Fire with Fire, Second Edition
Page 57
Add to this the phenomenon of how the declaration of bloc membership can, in many cases, actually destabilize a nation. For instance, the Philippines remain deeply divided between a rural/Muslim/traditional faction militating for Coalition membership and PacRim solidarity, versus the urban/Christian/progressive segment of the population that brokered and maintains the nation’s membership in the Commonwealth.
The Quebec situation has grown even more serious. As Canada moved more steadily toward entering the Commonwealth, Quebec province moved further away from Ottawan authority. Commentators are uncertain how the situation will resolve, with many hypothesizing Quebec’s split from Canada, and entry into the European Union. Naturally, this would vastly diminish Canada’s contributions to the Commonwealth and therefore its stature and power within that bloc.
Similar situations exist in at least a dozen nations, and do not promise to be either easily or swiftly resolved.
The Sixth bloc—Megacorporations
The so-called Sixth Bloc, that comprised by a loose consortium of the world’s megacorporations, has presented increasingly troublesome challenges to the evolution and coherence of bloc politics over the past fifteen years. These frictions grew sharply when the nations made it clear that interstellar development policy and control was to be strictly and solely determined by the blocs. With megacorporations already flouting their disregard of UN laws and regulations by acquiring territories in perpetuity from small nonaligned governments (and thereby founding “non-national corporate cantonments”), they swiftly set about creating their own small fleet of interstellar shift-carriers to exploit opportunities bypassed by the colonization efforts of the blocs. This meant foreswearing settlement on green worlds, and instead, focusing on resource extraction from “grey worlds,” planets that are barren rock or inhospitable, yet offer strong advantages in terms of location, mineral deposits, or both.
Predictably, in their incessant quest for political validation, the megacorporations—usually operating under the aegis of their loose affiliation, the Colonial Development Combine (or CoDevCo, for short)—have begun mounting a campaign to scoop up non-aligned orphan states and offer profitable affiliation deals to flexible states. The objective: to fuse the national/political legitimizing properties of those states to CoDevCo’s own fiscal and material assets and thereby create a functional Sixth Bloc.
Whether these attempts will ultimately succeed—and whether the representation of the members of such a bloc would be as citizens with uniform rights, or as an extremely class-distinct collection of shareholders and corporate thralls—is impossible to foresee.