Dan1988
DO! YOU! HEAR THE SONG OF PEACE!
- Location
- North America
- Pronouns
- he/him
So, I've a few things that have been floating around in my head and I'd like to "test-drive" them on you guys.
I'm thinking of rebooting my Fallen Madonna TL I had started at the other place and had started (but haven't finished yet) reposting here. Eventually, I want to continue reposting old updates here (along with a couple of additional Great War ones), but there's one thing I want to retcon, but as I'm not terribly familiar with British political history in many places, I want to posit a thought here. I want to try taking a different tack with the whole Imperial Federation concept that occasionally gets thrown in conversation as one way to reform the British Empire.
Now, some of us may have heard about the concept of Imperial Federation and know that it was championed as one way to resolve both the Irish Question and the conundrum of managing the future of the Empire. It was also, in turn, championed by a minority and that in some quarters the ideas was not that well-received. Alongside many of of the familiar issues, such as tensions between the Dominions and the UK and fears that a super-parliament would impinge on the Dominions' autonomy, one of the main problems as I see it is what the historian Geoffrey Blainey calls the tyranny of distance. That is, the further remote geographically a colony is from the UK, the more that remoteness shapes the identity and culture of the people in that colony. Sometimes you get extremes, such as the expat nostalgia found among the British communities in the colonies and protectorates (I'm thinking here of the actor Richard E. Grant's recollections of growing up in Swaziland/eSwatini within an expat British community there, or groups like the Anglo-Canadians (which basically took Anglophilia to the extreme, affecting even their natural speech) who used to exist before the 1960s), and other times you have the difficulties of managing such a Federation with the core units so far away that the remoteness - and perception that they will never be seen as equal to the metropole - creating distinctive identities which reflect this ambiguity and anxiety combined with low self-esteem.
Thus, a federation of equals such as what the basic Imperial Federation concept suggests would be problematic. I had initially considered directly integrating (in a piecemeal fashion, of course) the Dominions into a federal UK where Home Rule All Round would be a reality, but ran into the realization that with a UK divided into such small components, the only way it would work would be if the component units were equally small and, to mitigate the tyranny of distance problem, be close enough geographically to the UK where it would be feasible. Places like Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Malta, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, some of the Caribbean holdings would work for a direct integration into a federal UK; places like Canada, OTOH, would not (also, for reasons that I don't know why but seem to creep up time and time again in my readings, Canada seems to be used as a guinea pig for the rest of the Empire as far as political and Constitutional development goes). So, I leave you guys with this question: are there any other ways to make an Imperial Federation work outside of the usual trope of creating a Imperial super-Parliament?
I'm thinking of rebooting my Fallen Madonna TL I had started at the other place and had started (but haven't finished yet) reposting here. Eventually, I want to continue reposting old updates here (along with a couple of additional Great War ones), but there's one thing I want to retcon, but as I'm not terribly familiar with British political history in many places, I want to posit a thought here. I want to try taking a different tack with the whole Imperial Federation concept that occasionally gets thrown in conversation as one way to reform the British Empire.
Now, some of us may have heard about the concept of Imperial Federation and know that it was championed as one way to resolve both the Irish Question and the conundrum of managing the future of the Empire. It was also, in turn, championed by a minority and that in some quarters the ideas was not that well-received. Alongside many of of the familiar issues, such as tensions between the Dominions and the UK and fears that a super-parliament would impinge on the Dominions' autonomy, one of the main problems as I see it is what the historian Geoffrey Blainey calls the tyranny of distance. That is, the further remote geographically a colony is from the UK, the more that remoteness shapes the identity and culture of the people in that colony. Sometimes you get extremes, such as the expat nostalgia found among the British communities in the colonies and protectorates (I'm thinking here of the actor Richard E. Grant's recollections of growing up in Swaziland/eSwatini within an expat British community there, or groups like the Anglo-Canadians (which basically took Anglophilia to the extreme, affecting even their natural speech) who used to exist before the 1960s), and other times you have the difficulties of managing such a Federation with the core units so far away that the remoteness - and perception that they will never be seen as equal to the metropole - creating distinctive identities which reflect this ambiguity and anxiety combined with low self-esteem.
Thus, a federation of equals such as what the basic Imperial Federation concept suggests would be problematic. I had initially considered directly integrating (in a piecemeal fashion, of course) the Dominions into a federal UK where Home Rule All Round would be a reality, but ran into the realization that with a UK divided into such small components, the only way it would work would be if the component units were equally small and, to mitigate the tyranny of distance problem, be close enough geographically to the UK where it would be feasible. Places like Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Malta, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, some of the Caribbean holdings would work for a direct integration into a federal UK; places like Canada, OTOH, would not (also, for reasons that I don't know why but seem to creep up time and time again in my readings, Canada seems to be used as a guinea pig for the rest of the Empire as far as political and Constitutional development goes). So, I leave you guys with this question: are there any other ways to make an Imperial Federation work outside of the usual trope of creating a Imperial super-Parliament?