Settlement Movement
The Settlement Movement (Kiravic: Trebiktorléran) is a modern social movement in Kiravia promoting settler colonialism through the foundation of intentional communities overseas, primarily in Crona and other areas under Kiravian control or influence. Settlements associated with the Settelment Movement are called Movement settlements (Lératrebin, Lérakopsin). The movement comprises a number of different tendencies with different ideological inspirations for their colonial undertakings, which can include Coscivian nationalism or related civilisational ideas, religious revivalist movements, and Kirosocialism, among others. Settlers and sympathisers who support the same ideological goals and models of settlement governance have grouped together under a number of Great Kirav-based umbrella organisations that provide financial and operational support for settlements and new settlement initiatives, organise mutual aid and inter-settlement coöperation, and act as an important component of the pro-colonial lobby in Kartika.
Although most settlements in the Kiravian overseas colonies are ordinary cities, towns, and villages governed by the general law, Movement settlements account for a large and growing share of recent land grants in the Cronan colonies, and have played an important role in the settlement of new frontiers, especially in areas with insufficient security or infrastructure to attract large-scale private immigration.
Characteristic features of Movement settlements include:
- Selectivity - Settlement trusts can choose who can and cannot live in their community, and usually limit admission to people of particular ethnic, religious, ideological, or other affiliations in order to create a community that is homogeneous along one or more dimensions.
- Coöperative economics - Although Movement settlements vary in their manner and degree of economic coöperation (see Models below), nearly all maintain a significant element of coöperation, especially with regard to land tenure, physical capital, and other management decisions.
- Communitarianism - Movement settlements aim to maintain high social capital and provide community-based institutions for mutual aid, social services, and cultural life at the local level, often with the explicit goal of stengthening a sense of community and minimising reliance on external entities.
- Collective defence - Most Movement settlements outside Atrassica have - at least initially - maintained their own militia to guard against attacks by hostile natives and general banditry. While many settlements in areas that have become more secure and densely settled have disbanded their militia over time, others have retained them in order to reinforce allied settlements in less secure areas if called upon, or as government-sanctioned units under state/territorial citizen readiness programmes.
Historical and Ideological Background
The settlement movement is more accurately described as several distinct movements with different histories and ideological goals that have converged on intentional settlement in Crona to realise their aspirations and formed a united front to advocate for their shared goals in the public sphere and political process.
Precursors in Æonara
Many methods and practices characteristic of the Settlement Movement grew out of the experiences of the Sunderance, namely the phenomena of block settlements (ramkopsin), resettlement towns (ōrtrebikorsar), and exits (tivra). From the latter half of the Civil War through much of the subsequent Sunderance, anti-communist emigrants fled the Kiravian Union in significant numbers to resettle in Æonara, Atrassica, Kiravian Cusinaut, and Kiravian Catenias. The Kiravian Remnant encouraged an open-door policy toward these arrivals, but given its difficult strategic position, it was short of funds to assist them in establishing themselves, causing many to turn to mutual aid. At first, most emigrés were directed to "resettlement towns" where refugee accommodations were colocated with new state-sponsored industrial enterprises as part of the Remnant's national development strategy, essentially using emigrés as a labour pool. Although state-planned and not coöperative in nature, the ideological motivations and architectural features of resettlement towns would later be reproduced in Movement settlements. Subpar conditions in the resettlement towns and consequent resentment of the Federalist authorities was recognised as bad for stability, and the government adopted a new strategy for emigré absorption, the "block settlements". Block settlements would be smaller, more rural in nature, ethnically homogeneous (designated for a particular Coscivian subgroup, caste, religious sect, or minority group), and have associated coöperative and self-managing institutions for social protection, principles that would be inherited by most wings of the Settlement Movement. The land reform process in the Remnant territories, which unfolded around the same time, led to the organisation of "exit" (tivra) communities in Æonara, Sarolasta, and parts of Krasoa, where tracts of redistributed land were owned and managed communally, with usufruct rights over parcels allocated and reällocated among peasant households, presaging the smallholders' coöperative model.
Coscivianist-civilisational settlements
The oldest and, by many assessments, largest tendency within the Settlement Movement is the "civilisationist" or "Coscivianist" tendency, which advocates the geographic expansion of Coscivian civilisation in order to secure its long-term future and challenge the global dominance of Levantine-Occidental civilisation. This school of thought has a long history that predates the modern Settlement Movement, and first rose to political prominence during the Kiro-Burgundian Wars. The Kiravian-Burgundine rivalry for control over transoceanic trade was initially viewed as an issue of interest only to the mercantile classes of the large coastal trading cities, until [YEAR] when essays published in major papers such as the Primóra Moon and Valēka Post recast the commercial-colonial struggle as a battle for the survival of Coscivian civilisation as a distinct cultural sphere in an effort to cultivate more broad-based political support. Slogans such as "Expand or perish" and "Colonise, lest we ourselves be colonised" express the spirit of the movement, and continue to be used in political discourse to the present day.
Religious settlements
The religious wing of the Settlement Movement has risen and fallen in prominence over time, reflecting internal disagreements within the major Kiravian churches and the Christian political movement over the ethics of colonialism. The most recent wave of support for religiously-inspired Movement settlements began during the Crippling Depression and was buoyed by the domestic alter-modernist and anti-modernist back-to-the land movements in Kiravia advocating religious revival, agrarianism, localism, and communitarianism. The leading theorist behind the religious Settlement Movement was the Coscivian Orthodox writer Avvakuv Texavyrin, editor of the Kiravian Homestead Hebdomadary, who argued that "overseas colonisation and agrarian, communitarian religious renewal are inseparable from one another, if for no other reason than that there is not nearly enough affordable arable land on this island continent to allow for a large-scale escape from urban wage-slavery." Religious Movement settlements are usually associated with distributist economics.
Most religious Movement settlements are Coscivian Orthodox or Roman Catholic, though a smaller number of Insular Apostolic, Muslim, Cronan Orthodox, Reformed Orthodox, and Protestant settlements exist. There are a few settlements associated with Coscivian monotheistic religions, but these are more properly associated with either the Coscivianist-civilisational or Preservationist wings of the movement.
Cultural Preservationist settlements
A smaller but still important tendency within the Settlement Movement has been the cultural-preservationist current, which supports transplanting members of small ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural groups (usually but not always Coscivian) from Great Kirav to the Cronan frontier, where they hope to preserve their culture by maintaining economic self-sufficiency and distancing themselves from larger neighbouring ethnic groups and more mainstream Kiravian culture. There is significant overlap between the cultural-preservationist and Coscivian-civilisational wings of the movement, as many preservationist settlements are sponsored by the larger civilisationist-minded organisations, and Coscivianists generally view the internal diversity of Coscivian civilisation as one of its strengths.
Some non-Coscivian minority groups in Kiravia have formed movement settlements, including the Rhūniks (who have settled in Thýstara), Skithanawites,
and the Sinyolans of Æonara (who have formed a Mormon settlement in the Northeast Territory). There was a notable attempt in 21204 by members of the Makaveli tribe, a Kiravite Urom people, to form a strictly traditionalist village near the northern frontier of Porfíria that would preserve their pre-Coscivian way of life. The Makaveli initiative secured the support of [organisation] and obtained a land grant, but was denounced by the tribe's leadership as hypocritical and later abandoned due to a lack of financing and difficulties in recruiting settlers.
Kirosocialist and Left-wing settlements
The Kirosocialist régime in Great Kirav took an insularist-souverainist approach to foreign and colonial policy strategy and what interest it had in the Kiravian overseas provinces was focussed on defeating the rival Kiravian Remnant. However, the end of Kirosocialist rule over Kiravia spurred a Kirosocialist wing of the Settlement Movement and caused colonial policy to be reëvaluated in Kirosocialist circles. Faced with the dismantling of the Kirosocialist economic system at home and the electoral decline of the People's Alliance and later Popular Democratic Front, a number of Kirosocialists embraced the methods of the Settler Movement as an opportunity to preserve the ideology, values, and Red culture of their own movement away from the capitalist dominance of mainstream Kiravian society, and prove the merits of collectivist economic models in relative isolation from national and global market forces. An early proponent, Turan Uśixin of the Labour Cronanist Society, reasoned that an imbalance beterrn top-down and bottom-up approaches to building socialism had contributed to the Kiravian Union's failure, and that "Coscivian socialist civilisation must be built by and through the Coscivian working class from its very physical foundations on upward".
Models
Collective village (Dataglédikōsuv)
Collective villages are the most economically and socially collectivist form of Movement settlement. All land and other means of production are held in common, and all management decisions are made collectively, either through direct democracy or delegation to officials elected by direct-democratic means. The majority of collective villages make some form of allowance for small-scale private consumption by individual households. Those that strictly do not allow any private household or individual economic transactions or activities at all are considered by some to constitute a separate model, called "communal villages". Collective village settlements are most commonly associated with Kirosocialist and cultural-preservationist communities. In many respects, they intentionally resemble traditional village communes found in many parts of Great Kirav under the Medial Coscivian Economy, as well as Kirosocialist-era collective farms.
Village coöperative (Kōsūdataventora)
In a village coöperative, land is owned communally and farming is undertaken collectively and the profits from sale of produce are shared equally, but the disposal of this shared income is at the discretion of each member-household. In other words, production, supply, services, and marketing are all coöperative in nature, but consumption is private.
Smallholders' coöperative (Thramtredataventora)
In a smallholders' coöperative, farm plots (usually of fixed and equal size) are granted to and worked by individual families (though labour is often pooled or swapped as needed). Supply, services, and marketing are undertaken coöperatively, but production and consumption decisions are private. The smallholder coöperative model has become the one most commonly used by settlers of a distributist persuastion. Village coöperatives have been known to restructure into smallholder coöperatives due to internal political problems or dissatisfaction with that model's level of collectivism.
Freeholders' coöperative
The freeholders' coöperative is the least collectivist form of Movement settlement, and is generally reminiscent of a strong homeowner's association or gated community. Economic coöperatism, where it exists at all, is minimal, and households are fully independent economic units. Collective decision-making is limited to controlling membership and access, normal municipal functions like planning, and providing common amenities to foster social capital and improve quality of life. These are more common in less recently annexed areas with better infrastructure and security and thus less of a need for mutual aid and militia defence. Some freeholders' coöperatives no longer farm at all and a few have never farmed, instead functioning as bedroom communities economically dependent on larger, non-Movement settlements within commuting range.
Organisations
The Settlement Movement is led by a number of non-profit organisations, most of which take the form of second-order coöperatives. These organisations serve to structure coöperation among communities with similar ideological leanings and models of governance, help new settlement initiatives obtain land grants and financing, and work with federal and colonial authorities to protect the interests of Movement settlers.
- Coscivian World Foundation - Based in Escarda, the Coscivian World Foundation supports Coscivian settlement in Crona and elsewhere for civilisationist and strategic regions. It is the oldest of the Settlement Movement organisations and the largest private landowner in Kiravian Crona. Though officially nonpartisan, it has close ties with the Coscivian National Congress.
- Coscivian Future Fund - Based in Tandhurin, Valēka, the Coscivian Future Fund is broadly strategic and civilisationist in outlook, but has backed a diverse array of settlement trusts, many apolitical in intent. It is reported to have had close links with the Candrin administration and played a key role in cultivating a strong colonial hawk caucus within the FRA.
- Association of Socialist Pioneers - Based in Xūrosar, the ASP is the preëminent organisation representing the Kirosocialist wing of the Settlement Movement.
- Preserver Institute - Based in Ansalon, Valēka, the Preserver Institute is a more diversified organisation dedicated to the cultural survival of endangered Coscivian peoples, as well as national minorities and select small-numbered peoples elsewhere in the world. Sponsorship of Movement settlements for peoples at risk of assimilation is only one of the group's activities, which also include language conservation, literary development, anthropological research, and advocacy. It has also been accused of assisting the Kiravian government in efforts to Coscivise native Cronite groups and spread pro-Kiravian propaganda to minority groups abroad.
- Virgin Lands Trust - Based in Nív-Xavier, Ilfenóra, the VLT is a distributist, alter-modernist, and (unofficially) Catholic organisation.
- National Fund for Crona - Fort Kenmór, Atrassica. The NFP is inspired by a "Cosco-Cronitic" ideology that claims, in one form or another, either that Crona is the historic homeland of the Coscivian peoples, or otherwise a deeper historical relationship between Coscivian civilisation and Crona that justifies Kiravian expansion there on grounds of irredentism or civilisational restoration. In addition to sponsoring settlements of Cosco-Kiravian emigrants, it has also spearheaded the formation of Movement-style settlements by native Cronites with the goal of "re-exposing" them to their purportedly ancestral Coscivian culture, and spreading pro-Kiravian propaganda.
- Popular Fund for Extensive Promotion of Coöperative Sylvan Agriculture (PFEPCSA) - A smaller and less prominent organisation based in Ainterek, Kiorgia, PFEPCSA is a neotraditionalist group that seeks to preserve the historical lifestyle of particular Coscivian ethnosocial subgroups defined by their practices of silviculture, silvopastoralism, and agroforestry by resettlement in Crona.