So one of the jarring things about the Infinity fluff, especially as it relates to Uprising/JSA and the newcomer O-12 faction, is that Westphalian Sovereignty seems to be an idea that the Human Sphere has rejected over the course of the next 180 years, and that this is not treated as a big deal. In terms of things that would leave us scratching our heads and be difficult to reconcile, this is up there with the "Hyper-reality" and Resurrection as cultural touchstones that greatly differentiate the setting of Infinity from the real world. What else do you think is core to understanding the Science Fiction of Infinity - as in, what has changed about the human experience compared to the real world in the setting?
I have to admit I’m not terribly well versed in the governance of historical german regions. Can you clarify your post a bit?
Westphalian Sovereignty is the idea, purported to be derived from the Treaty of Westphalia after the 30 Years' War, that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its own territory. Obviously this idea has been spottily applied in the real world, but the United Nations has words to that effect in its own charter. "Humanitarian Intervention" is obviously an idea that runs contrary to this ideal, but in the context of Infinity, that's what O-12 uses as a justification for basically everything it does - including intervening in the affairs of the most powerful of its own member-states, like Yu Jing. To a certain extent it's just a matter of power - major geopolitical players jealously defend their sovereignty, and smaller powers *would* but *can't*. But in Infinity that idea doesn't really exist - the Concilium Convention, as it's describe, essentially exalts humanitarian intervention above sovereignty, which is something that a great many people would find uncomfortable today. When one is describing a science fiction setting, you can talk about all the minute details that are different from our present-day world, but I think it's usually better to talk in broad strokes, about the ideas that are different. Resurrection and "hyper-reality" are described up front in a lot of the setting materials as stuff that makes the human experience different from the modern day (although hyper-reality is probably closer than we think). My point is that with sovereignty being discarded, it's actually a pretty fundamental change to how things work, or at least with how people perceive things working, and it's as important to the setting as these other ideas. To go back to the question I'm actually asking, though - if part of what makes the human experience in the Sphere different from the modern day, besides the flashier tech, is Resurrection, "hyper-reality," and the loss of this ideal of sovereignty, what else is different? How would you describe the average resident of the Sphere? "Their worldview is like ours but..."
I don't think Westphalian Sovereignty is how it is usually described, but anyway. Well you have to remember that things can change rapidly Before WWII and the subsequent Nuremberg trials (and to a degree of an extent some pre WWII post WWI moments but not often) there was not really any idea that you couldn't treat your citizens however you wanted as long as it was legal. There was no real concept of there being inalienable legal rights that couldn't be legally overruled. Lemkin and Lauterpacht's legal ideas of Crimes against Humanity and Genocide were incorporated into legal documentation from then onwards. Since then however we do have quite a strong idea of inalienable human rights that cannot be legally overruled. And while those are often broken (what laws aren't?) and enforcement is weak, the idea is definitely there. The history of O-12 is that it was promoted by PanO and Yu Jing as a UN alternative sponsored by them which would pull the world away from the old US backed UN, but which then took to it's role with much more gusto and had much more power (both soft and hard power) than the UN and therefore was able to delicately manage the international situation while also taking a more interventionist stance at times. So to me it makes total sense; at the end of the day Sovereignty is what you can defend and afford, and the O-12 is much more capable of intervening in Great Power affairs due to it's own status as a powerful entity, as well as there being a delicate balance which means that the O-12 can generally rely on Yu Jing not crushing it due to PanO standing against that and vice versa. And therefore it can take an open "our enforcement of inalienable rights as part of humanitarian intervention trumps your right to run your territory as you see fit" because it can, to an extent, justify and act upon that. I think that most people in the human sphere don't think about it, don't care about, care about it and agree with it, and care about it and disagree with it, just as they by and large do about many people now.
Is it? My understanding is that it just sort of sprung up after a war that Russia had with China/Proto-Yu Jing. It seems weird that a nation which had just won a war would curtail its own rights in that way. That's definitely one way of looking at it. There's some other factors going on there too; the fact that O-12 has its own citizens and O-12 functionally *isn't* subject to this kind of oversight, so there's essentially a two-tiered system - O-12 is treated as a superior nation under international law than any other.
Please remember that not just O-12, but also PanO and Yu Jing are sprung from multi-national associations you see today in the form of the EU or the UN. A lot of sci fi does this; if you want to expand your story scope to the stars, you need ways to unify and simplify Earth politics into large blocs. Infinity’s history also has a significant power vacuum after a number of the (current day) large powers burnt themselves out on wars and failed first-wave space exploration. There’s no reason that what arises to fill that vacuum would feel obliged to play by the same rules as its predecessors did.
I believe the original idea behind the O-12 was that all of it's sponsors thought they would be able to control it more effectively and that turned out to be not true. However I think they also recognised that O-12 was reliant on them and also was a way for them to cement themselves as the new world order. Also yes the O-12 does have citizens although comparatively very few compared to PanO and YJ. I'd say that O-12 is not really more powerful than either; it has a different form of power than either but it is also reliant on the G5 as they functionally do form a large part of it's government. O-12 would probably say that they serve the citizens of the Human Sphere and that the citizens of the Human Sphere hold them accountable through their representation in the structure of the O-12. It is not quite as easy as saying "O-12 is more powerful" as it is demonstrably not but it does have it's own form of influence and such (which does go both ways, even then). It is a complex scenario which shows that ultimately the structures of power are somewhat different from the ones in our own real world right now. That's fine, and to be expected, and also you would imagine that ideas of sovereignty, what constitutes the state and so on would have changed in the best part of two centuries, as they have in the best part of the last two.
Maybe. We don't have any information on them being regarded that way; it seems that most entities within the setting seem to acknowledge O-12's moral superiority. It's strange. I mean they've got their finger on the big red button that would destroy PanO, Yu Jing, and a number of other nations (bricking the ALEPH server rack and turning off the circular network). They jealously prevent their servitor nations from developing safe, efficient interstellar travel. Well I think its changed pretty dramatically in the theoretical future 180 years compared to the past 180 years. But sometimes things change fast. My point, though, is that it isn't really talked about in the setting as a cultural change, and it is a significant one.
I mean, sure. I'm not saying they're not nations. But take a modern nation with a fairly strongly federal system, like the United States. In addition to one central federal government, we have 50 state governments, each with relatively sovereign powers within their own borders (plus a number of territories and protectorates with widely varying degrees of independence). There's no reason that what is currently a loose confederation couldn't develop a stronger central government of its own that slowly takes over tasks formerly owned by the members. Similarly, there's no reason that PanO and Yu Jing couldn't voluntarily cede certain powers to O-12, especially if it is seen that clinging too strongly to those ideals contributed to the downfall of the old order.
Perhaps, but since Yu Jing and PanO are the inheritors of the states that *didn't* fall in the collapse of the old order, it doesn't seem too logical or in their self-interests. And, in Yu Jing's case, it's *definitely* not in its self-interest.
States often act in illogical ways or against their own self-interests, they do it quite literally all the time. They make bad assumptions, they have institutionalised blind spots, they are overly optimistic or too short-sighted or driven into certain things by perceived political necessities. That Yu Jing would make O-12 as a kind of UN-alternative that they had sponsored and therefore was more under their control despite the public ceding of de jure power and that would actually backfire for them both is not unrealistic or really that unsurprising. That happens a lot. "This film is dedicated to the brave warriors of the Mujahadeen" etc. This is actually a big problem with a lot of the fanbase's involvement with certain elements of the background; they identify with a faction and see a faction acting stupidly and get upset cos that faction would not do that! It's illogical! Infinity would be considerably less realistic if the factions didn't fuck-up in some way on a relatively regular basis.
I feel like all the factions get it but that Yu Jing got it in a more high profile way due to the Uprising event That's fine by me. I don't require some sort of asinine idea of every faction being portrayed as balanced in their competency in order to enjoy the game's narrative and background, these aren't real entities and it's okay for YJ to be institutionally dysfunctional in some very clear ways.
I don't really see any other instances of it. Well, it's an ensemble cast. The weird thing is there's this dissonance with respect to the YJ intelligence service; they're portrayed as superlatively competent but the one time it mattered in the fluff they failed utterly.
Are you talking about the Yu Jing intelligence services during the Uprising or the US intelligence services just prior to 9/11? The most sophisticated intelligence community in the world failed to identify the most deadly terrorist attack that has ever happened taking place on it's own soil. These things happen.
Don’t forget the Hexahedron’s failures that lead to YJ’s acquisition of Huang Di. All of the entities are smart and stupid by turns and different ways. Haqq let the “loyal” Silk Lords get too high and mighty and suffered through a bloody internal conflict, Ariadna’s had multiple conflicts, Nomads their own fun.
The Stavka and Black Hand are never portrayed as incompetent, and to my knowledge have never suffered a defeat acknowledged in the Infinity timeline. Subfactions from Nomad and Ariadnan backgrounds have fought and failed, but typically those two are untouchable. The CA is the absolute worst about this, especially when the Shasvastii are behind a plot. ALEPH is a bit of a weird case; there's lots of unprovable rumours and propaganda, but they can't really mess up "on screen" to anything except the aliens because it will either prove the Nomads right or make them look like idiots. The Tohaa are the funny ones, since the Human Sphere doesn't know a thing about them, but the Triumvirate are the unacknowledged Team Rocket of the setting and haven't done anything right since their introduction. Most fluff about the Yu Jing intelligence community just makes more since if you completely ignore Uprising. It's notable that while acknowledgement of sovereignty in the Human Sphere is a bit spotty thanks to O12 swanning about and nobody else being able to enforce anything against PanO (which itself is a weird case, since it's more a corporate conglomerate with an army than an actual country), borders and control between Humanity and the Tohaa is black and white. They brook no interference in each others' business and conduct subversive operations only when deniability is certain.
Not really. 9/11 was a small isolated incident with fairly massive consequences. There is a Quebecois separatist movement, civil peaceful separatist, but they don't have a very wide-spread support, but even so just coordinating all of them and radicalising them to take to violence is a massive undertaking. 9/11 was a very limited single event in scope. There's several ways that intelligence services and secret services and governments fail, even ways that make them look like crayon wielding toddlers or even co-conspirators, but in the specific way that Yu Jing was described as being blind-sided is not very believable to me as that specific kind of insurrection is specifically what intelligence services have been trained since medieval times to detect and do something about. Basically, it'd have made more sense if they'd caught the Kuge red-handed, tried to make an example of them, and instead triggering mass-riots and ad hoc insurrections as a result - prime for Hexahedron to exert -deniable- influence and direction over. CB went for the high-stakes heroic narrative instead, popcorn movie thriller style, the one that only works with plot armour because it's extremely complicated and difficult because the work involved sends a lot of signals to detect for those listening.
