic sentiment in Europe was on its meteoric rise. It was not the only one of such groups, but it was by mere chance perfectly positioned to take on the leading intellectual role of a new international movement. A group with an interesting-sounding name and some wealthy, eccentric backers, which caused them to have slick presentations and which allowed them to be invited on various talk shows as 'historians' and 'philosophers'. The whole continent wanted to know their eccentric ideas, and as their members were pushed out of academia for their unorthodox views, they took on the role of an 'anti-woke' propaganda organisation, earning their money by decrying censorship in academia. This opened their doors for non-academics who had likewise hit the end of the road of their careers due to views incompatible with respectable civil servants and middle managers. They included experts in every possible field, carefully selected to spread their increasingly conspiratory ideology among target demographics, especially among police forces.

Now, the Templars were again by no means the only group doing this, but they did have the right alliances so that by the mid-2060s, their members included most fascist politicians on the continent, a deal that was mutually beneficial by giving the Templars legitimacy which they could use to draw funds into their members' fascist parties. In a sense, the Templars formed a pan-European political party, even though it was more than that. Various other far-right pan-European groups existed, such as the Hoplite Legion (a veterans organisation), the Valkyrie Women's League, the Sons of the 300, Praetorians, Knights of the Ice... All far smaller and less succesful than the Templars and their strict hierarchical organisation, and more importantly all linked through dual membership of their leaders or other key figures. Another boon for the movement was its lack of a strong central figure. The importantly-titled Grand Master of the organisation, its founding leader, was Gérard Mt-Saint-Michél, who was killed in 2064 in a car bombing that left the leadership of the organisation to a 'council of Grand Masters'. The lack of a central leading figure convinced many liberals that the organisation could not be fascist, while also ensuring that power struggles were relatively contained.

The group would rise to sudden prominence in the 2070s. Their allied political group within the European Parliament, the European Heritage Group, had gained a large number of seats in elections, bringing up to parity with more established political groups. The leftist block was still larger than them, but because those were separated into a communist, social democratic and 'unaffiliated' (anarchist-leaning) block, they could not claim a combined majority. This made it politically viable for the European Council to nominate from whatever party they wanted. Ever-increasing pressure from the left, who had formed an alliance to elect a Marxist social democrat to the presidency, made centrist and neoliberal parties so nervous that they were willing to enter into a coalition under the presidency of Rodrigo Fernandez, one of the Grand Masters of the Order and a prominent politician in Spain who had served as Minister of the Interior there. Fernandez appointed his fellow Grand Masters to important positions, both within the European Commission and important executive positions within the European government. With the existing powers of organisations like FRONTEX and EUROPOL, it was not hard for Fernandez to remove most serious political opposition in five years time, so that by the time new elections rolled around, Fernandez felt comfortable to turn it into a referendum on European federalisation under his ideological model. Winning those elections barely, he saw all the mandate he needed to transform the EU into the Federation of Free Europa, with the express purpose of defending the white European race and their destined hegemony.

---

2095: Blood and Iron; an application

[G-Tech Corporation]

Polaris
The United States of Polaris
A Legalist Oligarchy with shades of Revolutionary Nationalism and Liberalism

---

History

The United States of Polaris dates her origin back to the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 and the Antarctic Treaty System which that concord established. At least, that is what the various Great Houses would like their populace to believe. The truth is that without the 2024 Amendments the Astral Continent would likely have remained a wasteland, unsettled and unutilized even as humanity's resources dwindled into obscurity.

Thankfully, from the perspective of both mankind and Polaris, the 2024 Amendments were indeed effected. The Antarctic Treaty System, after operating for over sixty years as a purely scientific endeavor, opened in 2026 for 'ecologically responsible' development of the Astral Continent, and so the so-called "Southern Gold Rush" began. Despite protests in Western Europe and North America, the globalist consensus of the time was certain that the pragmatic development of the untapped resources of Antarctica was vital to support the worldwide transition away from fossil fuel sources, and so the mining and export of newly sited deposits of lithium, thorium, cobalt, and uranium began in earnest - alongside the exploitation of traditionally attested ferrous and bauxitic geologies.

Those companies which managed to swing the lucrative contracts from their various governments saw record-breaking profits, a fact which was decried by Green politicians the world over, but which drummed up little political will for cessation of the endeavor as the manufacturing of lithium-ion energy systems and cobalt-synergistic solar arrays gathered pace in the Global North. From all appearances Antarctica was the goose that laid the golden egg, and by 2032 nearly fifty thousand specialists, logistics experts, scientists, monitoring experts, and corporate personnel called the Astral Continent home.

Then came the Crises of the 30s, and a sustained campaign of eco-terrorism carried out under an umbrella of various organizations. With the political fragmentation and disruptions of both Russia, China, and the United States, much of the oversight and governmental regulation that had been focused on the Treaty System simply dissolved. Corporate security forces used the October Bombing of 2035 as a pretext to begin screening individuals visiting the Astral Continent under their own auspices instead of those of the various governments who nominally claimed the swathes of Antarctic that they were contracted to exploit; these claims were made all the more dubious by the conflicting opinions of the various successor states which had little energy for monitoring entities a world away, far more focused on their own borders and internal security.

Thus it was that the Atlantic Treaty System fell into disuse, though it was never formally dissolved. A series of bilateral agreements between prominent mining consortiums like Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, Glencore, and others, saw the creation of a unified Antarctic Security Directorate, nominally operating under the auspices of the Treaty System, charged with securing the waters of the Southern Ocean and her coasts against agitators from Australia, Brazil, and Argentina who had been launching regular terror campaigns on corporate assets in the region. This Directorate is widely viewed as the last step before the formation of Polaris was inevitable, when the sovereign states of the world could have reigned in the corporate excesses and violations which were to occur in the next few decades. Unfortunately for the planet, the isolationist attitudes of the 40s and the growing migration and climate crises devoured governmental will like nothing since the Great War, and thus though a few diplomatic protests were lodged by conscientious states like Swizerland and the Vatican City, by and large the formation of the Directorate was viewed as a stabilizing force in the region. After all, the uninterrupted flow of valuable metal ores to coastal industrial centers throughout the developed and developing world was a significant source of government income, and supplied the engines of industry necessary to keep at least a semblance of the global economy functional.

As further penetrations were made into the Astral Continent were made in the 40s the corporate and thus human presence in Antarctica only increased; no census was ever taken, but demographic estimates believe nearly two hundred thousand individuals, including the better part of ten thousand private security contractors, could be found across the Directorate by 2044. UN Resolution 44/219 establishing the IAEA Polar Commission, which oversaw the construction of a variety of test-bed breeder reactors and RTG models for the purposes of powering industry and science in the Treaty System, as concerns had been growing internationally about the amount of fossil fuels and nonrenewable resources being consumed for the extraction of Antarctic minerals. These reactors would be the foundation of the widespread use of nuclear power on the Astral continent, and in time the Freehold's atomic weapons program.

Attempts by the foundering American state during the Harkin administration to exert sovereignty over the Astral Continent's American tract (widely seen as an attempt to fill budget holes left by environmental expenditures through taxation of business interests) led to the Declaration of State in 2045, the major turning point for Antarctica. A widely criticized plebiscite of the workers and contractors across the region nominally supported the creation of an independent state, and thus the entire continent nominally became the "United States of Polaris" on September 25th, 2045. The fledgling state was promptly recognized by a wide coterie of African, Asian, and South American national entities - this recognition has been historically attributed to anti-colonial resentments, but more recent historiography focuses on the hand-and-glove relationships many such states already enjoyed with corporate entities strongly represented in the new Polaris government. With little political will for war at the bottom of the world, and the public consensus worldwide tired of globalization's overreaches, no formal conflict occurred save for a desultory and bloodless expulsion of an Argentine military garrison from King George Island.

The last half of the 40s and the early 50s were marked by a dramatic influx of corporate entities to the Astral Continent, and the importation of large numbers of workers alongside this inflow. Polaris conscientiously marketed itself to the world as a state where anyone could do business without the increasingly meddlesome hand of the government engaging in regulatory oversight or corrupt capture - although of course in truth any operations in Polaris required a certain amount of graft to move forward, as those entities already in force on the Astral Continent were oftentimes ill-disposed to allow competitors to flourish alongside their own syndicates. Still, in 2052 moving for work to Antarctica was a not-uncommon social phenomenon for those seeking advancement in an increasingly immobile corporate world, and the profitable realizations when stifling regulations were abrogated through geographic transfer were very attractive to those companies still publicly listed.

This period also saw the development of a nascent but rapidly growing manufacturing industry in the United States, propelled by the importation of a variety of refugees and the decampment of heavy industry from a variety of increasingly unstable states in south Asia and the Near East. Fundamentally, once the conditions existed to allow the ruthless exploitation of labor, mass fabrication in Polaris was a foregone conclusion - instead of shipping metals or raw ores half a world to southern India or China, companies began to take advantage of the lack of environmental regulation and the ready supply of cheap workers from the Global South to onshore manufacturing processes in a human tragedy of rather staggering proportions. The Ministry of Demographic Analysis and Advancement officially estimates that nearly four hundred thousand individuals arrived in Polaris under indefinite labor contracts between 2050 and 2065, and approximately a thousand of those who moved to the Astral Continent under those conditions perished due to industrial accidents or negligence. Human Rights Watch disputes these figures, placing the totals more in the vicinity of six hundred and fifty thousand individuals, and as many as ninety thousand dead or disappeared in the unscrupulous conditions of the first subterranean cities along the Antarctic coasts. The discrepancy between these estimates has yet to be reconciled, but the promises of a better life and social mobility in exchange for hard work, as well as food and housing assured by the sponsoring corporation, continued to draw unemployed skilled and semi-skilled professionals from across the Global South through the 2060s.

The United States of Polaris were one of the chief proponents of UN Resolution 62/117, which altered the definition of territorial waters to include seafloor habitations and constructed islands, alongside island micro-nations who were laboring to protect their interests. Her extensive investment in automated extraction and harsh environment adaptable technologies led to some of the first suboceanic mining operations along the Vernguelen Plateau, and the legal conflicts over the extent of Argentine territorial waters have been ongoing since the first filing in 1968 which has yet to be resolved. Similarly dubious from a historical perspective were her joint treaties with a multitude of South Pacific island nations for the development of their Exclusive Economic Zones in exchange for funding for the wellbeing of their stateless populations, widely decried as 'bargains with the devil' in international media.

As the 70s turned into the 80s continued migration to Polaris began to take on social instead of employment dimensions, with the services needed by the large urban habitation-cities of Antarctica and the traditional trappings of urbanization drawing in professionals from North America and Europe where pay scales were stalling and opportunities for ownership all but nonexistent in post-capitalist rent-seeking economic climates. Strong focuses on and social responses to the harsh climate and unique challenges of the Astral Continent have been cited as reasons for an above average rate of technological innovation and willingness to deal with the hardships of the 70s social turmoil, with individuals interested in peaceful living instead of political turmoil attracted to the apolitical nature of the United States and the continued ability for social advancement with sufficient capital and education. Inflows of semi-skilled and industrial workers are notable for continuing at this time, but seeing increasingly difficult working conditions as capital inflows and investment in high-tech manufacturing displaced such individuals into positions where even the most desperate were loathe to work, such as the algae-harvesters of the Southern Oceans or offshore rigs supporting seafloor mining operations.

Polaris is believed to have tested her first atomic weapon in 2076, based on seismological readings from the MacArthur Trench captured by Australian monitoring equipment and subsequent current sampling for radioisotopes, but formally the United States will neither confirm nor deny the possession of nuclear capabilities. Certainly her enrichment of uranium for use in domestic reactors could allow her to produce weapons quickly, if the state decided such were in her interest, but most military observers believe the Korean Reunification and the ancient Russo-Ukrainian Conflict were formative to a strong pursuit of nuclear capabilities. The launch of the USS Nautilus in 2082 as the first fully submersible aircraft carrier to project force in the notoriously turbulent Southern Ocean and her sister ship, the Intrepid, established Polaris as a power with the ability to impose her will on a regional basis, as did the launch of several satellites from McMurdough Base Aleph in the South Pacific in 2084.

Current political debates in Polaris are focused on the rights and responsibilities of the nation as ecological crises continue to hammer the globe, as well as a large degree of social foment related to what is colloquially referred to as the 'underclass' of United States' society. This underclass is relatively well educated, but with labor fading into irrelevance as Polaris' automation proceeds apace and thus capital begetting capital without input from the worker the role of this under-employed and increasingly marginalized mass of humanity which built Polaris' manufacturing base in the 50s is a political landmine which the Conclave regularly debates but has yet to hit upon any solution for.

---

Government and Politics

The United States of Polaris (commonly called the Freehold) is a federal republic of 11 states, a federal district, and twenty two territories. It is a federal republic and a weighted representative democracy in which, nominally, majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by firm legal precepts. These minority rights have been widely criticized as plutocratic and oligarchic, but are best understood as foundational to Polaris. In 2090 Polaris ranked 89th on the Democracy Index, and is described as a "degenerating democracy". On Transparency International's 2088 Corruption Perceptions Index, its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 86 in 2084 to 83 in 2088.

Polaris is unique in many ways in that it is one of the few republics of the last century to have returned a monarch to power, rather than divesting itself of the last vestiges of the 19th century. The current Emperor of the South is Karl II, of the Imperial House of Habsburg-Lorraine. The position is largely ceremonial, having been created by several of the Great Houses of the Conclave after the Declaration of State in 2045, but wields significant popular and political power in the rare exigencies where the Crown sees fit to interject into the affairs of the Conclave.

The Conclave, or legislative branch, is where the predominance of power in Polaris rests. Members of the Imperial Conclave are known as Senators, and are elected by their parties to serve at the discretion of their patrons. Voting of the plebiscite is done every ten years, with snap elections held commonly more frequently but no less than every fifth year. Voting is done not for candidates, but for parties, of whom the League of Progress and Polaris First comprise the lion's share of the electorate in 2090 (22.8% and 16.1%, respectively). Informally most parties are known to be aligned with a corporate interest or House, and voting is often done by the masses on the basis of benefits distributed by said interests. Voting rights are weighted by tax receipts maintained by the Antarctic Revenue Service, with those who do not pay taxes being accorded a single vote, with additional votes being distributed to individuals based on a logarithmic function of their contributions to the coffers of the state.

A Judicial Branch also exists, which is charged with enforcing the Federal Constitution and criminal justice as a balance on the Conclave.

---

Territory: Polaris composes the entirety of the Antarctic Continent, with a variety of treaty obligations to allow scientific exploration which render particular areas less than fully sovereign. Uniquely amongst nations of the world she also maintains territorial possessions along the various ridges and highlands of the Southern Ocean and the neighboring waters, which extend her claimed EEZ to approximately the 45th Parallel South under UN Resolution 62/117 amending the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Population: As of the most recent census in 2090, Polaris composed 109,826,700 citizens, with 12,915,014 resident aliens and an estimated 2,100,000 residents of no status. The median age of the Polarian population was 32.5 years, with age clustering in immigrant populations being lower than average. In 2090, there were almost 78 million immigrants and Polaris-born children of immigrants in the United States of Polaris, accounting for 63% of the overall population. Polaris has a diverse population; 19 ancestry groups have more than one million members. White Polarians of European or American ancestry, mostly German, Irish, English, South African, Italian, Polish and French, including White Hispanic and Latins from Latin America, form the largest racial group, at 83.1% of the population. Asian-Polarians constitute the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group, and are around 13% of the total population (the three largest Asian ethnic groups are Indonesian, Indian, and Filipino). African Polarians are the country's second-largest racial minority, reflecting recent influxes of migrant workers from sub-Saharan nation-states, particularly Southern Africa.

Social Alignment: Firmly technocratic, in the collectivistic vein of Legalism and Revolutionary Nationalism. Polaris' founding mythos emphasizes the removal of old systems which limit human collective and individual potential, and is notorious for lax regulations on corporate and personal freedoms. There are certainly liberal and arcadian notions and factions within both her society and government, as reflected by her firm embrace of the democratic tradition and the elected monarchy as well as national pride, but progressive technocraticism is the fundamental axiom of her populace. A muddled state, more prone to view men as machine than multifaceted, and yet at an intrinsic level committed to the overall state of mankind more than the single wretched individual.

Development Level: A firmly technological society; unfettered research and development as well as large scale migration inflows have produced a dynamic economy happy to devour the demographics of other states to fuel her own prosperity. Capital begets capital to an extent in Polaris rarely seen elsewhere, a stark transition since the 2070s, and one whose outworkings in Freehold society are still unfolding.

---

Society and Culture

Polaris is a melting pot in every sense of the word, and has the strengths and struggles attendant to such a classification. It deliberately promotes an open visa process for individuals from states around the world who possess economically valuable skills, as well as unskilled individuals willing to take work in unsavory or dangerous sectors of the Polarian economy where automation is either impractical or unprofitable. Polaris is also notable for her generous approach to refugee integration, having taken in notable amounts of expatriates fleeing the Rainbow Revolution in South Africa and the Taiwan Crisis of 2038. On account of her fledgling state and her shallow history, to understand the culture of Polaris is a difficult task - she is far from a homogenous country, with her elites being old monied classes from the Americas and living a far different life to the feed-growers from Sudan and Lebanon who man her factory ships. Wealth inequality is very high, but social mobility is consistently ranked among the top ten nations of the world, and so though social frictions have led to difficulties with terrorist organizations and political protests, a majority of her populace enjoys considerable freedom of speech and robust internal debate as to the course of Polaris in the future.

---

Economy

The United States of Polaris is one of the premier dynamic powerhouses of 2090 - a firm focus on globalization and trade with the Global South has seen her well positioned in terms of both finance and import-export balance. Though initially her economy was heavily dependent on the mass export of the vast mineral and material wealth the Antarctic Continent had to offer, economic destabilizations in the 2070s and the very practical realities of distance to most manufacturing centers led to the onshoring of increasingly skilled and high value industries by multinational corporations. Exports of finished products to the growing states in South America, South Asia, and Africa make up the majority of the Polarian economy, though finance and technology sectors are also significant, as is arms manufacturing. Defense industries in particular have seen a surge in demand in the last decade as the powers of the multipolar world look inward to their own needs for the continuance of internal peace, and moralizing politicians begin to cut back on arms exports to morally dubious regimes. Polaris, in contrast, pursuing as she does a broad policy of non-interference in foreign affairs, is only too happy to provide both armaments and supplies to some of less savory states in the developing and industrialized world. Her industrial sectors rely on automation and cyberneticization more than most other state in 2090, mass immigration having proven insufficient for the needs of her economic development and early experiences with remote labor during the settling of the Astral Continent promoting a culture of the expectation of high productivity from every human worker.

---

Defense

The Emperor is the commander-in-chief of the Polaris Armed Forces and appoints her leaders, the Grand Marshal and the Estates Martial. The Ministry of National Defense, which is headquartered at the White Spar Naval Base near Tsargrad, Palmer Governate, oversees four of the five service branches, which are made up of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Aerospace Force. The Littoral Navy, also a branch of the armed forces, is normally administered by the Ministry of Borders in peacetime and can be transferred to the Ministry of the Navy in wartime. In 2095, all five branches of the Armed Forces reported three hundred fifty thousand personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 3.3 million. The Ministry of National Defense also employed about 400,000 civilians, not including contractors.

Military service in the Freehold is voluntary, although conscription may occur in wartime through the National Service System. Today Polarian forces can be rapidly deployed by the Aerospace Force's large fleet of transport aircraft and suborbital shuttles, the Navy's two active aircraft carrier groups, and the extensive Polarian submersible vehicle fleet. The Aerospace Force can strike targets across the globe through its fleet of strategic bombers, maintains the air defense across the United States, and provides close air support to Army and Marine Corps ground forces. It also operates the United States' Space Surveillance and Missile Warning networks. The military operates about 50 bases and facilities abroad, and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 5 foreign countries.

Polaris is a presumed nuclear weapon state, but pursues a policy of nuclear ambiguity. It is projected to have the world's sixth largest nuclear weapons stockpile, with a strong focus on first strike capabilities and SLBMs utilized in combination with hypersonic delivery systems.

---

2095: Blood and Iron; an application

[Reverend Norv]

UP, GCCS' WIP looks consistent with your concept to me, at least so far. Would you be willing to work with him, building a France within Free Europa as a cooperative project?

If there are issues, let's take this to the Discord and see if we can hash them out in conversation. I want to make this work.

[Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States]

Would it make sense to imagine a France of that sort remaining in - or rejoining - some sort of federation of Western European countries based on the same or similar ideas? In other words, do you think your concept can be aligned with GCCS' idea?

Most likely, since I imagine it would be difficult to withdraw from the EU after being integrated for so long. France can be negotiated to stay with some compromises, especially when it comes to maintaining cultural independence and military autonomy

I can definitely work with this. And it will be interesting: there is not necessarily less devolution of power in an autocratic state, just different ways in which conflicts are resolved. I envision my 'Europa' as being sort of a de facto junta of border control and EUROPOL-descended police force chiefs. This will perhaps be the quagmire: Europa claims to defend a 'white identity' which, of course, does not exist in a place as diverse as Europe. Its claims of cultural homogeneity go against France's claims of cutural superiorty over others. Meanwhile, on many issues, France and Europa will see eye-to-eye, both being fascist institutions.

In fact, I wanted to propose that France stood at the forefront of the development of the EU from a neoliberal institution into a reactionary one.