Travolore Wrote:Jemini Linaki changes tactics to track down Bare Squadron on Sylvawen. Meanwhile the squad discovers that the Treemen's divisions runs deep....

Quote:It should be noted that the process of forming a national identity is a significant one in itself. Citizenship is only part of the answer, as most people will still identify with their immediate regional, ethnic, or religious group, allowing for social fault lines to form. Generally speaking, a central “pole” is needed to act as a unifying force of identification in any large-scale nation-state. This can be a national epic, a written constitution, a venerated royal dynasty, an ideology, a larger ethnicity, or a religious institution, but to help weld together more multitudinous groups, some unifying symbol of identification is needed to be able to create the social institutions that allow for members of the nation to identify as members of the nation, as opposed to seeing themselves as part of the nation only through their identity as members of a social group which is a constituent part of that nation.

This might seem like splitting semantics, but it is an important distinction. If a feudal count declares war on his neighboring count in the hope of taking some of the man’s territory, despite them being part of the same kingdom, which perspective is more useful for halting hostilities? That their levies owe them fealty and thus must follow their orders? Or that their levies are being ordered to attack and kill their fellow subjects of the kingdom? The latter is clearly the more effective means by which to bond the two disparate groups together under a single unifying identity, even though there is no structural legal difference between the two.

Of course, there is always the option of coercive power by a central government to forcibly keep the peace between disparate groups, but this is rarely a long-term solution…

—Nationbuilding: How People Move, Talk, Think, Organize, & Structure Themselves, 1888, Amsterdam University Press

Quote:While there was no shortage of voices in the aftermath of the founding of the Grand Thing complaining that the Citizenship Conclave had gone too far, or not far enough, it should be noted that the majority of the population it governed found the structure it offered acceptable. Certainly there were firebrands and reactionaries, radical egalitarians and staunch authoritarians, all of whom had their issues with the new social structure. But while accounts of these are easy to find in the historical record, a counterpoint must also be raised before it is taken as given that these viewpoints were normative. And it is quite simply the fact that they were not. The majority of the populace of the Kingdom of Berk, and later the North Sea Empire, that was governed and regulated by the Conclave’s output had no substantive issue with it. Standards of living were rising for all classes, and while some reactionary authoritarians grumbled at giving any voice to the general masses, they found amassing any general following beyond a few likeminded individuals difficult.

Of course, these factors are difficult to separate out from the events that immediately followed the Conclave, but a general look at the data collected by the royal government paints a clear picture of most of the populace accepting the compromise as a generally beneficial decision for everyone involved, even if they themselves had their individual sticking points.

The typical counterargument to this is that the populace was cowed by the military force available to Berk in the form of dragon-riders. However, this is not supported by the data, as there are records of protests, strikes, lawsuits, and other such actions which show that the general populace had faith in the rule of law…

—Origins Of The Grand Thing, Edinburgh Press, 1631