It was a plane over the outback. FLY RESEUNEAIR, it said.

Verbal Text from:

A QUESTION OF UNION

Union Civics Series: #3

Reseune Educational Publications: 9799-8734-3 approved for 80+

In the years between 2301 and 2351, Expansion was the unquestioned policy of Union: the colonial fervor which had led to the establishment of the original thirteen star stations showed no sign of abating.

The discovery of Cyteen's biological riches and the new technology of jump-space travel brought Cyteen economic self-sufficiency and eventual political independence, not, however, before it had reached outward and established a number of colonies of its own. The fact that Cyteen was founded by people seeking independence from colonial policies of the Earth Company, however, provided a philosophical base important to all Union culture—the idea of a new form of government.

From the time the tensions between Cyteen and the Earth Company they had fled, led to the Company Wars and the Secession, we have to consider Cyteen as one planet within the larger context of Union. Within that context, the desire for independence and the strong belief in local autonomy; and second, the enthusiasm for exploration, trade, and the development of a new frontier—have been the predominant influences. The framers of the Constitution made it a cardinal principle that the Union government will not cross the local threshold, be it a station dock, a gravity well, or a string of stars declaring themselves a political unit within Union—unless there is evidence that the local government does not have the consent of the governed, or unless one unit exits its own area to impose its will on a neighbor. So there can be, and may one day be, many governments within Union, and still only one Union, which maintains what the founders called a consensus of the whole.

It was conceived as a framework able to exist around any local structure, even a non-human one, a framework infinitely adaptable to local situations, in which local rule serves as the check on Union and Union as the check on local rule.

But, in the way of secessions, Union began in conflict. The Company Wars were a severe strain on the new government, and many institutions originated as a direct response to those stresses—among them, the first political parties.

The Expansionist party may be said to have existed from the founding of Union; but as the war with the Earth Company entered its most critical phase, the Centrist movement demanded negotiation and partition of space at Mariner. The Centrists, who had a strong liberal, pacifist and Reunionist leaning in the inception of the organized party, gained in strength rapidly during the last years of the War, and ironically, lost much of that strength as the Treaty of Pell ended the War in a negotiation largely unpopular on the home front. Union became generally more pro-Expansion as enormous numbers of troops returned to the population centers and strained the systems considerably.

From that time the Centrist platform reflected in some part the growing fears that unchecked Expansion and colonization would lead to irredeemable diffusion of human cultures—and, in the belief of some, —to war between human cultures which had arisen with interests enough in common to be rivals and different enough to be enemies.

But except for social scientists such as Pavel Brust, the principal proponent of the Diffusion Theory, the larger number of Centrists were those who stood to be harmed by further colonization, such as starstations which looked to become peripheral to the direction of that expansion, due to accident of position; and the war-years children, who saw themselves locked in a cycle of conflict which they had not chosen.

The Centrists received a considerable boost from two events: first, the peaceful transition within the Alliance from the wartime administration of the Konstantins to that of the Dees, known to be moderates; second, the discovery of a well-developed alien region on the far side of Sol. Sol, sternly rebuffed by the alien Compact, turned back toward human space, and it became a principal tenet of the Centrist Party that a period of stability and consolidation might lead to a reunification of humanity, or at least a period of peace. To certain people troubled by the realization that they were not only not alone, but that they had alien competitors, this seemed the safest course.

In 2389 the Centrists were formally joined by the Abolitionists, who opposed the means by which existing and proposed colonies were designed, some on economic grounds and others on moral grounds ranging from philosophical to religious, denouncing practices from mindwipe to psychsurgery, and calling for an end to the production of azi. Previously the Abolitionists had lacked a public voice, and indeed, were more a cross-section of opposition to the offworld government, including the Citizens for Autonomy, who wished to break up the government and make all worlds and stations independent of central authority; the Committee Against Human Experimentation; the Religious Council; and others, including, without sanction of the official party, the radical Committee of Man, which committed various acts of kidnapping and terrorism aimed at genetics research facilities and government offices.

To those who feared Sol's influence, and those who felt the chance of alien war was minimal, the Centrist agenda seemed a dangerous course: loss of momentum and economic collapse was the Expansionist fear. And at the head of the new Expansionist movement was a coalition of various interests, prominent among whom, as scientist, philosopher and political figure, was Ariane Emory.

Her murder in 2404 touched off a furor mostly directed at the Abolitionists, but the Centrist coalition broke under the assault.

What followed was a period of retrenchment, reorganization, and realignment, until the discovery in 2412 of the Gehenna plot and the subsequent investigations of culpability gave the Centrists a cause and an issue. Gehenna lent substance to Centrist fears; and at the same time tarnished the image of the Expansionist majority, not least among them Ilya Bogdanovitch, the Chairman of the Nine; Ariane Emory of Reseune; and admiral Azov, the controversial head of Defense, who had approved the plan.

The Centrists for the first time in 2413 gained a majority in the Senate of Viking and in the Council of Mariner; and held a sizable bloc of seats and appointed posts within the Senate of Cyteen. They thus gained an unprecedented percentage of seats in the Council of Worlds and frequently mustered four votes of the Nine.

Although they did not hold a majority in either body, their influence could no longer be discounted, and the swift gains of the Centrists both worried the Expansionist majority and made the uncommitted delegates on any given issue a pivotal element: delegates known to be wavering were courted with unprecedented fervor, provoking charges and countercharges of influence-trading and outright bribery that led to several recall votes, none of which, however, succeeded in unseating the incumbent.

The very fabric of Union was being tested in the jousting of strong interest groups. Certain political theorists called into question the wisdom of the founders who had created the electorate system, maintaining that the system encouraged electorates to vote their own narrow interests above that of the nation at large.

It was the aphorism of Nasir Harad, president of the Council, on his own re-election after his Council conviction on bribery charges, that: "Corruption means elected officials trading votes for their own advantage; democracy means a bloc of voters doing the same thing. The electorates know the difference."