History | A Young Nation - (1867-1900)

A Young Nation
Categories: Ainslie | History

The Period of Nascence, otherwise known as the post-Federation period, is a time stretching between 1867 to 1900. During this time, a number of Prime Ministers set about unifying the nation on multiple fronts, whether that be by infrastructure, culture, economy or by completing the national capital. Early points of tension in the Ahnslen nation also begin to develop, such as the urban-rural divide, clashes between the government and trade unions and the injustices that the Merenese face at the hands of the Dallaran Government.

Immediately after Unification
The five leaders (as they were at the time) had a major task to undertake - to unify a nation which although on the trajectory to form one people were still very much distinct entities. They immediately formed the Electoral Council of Ainslie, establishing a seat of government in Arborai, in the nation’s north. For three years, the leaders continued negotiations and discussions as to what the nation would become. In 1868, the electoral council (after each of the nations’ leaders separately agreed upon the Constitution in 1867) gave assent to the Ahnslen Constitution and formed what is now the Unified Electorates of Ainslie. This also had the effect of turning the highest courts of each predecessor state into an Electoral Court. Further, it established the Collective Court of Ainslie as a means by which people could appeal from those courts to a federal court which could set standards nation-wide. One year later, the Electoral Council officially decided that the small village on thee Barrader River where they declared the establishment of the nation - Arine - would become the national capital and adopt the name Ahnerten for it.

Antertan-Gosren period
Antertan and Gosren’s Prime Ministerships are largely grouped together for a number of reasons. Firstly, the two leaders both had a close personal friendship with one another and both were endorsed by the Federation Party which Anertan and Kareena had established. The years they were in power are also characterised as being decisive to the unification of the nation culturally and in terms of its economy but the means by which the two leaders went about doing this differed. Wellen Antertan’s reign is largely dominated by the infrastructure projects he promoted and actively ensured the progress of, as well as overseeing the development of the early guiding principles which would see Ainslie over time form to become a united nation - particularly in terms of its law and its banking system. Gosren initially appeared to be of a similar mindset. His early years of governing can be seen as building off of Antertan’s policy of nationalisation and a keen interest in the development of a national economy - largely owing to the fact Gosren promoted and established a number of publicly owned nation-wide corporations. However, as PM Gosren continued overseeing the nation he turned his attention to matters of culture - establishing a horticultural society and championing the development of the Arts, in particular poetry and landscape art. These, through Gosren’s close interest of them, became key driving forces in the development of Ahnslen nationalism - in particular the shared experience of closeness to the land and to nature that all of the cultures of the predecessor states had.

On the 6th of January 1870, Weslander Wellen Antertan was popularly elected as the first Prime Minister of Ainslie and the Federation Party whom he was closely linked with enjoyed a large majority in The Assembly, the new legislative body governing the nation. It is important to note that whilst this was the first time the entire nation was governed by the principles of democracy at the same time. However, many were excluded from Ainslie’s first election. Women were broadly excluded from all of the elections across the nation, whilst Dallara undertook a program that has since been identified as systematically excluding the Merenese communities that made up much of the electorate’s east. Intimidation, limited access to polling places, delayed ballots and a lack of programs to inform these groups caused many of them not to vote or to vote in a way that caused their votes to be not counted. This election also saw the democratic election of five governors and the Electoral Delegations which would represent each of the subdivisions in Ainslie.

One of Prime Minister Antertan’s first acts was to nationalise all of the private railways in the nation whilst obtaining the consent of the Electoral Council to acquire all of the publicly owned railways owned by the various Governors. Antertan quickly set about to make the standard gauge the uniform style of track across the nation one year later, as the north before was different to the south which was different again to the east. In July of the same year, he also established the Ahnslen Reserve Bank and the national currency - the Ahnsen, which would be fixed and determined by the aforementioned central bank in 1871. The Collective Court, unhindered by any court above it and exercising the new powers it had under the Constitution, set about to interpret the Constitution and significantly contributed to harmonising laws across Ainslie in key areas. Further, it rejected the position of the Electoral Courts of Arlanah and Norlands, which up until then maintained the adoption of Civil Law in a case in 1872. The Court instead sided with the decisions in Wesland, Mannen and Dallara, declaring that English-style common law should be the key underlying principle which establishes the broader law of the Unified Electorates. In 1873, Anertan established the Cross-country Poet’s Society which actively sought to develop and help a growing contingent of poets across the nation. These people largely came from working class backgrounds and often a part of the agricultural industry. Historians have commonly pointed to the 1870s as the key moment in which the romantic rural mythology that is a common thread through Ahnslen culture - partially because of the prominence of these poets. In order to facilitate further communication, Anertan also oversaw the completion of telegraph lines between Ahnerten and Arborai.

The second Ahnslen Federal Election occurred in 1874. Shortly prior to the election, Wellen Antertan announced his resignation and the subsequent endorsement of Enere Gosren as Prime Minister - from this point onwards it has become customary for an outgoing Prime Minister to point towards their desired successor, a long-standing tradition that aims to symbolise the independence of a Prime Minister from the political party which helped facilitate their rise in politics. Enere Gosren, who unlike Antertan was from the electorate of Mannen, had been endorsed by the Federation Party to become Prime Minister. The people of Ainslie, in a similar situation and context to 1871, voted Enere Gosren to become the next Prime Minister.

Gosren’s commitment to nationalisation and federalism was more radical than Antertan’s incrementalist approach. The Prime Minister immediately set out to establish a range of national companies - in 1874, the same year as his election, he convinced The Assembly to establish the Ahnslen Timber Corporation (which was established in Arborai), the Ahnslen Wheat Corporation (established in Anertah) and the Ahnslen Wool Corporation (established in Kianara). As a means of further imposing the national character of Ainslie over the citizens of the predecessor states, a national guard was established in 1875 as an early form of what would eventually create the Ahnslen Regional Stability Force. The guard was divided into four different units - The Norland Guard, the Dallara Guard, the Southern Guard and the Wesland Guard. In that same year, Gosren also established the Bank of the Unified Electorates as a commercial investment and consumer lending bank for the nation.

At the electoral level, the Mannenite Government completed seven years of negotiations with various Merenese tribes which amounted in the Macari Treaty in 1876 which resulted in the cessation of their sovereignty in exchange for an array of rights and privileges within the system the electorate had set up. Although this treaty has become controversial as a result of its racist and paternalistic reasoning, it remains largely considered as an achievement of a young progressive government in Mannen. This can be contrasted with the systematic discrimination of Merenese communities in the electorate’s western neighbour, Dallara. Meanwhile, at the federal level, Prime Minister Enere Gosren established a nation-wide botany and horticultural group devoted to a number of scientific pursuits associated with Ainslie’s natural history, geography and sciences. This was called by the Ahnslen Bush Society. After Gosren stepped aside from his role in politics, he remained a patron of this Society and was actively involved in the group. Whilst Antertan largely focused on infrastructure, Gosren’s term can largely be seen through the lens of a leader trying to establish a unified Ahnslen cultural identity through the means of the arts. Gosren continued after the establishment of the Bush Society and national corporations to set up the Federal Arts School, which actively promoted the pursuits of open air impressionist painters who documented the diverse landscapes of Ainslie. The style remained popular for many decades and their work appeared in many government offices and homes alike, playing a key role in bringing the nation together over a shared love of its natural environment. Two months before the third federal election, Gosren announced that Anertan’s master project - the national railroad system was completed. Ahnslens could now travel with ease, provided they could pay fares, to any electoral capital in Ainslie. Riding off of the buoyancy of Gosren’s popular cultural and economic programs and the completion of Anertan’s rail project, he was re-elected by a larger margin than Anertan in his first election. This made Gosren one of the most popular Prime Ministers in Ainslie’s history.

However, Prime Minister Gosren’s second term was not marked by the same amounts of new projects and initiatives that helped define his first four years. The first year of his term was largely occupied by mediating between the various electorates and reforming the taxation system so that the Federal Government held the majority of the nation’s taxation revenue. In 1880, Gosren held a poetry competition which would form the shortlist of candidates for a popular vote to establish a national anthem. Pride in Ainslie, a poem by Chare Staffern which he wrote from his farming property south of Highland Ridge, was voted by majority to be the new national anthem of Ainslie and remains to hold that position up until present. In the last months of his Prime Ministership, Gosren established the University of the Unified Electorates (today known as the Universaire Unife) to attract the brightest minds from across the nation to convene on Ahnerten. This became instrumental in forming an identity for Ahnerten and to ensure that the capital would truly become the cultural and economic centre of the nation.

Ainslie under Laranah & Morsen
Renten Laranah, an ethnically Merenese man from the upper classes of Mandara (the capital of Dallara) was elected in 1882 as the next Prime Minister. Much of his campaign was focused on continuing the process of nation-building that Antertan and Gosren had started. In particular, Laranah focused on the need to finish the Ahnslen capital and to move the nation’s institutions such as The Assembly which was still in Arborai and the Collective Court which was still in Benarin, into Ahnerten. He also ran on the controversial yet reasonably popular position of introducing national civil service for young people, a policy he would never get to implement owing to bitter internal disputes within the party as to how what should qualify as service and the length at which they should serve for. His plan was for a model of two streams - one where you could join the defence forces or could undertake employment or volunteer work in the public service. Meanwhile, a sizeable amount of people moved towards Ahnerten in order to help the construction effort and fill vacancies within the public service at the federal level - many come on the promise or prospect of higher paying jobs that would be more stable than what they get elsewhere. Arnish during this time was already the language spoken south of Norlands, though during this time many in that electorate too were learning or had learnt the language - effectively making it the informal language of Ainslie.

However, whilst the capital was being built and the national spirit was at a high, the Prime Minister also had to address the rising tensions which would simmer during the next century of Ahnslen politics. In particular, the rural-urban divide was becoming more and more pronounced and a desire for more autonomy by rural townships and communities broadly resulted in a number of protests. Primarily, these protests were about the large city council areas - communities during this time could be ruled by Mayors whose chambers were hundreds of kilometres away. With the blessing of the Arlanite Government, a number of regional and rural town councils established themselves within that electorate in 1883. This began a wave of self-initiated councils which Laranah nor the Electoral Council nor The Assembly had much desire in seeking to quell. In 1884, citing a need for the federal bureaucracy to have their own specialist security force, Laranah established the Federal Corporals Unit, a group well known today for their diplomatic, peacekeeping and personal security role in modern Ainslie. As infrastructure became increasingly advanced and popular amongst Ahnslens, bandit gangs began to form in order to steal travellers’ property and hold the travellers to ransom. Soon after the establishment of the Federal Corporals, they were regularly sent with government officials and other government transports to deter and detain these bushrangers.

Meanwhile, in the electorate of Dallara, the Governor of the day introduced a new strategy to police the Merenese communities in the east of the electorate. Much of this revolved around arming and training the weaker tribes in order for them to police the stronger tribes. This had devastating effects for the Merenese community in Dallara, resulting in kidnappings, arbitrary detention and unjustified violence as well as the raiding of villagers that had been not friendly with the ‘police’. This effectively caused a minor civil war between the communities of the east of Dallara to which the electoral government turned a blind eye to. Later that same year, in 1886, the Dallaran Government more directly establishes the ‘Eastern Schools Program’, which sought to ‘civilie’ and re-educate the Merenese through a program of cultural detachment and assimilation into the Dallaran community. These schools, many of which today are now public schools run by the Electoral Government, were facilities where the Government either through the ‘consent’ of their parents or through detention of minors, would become boarding schools for young Merenese people.

On the 2nd of December 1886, Seran Morsen becomes the second Prime Minister hailing from the electorate of Wesland. Morsen continued the establishment of major Ahnslen institutions by creating the Ahnslen Institute of Disease in 1887 (today known as the Ahnslen Institutes of Disease and Epidemiology) and ‘The National’, the first nation-wide broadsheet newspaper with a readership across all five electorates. The dividends of Gosren’s focus on the Arts also began to become clear during Morsen’s reign, as many Ahnslens began to identify themselves with the nation of Ainslie and of being Ahnslen rather than the linkage they had to their predecessor states. Whilst they maintained a strong ancestral link and some sense of belonging to those states, the idea of being ‘Ahnslen’ and of a sense of national identity and nationalism came to particular strength during this period. Whilst almost every institution described in the Constitution had been set up by now, one remained non-existent until 1890. Owing to strong pressure from Norlands especially and to a lesser extent Arlanah, Morsen was pushed into establishing the Judicial Council of Ainslie - an inquiry-conducting and a judicial body that was at the apex of the court hierarchy and which wielded significant influence over the Ahnslen Executive. This was despite Collective Court hesitation and the position for the past twenty years prior that Ainslie was not ‘national’ enough to allow for a strong federal court to exercise its power. Within a year, the Collective Court and Judicial Council began to clash over key legal questions. However, they did agree that common law is to be preferred over civil law, giving the former the full irrefutable force over the entire nation. In 1891, the Judicial Council, on appeal from the Collective Court who tried to outright ban slavery, found that the specific program that the Dallaran Government had was unconstitutional. As such, whilst slavery remained legal at this time, it was effectively abolished through a mixture of lack of political will and of judicial determination.

One year later, the Prime Minister goes further than the Council did and bans slavery through the Slavery Abolition Act 1892 (UE). The Merenese, having been in a state of conflict with one another for many years now, revolt against the Dallaran Governemnt and to a lesser extent the Federal Government. Whilst the Morsen Government maintained a largely non-interventionist stance, they authorised the Southern Guard to be temporarily controlled by the Dallaran Government. By using their police assets, the local Merenese communities they had armed and the Southern Guard, the Electoral Government brutally stopped the protest - it is said that well over three hundred Merenese were killed at the hands of government forces that day. There remains a lack of data and conjecture around the number. The revolt, being largely framed as a threat to the Dallaran Government out of the interest of Merenese statehood rather than their anguish as a result of that government’s discriminatory policies, was ignored if not supported by the rest of the country.

Maren and early progressive tendencies
In 1894, the largely conservative trend in Prime Ministers was overturned with the election of Elijah Maren, a Norlander, to the position. In that same year, the Judicial Council appointed Arceen Burnessa as their first Judicial-General and Ainslie played its first test cricket match against <insert nation>. One year later, a growing trade union movement is given legitimacy and protection from the Electoral Governments by Maren, who actively allows for their creation. In 1896, Laranah’s vision of Ahnerten was complete - the city is now a collection of multiple microcities. As Maren described it at the time:

“Ahnerten is truly a city which represents Ainslie. It is a nation of settlements in its own right, with open space and natural environment between them.”

In that same year, Maren offered discounts on land to those involved in the construction of Ahnerten. This allows many families to move into the city and quickly causes the development of Ahnerten. In turn, it also began the construction of houses in the outer suburbs (at the time) such as Lestern, Keversen and Menindara. It also established a close sense of self-identification of being from Ahnerten, as a result of many of its early residents having built the city with their own hands. In 1897, Maren’s policy of supporting the trade unions came to its climax as newly formed workers organisations across the country began to protest for better working conditions. However, the Electoral Governments remain apathetic if not belligerent against these groups and the members of The Assembly are hesitant to bring the concerns of the unions into the Chamber. In this year, under Ahnslen Institute funding, Ahnslen doctors make one of the first vaccines in The Western Isles for diphtheria. In the lead-up to the Federal Election, the Mannenite Government gives all women and all Merenese the right to vote at electoral and national elections. Meanwhile in 1899, the Dallara Government remains to disproportionately convict Merenese people for murder and a number of other serious harms, causing long-term incarceration and capital punishment to be used against these citizens. Maren during this time also established new immigration facilities in Arborai, Mandara and Renderra, which aim to naturalise migrant workers and migrants into Ainslie and Ahnslen life. In the winter of 1899, the north of the nation also experienced a bitter winter as a result of a number of major cold fronts. During this time was one of the few recorded settled snowfalls Arborai has ever experienced. In January of 1900, the Collective Court also heard the first defamation case in Ahnslen history and rules for the plaintiff. Maren also in this year establishes the ‘National Hospital in Ahnerten’ (today known as the Ahnerten Hospital) and declares his interest in establishing one in every electoral capital to replace the decaying and dated electoral government hospitals.

Ramifications (in Ainslie)

• A number of national cultural institutions and publicly owned corporations are established such as the Universaire Unife, the Ahnslen Institute of Disease and the Ahnslen Bush Society.

• Slavery is effectively abolished, however Merenese communities in the east of Dallara continue to experience systematic injustice at the hands of successively racist Electoral Government.

• Mannen begins to establish its reputation as being a progressive electorate in Ainslie, establishing a treaty with its Merenese communities and soon after giving all women and any merenese person the right to vote, effectively implementing universal suffrage.

• The Judicial Council is established

• An early iteration of Ahnerten is built

• A number of Ahnslen federal military institutions are born, such as the Guards of the Electorates and the Federal Corporals, alongside the more conventional armed forces.

• Arnish becomes the main spoken, informal language in Ainslie.