ZOCU: Ideology and Alliance
ZOCU: Ideology and Alliance
From ZOCU Politics and ideology by Patricia Stephenson: available at the Landing City University research portal.
More than two centuries ago, notable neorealist John Mearsheimer stated that for a state to be a super power in a region, all other powers would have to consider it in all aspects of its foreign policy. If this is true, then ZOCU is certainly the super power of modern international relations scholarship. It’s all but impossible to find a study, within ZOCU, the Core or Expanse that doesn’t somehow reference ZOCU.
Studies from European, Brazilian and North American sources tend to believe that ZOCU will eventually collapse. Brazilian and North American sources tend to concentrate on how either ZOCU’s smaller economy will be unable to cope with the strain of arms racing with the Core or, particularly in the case of studies from Brazil, on how the hierarchy of talents created by wide spread usage of Transgenics will lead to social discord.
While social policy is beyond the scope of this work, it could be noticed that the treaty of Sirus makes ZOCU economic collapse through arms racing unlikely. On the matter of transgenes, Londinium and many other ZOCU powers are currently moving towards entirely transgenic populations.
European predictions about ZOCU’s coming collapse are perhaps more relevant to this volume. Specifically European academics tend to focus on a perceived lack of an ideology binding ZOCU together. They suggest that without such an ideology ZOCU is unlikely to survive long term. European studies, which tend to be extremely critical of real politic descriptions of international behaviour, suggest that this lack of an ideology will lead to a ZOCU collapse especially as the alliance is weakened by the treaty of Sirus.
On the face of it this explanation is fanciful. ZOCU has after all survived for over three decades and through major wars. However, it is notable that few significant alliances have seen long term survival and integration without some level of ideology behind them. For instance the EU has developed a level of common ideology, to be inclusive, democratic social democracies, while the much loser PACT and Chinese alliances do not.
Compared to the Core powers of earth and its most powerful first stage colonies, ZOCU is far more diverse. For instance, ZOCU includes avowedly transhuman powers (Haraway) and entirely baseline powers (New Mercia). It includes aristocratic systems (such as Kanon, Londinium and Ithaca) and direct democratic ones (Haraway) and representative democracies such as Hampshire.
How then does ZOCU manage to maintain such a close alliance between such equal and diverse nations? Core commentators are almost unanimous in suggesting that that it is the threat of the Core that causes ZOCU Unity. This explanation also doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny; after all, ZOCU was founded during the break down when there was no Core threat, and even fought along side the Core against the Magnates.
What then can we use as an explanation of ZOCU’s continued unity? This volume will suggest that in fact ZOCU does have a shared ideology: that states should be sovereign over their internal and external affairs.
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the idea of absolute national sovereignty on the Westphalian model has been steadily eroded on Earth. Some commentators have traced this to the need by the established great powers of the United States and Europe to match the hugely populous rising powers of China and India, but in fact its origins can be traced back to the end of World War Two, and the creation of what would become the European Union and United Nations.
The positive need to concentrate into power blocks to deal with India and China certainly accelerated things in the twenty first century, and states on Earth have become increasingly bound by various agreements and restrictions on their sovereignty. For instance trade is regulated not by bilateral or multilateral agreements but by the WTO, Core powers contribute troops to UN military forces like ARROWs, and within blocks, economies and militaries have become harmonised.
This is particularly clear in the EU, but even PACT now has a single set of rules on internal trade, and is seeing harmonisation in terms of currency and some internal policies, especially those related to economics and certain banned technologies.
This is not even mentioning national colonies which while often nominally independent have a strange status in which while they have their own local government they are expected to obey precepts from earth, no matter their local needs.
ZOCU on the other hand is both explicately and implicately committed to its members sovereignty, and it is thisideological commitment that allows ZOCU to maintain its integrity as an Alliance, and has maintained the alliance through two terrible wars.
The rest of this book will deal with how this commitment to national sovereignty came about, in a time when the notion was largely being discredited on earth, and deal with the common objections to this theme, such as the harmonisation of ZOCU’s military procurement and military operations.
Part one will deal with the way that colony formation, the isolation of the years before recontact and of the break down reignited the idea of sovereignty among the colonies, and the influence that those groups who moved to what would become the ZOCU worlds had on this trend. It will conclude that while the events of the breakdown and wide separation from earth did have a massive influence on early political development, the specific populations who first settled the worlds of the Union was equally, perhaps more important.
Part two will expand on this theme and will deal with the way that colonial history, especially the original lack of technology on many Expanse worlds has led to the collectivisation of technology within ZOCU, and created the relatively homogenous ZOCU military and technological base which we see today. It will also look at present trends such as the proliferation of non-standard hoplite designs as ZOCU planets meet their various technological needs.
Patricia Stephenson is a Senior Lecture in international relations at the Landing City University, Haraway