Zor wrote: ↑2018-01-12 09:59pm
Simon_Jester wrote: ↑2018-01-12 08:06amThe point is, by the time the movies start, the "Republic brings peace and stability to the galaxy" era is
already over. The Clone Wars and the Empire do not restore it. By the time the rebels kill the Emperor, there's nothing left to save of the old peaceful, stable system of things.
If there was political division it never would have happened in the first place. There could up to millions* of political entities, each with their own militiaries, political agendas and fears.
*though I doubt that would be the case to be honest, frankly you'd have local Madisons, Bismarcks, Charlemagnes and Tokugawas that would carve out new intersteller federations and kingdoms. This is basically the pattern that was followed in the real world, bands of a few dozen became tribes of a few hundred which became small agrarian clans/chiefdoms of a few thousand to small city states that were eventually hammered into kingdoms, empires and nations.
If the Republic had been more tightly organized it might well have provoked more rebellions. "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." A galactic regime that tolerates a great deal of diversity and local autonomy may be less able to rein in splinter factions, but it's also less likely to create them.
What she was referring to was Tarkin's use of the threat of extreme military force to keep. Not every centralized state makes use of such heavy handed methods that make such enemies to keep it's populaces in line.
#notallempires
Riiight.
The point remains valid. A
loosely affiliated system that exists mainly to provide a common framework for settling interstellar disputes may well be much better suited to governing a sprawling galaxy full of diverse alien species and planets at wildly different levels of development. Having everything micromanaged in detail from Coruscant would almost certainly result in Coruscant mismanaging most of the galaxy, simply because human usually won't have much insight into how to govern hermaphroditic methane-breathers, and vice versa.
Tighter centralization is not always better. I don't know how to make this more simple, and I wish you could wrap your head around the concept. There are genuinely circumstances where it is better to let groups govern themselves, while operating within a broad legal framework, rather than trying to conquer and unify and merge them all into a single homogeneous blob against their will.
The Old Republic clearly worked quite well for a thousand years or more, as a loosely structured body, with a limited military. Relying mainly on the Jedi to keep the peace
worked; having a large Republic fleet that dominated the galaxy by force was unnecessary.
And the system did not start to collapse until corruption and conspiracies arose within the government itself, catalyzed in large part by the Sith. And once corruption and conspiracies are major factors,
being more centralized doesn't help.
And yet, the "worst form of unity" is
exactly what the Star Wars Galaxy had under Palpatine. Whether or not the New Republic can do a better job of governing the galaxy is an open question.
Citation needed. Experience on Earth tends to suggest that this effect is weak or nonexistent. I could equally well argue that larger nations tend to be less cohesive due to the sprawl of territory and interest groups they include, resulting in increased internal competition that more than offsets external competition.
If we look at specific examples the evidence is unclear. The US is economically more productive than a random sample of Third World nations, but politically divided Europe is by any reasonable standard at least as productive as politically unified India or China- and has been for centuries.
For 1,000 years from the fall of the western Roman Empire china was quite decisively in the lead as far as human civilizations went...
Debatable if you don't include metrics that are all about size. And you shouldn't focus on size, because it leads to tautology: "bigger is better because it enables more bigness." Was China in some sense objectively more cultured and enlightened than India or the lands of Islam during this era? I don't think you can prove that China was objectively better off than, say, al-Andalus, which was much more disunited during much of the timeframe you cite.
...and it lagged due to issues largely specific to the Qing Dynasty and foreign involvement and then disunity at that collapsed into warlordism . Now that China was on the rise. Rome's fall in the west came with a decline in population, urban centers, literacy (they did not need monks copying a few scant texts in Byzantium or the Caliphates, people with an interest in classical philosophy just bought books from scribes or book merchants which commissioned scribes to make certain books because they might sell it down the line). Germany around 1800 was considered a land of hillbillies and petty princes (which fought some very nasty wars, see 30 Years War) bur emerged as the leading industrial power in 1900, three decades after unification. Or compare Sengoku era Japan to Tokugawa or Meiji period Japan. Or Han China to Warring States period china.
While we're at it, why don't we bring up some example of less tightly centralized societies that flourished culturally and economically? How about Greece during the classical era, or much of the Hellenistic era? What about Renaissance Italy, which was mostly a mass of city-states?
Conversely, attempts to forcibly unify under governments that lack the administrative skills to run large countries tend to be disastrous. The Mongol conquests united Central Asia- but they also did massive damage to it economically, and within a few hundred years the region had decayed back into warlordism.
Look,
THIS IS NOT SIMPLE. Please. That is literally all I am trying to get across here. Assuming by default that a unified government will be better than a disunited one, in the absence of evidence or reasons to expect the unified government to be good at its job, is quite simply unjustified by the evidence.
As for internal competition, unless you are talking about some loose feudal affair such as Westeros where every fief has it's knights and levy internal conflicts don't reach the level of destructive wars. Competition to a society is like combustion, properly contained and channeled it can be beneficial (companies trying to produce better goods) though left unchecked it is be destructive.
Until you get a civil war over who holds the throne? The Roman Empire was pretty damn centralized in 200 AD; that didn't stop it from experiencing the Crisis of the Third Century and starting to fall apart. Again,
this is not simple.
There are reasons why many generations of historians have supposed that history tends towards cyclic phases of centralization and decentralization of power, and that the decentralized phases are not always the dark ages of the cycle. Those hypotheses may not be true on balance, but they are not without support.
There are certain highly specific situations where a single larger government reliably performs better, such as during an ongoing war with a foreign power. But that doesn't necessarily translate into any broad argument that can prove larger governments superior for reasons of pure theory.
Many businesses in Britain have taken a hit from Bexit. Also the Balkans have been a divided mess with a lot of armed conflicts between various armed groups.
But as to my initial point, localist nationalism is often born out of fear of the external other and fueled by it. If the state policy is to raise rabbles up with that sort of rhetoric (and if they see a Jedi Order as one of those external others) you are going to see force users fall to the Dark Side and at least some ruling groups seeing them as a tool to be exploited and cultivated.
Zor
Okay, see, that is a valid initial point
specific to Star Wars, especially in a probable post-Imperial system where the Jedi Order is effectively nonexistent or erduced to a single man and his disciples.
