By Max Couper 1995
There was a group of nations who at various times of the past allied themselves with or against their neighbours.
Sharing the Western end of a huge landmass that stretched a third of the way round the globe, their natural borders had often been the mountains or rivers that crossed the region.
The mountains frequently proved to be the obstacles and natural demarcation lines between them, whilst their rivers and landtracks were what brought many of the things that linked them. Goods, ideas, bloodlines, language, mixtures and additions.
This pot of mixed tribes also had its offshoots. The closest of whom was the Kingdom on a nearby island, and beyond the continental shelf itself, the Federation of States.
Over the passage of time various things created alternately attractive or repellant forces within their common region. The most damaging of which was war. Usually motivated by the thirst for domination of one tribe over another, these went on endlessly from one millennium to the next.
Then, at the end of one of these regular dust-ups, which also happened to drag in the rest of the world, the group's distant relatives the Federation discovered a new tool of war. They tested it first on yet another more distant people, who had attacked them because they were worried about their access to the most valuable resource, upon which all nations by then depended. Black Petroleum.
The unexpected power of this new weapon was so awesome that, once developed by some of the group and their other neighbours to the East, its threat of complete mutual destruction meant that the era of major territorial war between themselves had ended.
The emphasis changed. Whereas in the past economic power had come in part from stealing it from your neighbours, now it was mainly about using the black stuff to move goods and home-spun inventions around to add value to them.
The outcome of this process was a natural allying of interests among the neighbours, as they needed the large diversity of skills and markets that only a greater association could provide.
As the second millennium of their civilisation started to close, other parts of the world started to do the same. The race for integration into trading blocks was on. Trade replaced war as the main game of competition.
Where did this leave the peoples of the group?
Certainly a bit confused as to how far they should go in committing themselves to one another, and increasingly unsure about the value and belief system that this culture of trade had led them into.
They turned away from inter-help philosophies developed at the end of the previous century, and most things that stood in the way of enhancing trade. But still found it hard to go the whole way.
In a sense they were such well-worn characters that it made no sense to homogenize as their Federation cousins had done, so they settled for stick or mix where it suited them.
This of course led to problems of interpretation, especially since they spoke different languages, and the old possibility of cabals developing between one nation and another still existed.
But in general, they persevered.
They persevered partly because the ease of travelling the rest of the world, brought about by the power of the black stuff, had taught them that despite their differences, they had more in common with one another than with anyone else on the small planet. And increasingly that included even their distant cousins, the Federation.
The question was, despite the leg-draggers and the mischief-makers, how do you pull this together and make it work?
Is trade something that is for the betterment of the peoples themselves, or for the benefit of the persons running trade?
The obvious old solution would have been to control things firmly from a centre somewhere, but this was somewhat out of favour with the laissez-faire attitudes of the time. And complicated by the fact that many of the people running the nations were also running trade.
In fact the controllers of Trade and what was left of the Industrialists were in such a powerful position, that there was a danger of the philosophy trade dominating everything else. Especially once the companies established themselves more and more across borders.
The traditionally blurred separation between trade and culture slowly focused to not-at-all. Economics had replaced church-going religion as the answer-all solution. And politicians had generally become economists.
It was a spiral. That left the populations a little confused. The new advances in information-exchange glued facts more and more to the concentrates of existing power, and not them.
This network-machine-talk of the computer compasses became the first major creation of a new language that the West end of the continent had seen for hundreds of years. It even went as far as the machines that were talking to one another handling main aspects of trade. Or at least the numerative side of it, which was what trade served first and foremost.
Some people then asked if Corporations of Trade were organisms more powerful than even the people that ran them?
It was a question of assertion.
Was trade a tool at the service of the nations, or were the nations tools at the service of Trade?
It was a question that burned slowly. But it burned because communication was possible between nations. And memory, which collectively people called History, was able to stop them becoming complacent.
The argument went on for a long time, but they knew it had to. The economic power of Trade was not about to give up the ghost of a fight overnight. They would have to be probed, till their weaknesses showed.
This became known as ‘The Era of the Fourth Attrition’.*
*Author's note: The first three Attritions were Feudalism, Industrialism, and Transnationalism.