Lit So what did the non-Sith/Corporatist Separatists actually want?

The Sith created the CIS as part of their bid for power, the Corporations were won over by promises to create a hyper-capitalist free trade order and also to amass money and so forth.

In the EU, we are introduced to a good amount of local, often alien Separatists (few to none on the actual TV show, sadly) who have legitimate grievances against the Republic. However, more often than not, we just hear that they dislike the Republic for "corruption", whatever that means. Why would overthrowing it and establishing a confederal government help it?

I think the most prominent member of this group of anti-corruption "local nationalists", as I like to call them, (or 'true believers', in this post - they're basically the members of the puppet Separatist Parliament) would be General Grievous- or rather his original persona, Qymaen jai Sheelal. He hates the Republic and the Jedi because they simultaneously supported the Huk, and later failed to save the Kaleesh. So there's a motive of revenge. But ideally, if he had somehow overthrown the Republic... he would have wanted a strong Confederate military to be able to step in and support his people from being overrun by the Huk?

Maybe trying to convert a personal, local motive into a postwar government structure doesn't work out so easily. But what I'm trying to do is to speculate what kind of Separatist government would have looked like, if they had succeeded, even partially- suppose the war ended in a stalemate, with part of the Galaxy left alone under a loose confederal government. You can speculate that the corporatists would run their fiefs like the Corporate Sector Authority, writ large (isn't the CSA already the apotheosis of space capitalism anyway?), but what do the nationalists get out of it?

 

The problem is, it was never in the cards for them to win. The Republic was always planned to win by Sheev and thats why the confederacy would not work as a government after war.

 

Right, but I'm also curious that hypothetically, and ideologically, what the Separatists wanted. Though I guess a lot of it was more about who they were fighting against, not what they were fighting for.

This prior quote is pretty good:

 

I agree with the above quote. Years and years and years ago, although it sometimes seems like yesterday, the whole premise of the Clone Wars developed fairly slowly between 1999 and 2002. Slow enough that every time a comic or book or Holonet News article came out, we had a lot of time to discuss it. So it seemed at the time that galactic geography played a big role in the Separatists' grievances against the Republic. This was further developed with the onslaught of stories between 2002-2005, some of which made a legitimate effort to map out the locations of territories and front-lines.

With the exception of the Essential Atlas and a little of the Warfare book, most of this was forgotten post-2005. I would say it was due in part to a combination of the EU trying to move away from the war immediately after 2005, and then the new TCW show starting a few years later, which basically did its own thing. That gap, then the new show, seemed to cause the subtle shift in plot regarding what the Separatists' intention had originally been.

 

The thing is, the idea of a corporation, or even a series of corporations, trying to split off from the rest of the galaxy makes no economic sense. It'd be like if a bunch of company towns in the Wild West decided to wall themselves off from the rest of the US.They're leaving the government that basically controls the entire galaxy; if they succeed, who is their market going to be? From the standpoint of basic economics it makes far more sense for them to just keep doing what they had already been doing, keep basically buying out the Republic government to use it as their puppet for setting up a galaxy-wide free trade zone with no corporate regulation.

Now, on individual planets whose leaders have grudges against the Republic, or groups that are specifically anti-Jedi or whatever, separatism makes sense. But if anything it would make sense for the corporations to side with the Republic against that sort of movement, to keep those worlds open to the galactic economy.

 

Also doesn't make sense because, you know, the Corporate Sector Authority is right there.

 

Well, without going back to check, I'm pretty sure the early Bantam era/WEG stuff had the CSA being set up under the Empire (I'm guessing to mirror the Chinese Special Economic Zones) and only later did it get established as being there during the prequel era. I was always surprised we didn't get a story tying it more into the corporate stuff from the prequels.

 

I'll dive into my theory later, but I think there's two possible solutions for why the corporate groups sought to separate:

1. The CSA, if it was around, was dominated by rival corporate entities. It's a galaxy with billions of worlds, sure the dozen or so in the CIS were a tiny fraction of them.

2. The real-world CSA model. The South seceded in the Civil War in part so they can practice their peculiar institution of slavery, which has both economic implications in addition to the social ones we mostly focus on when studying history. In theory, a Separatist movement that managed to win and secede (as opposed to say taking over the Republic) would be likely the historical CSA had gone its own way, apart from the USA. That is, they'd still continue as usual, except they'd call the shots in terms of how they'd want to practice their business. Slavery for the South, and hyper-space-capitalism for the Separatists.

Problem with that is twofold:

A. The American South had an external market they could trade with, regardless if they became international political pariahs. A victorious CIS has what- Hutts? Hapans? for them to do business with. The Republic would not be happy to continue business with them after they lost such a war.

B. The idea that such an order of interstellar business concerns, devoted to self-perpetuation and domination, could even find enough common ground to maintain their own polity after the war without endless back-blastering and mutual assassinations.

I'll post later about what I think the local nationalists/true believers might have wanted out of the Separatists, beyond out of the Republic.

 

They're going Galt.

 

I think the CIS wanted Independence for each system and the freedom for each system to self govern. They also wanted a completely or nearly completely free market unshackled by regulations from a centralized government. The members of their parliament were composed of leasers in industry, trade and commerce, all people who would greatly benefit from a lack of a centralized government.

I imagine a hypothetical post-war confederate government would be small; maintaining a military for security and possibly to resolve inter-system conflicts. Other than that, each system would have the freedom to self govern.

 

I understand that corporatism is actually referring to a political concept, similar to and possibly a subset within fascism, where the State is expected to be an organic, corporate body made up of one unified society that the individual is subordinate to. And in fact, that probably fits the Empire better, or at least in the theory of the New Order. However, I'm just using the word as shorthand for representatives of the corporate powers who dominated the Separatist Council. Perhaps simply calling them "corporate" would be sufficient as an adjective, but the -ist suffix is helpful. Maybe I should then call them plutocrats.

 

I'm not so sure the Confederacy was the real model for the CSA - I don't think they're really comparable, and as I mentioned above, I think the Special Economic Zones are a much closer match, especially since the early WEG stuff clearly had at least Soviet bureaucracy and organization in mind when they were describing a lot of the Empire's machinery.

But as a professional historian, albeit one who likes counterfactual history, I'll just say that the problem with trying to approach it as a matter of serious analysis is that it's almost impossible to say what would or wouldn't have happened if things had gone differently. With the Confederacy, its main foreign markets were France and Britain. The wartime blockade of the South stimulated them to look for cheaper cotton elsewhere, which stimulated their own colonial cotton development in West Africa, the Caribbean, Egypt, and India. And the reason France and Britain didn't side with the Confederacy was because of the upsurge of anti-slavery sentiment among their populations as well as their political elites. So between those two factors, if the Confederacy had succeeded, there's no definite way to say its foreign markets would have still been there. Plus, I'll add that most historians do take economic foundations into consideration, particularly after Marx and Engels. Eric Williams and Sidney Mintz in particular argued how slavery, while helping establish the conditions necessary for modern industry and capitalism, retarded their development if existing alongside it, especially as the slave-owning elites in the Confederacy were highly anti-capitalist and anti-industrial. Once a Confederacy entered the twentieth century in particular, it would be hard pressed to keep itself viable as a slave-owning economy.

 

Consider the (most likely) situation as it appears to an outside observer when Palpatine becomes Chancellor.

- the Senate doesn't seem to get anything done, because its members are corrupt,
- groups like the Trade-Federation, CommerceGuild and TechnoUnion have free reign to exploit the outlying systems,
- many outlying systems are also represented in the Senate by these groups,
- many outlying systems also depend on smuggling, piracy, slavery and other questionable means, that would raise the hairs of every law-and-order-coreworlder, to survive,
- the law-and-order coreworlders want to see the megacorps reigned in and their influence cut down,
- the law-and-order coreworlders also want to see the piracy, smuggling and slavery in the outlying systems ended.

So what does Palpatine have to do?

He increases regulation in the name of fighting "corruption" and undermines the influence of the corporate groups. Especially those dominated by the non-humans and hive-species. So they have a reason to leave (or find a way to force the Republic to change back). Since those groups are under pressure they - to balance out the tightening grip of the Republic - put pressure on their client-worlds and blame it on the Republic. So those worlds have an incentive to leave, too.
Palpatine and the law-and-order-types also increase the efforts of the security-forces to restore order in the outlying systems (Ranulph Tarkin sends his regards), putting the survival of those systems dependent on criminal endeavors on the line. Another group, who thinks about finding a better future outside the Republic.
Transferring power and responsibilities from the ineffectual senate to Palpatine's executive also annoys the - for lack of a better term - ultra-liberal/base-democratic senators.

Tensions rise and the Jedi and Judicial Department Forces are no longer capable of maintaining order on their own, which leads to the discussion of a MilitaryCreationAct, but also to fear in the Outlying Systems of more future repression and regulation from the Core.

Enter Dooku, a highly respected and charismatic figure, who left the service of the Jedi-Order and the Republic, because his conscience allowed him no longer to support these institutions, who brings all those dissatisfied groups together and - BOOM. Begun the clone-wars has.

 

Independence, obviously. Other than that, I don't think they had much in common and each planet had its own reason for seceding, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend after all.

That said, the most common motives in the EU seem to be either a) the right to sell things to whomever they wanted without regulation (Nosaurians with eggs, Valahari their engines, Jabiim their ore etc) or b) general anger over treatment by the Republic (Jabiim ignored through many crises and atrocities until they tried to regulate the ore trade, the Ishi Tib were ruled by a republic backed dictator, I think Brentaal 4 was mad about being used as a dumping ground for republic prisoners, so on and etc.)

 

I also really like this bit from Essential Guide to Warfare (author's cut anyway):

As weird as it may seem to us,* I could see that for a lot people on the Rim, the corporations are not the ones exploiting them. To them, groups like the Trade Federation are the ones who are actually preforming the duties of the government and allowing them to have any prosperity at all, while the Republic does nothing to help and reaps the benefit through taxation, maybe actively doing harm through some laws that favor core worlds at the expense of the Rim.

For others, it might be a necessary evil. They don't like the corps, but without the droid armies they know they wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance.


*Though to be honest, how many political movements in real history have ever been 100% consistent in their beliefs and practices? I mean, I could see an outside observer point out how it makes no sense that a democracy would ally with a dictatorship in the name of protecting freedom but that happens all the ****ing time.

 

FTeik's analysis is great, because it takes a lot of the good content laid out in this thread (the tension between Core and Rim, the ambiguous status of the large corporate interests, the way how the galactic periphery was underserved by the Republic and thus sought corporate protection), and combines them, even if the result is somewhat contradictory. So you have pro-corporate interests (both the corporations themselves, and perhaps local systems that are dependent upon their support, such as in the above post, and anti-corporate interests who are being exploited by them; you have systems whose economies are based on illicit, predatory activities (nice callback to the Stark Commercial Combine), and those who are being victimized by them. And then there are nationalists who may believe in the political process, but are increasingly disgruntled by the corruption and disenfranchisement under Palpatine's actions.

Which is fine- most successful political movements are big tents, and big tents are ultimately contradictory. And given that Dooku was the ultimate charismatic demagogue, he was able to smooth over the contradictions in the CIS tent, while harnessing their respective grievances and anger towards the Republic and the Jedi.

 

Hm, somehow I always assumed that those Separatist corporations wanted to overthrow (or at least destabilize) the Republic government because it was "corrupt" in the sense that public spending went almost exclusively into the pockets of a few "trusted" Core companies -- i.e. companies with close ties to senators or influential Core families, unwritten kickback agreements, etc.
This, and/or the Republic could have been "nationalizing" more and more sectors entirely to keep bigger parts of the economy under government control (and, as an added bonus, create a voter base that is loyal out of professional necessity; and have more nice management posts to hand out to your cronies as a reward...)
So in this scenario, the Trade Federation would have been founded by companies that were "out of the loop", as basically a self-help effort -- and it also makes sense that these companies would focus on the Rimward parts of the galaxy, the ones not so deeply enmeshed in the whole Core state/business cartel, and try to establish some sort of counterweight there by putting their weight together. So now if some master manipulator comes along and promises you to destabilize the Republic, thereby potentially disrupting the cartel structure and freeing up entire market sectors for expanding into -- that might sound like a good deal, so long as you don't know they're Sith and all that.

 

So the reason why I asked all of this is because I'm trying to imagine what a successful CIS-controlled polity would look like during peacetime, based on the reasons why the Separatists seceded in the first place. My theory is that it would be more or less a night-watchman state, interestingly enough. I think the key aspects would be:

• Confederal, because the whole point is to establish a less centralized government than the corrupt Republic. Local systems go their own way.
• Laissez-faire, because the plutocrats want corporate power to have free rein, and those engaging in unethical practices, such as slavers, want to be unbothered by central government.
• With a strong military - this is where my theory that a successful CIS would be pseudo-minarchist kicks in. A successful CIS polity would have a government only to run a capable navy to protect itself from a resurgent Republic (for obvious reasons), but also from local, Rim, interests (my theory).

Why? Because if you read about Grievous' background, and other figures such as Alto Stratus, you can see that the local nationalists are angry at the corrupt, feckless Republic for not being sufficiently interventionist. Humanitarian crises happen, local wars break out, and the Republic and the Jedi do not protect them. Thus, they'd rather align with a new government, drawn from local powers (the corporations), who are seen to better understand their local interests.
Of course, this end-state is as contradictory as the Separatist political cause itself. A confederal government, without a firm central constitution or articles of confederation or any sort of agreed laws, would not be able to decide what constitutes a reason to send a strong navy into intervene. How would a theoretical CIS peace-enforcer force be able to distinguish between whether the Kaleesh, or the Huk, is in the right? Who would even be in this military, aside from the droid armies of the corporations? And the Separatists are only allied in who they're against- surely in peacetime, the Trade Federation would just as likely conduct corporate espionage and warfare against its fellow plutocrats. Without a constant external threat to unite their interest, the confederal night-watchman state would quickly devolve into infighting.
(As an aside, what did the Corellian Confederation look like, as a government?)
But I still think that in an Infinities type situation, a victorious Separatist movement would try to have a weak central government, but ironically, many of its members would call for a strong military, for security and protection.

 

And that's basically how the Galactic Republic started, so it would basically be like pressing "reset," except with a divided galaxy.

It's also like how the United States began. Not many think about it, but there was a United States government before the Constitution. The United States was a Confederation, because the Founders were afraid of a centralized government. But they quickly learned that it needed to become more centralized after all in order to properly function, so the United States became a Republic. And then the Civil War made it more centralized... and Westward Expansion with the removal of natives, and the Progressive Era in response to the Gilded Age, some Imperialism in the early 20th century, the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and Roaring Twenties, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, the Space Race, the Cold War, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, September 11th, etc.

The U.S. founders weren't that different from the Separatists. They were privileged, wealthy landowners, white, and almost all male. Many were slave-owners. They rebelled against taxes and regulations. Yet they were also liberals and idealists. They were full of contradictions too. They wanted a confederation first, then after winning the war and getting a confederation, realized they were wrong and changed their minds.

The CIS would probably undergo a similar path. And eventually resemble the Republic. Assuming the Republic didn't try to invade it again.

I kind of wonder a little more what path the Republic would have taken, had the CIS "won" its independence and the two co-existed in the galaxy (disregarding the Sith conspiracy for sake of debate). They're not inherently at odds, like Jedi and Sith are. What would a galaxy split between the Republic and Confederacy, at peace, be like? How would the Republic change? Would reformers and idealists in the Republic, like Padme Amidala and Bail Organa, become more or less influential? Would the Republic being reorganized into the Empire become less likely, or more likely (even without the Sith)?

 

I see four different possible outcomes for a Confederacy, that wins the war and is free of the influence of the Sith:
- the galaxy is run by a factual dictatorship of the megacorps, that have divided their fiefdoms
or
- with someone like Grievous controlling the droid-military we're getting a military dictatorship, that keeps the megacorps and everybody else in line
or
- the entire structure breaks apart, leaving the galaxy shattered into lots of independent states and systems with all the problems and chaos that brings
or
- the peoples representatives of the CIS get their act together, in which case the galaxy sooner or later ends up with a Republic, Version 2.

 

Just to comment on that one teeny point - in the old EU at least, the pro-Separatist commerce guilds were all said to be basically monopolies in their respective sectors. For the Trade Federation, that sector was interstellar transportation, for the Commerce Guild it was resource extraction, for the IGBC it was banking, for the Techno Union it was development of new technologies, for the Corporate Alliance it was political lobbying. There'd still be espionage and clashes to some degree, but I imagine not nearly as much as there would be between, say, Sienar Fleet Systems and Kuat Drive Yards, because they're not competing in the same fields. Everyone sticks to what they do best and no one has to step on anyone else's toes.

If anything, all these megacorps complete rather than compete with each other. IGBC loans can finance the Techno Union's development of new tools and equipment needed by the Commerce Guild to better exploit certain resources which will then be shipped across the galaxy on Trade Federation freighters while the Corporate Alliance ensures that all the relevant politicians support the process.

 

Knowing Sidious and Dooku, they probably promised all of these things, depending on who they were talking to. Tell the megacorps that they're signing on to basically recreate the Corporate Sector on a galactic scale; tell Grievous he and his droid army will be the ones really in charge; tell any friends they might have in the underworld how nice it'll be for them to have no more law and order; tell the few genuine activists and representatives of their people that they're signing on to create a new government that legitimately represents their people.