Fire with Fire, Second Edition

by Charles E Gannon

  Possibly, it would not have made any difference. Suffice it to say that when the negotiators from Canada and America convened the next day, they were horrified to arrive at their sessions only to be surrounded by reporters from newspapers that had already announced the formation of the UCA: the Union of Canada and America. By the end of the day, a web-pundit had dubbed this wholly phantasmagorical polity “Americanada.”

  The damage done by that innocent set of events and the groundless fabulations of hypervigilant watchdogs was a lesson to both the US and all its allies: fear of American erasure of the sovereignty of its cultural cousins was immense and almost impossible to ameliorate. In consequence, the coordination and integration of England’s three largest Anglophone colonies—the US, Canada, and Australia—proceeded more slowly than any other. And while many in the UK have long urged consideration of the benefits of joining their New World offspring, the same fears and reservations are present there—only magnified a hundredfold.

  The Impulse Toward Greater Bloc Cohesion

  Three factors accelerated the closer integration of these five emergent blocs in the last years of the twenty-first century, all of which underscored the need for pooled resources and cooperative action.

  The first was the Belt War, which drew the international differences in space technology and presence into sharp relief. The inability of China’s aligned states to provide meaningful assistance when its fortunes faltered, and the decisive intervention effected by a comparatively small high-tech American-Australian-Canadian contingent, engendered two powerful realizations. Firstly, power parity on Earth required power parity in space. And secondly, the expense of purchasing and maintaining that parity was best achieved (arguably, could only be achieved) by integrated and cooperative efforts. This accelerated the movement toward genuine blocs.

  The second incident was fundamentally both a coda and an exclamation point adorning the first: the detection of the Earth-approaching asteroid labeled the “Doomsday Rock” in 2080 and its destruction by an ambitious American-Canadian mission in 2083. Optimistic estimates indicated that the Rock might kill no more than four billion and push Earth back to the technological level of the American Civil War. Pessimistic (many say “realistic”) estimates prognosticated between 95-97 % destruction of the human race, and a return to the Bronze Age. The global need for developing a spacefaring civilization was suddenly drawn in high-relief, and it was clear that the only way to do so effectively was to cost-share the expenses.

  The third, but clearly greatest, impulse toward true bloc power structures was generated by the electrifying announcement that, in 2105, the recently formalized New World Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States), acting in concert with the UK, had succeeded in their attempt to create a supraluminal (or so-called “faster-than-light”) craft and had visited the Alpha Centauri system as the crowning achievement of their ambitious Prometheus Project. Global outcries to share the technology were no doubt made more shrill by the fact that analogous programs in other blocs had lagged behind Prometheus. The New World Commonwealth’s subsequent delay in sharing the technology of the Wasserman Drive—a reluctance seen as needless by most, and ill-understood to this day—was not essential for the European Union and Russlavic Federation, which either cleared the final hurdles on their own or after receiving one or two useful hints from colleagues within the Prometheus Project.

  However, by withholding the information for almost half a year, the New World nations’ strategic silence arguably achieved what loud and impassioned rhetoric never had: a rapid integration of the nascent blocs into powerful, dominant organizations. The intense resentment and competitive spirit sparked by that silence swept aside all remaining national impediments so that maximum energy could be brought to bear upon the quest to match the NWC’s feat of interstellar travel.

  THREE: THE BLOCS TODAY

  This brings us to an overview of the blocs as they are today, and then, the ongoing challenges that they face, either individually, or collectively.

  The New World Commonwealth is overwhelmingly comprised of the Anglophone states—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—that took a powerful and enduring imprint from their initial and decisive English roots. Although there was considerable outcry in the UK over the formation of Prime Minister Hadley-Singh’s blue-ribbon commission to critically assess and critique the costs of renouncing the Great Britain’s titular membership in the EU and formally joining the Commonwealth, it seem likely that, despite much reluctance and caution, England is in fact poised to make this shift. However, all indications are that it will also strive to retain equal ties to Europe for as long as possible, retaining its status as the most pivotal nation in the ongoing efforts to maximize common purposes and goals between the New World Commonwealth and the European Union.

  Of all the blocs, the Commonwealth remains the most self-sufficient, both in terms of resources and development. While its political integration is in many ways more loose than any other bloc except TOCIO, its near absolute linguistic uniformity and shared legal, political, and cultural traditions enable surprisingly close cooperation (comparatively) across a wide range of complicated activities. Although its preeminence in military and space technology is frequently cited as being its most noteworthy advantage, it should be remembered that it is, by a small margin, the largest gross producer of foodstuffs among the five blocs, and is, by an immense margin, the largest net exporter of the same. Being the breadbasket of planet Earth, the New World Commonwealth has profound potential leverage over the global market.

  The European Union has recently expanded modestly, due to new extra-Continental memberships awarded to nations which retained very strong affinities to one or another of the European cultures and have no better alternative for membership in any other bloc. The most noteworthy of these new members is Argentina.

  The Union enjoys very high levels of education, employment, and social care, as well as excellently run and supported high-tech industry and service sectors. Although very diverse in national customs and language, it has very strong commonalities regarding political culture and foundational values, allowing disputes within the bloc to be settled without undue rancor. This amplifies the Union’s already high levels of internal efficiency.

  However, the Union remains power-dependent and food-dependent, largely due to its population density and its unfavorable location for any of the cheap and quickly employed solar-based power augmentation strategies available to equatorial regions. Imbalance of political power also still persists, with German fiscal dominance prompting intermittent episodes of French resentment, resulting in the only significant political logjams within the Union’s political apparatus. Continuing problems with economically weaker states—such as Portugal, Greece, and a number of newer members—perturb the otherwise smoothly running economy. Ongoing challenges include the refusal of various states to contribute to space or other large programs, claiming that even token participation in such activities is incompatible with their attempts to stabilize their internal economies. Also, due to sour memories of—and often, harsh experience with—the processes of foreign settlement and colonization, the EU tends toward extremely gradual, careful expansion, which has made it a less dynamic factor in interstellar colonization than it might otherwise have been. This is reflected in its comparatively modest investment in shift carriers and establishing communities on green worlds.

  The Russlavic Federation is comprised of states that share the linguistic, as well as the uniquely synthesized Eurasian cultural, roots that predominate where Europe abuts Asia. This so-called “Russian” bloc has achieved good results in terms of promoting a relatively high standard of education, healthcare, and industry. With the shift away from a petrochemical energy economy, it has become somewhat deficient in terms of clean power production, but its southern extents—including the broad, unused expanses of Kazakhstan—furnish it with some more auspicious regions for increasing its use of sol
ar-power options. A dramatic movement toward fusion plants, while phasing out fission generators, is ongoing.

  Although the Federation lacks a booming high-technology consumer production sector, it makes up for that weakness with excellent heavy industry, aerospace manufacturing and design, and vast reserves of high-value natural resources, including rare earths, metals, and petroleum-based products of all kinds.

  A highly unstable equilibrium between nationalist drives and free market tendencies became comparatively less erratic during the second half of the twenty-first century. This was undoubtedly due, in no small measure, to the bloc’s emergence from its own integrational political crises and variations. As the bloc settled into a reasonable and durable modus vivendi, it also engaged in less of the posturing and “spoiler politics” with which it drew attention to itself in the decades following its loss of the attention and importance once conferred by the white-hot Cold War spotlight.

  While this helped create steady, and generally improving, relations with the Union and Commonwealth blocs, it did nothing to ameliorate the stressors in its relationship with China’s DWC bloc. With most of the southern-fringe “Stans” possessing membership in the Developing World Coalition, the traditional border tensions between Russia and China did not abate. Indeed, Kazakhstan became a tense area as the more traditional (and less economically modern) indigenous population desired membership in the DWC, while the more modern, and Soviet-era Byelorussian population was firm in its commitment to the Russlavic Federation. For reasons too complicated to recount here, the spacefaring ambitions of the two superpower nations (and their nascent blocs) came into conflict on two occasions in the second half of the twenty-first century. The first was a brief, mostly automated conflict dubbed the High Ground War. The second was a slightly longer and far-ranging contest known as the Belt War. Although conditions between the powers have since improved, theirs is still the most fraught relationship between any two blocs.

  China’s Developing World Coalition (although it resists that possessive labeling) is, more than any other, dominated by its core national power. China’s attempts to legitimate itself as leading a bloc rather than as a superpower with a collection of largely steerable satrapies is founded on its genuine and ongoing attempts to reach out on an economic basis to disparate nations and groups that are not within its (or, usually, any other predominant) cultural sphere. However, while Beijing is, in theory, just another member of this bloc, the population and economic weighting of political representation within it gives China what amounts to a monopoly on political power. This translates into an administration and bureaucracy overwhelmingly staffed by Chinese nationals. The establishment of Chinese as the only official language of the bloc intensifies this effect. Although there was originally slightly greater parity between China itself and the Pan-Islamic League that joined the bloc en masse upon its founding, this faded along with the passing of the oil-based global economy and the concurrent shifts in the dominant energy-generation paradigm.

  Having also accepted many of the most troubled African states as members, the DWC continues to grapple with all the social challenges problems one would expect (except in the Chinese littoral and urban regions, where infrastructure conditions approach those of the developed world). Particularly outside of China, the DWC population has significantly lower life expectancy, significantly higher infant mortality rates, significantly more rudimentary education and health care delivery systems. While Chinese technicians are working throughout the Coalition to upgrade (or maintain) infrastructure (from power and plumbing to IT and telecom systems), most member states have not become self-sufficient in any of these areas. This, in turn, prompts persistent debates in Beijing regarding the wisdom of maintaining so many other member states largely at China’s own expense. Moderates and internationally-minded Transformists argue that the formal and legal structures of a genuine bloc must be maintained in order to ensure global legitimacy and equal consideration from the other blocs. Traditionalist skeptics argue that such values are both intangible and dubious, and that the interests of China would be better served by a bloc balance sheet that had fewer noncontributing member states listed on it.

  Although Traditionalist Beijing tries to suppress or downplay these debates, they are well enough known, and have had significant repercussions. Of all the blocs, the DWC is the one evincing the highest tendency toward membership churn. In short, various DWC member-states are making subtle overtures to other blocs, or even megacorporate entities, for a better deal. Between the lack of autonomy within the bloc, the second-class citizen status of most non-Chinese, and the leadership’s known ruminations upon the wisdom of jettisoning some of the current bloc members, this tendency toward comparison shopping is unavoidable.

  The acronym of the Trans Oceanic Commercial and Industrial Organization (TOCIO) indicates its Japanese center of commercial gravity. This bloc has been called the “default bloc,” since it is largely comprised of nations that are not culturally, politically, or commercially satisfied with the four other alternatives. Nations such as India, Brazil, and Indonesia deemed themselves undervalued as so-called “outlier nations” and decided that they would fare better in union with each other, rather than subordinating themselves to one of the other four blocs, each of which is characterized by strong, core cultural affinities that they do not share.

  Consequently, TOCIO is by far the most diverse bloc, and is variably represented as the “junkyard bloc” and the “bloc of the future.” The pejorative term “junkyard bloc” is easily understood; it is indeed a haven for those nations that could not cut a good deal elsewhere, or whose cultural particulars fell too far outside the limits of the other four. It is labeled the bloc of the future because, among those who foresee bloc politics as an evolutionary step toward a true one-world government, it has pioneered a number of innovations in establishing compromises between the three primary axes of representational power sharing: voting based on population, on economic output, and on equal representation (i.e. one polity, one vote). Exclusive adoption of any one of these pluralistic paradigms would create a bloc without any hope of durability, given the subsequent disproportionate allotment of power and influence. So a blending of these models was required.

  This blended approach was necessitated by two factors: the vast differences among the member states, and the lack of a strong central power. Although the EU is the most similar to TOCIO in its lack of a central power around which the bloc coheres (although Germany comes much closer to this than Japan), the Union enjoys a very high degree of cultural commonality, and the longest history of bloc-wide consensual political process. In contrast, Japan had to build its bloc out of nations as diverse as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa.

  However, Tokyo shrewdly maximized the freedom of action for each member state, and did not attempt to (i.e., realistically could not) impose its culture upon those states. In consequence, there is more general buy-in, and while there is some churn among the member states, this is generally a matter of exploring superior options, rather than escaping an oppressive or constrained political environment, as pertains in China’s DWC. Because of this, the Japanese were able to be selective and “cherry-pick” the most attractive member nations for their bloc, attracting the most stable and resource-rich African, Asian, and South American countries. This has left it with fewer problems to manage than the Developing World Coalition, and consequently, further reduces its needs for the creation of centralized relief and/or interventional agencies.

  The only uncomfortable, but unchanging, reality of the TOCIO bloc is that it grows at the expense of the DWC bloc, since they both specialize in producing mass consumer goods. China has the advantage of being a command economy, able to refocus a huge workforce at will. Japan, however, enjoys the advantages of a considerable number of large workforces around the world, each with different areas of specialization, and a robust currency. In the past two decades, the emerging TOCIO bloc has generally beaten the DW
C in almost every measure of trade and production except high-volume heavy industry production, such as ships, trains, construction equipment, etc.

  FOUR: CHALLENGES WITHIN AND AMONG THE BLOCS

  The United Nations and a Conflict of Interest

  One of the ongoing difficulties posed by the emergence of bloc politics is the reduced primacy, efficacy, and practical legitimacy of the United Nations.

  The cause of the UN’s loss of primacy is obvious: as the blocs have matured and normalized, they have been far more successful at achieving the mandates of the UN than the UN ever was. They have certainly created a more stable and balanced world order, in large part because the UN was arguably flawed in the unwarranted idealisms which undergirded its conceptual origins. The UN was an admirable attempt to leap ahead to a global concordiat comprised of nations equalized in and by their common interests. This was certainly a consummation devoutly to be wished—but far, far away from becoming a reality in the power ecology of nation-state politics, particularly in the wake of World War II and at the very dawning of the Cold War. The logical intermediate step was, and remains, a more gradual and natural amalgamation of nation-states along enduring cultural lines into stable structures of shared transnational interests that are constant enough to promote a habit of political consensus and conjoint action. From exchanges among these fewer, yet larger and more stable political entities (which we call blocs) a more manageable world oversight council might realistically arise.

  Ironically, what made the UN so wonderful as an ideal—a concordiat in which all nations had direct representation—also made it too unwieldy to be effective. But until the emergence of those collectivizing political, social, and fiscal forces which also prompted the emergence of the blocs, there was also no interest among the major powers to revamp the UN—or to scrap it, either. Belonging to the UN symbolized a commitment to global discourse, regardless of whether this symbol actually bespoke such a commitment or was simply an obeisant bow in its general direction.