Weird Harold wrote:
The partitioning of Silesia by the Anderman Empire and Manticore is a possible analog of what FF and OFS started out as.
Actually, that would be both yes and no. Under the original writ of OFS, star systems in which OFS intervenes must remain sovereign and be restored to complete independence (or become member systems of the SL) as soon as
practicable. That qualifier gave the later versions of OFS the loophole to retain de facto sovereignty of other people's star systems for as lone as they wished. All they needed as an inspector or ombudsman who would agree that it was not yet "practicable" to restore a system to full self-government. The situation was only made worse because the enabling
legislation included no hard-and-fast definition of terms, which allowed generations of
regulators to eventually work their way around --- by power of precedent --- to a position in which the fact that the system in question could not yet pay its legitimate debts (i.e., pay off its debt peonage fees to OFS) was evidence it was not yet capable of "standing on its own two feet" and hence must be kept in protected status just a
little longer. But you'll be coming out of it Someday Real Soon now, promise!
The Andies and the Manties were both more pragmatic and more honest (and compassionate) than the final version of OFS. They'd both spent generations, lives, and a lot of treasure trying to maintain some sort of interstellar order in a region whose own "government" was a self-evident disaster: riddled with corruption, perpetually insolvent, and unable (and, worse,
unwilling) to guarantee its own citizens safety. It was as if the SL's federal government had been treating its member systems the way OFS treated the Protectorates . . . only worse.
On top of this, there were diplomatic tensions between the AE and the SKM because the Andermani had clear territorial ambitions in Silesia and the SKM had long standing economic interests in the area. Ideally, the SKM wanted an independent Silesia where the rule of law actually worked. They
didn't want that at the cost of seeing the entire Confederacy incorporated into the AE, when no one knew how that would work out economically (on the one hand) and it would bring the Andy frontier a hell of a lot closer to Manticore (on the other). Relations had been pretty good with the AE for a couple of three centuries, but there
was that strand of expansionism in the Empire's DNA and the Junction did have to represent an awful tasty prize.
So pragmatism came into play when they both recognized the resurgent ROH as a threat and decided they needed to bury their differences in the face of a common enemy. Honesty came into play because, unlike OFS, they refused to pussyfoot around protesting that they would pull out of the Confederacy "as soon as practicable." And compassion came into play because both the AE and the SKM genuinely intended --- and proceeded to prove they did --- to restore interstellar order, put an end to the bloodshed and violence, improve standards or living enormously, and eventually incorporate their new possessions into their core political systems as full members. In the Andies' case, those new possessions didn't have any choice about that; in the Manties' case, those new possessions got to vote on it and could decide to become fully independent star systems if they chose. And unlike the OFS enabling legislation, the Act of Parliament which controlled the Silesian Partition set up hard and fast mileposts for the process, so there's no room for anyone to waffle or strain at any gnats.
So you're right that it ended up --- especially for the Manties --- coming far closer to the original
intent behind OFS, but it was always up front and honest about the fact that the systems involved were almost certainly (without the "almost" in the Andies' case) going to be firmly incorporated into the empire/kingdom into whose hands they had fallen.
