Northern Confederation: Difference between revisions

Although the Great Confederation was ultimately fluid, some of the most important governing institutions of the Northern Confederation were in existence for all or a majority of its existence. For the first century after the Great Confederation, the central body was an institution translated as the National Conference which served as the only unifying element of the Confederation. In the first five decades of the Confederation, the National Conference met once or twice a year in different cities across the Confederation. This first Conference had few direct powers, instead serving as an arbitration board and a committee of correspondence, ensuring that important issues affecting Confederation members were known to the other members. In this form, the Conference usually met with 15 to 40 delegates. The delegates were not elected or chosen by their nation; instead, a number of trusted and well-known individuals were chosen by the nations, often more than one nation at a time. This class of men, known as the ''[[Mitei]]'', would usually come from healers or other respected, learned men throughout the Confederation. In time, however, the motives of the Mitei was called into question, as some who represented multiple nations would receive bribes to favor the interests of one of their clients over another. In [[1741]], such a conflict of interest sparked a riot in Kaigwa, where the Conference met, precipitating a number of changes. The national heads and councils of the Confederation's members imprisoned the Mitei and replaced them with chosen delegates from among their number. The post-1741 Conference then employed a one-nation, one-vote scheme, and accordingly the number of delegates expanded dramatically. It also took on additional legislative powers after 1741. This form of the Conference persisted through the enactment of the Received Guidances in [[1847]]. By that period, the National Conference adopted a three session a year schedule meeting in April, July, and October, rotating host cities but usually held in Kaigwa, [[Housatonic]], and elsewhere; the prominence of these cities, which became a prominent cultural feature of Confederation life, led to the establishment of National Conference halls in these cities. These buildings became politically divisive and represented the growing imbalance of power in Confederation members. The most prominent members of the Confederation began to agitate for proportional representation rather than one-nation, one-vote representation.  

The degree of centralization and unified political authority varied over the course of the Confederation's history. In [[1883]] following the Confederation's victory over [[Urcea]] in its attempted expansion of [[New Harren]], the Confederation convened an emergency standing central government called the Union Directorate. The Union Directorate was invested with the ability to call on any Confederation unit military while also collecting a small voluntary contribution from the members on an annual basis; in [[1912]] it also began to collect a share of all tariff dues collected by the members. With these funds, a small but functional Confederation-wide bureaucratic apparatus was established, allowing the Directorate to sponsor construction of roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure. Composed of seven independent Directors, the Union Directorate was nominally under the authority and direction under the National Conference. In practice, the Union Directorate took on the characteristics of an independent central government, renewed annually by the National Conference for the "duration of the crisis" that was continued Occidental pressure in [[Cusinaut]]. The Directorate's independent power was its authority over the military, bureaucracy, and administration, largely ensuring the inability of the Conference to dissolve it. The Union Directorate served as a quasi-executive committee at the pleasure of the National Conference in theory, but in practice many members of the Directorate became independently politically influential, preventing them from being recalled or replaced. National political factions in the 20th century would often form as cliques around individual Directorate members. In the 1960s, these cliques would increasingly take on an ethnic component.

Legal conceptions of the sovereignty of the constituent members evolved over time, altering the model of how "local governance" and "constituent nations" worked in the Confederation. The Occidental notions of sovereignty and nationhood were largely foreign to the indigenous Cronan peoples that formed the Confederation in the 17th century. As the peoples of the Confederation were exposed to [[Occidental]] legal treatises and conceptions, the leading legal experts and thinkers of the Confederation began to adapt the Occidental models and systems into their own conception of themselves.