57c-59c: Reunification

After nearly twelve centuries of chaos and war following the collapse of the Imperium, a number of wealthier interstellar states were united under a republican government. This Reunification began a peaceful and idealistic period of expansion. While sometimes tumultuous, all branches of humanity were finally united under one enlightened government.

Humanity climbed out of the Second Decline as hyperspace travel again became reliable. A number of states began to accrue through warfare and diplomacy a large number of client systems. With the wealth and resources that came along from such larger political unions (most often in the form of monarchical empires or autocratic republics), they asserted their dominance over neighbors, offer greater protection to weaker systems, and restarted interstellar trade as a major economic activity.

Memories of the Old Imperium were not entirely lost, and many of these interstellar states came to see themselves as the natural heirs to that ancient order. This again lead to a final period of rivalry, though the sheer size of these interstellar empires made open warfare far less common. It did accelerate exploration and the rediscovery of lost systems, as well as involvement in a number of proxy wars between various vying client states.

The desire for peace came to be very great during this time. Many feared that the fledgling interstellar civilizations might again be snuffed out by warfare. Out of this came a wide-spread sentiment, even among the ruling and military classes, that humanity needed to be reunited under a single government.

Still, historians and philosophers of this age were well aware of the Imperium’s many failings, and looked to that ancient state’s roots in the short-lived Macropedia/Terran Republic as the inspiration for their own new human-wide interstellar state. New humanistic philosophies and a growing political liberalism convinced many that the new state must be a republic, with greater respect and recognition of human rights, and less upon the rights and privileges of governments.

By no means was this unification process an easy one, and not all the interstellar states were as keen to permitting their own power to be supplanted by some new republic. Negotiations were long and difficult, testing the resolve of the numerous diplomats, politicians, citizens, merchants and theorists that gathered to create a functioning government out of an ideal. War was still a threat during this period, but the idealists stood their ground even in the midst of such threats.

In the end, the effort paid off. Most of the systems of far-flung humanity submitted themselves to the new republic, thus ending the agonies of the Second Decline. The new republic proved wiser and more moderate in its use of power than its predecessor. It sought to use its military might as little as possible, preferring its growing economic and diplomatic power instead. With those systems that would not join, it always attempted peaceful coexistence, and where that was not possible, containment rather than invasion.

While it could never entirely avoid the sins of the past; a large and at times distant aristocracy, a large bureaucracy and the ever-constant clash between the central government and the constituent systems, it did manage to protect the individual citizens to a much greater degree than ever before.