Philosophy Governing The Star Wars Galaxy

PeliusAnar

Well-known member
You do not need Bacta. There are other forms of medicine. The idea that a single planet can provide it to millions of worlds in a galaxy is hard to believe anyways.

You do not need Tibanna gas. There's other types of weapons technology available, canonically, and those gas giants are scattered throughout the galaxy anyways.

Cortosis and Kyber are both insanely niche items, they literally only matter if you're a Jedi/Sith/similar or trying to fight them.

All of these are nice things to have, but the problems of scale in trying to have a nation the size of a galaxy create far more pressure and problems than having any of these things would relieve.

Again, it is not human nature to be so unified and harmonius on a macroscale. It just does not work.

It is about supply chain efficiency. We see it occurring today with the food supply due to Covid. Food processing plants that cater to super markets are completely different than food processing plants that cater to restaurants. Another example is rare earth metals, sure there are a lot of locations that have them, but 90%+ of the production is in China. The market is only so elastic and their is a profitability to streamline one's production process as much as possible. On Geonosis we see the droid factories, but having them switch over to another droid is not simple. Unlike Star Trek, things have to be made piece by piece.

Let's take weapons tech. Switching over your hand guns is probably fairly quick, depending on the volume. But then you have to swap out all your ship weapons and the weapon storages in said ships. Also the controls that monitor said weapons and training to use said weapons. The scale gets a lot worse at that level. Then scale that across all your ships. While it isn't human nature to be harmonious on a macroscale, it is in a corporations interest to be harmonious on a macroscale.

'I am sure.' That's nothing but an assertion, and it completely ignores the costs of shipping a low-value high-bulk good like food, as well as the sheer size of worlds and populations, and how rapidly you can cause mass starvation if there's disruption to a massively inter-dependent food trade system.

There isn't just a world of difference between 'growing potatoes in Idaho and shipping them to Texas,' there's literal worlds. You're making massive assumptions about how things could or would work, then completely hand-waving away the equally-massive logistical and technical difficulties in making that happen, as well as the consequences if those things fail.

It's one thing to have some specialized worlds that are very dependent on food imports. It's another thing to try to have the majority of worlds dependent on food imports. And this is one industry you're trying to make claims about that is vastly more complex than you understand.

There are at least two worlds dependent on imports, Coruscant and Nar Shadda. Coruscant Food Supply.
Orbital traffic encloses the planet like electrons around a nucleus, delivering food and supplies, ambassadors and tourists.

Palaeontologists believe most of Coruscant was already paved over by the time interstellar flight became common. Such rampant overpopulation forced the inhabitants to develop the first atmosphere scrubbers, hydroponic farms, delivery pipelines, and recycling plants.

Well that is how Star Wars is. Thrawn's blockade of the planet in legends probably killed a couple billion poor people easily now that I really think about it. But in Star Wars that kind of number means nothing and unless they are a Force User or closely tied to one, the setting pretty much glosses over them. There are complete agri-worlds in the galaxy, that is where unchosen young Jedi get sent to. So we can say their supply chain is partly force powered, though I do agree that such a supply chain is insane.

You're actually wrong about this. You have truckers on 'back' country roads all the time. Not all of them, certainly, but quite a number, and they do so because while it is slower, it is more direct and saves them time. It's not about the tolls, it's about the time saved.

Also, quoting the last couple of Star Wars movies does your argument no credibility, since they were blatantly written by people who are actively ignorant of how things like trade and logistics really work.
Hyperlanes area thing in Star Wars. My analogy might be a bit off, but hyperlanes are a thing in Legends and Cannon. I agree with you 100 quintillion percent, that the writers don't understand the supply chain. I would argue that there are 10-1000x more supply and trade ships that they didn't include in the background scenes to save on their budget.

I'm not sure what your point here is?

Some corporations are quite powerful, yes. The problem with the prequel trilogy and the Trade Federation isn't that the Trade Federation has militarized, it's the absolutely farcical notion that the Republic could exist without a standing military in the first place. A nation without a military exists purely on the sufferance of other nations.

It is the sole super power and has Jedi that have been putting on band-aids for a thousand years. After the Sith were wiped out, there was no need to have a large military and everyone was pretty fed up of the intense fighting. There can also be an argument made that the line of Sith encouraged the military to draw down and have the Jedi take center stage. A single Jedi master can easily take out a capital ship, just by flying to it through all the turbo lasers and then lightsabering their way to the bridge.



The idea that the entire planet had jack-all for military is also silly. The idea that the Republic didn't have a standing military capable of smacking the Trade Federation down is even sillier.

To clarify, the people writing this stuff didn't know anything about the subject matter. Naboo (not counting the Gungans) is a human civilization. No planet-wide human civilization would be capable of existing without a military for any meaningful duration, that's not how human societies work.

Naboo was very clearly an idealized 'peaceful and enlightened' civlization, with a romatnicized conception of how it was run and ruled. They have an 'elected monarch,' in an attempt to appeal to the nostalgia for the 'good king' and the 'representative statesman' both at the same time.

If you want to go down the road of fantasy-humans not being like real humans, but instead less evil, more enlightened, less war-like and sinful, then you can have whatever kind of government you want.

That's not a story that real people can relate to as anything more than wish-fulfillment fantasy though. Part of what made the original Star Wars so iconic, and so much of the original Expanded Universe material at that, was because it was a tale both of struggle against external evil (The Empire), and internal evil, Luke trying not to fall to the Dark Side, Vader turning away from it, Han Solo choosing to come back and risk his life even after he'd gotten paid, etc, etc.

The original trilogy also did a very good job of not going into fine detail about the size or scale of the conflict. The Empire is bigger and more powerful than the Rebel Alliance, with large fleets and large numbers of expendable forces. The Rebel Alliance tries to fight in a way to preserve their people while still dealing effective blows, because that's how the good guys fight, treating life as precious as they can in war.

The Prequels had almost entirely lost that. The only character you really see struggling with that, is Anakin, and the way it's written is really shitty.

Again I agree with you, but we are left to pick up the pieces where the writers tossed them. I would argue the Jedi taking the primary role, seen as they were sent in to deal with the blockage and went straight for the bridge (still don't get why they ran away, but whatever). I would say they spent all their money on social programs, architecture, and Padme's wardrobe. There just wasn't anything left for a sizable military after all those dresses.

No, this is not 'the scale of the problem if everything fractures to the system level,' this is the reason that you can't have a monolithic galactic civilization in the first place.

There are too many conflicting interests, too many different people that want to seize power, just too many conflicting factors period.

Feasibly speaking, you wouldn't have everything devolve down to single-system polities, but once things move past hundreds or a few thousand systems, a nation will be too busy trying to not fly apart from all the internal stresses to keep expanding. I'd expect most systems to be part of nations that range from the dozens to low hundreds of systems in total, with some much smaller, and some larger.
I disagree on this. If you have a charismatic enough leader, you can keep expanding until they reach someone stronger or said leader dies. Then you get Jedi putting band-aids on everything, and the war weariness of the general population. I mean after 24 crusades, a couple genocidal wars with the Sith, and any body would get tired.

No, the issue is not communication and travel time. The British Empire held together for generations in the age of sail, when it could literally take months for word to reach London from a given colony. The British Empire fell apart after WWII, when air travel and radio existed, and thus you could send a message across the world in minutes, and move people and equipment around the world in a couple of days. To be clear, the British Empire endured when communication and travel took weeks and months, and collapsed when that took minutes and hours.

The issue is that every local area has conflicting interests and priorities, and as your nation scales up in size, you have more and more conflicting interests fighting within it. Further, as the scale of a nation becomes more difficult for people to conceptualize an identity around, the people will more and more often build their identity over something more local. You can fight this to a degree, but that only goes so far.

This is Mandalore in a nutshell. The Core systems have fought so many times in the past, they are basically warred out. The rim systems don't have the infrastructure to support a large conflict. So things just dragged on. There just aren't any large capital shipyards in the outer rim that can compete with the core. Also you have to figure that human average life span is doubled and other species are long lived. So the time scales also becomes bigger.

You're completely leaving out that wars can also lead to divisions. The Roman Empire gradually accumulated territory, then it collapsed. So did the Persian Empire. So did the Mongol Empire. So did the British Empire, the German Empire, the French Empire, etc.

If you just completely leave out the decline part of the cycle of nations and civilizations rising and falling, of course you'll end up with an eventual conglomeration into a unified super-state.

But that's not how history actually works out. Things do not naturally move towards hegemony without limit, they naturally move towards hegemony until the internal stresses overcome the strength of the hegemony. Then they start to fall apart.

I'm going to cut back on the spaghetti-post responses after this. It eats a lot of time.

And again, all of this is so long as you're using a human psychology. If you want to have some alien race that is more suited to being a cultural monolith and accepting authoritarian structures, it could work with that. A large human population could tear it apart though.
I would also agree with you. But I would say those internal stresses are not large enough to overcome the barrier that is galactic trade and remain purely at a System level, which no one cares about in Star Wars. Or it becomes serious enough Jedi are sent in with a beat stick. The threat of Jedi was probably a strong deterrent. Also the Republic did have internal strife, looking at you Pius Dea crusades. The winner just kept calling themselves the Republic and took on the legacy of its predesscors.

Thanks for responding, I really enjoyed your post. :)
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
IIRC, the Jedi Order at the time of the Prequel Trilogy, numbered ten thousand in total.

There was no note that this was an exceptionally low or high number, and if there's an explicit canon number for any other pre-Empire period, I'm not familiar with it.

There aren't enough Jedi to act both as a military and a universal glue to keep society together. There aren't enough to accomplish either task, much less both.

And the only time that the concerns of corporations for maximally-efficient trade can become dominant enough to push for the kind of galactic unity you're talking about, is one where there's no military capacity to resist their interests, and that's the case for multiple generations at a stretch.

And that's not how civilizations work. You don't start from the position of a monolithic unitary government existing, and then try to argue about all the things that would be lost if it fell apart, you have to justify how it could come into existence in the first place. I don't need to explain why people would switch from a unified industrial and commercial economic system to a fragmented one, you need to justify how that unified system could possibly come into existence in the first place.

If you want to appeal to the plot holes written into the setting, there's no point in trying to talk about how to make an actual system of governance work. Pick your arbitrary number of inhuman plot devices that make the system work in spite of all the reasons it shouldn't, and roll out.

As a note, if you want to write that story by having Jedi exist in the order of hundreds or thousands per planet, rather than five digits existing in the galaxy as a whole? That actually sounds pretty interesting; I think it'd fall short as a justification still, but it's closer to it, and could take the setting in interesting directions.


Also, the idea that Star Wars isn't about 'single system stories' is nonsense. Each of the original trilogy movies took place in 2-3 systems, and many of the early major novels I can think of were primarily on a similar scale. The Thrawn trilogy isn't, but even then each book usually has a couple worlds it focuses on more than others, and beyond that...

1. The first four X-wing books were about (staging system for taking Coruscant), taking Coruscant, holding Coruscant, then taking Thyferra respectively. Or whatever the world Bacta is made on is called if I've forgotten.

2. Truce at Bakura was all about Bakura, as the title implies.

3. Courtship of Princess Leia is entirely on Coruscant and Dathomir.

4. The Correllian trilogy that's all, shocker, in Corellia.

5. The Jedi Academy Trilogy is a partial, but only partial exception to this. Much of it centers around Yavin IV, with one or two other major locations per book.


The narrative focus of Star Wars is actually usually fairly tightly-focused, though with much larger implications clearly working around that tight focus.
 
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JagerIV

Well-known member
@PeliusAnar : I think your misenagining how true megacorps work in a galactic power: their not a threat to galactic power, their going to be the primary pusher of it.

Most of the advantages for building galactic institutions, as youve suggested, are mostly to the benifit of galactic corporations. For example, a small trader is not immensely inconvienced if each world has its own currency. A corporation trading on a million world's is.

Its the megacorporations which are going to push for galactic reserve currency: its the mega corps that are going to bring the coresant credit to the galaxy.

Just think of earth: the big pushers of globalization are big multinational companies. Likewise, the people pushing galactization are going to be mega corps. A megacorp might be a threat to interests in the republic, like the east india company mkight be a threat to certain interests od the British empire, but it would be silly to say its a threat to the empire: its one of the driving forces of the British Empire!

Hell, probably one of the purposes of the Senate would be to check the corporations from being too enthusiastic about centralizing galactic power!
 

WyldCard4

Well-known member
I think there are several under-addressed problems that break some of the scenarios being discussed. I'm more familiar with Legends, so it might be easier in the Disney version of the galaxy, but it is still a big problem.

1. It is very easy, technologically, to move around the Star Wars galaxy. Decentralizing to the system level cannot work, as every system has thousands of neighbors one hyperspace jump away and cannot possibly deal with them bilaterally. Even basic things like "inter-system travel is regulated by central authorities, in-system is not" is an immensely complicated and costly affair, requiring an enormous government.

The incredible freedom of movement can be shut down by military forces, but this obviously imposes immense friction on any systems trying to isolate.

2. Systems vary so much in scale that exploitation is both immensely easy and hard to define. A system like Corellia has tens of thousands of systems it can interact with, ranging from other ancient mega-project heavy civilizations to stone age tribes. It is unlikely even an imperial Corellia could manage this if it sincerely wanted to. Any central authority is going to be blind and unfair because of how many particular situations are going on at any given time.

3. The massive problems of the late stage Old Republic were implimented for surprisingly good reasons. Intense demilitarization was necessary to prevent arms races. A military powerful enough to patrol the galaxy is easily powerful enough to massacre any particular nail that isn't pounded down, and if everyone is worried about being that nail, everyone is going to start militarizing to make this unattractive. Furthermore, this was in the echoes of a nearly post-apocalyptic war, making demilitarization far more practical, and then cultural and governmental inertia slowed down re-arming until far too late.

4. The Tarkin Doctrine was never going to work outside of the short term. Palpatine embraced the Tarkin Doctrine because he thought he was going to transcend the need for normal governance after a few decades of research into whatever technological or mystical plot devices he thought he could secure. Impartial governance being nearly impossible on this scale, no system will feel that they can be safe just be following the rules even if there were not pre-existing dividing lines to crack the galaxy apart.

5. The Core Worlds and the Rim hate each other for very good reasons. Smuggling, drug running, slavery, and other things are as unpopular in the Core Worlds as they are on modern Earth, and many powers in the Outer Rim consider these practices necessary for their survival. The scale of this "disagreement" makes even as cheap and easy a compromise as the American Civil War nearly impossible to contemplate. Trying to push a minimum level of decency into the Outer Rim is always going to lead to a situation like Clone Wars, probably even worse. Given the human cost to these practices, the Core Worlds tolerating them also make enemies of the Outer Rim, as it is the most diverse segment of the galaxy and plenty of planets are being abused as well as feel the need to rely on abuse to survive.

6. The Dark Side is an enormous problem impossible to really solve in either Disney or Legends. It might be possible to create some kind of "balance" or "gray" order, but nobody has ever come close, and even if they did it seems pretty likely the real Dark Siders would destroy it anyway. The Dark Side basically lets a handful of people trade sanity for power at a very good rate of return, which almost ensures that horrific conflict will erupt on a fairly regular basis. The prequel Jedi Order was probably the best counter to the problem of the Dark Side that ever existed, and it still failed dramatically.

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I think I would propose attempting to transform the Jedi Order into something akin to a feudal bureaucracy. This system would have incredible problems even with a Jedi Order that was competently reformed and administered, but I think it might be the least bad system that is most likely to be stable.

The Jedi Council would appoint Jedi as vassal lords with non-hereditary claims to systems. Plausibly, systems would have the right to choose their particular Jedi Lord, with this right being revocable in response to poor behavior. Jedi Lords would appoint Senators to the Republic Senate, handle inter-system disputes, and have other powers granted on a case by case basis as either a system proved irresponsible or the authorities inside a system considered their Jedi Lord to be a better arbiter than other options.

In theory, this system could prove much more flexible than the normal operations of the Empire or Republic. Jedi teachings of empathy and impartiality would hopefully make the Jedi better able to handle problems than local authorities, and it seems likely that force power based mediation of conflict would cause many Jedi Lords to become highly popular, and poor performance or popularity as a Jedi Lord has the escape valve of the Council changing a system's overlord.

Among other problems, perhaps biggest one is likely that the Jedi Order has too few members of talent to make a Jedi Lord branch of the size necessary to implement this system. My tentative answer would be to begin experimenting with cloning projects on volunteer force users, which is likely a necessary step no matter what else happens if you want to prepare for the next eruption of Dark Side influence. Ten thousand Jedi Knights are likely far too few even under the most optimistic projections of a stable galaxy, and ordinary Jedi reproduction seems unlikely to operate well enough in scale or consistency to remedy this problem before family lines fall to the Dark Side. Cloning Jedi probably won't work, but it might work.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
If the issue with scale is that the data for Jedi Knights says there's too few, then I'll bring up that the Knights are just the chamber militant. The Order has a number of wholly non-combative branches, including dedicated diplomats, so the Coruscanti Order being several hundred thousand strong isn't actually out of the picture.

Given that Force affinity is hereditary, making the Jedi Order into the semi-feudal backbone of a parliamentary system, the House of Lords to something like the canon senate's House of Commons, would likely allow for the system to grow to cover the galaxy, given sufficient time, and the nature of Force use makes upholding internal norms for essentially arbitrary periods something that's able to be done.
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
The system of the Old Republic before Ruusan, a pure oligarchic Republic in which Senate seats were assigned by political power and negotiation to species, polities, corporations and interest groups, and there were thousands of Senators functioning essentially like the Assembly of Athens and voting en bloc, using a strong military to keep order in coordination with the Jedi, lasted for 24,000 years with a fair degree of success, some periods of terrible war but reliably able to reconstitute itself and keep the peace.

In comparison the pacifist, democratic reformed government post Ruusan lasted less than a thousand years and totally failed to keep the peace or control slavery. The Empire proved unable to implement autocratic totalitarianism on a galactic scale and collapsed.

The blatant conclusion is that an Oligarchic Republic with no pretence of democracy and a strong Chancellor and Senate with a regular organised military is unambiguously the best government for the galaxy.
 
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Deleted member

Guest
It's sad in that respect that the New Republic in canon decided to basically commit suicide by going even more pacifist than the Ruusan-era OR.

Well, it did at least have a military, but it was totally inadequate for the job when you consider that there wasn’t an absolutely massive Jedi order to take the place of it. That’s how the Ruusan Republic faked it for so long, afterall.

Also the Ruusan Republic had massive private corporate fleets, of which the bulk were owned by Coruscanti Skyhook Society and basically they regarded the Republic as something that was good for business so they helped maintain a semblance of order. These fleets were “Imperialised” into the Imperial Navy and were therefore mostly destroyed during Operation Shadow Hand and therefore the New Republic was like the late Eastern Han, a shadow state with no real ability to control its own territory.
 

Hlaalu Agent

Nerevar going to let you down
Founder
@Tyanna of Pentos I am thinking, a proper reform to the oligarchic republic would be to add democratic elements, but have them be devolved regional senates that answer to the greater one, and maybe tip the hat and have each regional senate appoint their own representative or elect it to the greater senate. Perhaps make it a more finely mixed regime and find a way to bring all interests aboard and integrated into the regime. I mean, the outer rim being alienated is a massive problem, they aren't going to be represented in either senate, but having the ability to run their own affairs and avoid exploitation by the core would avoid many problems.
 

PeliusAnar

Well-known member
Hmmmm, I do agree to some extent, but I am hesitant to accept the premise that a mega-corp would be a driving force for stability. I guess the problem comes from resource exploitation. If the British go to India, it was mostly about exploiting cheap labor and locally grown commodities. For mega-corps they are less interested in the sentient type of resource and more interested in the mineral type of resource. Also said corporations have the ability to enforce a monopoly on a system, thereby keeping the population in poverty with almost no way to escape, since unlike a single land based government, a system based government has the barrier of space. Control the orbitals and you control the world.

I could see as the Republic built up mega-corps were pulled in and hence granted Senate seats, but their proportional power was much greater than other senators. This is evidenced by how the Trade Federation actually forms a bloc in the Senate. Also when these mega-corps expand, they are not bringing enlightenment and civilization. It is purely exploitation.


In Legends you can clone Jedi, but can't speed things up. You did touch on a number of unique issues which really highlights the complexities of Star Wars and the stupid size of the galaxy, including the Dark Side. The title of Jedi Lord was an actual title from about 1100 BBY to 1000 BBY during the later end of the New Sith Wars where Jedi went and defended systems left abandoned by the Republic and were named Lords by the populace for saving them. The most outstanding was Jedi Lord Hoth who gathered the Army of Light and battled against the Sith Lord Kaan and his Brotherhood of Darkness, ending with their mutual self destruction. Jedi Lord titles were then given up in the Ruusan Reformation but some of these outside orders survived like the Corellian Jedi and the Teepo Paladins.

The biggest issue with Jedi seems to be one of doctrine. When you decentralize them, this leads to variation in teaching, which leads to the slight danger of a fall to the Dark Side. The Coruscant Jedi at the time most likely wanted to consolidate in order to prevent Jedi from falling, since a lot of issues in their 20,000+ year history came from fallen Jedi. With the Sith defeated, they probably wanted to create a lasting solution to prevent another Sith or Jedi going over to the Dark side from rising up. Hence the age changes and consolidation. Looking at their results, the Jedi did succeed in limiting powerful Jedi from defecting to the Dark Side over the 1000 years after the Ruusan Reformation. We can remove Anakin, since he was an exception in terms of admittance, and point to Count Dooku as the biggest failure in the 1000 years.

Comparing this to all the crusades, wars, purges, and other nonsense beforehand, it makes sense why the Jedi wanted to stop more of that from happening. That is the main issue I have with your plan. Even if only 0.001% of 10,000 Jedi assigned to groups of systems fall to the Dark Side, that is 10 Jedi. This might be prevented with regular rotation and monitoring, but with all the artifacts out there, the risk is far higher than keeping everyone in a Temple except for the occasional mission.

SNIP

The blatant conclusion is that an Oligarchic Republic with no pretence of democracy and a strong Chancellor and Senate with a regular organised military is unambiguously the best government for the galaxy.

One of the big problems is how your military is composed. Take today's fighter planes, pilots need full color vision, and need to meet certain height and weight requirements. Sure in the future technology is more broad, but then you get aliens. You would not be able to put a Twi'lek in a helmet designed for a human. Even dietary requirements would vary to some extent. So while there are a lot of species in Star Wars, there is a reason that the militaries are very standardized. The sheer cost and logistics of coping with varying alien body types would be hugely prohibitive.

The solution would be to make mostly spieces segrated ships, but that would caused divisions and cliques to form in the military. In addition your costs and taxes would rise sharply. Having a human dominated military is what we had, but can lead to oppression. I mean if a human commander is policing space and comes across a human pirate and an alien pirate, the alien pirate is probably going to get the short end of the stick. This would lead to increased agitation.
 
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Deleted member

Guest
The solution would be to make mostly spieces segrated ships, but that would caused divisions and cliques to form in the military. In addition your costs and taxes would rise sharply. Having a human dominated military is what we had, but can lead to oppression. I mean if a human commander is policing space and comes across a human pirate and an alien pirate, the alien pirate is probably going to get the short end of the stick. This would lead to increased agitation.

The military was human-dominated because the Republic, and the Empire, were both human dominated. In fact, the Republic has been human dominated since its founding, and is even demographically human dominated, and only the Duros and their related species (like the cowardly Nemoidians) came a distant second demographically and in terms of power and influence.
 

PeliusAnar

Well-known member
The military was human-dominated because the Republic, and the Empire, were both human dominated. In fact, the Republic has been human dominated since its founding, and is even demographically human dominated, and only the Duros and their related species (like the cowardly Nemoidians) came a distant second demographically and in terms of power and influence.
But look at the Judicial Forces and all the Admirals that the Republic fields during the Clone Wars that aren't Jedi. They are humans. Even after a 1,000 years, every single person is a human, from the leadership on down. When the Empire took over, that human centrism in the military led to the oppression of a large number of spices. The only non-human anyone can point to is Thrawn, who is like the token black guy but was so Einstein levels of military smart that it was okay. Even then he was human shaped. I would say it is not a surprise that the Rebels were made up of a number of different species. You have the Core/Rim conflict, the Mega-Corp/System conflict, and the human/alien conflict.

Admirals During Clone Wars
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
@PeliusAnar but that's exactly what I meant. They're all humans because the Republic was always human dominated. The Republic is like Imperial Russia: Unlike the colonial Empires, the Central Asians are part of the Empire proper, they have the same rights as Russian peasants in principle, there's a few high-ranking Azerbaijani or Armenian or part-Mongol people at the top, but ultimately, the Empire is an affair of Great Russians, it's dominated by them, it's their country. The same is true of the Republic: There is nominal equality and everyone is a citizen under law, it has no formal mechanism of domination over aliens, but make no mistake, it is a human polity.
 
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Deleted member 88

Guest
Well there were the Duros as well. But yes the republic was a human dominated project from its inception.
 
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Deleted member

Guest
Well there were the Duros as well. But yes the republic was a human dominated project from its inception.


The Duros are noted, with their related cousin races (The Nemoidians and a few others) as being the only other really widely spread and highly populous species, with its own Ecumenopoli, and serious power by themselves inside the Republic. The Hutts were rivals for a while, but precisely because of that, when they were defeated, they turned into crime lords and were marginalised on the outside of the Republic with no actual political power. There's very little doubt that humans and near humans together are a majority of the Galactic population, and when you add the Duros and near-Duros species you probably have a supermajority, simply because of the weight in population the Ecumenopoli represent.
 
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Deleted member 88

Guest
The Duros are noted, with their related cousin races (The Nemoidians and a few others) as being the only other really widely spread and highly populous species, with its own Ecumenopoli, and serious power by themselves inside the Republic. The Hutts were rivals for a while, but precisely because of that, when they were defeated, they turned into crime lords and were marginalised on the outside of the Republic with no actual political power. There's very little doubt that humans and near humans together are a majority of the Galactic population, and when you add the Duros and near-Duros species you probably have a supermajority, simply because of the weight in population the Ecumenopoli represent.
The Hutts aren't marginalized though? As I have said many times, the Hutt's economic and political power is just exercised via the underworld, and they have great latent military power.

To the extent they scared the living crap out of the galaxy, in the post NJO era with their limited support to the Confederate cause.

The Pius Dea didn't defeat them, in fact fear of them was an impetus for the whole religion.

Need I remind you, they smashed the SW version of Alexander the Great in battle and tricked three humanoid warrior races into everlasting slavery.

The Hutts abandoned expansion policy due to a devastating civil war. Not because the Republic forced them too.

Humans and Near Humans combined making the majority I can definitely believe. Baseline humans are a plurality though IIRC.
 
D

Deleted member

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The Hutts aren't marginalized though? As I have said many times, the Hutt's economic and political power is just exercised via the underworld, and they have great latent military power.

To the extent they scared the living crap out of the galaxy, in the post NJO era with their limited support to the Confederate cause.

The Pius Dea didn't defeat them, in fact fear of them was an impetus for the whole religion.

Need I remind you, they smashed the SW version of Alexander the Great in battle and tricked three humanoid warrior races into everlasting slavery.

The Hutts abandoned expansion policy due to a devastating civil war. Not because the Republic forced them too.

Humans and Near Humans combined making the majority I can definitely believe. Baseline humans are a plurality though IIRC.

I would disagree with that. We don't see Hutts having power or influence in the Republic. I'm aware of their defeat of Xim the Despot... 25,000 years ago. But it's fairly clear that the Republic did, ultimately, smash their military power -- even if it had been weakened in a civil war, that still counts. They dominated the criminal underworld, sure, but in terms of actual entrenched power in the economic system? No, they didn't have it, and they were marginalised from the actual levers of power.

Of course, the chaos of the Galactic Civil War and the intrinsic power they did hold allowed them to ultimately rearm, and that was as scary as, say, Imperial Japan rearming today is for some Asian countries. But that doesn't mean they weren't legitimately beaten.
 

WyldCard4

Well-known member
Comparing this to all the crusades, wars, purges, and other nonsense beforehand, it makes sense why the Jedi wanted to stop more of that from happening. That is the main issue I have with your plan. Even if only 0.001% of 10,000 Jedi assigned to groups of systems fall to the Dark Side, that is 10 Jedi. This might be prevented with regular rotation and monitoring, but with all the artifacts out there, the risk is far higher than keeping everyone in a Temple except for the occasional mission.

Yeah, that argument is a really good one, unfortunately. The Jedi Order needs to be responsive to the galaxy, but it also can't allow internal drift, because the Dark Side seems to bubble up and massively overpower anyone who falls to it when the absolute numbers of Dark Side users are tiny. (Not exactly sure that's the mechanic, but it seems close. Even the Sith seem to believe this, based on Darth Bane's philosophy and the considerable successes of his order of Sith.)

Even without fallen Jedi, and even if Darth Bane never founded his order, it seems inevitable that a new Dark Side power will rise. Possibly something like the Night Sisters would eventually rise to galactic power if the Dark Side lacks other options, though it is very unclear how much the Balance and Dark Side are actually willing things to happen and how much force users apply mystical interpretations to events.


@PeliusAnar but that's exactly what I meant. They're all humans because the Republic was always human dominated. The Republic is like Imperial Russia: Unlike the colonial Empires, the Central Asians are part of the Empire proper, they have the same rights as Russian peasants in principle, there's a few high-ranking Azerbaijani or Armenian or part-Mongol people at the top, but ultimately, the Empire is an affair of Great Russians, it's dominated by them, it's their country. The same is true of the Republic: There is nominal equality and everyone is a citizen under law, it has no formal mechanism of domination over aliens, but make no mistake, it is a human polity.

I'd say near-human can be stretched really far, but otherwise I agree. I suspect some planets would consider Mace Windu's force sensitive sub-species to be too far outside of the norm to count as near-human, while others would consider the Twi'liks and Yevetha to be human enough they'd be surprised they were annoyed by human-supremacist policies.

Something weird is going on with evolution in the Star Wars galaxy to make species converge; this seems like one of the more plausible situations to blame on whatever will the Force has.
 

Lanmandragon

Well-known member
If the "core worlds" have more power then what possible reason. Do they have to unite with the core? Surely it's he better to simply form militray forces. Then smash the mega-corps rather then submit to corrusanti(which is what "the republic" is). I really don't get it why should thousands of systems bow to one system? Better to be dead then surrender your sovernity.
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
If the "core worlds" have more power then what possible reason. Do they have to unite with the core? Surely it's he better to simply form militray forces. Then smash the mega-corps rather then submit to corrusanti(which is what "the republic" is). I really don't get it why should thousands of systems bow to one system? Better to be dead then surrender your sovernity.


The Republic's "Main constituents" if you will consist of Coruscant and her main daughter worlds in the Core and the Colonies. They're mostly Ecumenopoli--city planets--with populations in the trillions and a vast network of nearby ag-colonies to feed them. They have enormous power because they have an enormous population, they have enormous industry with giant factory-moons, they pretty much do whatever they want because their fraction of the galactic GDP is huge, and has exactly two rivals...

The secondary constituent is Alsakan. Alsakan is probably the second-oldest human settled planet in the galaxy and it's probably from a divergent cultural strain from that which dominated Coruscant. It has ceremonial plazas and birds and ruthlessly powerful merchant women... So it's no surprise that the outright matriarchal Kuat is a daughter colony of Humbarine (the Ecumenopolis destroyed in the Clone Wars), which was a daughter colony of ... Alsakan (and then Commenor, in the Colonies, and called "The Queen of the Colonies", one of the most populous and economically powerful cities there, was a Kuati daughter colony).

Coruscant and Alsakan had similar populations, similar colonization efforts, and both wanted to dominate economic trade in the galaxy. So they fought Seventeen conflicts over the course of the 25,000 year history of the Republic for control of the Republic. But that's over 25,000 years! At its worst, the fighting was more frequent, with a few outliers like the Seventeenth War, which was fought around the time of the Sith Wars, but they were more or less decisively settled in favour of Coruscant thousands of years beforehand. And because you have to assume culture exists for a reason, elements of Kuati culture had to evolve out of Alsakan's.

So those merchant ladies sure put up a fight first.

Still, worlds founded by Alsakan remain incredibly important to the Republic. Kuat Drive Yards, the premier shipbuilding concern of the galaxy, is still a concern of the planet of Kuat, and in general, the Alsakanian side of the Core is well-integrated now.

(This may actually explain some of where the supposed HuMan elitism comes from -- Coruscant settled whether or not the galaxy would be a matriarchy thousands of years ago).

The third factor is Corellia. Corellia, and Corellians like Han Solo, were on the edge of the built-up core, and Corellia itself is only partially a Ecumenopoli (about 50% of the planet's surface is city), but the seven habitable planets in one system gave it an immediate advantage anyway and it had developed from either an early lost colony ship or, secondly, a group of revolted Rakatan slaves. It built up a large network of dense, rich worlds linked by trade, and was independent of the Republic for the first few thousand years. Taking advantage of the split between Alsakan and Coruscant in the Republic, this group, as an organised bloc with its own government, was able to negotiate special constitutional protections of its autonomy.

As an aside, in the early years of the Republic, the Ancient & Honorable Union of the Tion Hegemony. Located on the outer Rim instead of the Core, they still had a much higher population and early settlement date compared to the rest of the Outer Rim, because they developed from, presumably, revolved Rakatan slaves, into a major pre-Republic polity which began the basis of Xim the Despot's early Empire and fought against the Hutts and the Republic in major wars which ultimately devastated Tion. Forced to join the Republic for protection against the Hutts, this fourth factor in human politics soon slipped away into irrelevance, and has sat like modern Egypt in the ruins of ancient Egypt for thousands and thousands of years now, but it provided a fourth distinct cultural strain to humanity in the Star Wars Galaxy, with an elite that is quite arrogant and obsessed with lineage and blood purity, but essentially irrelevant in any kind of real power, with half-abandoned palaces mouldering in the ruins of civilisation and the deserts created by Hutt bombardments thousands of years ago on worlds whose populations have been in decline for most of the history of the Republic.

If the first three groups agree on something, it happens. And what they agreed upon was a galaxy open to free market capitalism. The Trade Federation was an attempt during the Ruusan Republic, when the Ruusan Reformation had reduced their power, to block them from large markets using unfair trade practices so that less-competitive alien corporations, especially those in the Duros-sphere of the republic (which is probably about as powerful as the Corellian sphere) could be artificially competitive again. The solution of Coruscant and Alsakanian elite society was to support Palpatine and the Empire as a way to make the galaxy safe for them to make money again.
 
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