While I have written far more here about Star Wars, I have actually used Star Trek more in my teaching, and I have watched far more Trek (there is simply many more hours of Trek content). Plus having written about NATO (the ebook is less than $18!), I have a few views on the matter.
To start, what is the United Federation of Planets and what is Starfleet? The Federation is an alliance of planets, more so than it is a true federation a la the US. Not even a confederation like Canada. How so? The planets still have their own foreign policies--we see plenty of meetings of diplomats from members to various proceedings. Note, diplomats, not just leaders or representatives. Just as I always like to make fun of Texas secessionists for having their embassy in Texas when it should be in Washington, DC or London or some place beyond the territory of the "country" it is representing, federal units (with the funky exception of Quebec) don't have embassies and ambassadors. This is a short cut, a bit of evidence, for the basic idea that the units in the federation are more independent, more akin to nation-states than they are to units in a federal country. So, yeah, the name is deceptive.
Starfleet adds to the confusion because it is the military (despite denials) of the Federation. This would make the Federation appear more like a country if it had a monopoly--if Starfleet was the only armed force within the federation. However, I seem to remember various planets within the fed having their own armed starships including Vulcan.
So, despite the name, the Federation is not akin to a single country. It is easier to dispense with the idea that the Federation is the European Union. How much of the series and movies are about economic regulations and subsidizing agriculture? Ok, more directly, the European Union, despite many attempts, does not really have a military, and it does not have a common foreign policy. The EU forces that have shown up in Bosnia and elsewhere only do so (this will be brutal, sorry) after NATO has done all of the heavy lifting. It was NATO that ended the Bosnia conflict, it was NATO that compelled Serbia to let peacekeepers into Kosovo, it is NATO deterring the Russians from attacking the Baltics, and so on. In trade negotiations, the EU acts as a single actor and with great power. In other stuff? Not so much.
Which leaves the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Clearly, from the name and from Gene Roddenberry's idealism, the United Federation of Planets is just a spacey UN, right?* The stuff above that makes the Federation not a country but many countries or nation-states works toward the UN idea--a bunch of different sovereign entities constantly negotiating, sending diplomats hither and yon to settle all kinds of issues. The big questions are what is the Federation for and what is Starfleet for? The classic answer is collective security: to deter aggression by any member against any member by providing assurances that any target of aggression will receive assistance from the rest of the community. Until Alexander Wendt has his way, the entire imagination of the role of the UN is focused on members. The UN is a universal organization...on Earth--the only countries that are not in the UN are Taiwan and ... depending on how you count the Vatican and Palestine and various unrecognized separatist folks. The key things about this notion of collective defense are that no member is excluded from its protection, and it is not aimed at any particular aggressor.
The UN does not have a standing military, but has "sent" massive interventions when the membership have agreed, to thwart North Korea's aggression in 1950 (because the Soviet diplomats were stupidly boycotting the UN Security Council at the time) and Iraq's in 1990-91. In both cases, it was really the US military and some allies under a UN banner in the former and nearly so in the latter. One could argue that Starfleet is mostly a Terran/American endeavor and its activities are simply under a federation banner. But again, the aim is at members. In the original Trek, maybe some of it was aimed at fostering peace among members, but for most of Trek's history, Starfleet was aimed at protecting its members from non-members.
Which gets us to NATO, which is not really a collective security organization, but a collective defense organization. It is not so much aimed at protecting Greece from Turkey, but all of the members from external threats--mostly the Soviet Union/Russia but also terrorism, maybe China, etc. "An attack on one is an attack on all", Article V, the heart of the alliance, is aimed at outsiders. All of NATO's military endeavors have been on the border of or entirely outside the territory of its members. Kind of like how much of Starfleet's activities are at the borders, patrolling nearby neutral zones, or going beyond to intervene, despite the Prime Directive, in non-members. How many episodes are akin to the Kosovo effort? A boodle.
Of course, the parallel is not perfect, since Starfleet is a coherent military organization from the academy to the command staff and in between, which NATO is not. Its captains may buck orders (Kirk more so than others, but all of them did so), but not because their home country/planet had different rules than the Federation for operating in place x or y. That is, the Steve and Dave book on the Federation would focus far less on the political systems of members states and far more on the personalities of individual ship captains, compared to our work on NATO (our book and articles focused mostly on whether countries had coalition governments or not, what kinds of coalitions they had, and personality of presidents and prime ministers only kicked in if there were no coalitional bargaining).
Of course, there is no perfect parallel between the Federation and an existing Terran international organization, but given the focus of the Federation and the activities of Starfleet, NATO appears to be the closest, and I didn't even discuss enlargement.
* I'd argue that Babylon 5 comes a lot closer to that, but that is a post for another day.
1 comment:
You are forgetting the other half of Starfleet's mission, which is essentially to serve as NASA. Starfleet was put together by Earth, with contributing personnel from other Federation planets, to not simply protect the territory of the Federation from non-members but to actively find and bring more member planets into the Federation, by exploring, studying, mapping unexplored and underexplored territories of space, making contact with new spacefaring civilizations and trying to establish first trade & science exchange relations and then, if all went well, membership into the Federation. They are also tasked in that exploration with finding and exploiting resources that can help Federation planets, as long as that doesn't disturb or harm existing civilizations. Additionally, they do provide protection but also transport, science and communication assistance to scientific exploration groups, outer Federation operations and colonies. They are in charge of all of Earth's and much of the whole Federation's exploration of space.
One of the most revered episodes of the original Star Trek is "The Devil in the Dark," in which the Enterprise is called to a far out facility to deal with a threat, but not a NATO like threat of non-Federation space invaders from another planet nation -- a science mystery/native life form that is killing miners. And they discover it's sentient and let it live, make first contact, negotiate a truce, adding to the knowledge of the Federation.
Additionally, Starfleet regularly ferries diplomats and aides in inter-planet negotiations, particularly first contact ones, is involved with trade affairs ("The Trouble with Tribbles") and economic concerns and does numerous rescue missions that are not military in nature. So the Federation is more like the UN than NATO. It is a political alliance that regularly meets with each other to hash things out among member planets. And Starfleet is a combo of NATO, UN military forces and NASA.
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