[SUI] Ireland: The Military State

Day 2,090, 20:42 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by Brian Boru


Irelan😛 the Military State

Like no other country, Ireland can be said to be a military state. To be precise, a semi-technocratic centrally-planned e-communist military state. While in reality this is a source of great weakness more often than not, democracy is almost assured in-game by the mechanics, the market even when it isn't broken is inefficient, and military expediency demands a level of solidarity that can only be created through what we have in eIreland. We are also a very open society, with a very unusually active media for a country our size, with a clear respect for practicality in government.

While there are minor details to iron out, as always, Ireland as a country can be said to represent essentially the archetype of military optimisation: A huge proportion of national damage DIRECTLY answerable to the elected government, a set of professional administrators who are recognised on a cross-party basis to be the best at what they do, and a sense that the country's progress is how best to measure success.

So, imagine my amusement when good Citizen Death and Taxes founded the Irish Military Party. Ireland has no need of such a party, as I have already explained, we are as optimised in a general sense as it is possible to be under current resources and circumstances. Apparently the objective of the party is not military optimisation, but to remove the political module from the considerations of the military.

The Importance of the Political Module:

Where once great battles were fought in the political arena over how we should organise eIreland, now battles are fought over two things: How we should maintain what we've built up, and what we should do with the very same thing. The answer to the former is a technical question, one that Sweet and Appleman have largely answered in the course of both their articles and in the carrying out of their duties; financial reconstruction being key.

The answer to the latter, i.e. the direction the country should take, is where more ideological notions can set in. RL nationalisms are complained of, and the idea that we should form alliances based solely on geographic and historical (presumably in-game history-based) motivations. There are distinct problems with this perspective.

The People's Choice

The first of which is the will of the people. The people are the ones who ultimately wield power via the elections that are impossible to avoid. The people are also the vast resource of the game that keeps the state and country afloat; The damage reserve. Dismissing their motivations for liking this country and hating another is generally useless. You can't argue simple practicality, you have to sell it.

The second is the nature of the people themselves. The largest single proportion of eIrish is consistently RL Irish people. They can, and have every right to, bring their ideas to bear on the country that bears their name, regardless of origin. Another huge proportion of the population are from the Irish diaspora or are highly sympathetic to the cause of Ireland for various RL reasons. Many of these people feel that "winning" the game isn't enough, they want to win in a way that is in line with their ideas about what Ireland is.

While this often does get in the way of practicality, it doesn't mean that it can be changed on the drop of a dime. Furthermore, associating that change with a single party can be highly divisive, as I know from personal experience when I founded the Labour Party to bring about the changes we can see evident in the foundations of the modern Irish state. The difference in this case is there is cross-party support for the change this time, making the founding of a party around the idea an isolating thing rather than a uniting thing. Not only unnecessary, but potentially damaging to the cause in the first place.

The cause of Irish military development, that is.
As I have pointed out, the country is so intertwined with the military that politicising it is a step backwards, not a step forwards.