New mergers for a new era

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Huge pointless merger was the most popular option on the last poll, and lots of people are saying they want a merge but don't want to lose Shireroth's independence and traditions and culture and so on so forth. There's been some work done before on incomplete mergers, but they've all mostly failed because their activity was divided across too many places (see: Grand Commonwealth).I've been thinking about how to fix that. Here's my idea for a new kind of merger.

The main thrust is: merge communities without merging states. In particular, merge forums, and more particularly still, the General Discussion and Off-Topic forums.

Here's how it'd work. Let's say for the sake of argument that the two countries involved were Shireroth and Antica.

We'd choose one of the two forums, make it the official Mergistan forum, and we'd all go there. There would be various skins to make it look like home to people on both sides, and the default skin would be something suitably inoffensive. The top section would be a unified General, a unified Off-Topic, and a few more unified things like Diplomacy Games. We'd then have a bunch of unified Ministries - for example, a Ministry of Trade could be unified because both Shireroth and Antica use the SCUE economy anyway, the Ministry of the Interior would be unified because we're both on the same forum, and we could consider a unified MiniEx and MOMA if we could get a united foreign policy together.

Next, we'd have the two countries themselves. For example, there might be a category "Shireroth" with five forums - Kaiser's Court, Landsraad, Judex, MiniImNat, and Subdivisions. After that there'd be a category "Antica" with forums like Antican Assembly, Antican Immigration and so on.

And finally we'd have a whole bunch of unified institutions. Unified university, unified multi-temple, unified marketplace, and so on.

The two countries would maintain full independence and would be allowed to leave the merger whenever they wanted. They'd each handle their own immigration - so you couldn't immigrate to Mergistan, you'd have to immigrate to either Shireroth or Antica. They'd both continue conducting their own governmental affairs: Shireroth would continue the succession of Kaisers, Antica would continue their Assembly votes. But there would also be a level of confederation government in which the leaders of the two countries interact in some way to set the unified foreign/economic policy, choose unified ministers, and so on. This could be as simple as the Kaiser and the Archon talking to each other every so often and unanimously agreeing, or it could be a whole legislature with its own procedures (I'd prefer the first).

This doesn't divide activity; instead, it concentrates all the activity into one place while maintaining most of the important features of being independent. It allows things that need lots of people - like off-topic forums, economies, and universities - to get them, but it still allows Shirerithians to be Shirerithians and do Shirerithian things instead of having to assimilate into Mergistan.

And, of course, if it didn't work, there'd be no legal barrier to us waving the Anticans good-bye and returning to normal.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

[Pachad]The inevitability of having to declare war on this poses a conflict of interests for me.[/Pachad]

[Kaiser Mors VI]

Looks like Regions from Tymaria...

[Daniel Farewell]

It sounds interesting.

[Gman Russell]

Absolutely not!

[Jonas]

Antica and Shireroth merging would be the same as the crazy proposal to create a French-British Confederation.

But I like the smell of adventure! Let's do it!

[Hesam Jayatar]

Do you mean Canada? Because it is crazy here.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

Sounds almost a little bit similar to how Gralus worked once, and it kinda didn't work if I remember correctly...

[Aster]

All I can say to this is a hearty "ho ho ho"!

[Andreas the Wise]

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.


Seriously though, having done something like this twice, I would say that if you want any sort of combined foreign affairs stuff to work, you have to all be on the same board. Gralus' experience is a little different, in that we became the one Empire instead of remaining separate nations (the second time round, at least); but I have noticed that provincial (read "Country") development and matters reduced after we became one nation. Not that they were ever that high to begin with.

On a wild guess, it would probably work (sharing a board) if there was already reasonable interaction between the populations. If you put two completely separate nations together (eg Gralus and Batavia) it would either flop miserably, or people would make new friends and it would work wonderfully.

[Oric the Damned]

you'd have to immigrate to either Shireroth or Antica.

I like the idea of everything else, but this is the one potentially confusing thing for new people- "which one do I join, and how are they different? It's hard to explain that Antica and Shireroth (speaking hypothetically of course) are merged states, but still different ones too." Probably the only reason someone joins one over the other is because it's the first board they stumbled across, or the first one they saw advertised elsewhere.

thus ends my first serious post in Shireroth

[Maksym Hadjimehmetov]

I don't follow... I mean, why merge?
What have you got to gain from a merger which you don't have in Shireroth already?
You've got an active, friendly community, a rich heritage and culture, and friends in the intermicronational community.
I just don't see what a merger could possibly bring Shireroth aside from making new enemies.