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What are the Federation legislators called? Do they reside in Paris?

Are they 'Senators'? Councilmen? Etc?

I don't know that it has ever been consistently described. Sarek is the Vulcan Ambassador, but ambassadors are representatives between separate states, and Vulcan is supposed a charter member planet of the UFP. I am guessing that members of the Council are called ambassadors, but I am sure there are references giving them other titles.

I get the feeling the UFP government is sort of like the UN.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

I think the Federation Council meets in San Francisco.

Considering they use a modified UN flag and Roddenberry hinted that the Federation was the equivilant of the United Nations, members of the Federation Council may well be called Ambassadors, which would mean that federation member worlds are considered nominally sovereign. It's hard to tell because they've always been very vague about how the Federation is actually governed, and by the TNG era, Starfleet has gotten its tentacles so far into everything that they may be the de facto Federation government.

You get right down to it, Starfleet is the only military in the Federation, and has the only decent armed vessels. Hell, Starfleet even controls the diplomatic service by providing transportation, protection, and often by Starfleet officers serving as diplomats.

You never hear the Federation Council tell Starfleet "Well, it's nice that you have this new starship design, but we don't have the resources to put it in production. You'll just have to make do with what you have." The Federation signs a treaty promising not to use cloaking devices, and Starfleet turns around and puts them in a ship, and the Federation says nothing.

The Federation sets up a base on a planet with the intent of acquiring a rare substance that promises to grant vastly increased lifetimes and enormous medical advances (Insurrection), and when a Starfleet officer intervenes, he isn't even officially reprimanded.

Whether they're the government in theory or not, Starfleet controls the Federation in fact.

The Federation has struck me as being much like the UN in that it does not tend to meddle in the affairs of member states. We know members have their own individual holdings; Turkana IV was an "Earth colony" before it fell into anarchy.

I think the Federation is probably an alliance of worlds formed for mutual protection and regulation of the space occupied and controlled by member states. I would be willing to bet that a big reason that Starfleet dominates the Federation so much is because Starfleet is one of, if not the major reason for the Federation in the first place.

The Federation is fairly insidious in that they offer the allure of technology on par with their major rivals, in exchange for sharing similar ideological views and contributing resources towards Starfleet. I seriously doubt member states get a free ride and suspect that the human-dominated Starfleet is due to Earth using the Federation to aquire a free, hell even willing resource base from which to build a navy capable of matching the Klingons and Romulans. With high technology and the "intellectual puppets of the Federation" behind them and dangerous, ambitious, ruthless enemies with a history of conquest in front of them, the core Federation members are in a key position to bring lesser worlds under their political, economic, and even sociological influence as worlds work to change their society so as to meet Federation membership requirements.

Kerneth - Why was such a big fuss made when that one Admiral tried to institute martial law in DS9, then? If the military already had the power, what was the point of that story then?

Uraniun235 wrote: Kerneth - Why was such a big fuss made when that one Admiral tried to institute martial law in DS9, then? If the military already had the power, what was the point of that story then?

I think the idea is that Starfleet has a great deal of influence and uses the Federation government as a way of making sure that the civilians feel they have the power. Last thing a shadow government wants is light being thrown on it by an admiral deciding to make things more or less "official"