The Doomed Politics of the CIS

in the Star Wars prequel trilogy we see Count Dooku we see the separatist Council and we see the Droid armies but others talk of Republic corruption and corporate greed the 7-hour run time wasn't really enough to dive too much into exactly what all of that meant who exactly is in the CIS what was its government structured like and what were the goals of its various members we know about the siths manipulation of both the Republic and the CIS but there were a wide variety of groups within both sides and they had a series of aligned or competing interests with deeper roots in Galactic history one of the most common questions which arises out of all this is why the CIS couldn't just secede but the short answer there is that actually they could and they often just did the longer answer is that it's complicated we'll get to the deeper historical roots of the separatist crises and the divisions of the Clone Wars but the CIS as an organization formed in 24 BBY 2 years before the Battle of Geonosis kicked off The Clone Wars that year Count Dooku went to raxis Prime in the ton hemony where he delivered what would be known as the rexis address described by the essential guide to Warfare as quote a fiery speech blasting the Senate and the Jedi for allowing the Republic's ideals and morals to decline end quote this set off a wave of secessions around 6,000 worlds according to the novel Labyrinth of evil so this puts us 2 years before the treaty we see being negotiated in episode 2 between the members of the future separatist Council but we do know many of those groups were involved with Dooku and the CIS in different ways leading up to that and a lot of the arguments which would be put forward for secession and for joining the CIS had been originated by those groups at this early pre-war Point while the Confederacy existed in name and many sectors had left the Republic to join it it was hardly the government or Galactic power it would quickly become over the two years which followed it was largely still just an association of those different worlds and sectors despite having been freely able to leave the Republic never recognized the CIS itself as a legitimate government and the process of secession well clearer than it often can be in the real world still reflects some of the Common Real World questions around secession with Federal systems which we spoke about in relation to the Republic at length in my breakdown of the galactic Senate and representation within it seceding isn't something governments really want their member parties to do so the question of what exactly a legal secession looks like isn't always clear at the best of times we can't read the Republic's Constitution but even with the Constitutions we can read what secession takes often isn't covered the American Constitution doesn't address secession and the Supreme Court's arguments surrounding the Confederacy secession being illegal in the American Civil War sometimes emphasize the quote indestructible Union the Canadian Constitution similarly doesn't offer a process for leaving Confederation for a province but legal discussions about how it would work have been somewhat less intractable on the possib ability than in the states well Canada isn't in space except in the strictest most boring sense that Earth is I'm bringing this up because I think it does help to show some of the complexities at play when discussing how messy things were about to get with the Republic and the CIS in 1980 and 1995 the Canadian province of Quebec held two different referendums on sovereignty failing to gain a majority each time in favor of leaving but even those referendum questions and the campaigning leading up to them often left open the interpretation that some linkages with Canada would remain called sovereignty Association especially in 1980 throughout the 80s and 90s issues like this fueled discussion on whether Quebec could decide to leave on its own and how that choice could be made how clear does the question need to be what kind of vote is required to do it even if a referendum were to have majority support for leaving would that be enough to initiate some sort of process to leave and then who would be able to actually negotiate a province leaving without getting too into the weeds here some of the relevant questions around the referendums in secession included whether this would be in the purview of elected representatives or the popular vote in the extent to which power was held by each if the elective Representatives could make some of those decisions then you end up with a very relevant question to Star Wars could the provincial legislature claim to speak for the province to a greater degree than the representatives within the federal government which included the Kea Prime Ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean creten during the 1980 and 1995 referendums respectively you can imagine a situation where secession of a planet gets murky within the Republic if it's a choice of the representatives where the planetary government feels one way but the Senate Representatives feel another other big questions focus on the constituent groups of the province or the planet in question Quebec for example insisted its secession would involve maintaining all territorial Integrity of the province while many First Nations within Quebec particularly the cre were public about opposition to this and their own right to stay associated with Canada in the the event of Quebec secession you also then have variance in the regional vote where some form of secession was much more popular in Quebec City and much less popular in Montreal in Star Wars these same questions of staying within or leaving the Republic would have been playing out in 6,000 different ways in 6,000 different places and the answer to those questions would look different in every sector system and even all on every planet in the early 2000s as Clone Wars media was starting to come out alongside the prequels there was an online holet news series along with The Insider magazine publishing news feeds within the Republic and CIS over the course of the war and these actually give us quite a bit of a window into some of those questions on one hand they do help answer the question of whether seceding was legal and a little bit of the mechanisms involved this article dated space March the space 28th in a year which corresponds to 22 BBY the same year the Clone Wars begin mentions the secession of the entire sluis sector simply by having Senator kissi ladar tender some articles of secession to The Republic Senate this was only one of several examples of this happening and the Republic seemingly didn't attempt to prevent or override these situations there may have been people arguing against it but it wasn't something that the institution itself would forbid it did turn into a whole thing where loyalist systems and sectors would then make a show of professing how loyal they were and how disloyal or useless other systems were but we also see how sometimes this seemingly simple process would erupt into violence within some of those areas both loyalist and separatist based on the same internal divisions and ideas about who could legitimately claim to best represent the interests of a planet system or sector that we explored with the Canadian examples we again get back to the question of which representatives have what authority to act the senator may be able to present the articles of secession but you could easily imagine a situation where the senator does that with full legal Authority and yet an unclear mandate especially if there hadn't been an election with that as a central issue or if different groups within the area a senator represented felt very differently about it the case of antar 4 is only one of many which resulted in violence but it gets brought up as a watershed moment in the separatist crisis where the essential Atlas says secession was announced quote with bombing and Blaster Fire end quote along with another example Ando antar 4 home of the goal species was also home of the goal assembly for separation a local political party in support of the CIS during the 3-we long New Year's period in the Star Wars Galaxy which I imagine must result in a ton of hangovers a radical Splinter of that party called the roshu sun attacked an enclave of Jedi supporters on antar the antarian Rangers and when I say Jedi supporters here I mean an organization which assisted the Jedi not just people who were fans of Jedi a bloody battle then ensued and opinion of the Jedi h a new low for their failure to prevent that battle all the Jedi Council insisted that Count Dooku as a former Jedi couldn't be be responsible for inciting all this violence this and a subsequent kidnapping on the goal Colony world of it Ziri continued to radicalize the goles toward secession and against the Jedi who were increasingly seen as unable to address the issues of the Galaxy meanwhile corellia one of the most high profile worlds of the Republic enacted its unique constitutional power contemp plant as hermy allowing it to seal itself off from its political connections to The Republic and remain neutral under Senator bis's leadership these growing crises especially the attack like that on antar 4 spurred the Senate into the passage of the emergency Powers Act this abolished Palpatine's term limits which were coming to an end in what I'm sure was an absolute coincidence in public Palpatine remained vague on his position with respect to the ever growing calls for the creation of a military to deal with the crisis allowing him to look like he wasn't the one responsible for stoking as much of the crisis as his and Dooku's little sithy hands could manage with they may have been able to accomplish and what you can definitely accomplish is subscribing for more also leaving a like if you're enjoying the video so far but while this explains a good chunk of the who and how when it comes to the early CIS growth in the Republic secession it doesn't really answer what anyone wanted Republic corruption is often cited here but what does that actually refer to there are a couple primary fault lines at play the first is the uneven representation of the core the mid rim and the outer rim within the Senate this also in not coincidentally fits along lines of powerful heavily human populated worlds receiving a lot of representation and nonhumans often not receiving that representation representation in the Senate went through a variety of forms over Galactic history and as a republic grew power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few of these heavily populated worlds originally every system was directly represented within the Senate this turned into an absolute mess as more and more systems joined rather than dividing up the Republic into further levels of representation or another alternative to keep each body a reasonable size and maintain some form of Equitable representation the so-called founding tyranny of the Republic came about most areas were moved to being represented at the sector level while a few historically powerful primarily core systems maintain direct representation although any system could still technically address the Senate if needed sectors at this time were small inconsistent constructs so as the Republic again continued to grow these eventually also numbered in the millions and gridlock came back with the Vengeance this time to get around it they continued to not do anything princible and instead just told a bunch of senators they don't actually get to vote democracy accomplished 1,000 years before the Battle of Yavin Chancellor Tarsus valorum ancestor of Chancellor finnis valorum from episode 1 thought he had the answer with the rousan reformations following the new Sith Wars unfortunately this answer also sucked sectors were redrawn and compressed into 1,24 sectors with one representative each which really just meant that often a single planet had representation within that sector if he didn't happen to be one of the groups that Senator wanted to have in their delegation then sucks to be you the chamal sector for example would almost always be represented by a senator from nabo and we don't even need to look away from nabo itself to see examples of this failing with conflict between humans and gungans on nabo lasting until the time of The Phantom Menace after which jarjar joined the delegation as a gungan representative but even at this scope many sectors as a whole felt unrepresented when presenting their articles of secession senator of the lahara sector TI aik said I have no doubt that many of my colleagues here have no idea where the lahara sector is they couldn't even find it on a map if their careers depended on it for the record it's here in the galactic North so we are all able to find it now like I said I've already done a video on representation within the Senate so I won't continue going too far down on the inherent issues of representation other than to say that this was a big force in many planets feeling they weren't properly represented and why even the technically existing means to succeed weren't always as clearcut as our real life Canadian examples Illustrated as well there's always a level of granularity at which this representation will begin to fall apart so between internal tensions on whether a given sector should or shouldn't leave the sheer volume of secession happening at once cutting off Republic enclaves down major shipping lanes what may normally have been a legal right leaving the Republic quickly made it obvious that war was coming on some level the bombing of Padme amadala ship on coron itself was only one more violent incident in the long line I'll be a much closer to home for the Republic's Elite than many prior incidents had been the second major fault line and the one which is actually cited most often by Confederate separatists so the reason that they say that they were leaving will also come back to the rouson reformations down the line a bit this is the galactic economy and the want for free trade as much as centuries and Millennia of inter species conflict may have informed where the fault lines would fall when you look for the explicit reasons stated for seceding from the Republic joining the CIS or just justifying the war the economic impact was almost always what was called out and this is where the influence of the mega corporations is most notable even when their direct involvement in the CIS was still growing the abrian sector which included many aggro worlds like the planet yukoh seceded saying they were being overburdened by taxes and bureaucracy and they hoped by leaving they would get more profits for their farmers and also that many of the neighboring world's day service had already left anyways the lahara sector which I mentioned earlier had similar agricultural focuses and cited similar concerns the organization of the Galaxy and some of the real world problems outter Rim worlds like this were experiencing related to the earlier issue of how Senate representation Works can perhaps best be explained by sociologist Emanuel wallerstein's conception of World Systems analysis and its predecessor Dependency Theory but applied on a galactic level at its core which is funny for a reason you'll understand in a moment World Systems analysis engages with the world economy as one worldwide system organized in the core semi- periphery and periphery with development the periphery being geared towards extraction of resources for the benefit of the core so all Surplus value goes to somewhere else the statements explaining why these sectors seceded and even the depiction of Naboo in the novel Darth pleus show how apt this formulation can be for Star Wars in particular many of these worlds are entirely geared around producing raw materials which then get sent to build up the industrialized core even more both in the galactic astrographical sense of the word core and in the theoretical World System sense at the same time some other dimensions of the logic behind the cis's secession especially as it's embodied by the mega corporations show why ultimately the political aims of the CIS members were contradictory and doomed to fail if the Republic was a diseased body the mega corporations whose ideas they were supporting and repeating in their secession and to whom they looked for defense were the disease not the Cure it's like going to Elizabeth Hol and Sam bankman freed for leadership on rooting out the corruption exploitation they represented then deciding the regulation stopping them was the issue well I've mentioned the mega corporations weren't directly involved in the CIS in its early days of Dooku's Rabel rousing this is largely in an official sense it was clear the ideological framework had been provided by these groups and they were getting more and more involved over time the key player in this was of course the Trade Federation it had according to the essential guide to Warfare quote began in 3 50 BBY as a republic chartered organization tasked with mediating disputes between the Galaxy's merchants and its shippers end quote it soon went from essentially a regulatory body or a tribunal to Foster cooperation among other Mega corporations into a mega Corporation of its own lobbying the senate for trade and building up infrastructure to explore and exploit New Frontiers of the Galaxy soon with the defense of the Republic having been devolved down to planetary Security Forces after the dissolution of the military by the rousan Reformation and with those forces being next to useless in actually stopping piracy the trade Defense Force was formed by the Federation to handle defense on their own this went on for a while but after a few Decades of slowed trade the Republic took even further steps in handing the Trade Federation the ability to act with impunity these changes came in the year 124 BBY first the entire outer rim was declared a free trade zone abolishing local taxes and directing revenues toward the Republic only with some mid Rim sectors joining that 6 years later considering the parts the Republic granted any real power in the Senate saw most of these planets simply as places to get resources extracted from while the taxes may have gotten easier to understand for the Mega corporations the claims that the revenues would be distributed more equitably are hard to take it face value from the Republic the changes of 124 BBY also saw an expansion in another thing introduced by the Senate changes mentioned with the rouson reformations earlier functional constituencies functional constituencies were different different types of groups given representation directly within the Senate which would now include guilds and other Mega corporations now that they'd been officially added by these changes to the Senate itself the Trade Federation wasted no time expanding its new found Senate influence they were able to buy and Bully their way into controlling the votes of many poor sectors soon becoming a dominant force in the Senate allowing them to quote hamper competitors influence courts and stall legislation they opposed end quote the outer rim in particular became essentially the trade federation's playground if the economy was set up in a way which extracted from the periphery and gave Surplus value to the core before the Trade Federation exacerbated that at every opportunity many in the rim were opposed to this expansion by the Federation but while the empowerment of the Trade Federation hadn't necessarily been the goal of the reforms of 124 BBY the alternative means to protect trade in the rim via a central military had ironically been too scary for some feing an increased militarization of the Galaxy which ended up happening anyways in these private hands so once again the utter Rim felt hung out to dry by the Republic armed resistance began forming against the Trade Federation by at least the 50s BBY with one group The nebula front gaining Galactic attention as they violently took the Trade Federation on some in the Senate sympathized and were concerned about not just the Trade Federation but similar moves by their allies like the banking Clan and the corporate Alliance but they also ironically worried the nebula front was too extreme and would grow into a separatist movement roughly two decades later Senator Palpatine convinced chancellor voram who was highly critical of the Trade Federation that the right move was to remove the free trade zones in exchange for the conglomerates being able to build whatever they felt was necessary for defense ultimately pushing more power into the federation's hands militarily to support the war Palpatine was secretly orchestrating while also galvanizing those conglomerates together by telling them they were now subject to taxes again they would however still be free to engage in the exploitation of outer imim worlds like nabo which just happened to be where they went further than they could get away with one of the things I'm less of a fan of which the Clone Wars cartoon leans heavily into which applies to both Legends and Canon is establishing that the mega corporations like the Federation and banking Clan are actually still part of the Republic with their Senate representation intact and they're technically not openly part of the CIS but this does only go so far the claim ends up being that there's kind of a Schism where gunray and the other Representatives on the separatist Council are Renegades leading other factions within those groups but even in the Clone Wars this turns out to be basically a fiction So It ultimately doesn't impact the reality of the situation too much it's actually something which does extend back before the Clone Wars cartoon issue 65 of the Star Wars Insider magazine CIS Shadow feed update has a whole section about the Republic occupying theoretically neutral banking Clan territory what the Clone Wars also does though is give us a look at the civilian government of the CIS splitting the leadership of the CIS between the separatist Council as basically an executive body run by the conglomerates and Dooku responsible for executing the war and then we have the separa Senate on raxus akundas the neighboring planet to where Dooku broadcast his first address from which is the legislative branch of the cis's government this Senate was presided over by Congress leader Beck leise whose position seems to be more like speaker of the house then say prime minister but I'm not 100% clear on that funnily enough despite the fact that their war effort was largely and clearly coordinated by the same conglomerates which represented the corruption of the Republic one of the senators in the peace attempt Arc featuring The CIS Senate calls out that unlike the Republic corporations don't rule them it's certainly true that many in the CIS were aiming to have self-rule rather than joining for the sake of replacing the Republic with a new Republic and a new Senate which just happened to be more blue primarily in the outer rim and largely under the thumb of Mega corporations but the mass wave of secession sparking tensions in a war meant more cohesion was needed the CIS war effort even started out far less coordinated between different conglomerates and local forces but one of General grievous' most notable achievements was bringing together these elements to one more cohesive force which he then used to depopulate entire systems in some cases the downside to the lack of Regulation and Independence they thought they would be gaining is that the Trade Federation and other conglomerates had already shown how little regard they had for these worlds under the Republic the roots of the calls for free trade to return had basically been the trade federation's growing want to exploit these worlds and act with impunity once again so many CIS planet were caught between a rock and a hard place they could either side with the Republic whose Decay had enabled these conglomerates to exploit them or they could side with the conglomerates themselves the Trade Federation was after all a creature of the Republic and one it had rarely shown either the willingness or the ability to temper ultimately it's hard to see the CIS as an organization as anything other than what it really was an attempt by The Sith to Hoodwink overly powerful conglomerates to take advantage of the support from disaffected and underrepresented groups within the Galaxy making them all act against their own competing interests and push a faltering Republic over a Brink it had slowly been led to by those same Mega corporations and Sith Lords for a significant portion of the last Millennium at least the fault lines between the core in the rim or the core in the periphery as well as the humans and non-humans grew even more Stark within the Republic throughout the war and the crisis which preceded it statute 312b for one example expanded the voice of the core and interim Worlds at the expanse of the outlier worlds even more while fascistic humanocentric organizations which grew especially powerful under the Empire began to gain Traction in response to the alien leadership and membership of the CIS non-humans need not apply signs showed up throughout establishments even on Metropolitan corusant and the commission for the protection of the Republic became one of the most visible political groups in the Republic organized around supporting measures to increase executive powers calling for the deportation of alien species from corusant to's home World supported the CIS and extoling the virtues of Palpatine via the Hitler Youth I mean subadult group at least some criticism was levied for their completely human makeup with the response being that they just hadn't happened to make it through reviewing the applications of non-humans and who they definitely wanted in their group as well that's going to do it for now I'd like to do a video soon expanding on the periphery and the core explanation with a deeper dive into World systems theory and applying it to Star Wars but we'll see if there's enough juice there this probably won't be the last video released this year but I do want to take a moment to thank all of you for your support over the year and especially in the last few months these have been the biggest months in the Channel's history even during slower periods for Star Wars content and interest more generally and I can't say enough how much that means to me I especially want to give a shout out to marar who edited many of the recent videos including this one which has been a big part of allowing me to Branch out more and increase the output of the channel I'd love to keep that momentum going into 2024 so if you haven't yet please consider subscribing for more Star Wars thanks for watching

Channel: Corey's Datapad

Views: 170,777

Keywords: star wars, clone wars, confederacy of independent systems

Id: Hz8l2aq6xvU

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023