Ridnez
| Ridnez | |
|---|---|
| Avaris | |
| |
| Flag of Ridnez | |
| Motto: "Salute alla Ragione, alla Nazione e alla Repubblica!" | |
| ("Hail to Reason, the Nation and the Republic!") | |
| Capital | Magnifico |
| Alliances | LOPN Member State |
| Population | 200,000,000 (estimated) |
| Currency | New England Inc pound |
| Open on NationStates | |
Ridnez, officially the Republic of Ridnez, is a peninsular nation in North Usea, bordered by West Heisen to the north, by the Golden Sea to the west, by the Sea of Alem to the east, and by the South Halaway Ocean to the south. Ridnez also shares a maritime border with the NEI South Usean Raj within the Golden Sea. The population of Ridnez, per the 2024 census, is estimated at 200,000,000, with 90% belonging to the Ridnezite ethnic majority and the remaining 10% divided among other ethnic groups. Ridnez has an important geostrategic position, overseeing access to the Golden Sea from the South Halaway Ocean via the Straits of Cocytus and from the Beran Sea via the Straits of Shah.
The history of Ridnez is intimately connected to that of her neighboring peoples; the earliest settlers in the Ridnezite Peninsula are hypothesized to be descended from neolithic populations who arrived from the north circa 6000 years ago, leaving behind archaeological evidence of primitive cultures over the course of millennia. The next wave of migration originated from Kanten across the Sea of Alem circa 3000 years ago and consisted of the households of Ancient Ziconean elites, who fled the period of continuous warfare between factions of aristocrats and democrats, or Alemites, known as the Ziconomachy. The earliest true cities in Ridnez were founded as an outgrowth of Classical Ziconean civilization, referred to as Zicona Megali, concentrated along the southern and eastern coasts. The previous inhabitants of the peninsula were designated by Ziconean colonists as ousanoi, a term from which originates the modern names for the continents of North and South Usea. From the 10th-8th century BRE, the unified Ziconean state on Kanten and the city-states of Zicona Megali were engaged in a period of internecine conflict, which ended with a draw upon the signing of the Dikaio treaty.
From the 7th-4rd century BRE, the Zicona Megali city-states entered a loose confederation and formed marital ties between Ziconean elite families and ousanoi clan leaders, resulting in an era of peace and prosperity that allowed arts, sciences, and philosophy to flourish. However, the Zicona Megali golden age was compromised by a slow rise in violence caused by differing views about the confederation's relationship to the Ziconean state on Kanten. By the end of the 3rd century BRE, Zicona Megali had become moribund by the time the invasion of another migratory wave, consisting of nomadic bands of Ancient Utopians, collapsed the material standards of civilization and plunged the peninsula into a dark age, the Era of In-Between.
Though written records fell out of popular use during this period, archaeological evidence and oral tradition both support that the Utopian warlords reigned over a mixed Ziconean and ousanoi populace as conquerors and pillagers for a time, before the deterioration of learning -- that which was a heightened attribute of the Classical Ziconeans -- resulted in the degradation of infrastructure, recordkeeping, and taxation systems over a few generations. By the mid-2nd century BRE, the state apparatus itself faded away from many areas where population was more thinly spread. In the major population centers, government continued in the form of a local manorial system under the Utopian lords. In time, the three populations of the peninsula began to merge into a single homogenous identity group, the early Ridnezites. Despite this, some Ziconean families perpetuated the priesthood (or prelateship) of their animist religion (Elementalism) exclusively amongst their own kind, in relative isolation from the Utopians and ousanoi, and thus were not assimilated. The name "Ridnez" for the modern country dates from this era, deriving from a name (ridens insula) which the Utopians allegedly gave to an island off the northwestern coast whose presumably ousanoi natives held an annual celebration of mirth.
Even while the rest of the peninsula regressed into an illiterate society, the Ziconean Elementalite temples judiciously copied the classical texts brought by their forebears from Kanten, thus preserving ancient knowledge and the means to rebuild civilization. By the end of the 1st century, city-states began to coalesce anew, spanning a wider expanse of territory than merely those lands which had been Zicona Megali. Inland cities focused on agriculture and resource-extractive industries such as mining, while coastal settlements prioritized maritime commerce.
In the 3rd century, the prelateship was opened up to the mixed Ridnezite population, and the first territorially contiguous empire in Ridnezite history was founded, led by the Elementalite clerical establishment and tracking the contour of the Chryselephantine River, the longest waterway in all of Ridnez. The earliest written form of the Ridnezite language, as a form of Utopian transcribed in Ziconean characters, appeared at this time. The collapse of the clerical state in the 6th century brought about a major theological and social realignment, as the Elementalite prelates divided into factions based on doctrinal disagreements, forming the sects of the Corpus Maris (Body of the Sea) and the Corpus Terrae (Body of the Earth). The Terrae built their power base in the inland municipalities whilst the Maris proliferated along the coastal zone.
In the same century, Diodorus Timodemus, a half-Ziconean Terrae prelate, founded the city of Nimbus Nuvoloso after being expelled from his hometown of Echelus. Bestowing himself the title of kaezar, or world-conqueror, Diodorus federated the majority of the inland zone and some coastal cities into the second Ridnezite territorial empire. The First Nuvoloso Empire, as it is known to historians, was passed down amongst scions of the Timodemus dynasty, who attempted to balance Terrae and Maris religious interests against one another while establishing harmony through secular rulership. By the end of the 8th century, the Nuvoloso Empire had been destabilized by the anti-sectarian movement of an outside force, the Kantenite-Ziconean preacher Philoxenos, and many of the provinces and cities of the Empire declared their independence. The praetori of the former Imperial cities declared their own kingships, while the maritime city-states of the coast came under the rule of a merchant oligarchy.
The state centered on Nimbus Nuvoloso endured, though in a largely weakened and reduced fashion, as the Second Nuvoloso Empire, under the nominal reign of the Suedonius dynasty, though the Terrae prelates held real power behind the throne. Despite this Era of Fragmentation, new cities continued to be founded as the population dispersed out from the Central Ridnezite Plain, and a few regional powers emerged in other parts of the peninsula, such as the Bimetallic Republic in the west or the Principality of Cocytus in the south. In the 12th-14th century, holy wars and incursions from Heisen and Shah against "pagan" Ridnez fomented a process of centralization of government, as many members of the feudal nobility were killed and replaced by Imperial governors (mayor-protectors). The era of the Third Nuvoloso Empire saw renewed efforts to overtake the entire peninsula through monopolizing transshipment points, until the 18 Days of Wrath during the summer of 1515, when Titus III Severinus Kaezar was killed in an unexpected flash flood of the Chryselephantine River.
In the 16th century, the Nuvoloso Empire crumbled after the siege of Nimbus Nuvoloso for 77 days and its final sacking by the forces of Magnifico, a rebellious Terrae tributary state to the north, and Colonia Solis (later Il Sole), an independent Maris merchant city to the south. For the duration of the early modern period, both states consolidated the inland and coastal zones of Ridnez around their capitals and vied for hegemony. Eventually, the Kingdom of Magnifico fell into chaos following rebellions by the army, attacks by robber-barons and brigands, and uprisings by the Northern Hill Tribes, and Colonia Solis was invited by the Magnifican Crown to restore order in return for accepting Solian suzerainty. Also during this period, Colonia Solis chartered the Great Voyages, naval expeditions undertaken by the Solian fleet called the Caelesti Classe to accumulate knowledge from foreign lands and spread Elementalism.
The 17th century was an era of relative peace in the Ridnezite Peninsula and also saw the reign of the most celebrated Ridnezite monarch, King Consus the Extant of Magnifico. Under Consus' influence, classical philosophy and knowledge from the Ziconean precursors was rediscovered and spread amongst the elite, while reforms were enacted to exchange the antiquated written form of Ridnezite used in official documents with a variant that phonetically approximated the spoken language of the time. The earliest system of public education was adopted in the Magnifican Kingdom of Consus' era, intended to give the sons of the elite an extensive liberal arts background, as well as assimilate the Northern Hill Tribe people into the Ridnezite way of life. The serenity of the 17th century came to a close with Consus the Extant's demise at the hands of privateers affiliated with the Solian Crown. This provoked the Thalassocracy War between the two Ridnezite monarchies, which raged on for 30 years and ended with the unification of both crowns under the Solian ruling house, the Bocaccis. King Alfonso II was the first ruler to hold the Magnifican and Solian Crowns in real union with one another, thus creating the Ridnezite Dual Monarchy.
The 18th century was Ridnez's time for coming out onto the global stage as a major power. To compete with the presence of the Estredenan Empire in Solmara, the Ridnezite monarchy established colonies in South Usea and Solmara. In 1735, explorer Valeriano Augeri was chartered by the Crown to establish the first Ridnezite colony in Asconea, where divide-and-conquer strategies were used against the local elites. The resultant settlement was thereafter named Halus Ayer, after the name given to the land by Utopian merchants from centuries prior. In 1741, Baron Guido Altera was posted by the Ridnezite monarch Rudolfo II to establish a military outpost on the island of Ostalia in the Solmaran archipelago to check Estredenan ambitions. Baron Altera's descendants have governed Ostalia as hereditary governors ever since. In 1757, Crispino Castiglione, Count of Grande Taguardo, published the seminal Treatise on the Rights and Liberties of Man as Servant to Nature, wherein he argued the virtues and shortcomings of the Alemite political system in classical antiquity, assessed the loose clan-based system of the Northern Hill Tribes, and concluded, "It is of utmost necessity that man doth restore those self-evident liberties which he did possess in the state of nature, lest the march of knowledge untempered by wisdom, conviction devoid of humility, and power lacking in virtue, do construct the most perfect tyranny ever conceived."
The advocacy of court philosophers and some Maris prelates moved by the Count's work influenced the restructuring of the Solian constitutional monarchy in 1774. Whereas prior noble families had hereditary rights to their ministries, a parliamentary system was inaugurated wherein an elected body of deputies would exercise the right to form the government, albeit with the requirement of royal assent. Despite this liberalization of the Solian political system, Magnifican Crown Lands remained subject to a completely separate legal code, largely preserved from the time of Consus, but with the substitution of official support for the Terrae in favor of the Maris. In practice, the Crown of Magnifico became an institution used to justify oppression and exploitation of the largely Terrae-affiliated Ridnezite population of the inland zone, or as later described by Republican leader Pasquale Amalfi, an "internal colony." Only Solian Crown Lands enjoyed the parliamentary reforms, in part because they actually increased the monarch's role in government relative to the previous, medieval system, which was directed through compromise amongst the noble houses.
In 1816, the Tomesian Revolution sent waves throughout the world, as radical republicans in favor of self-government threw off the yoke of the Estredenan Empire in their Solmaran colonies, forming the Solmaran Federation. This event sent shockwaves through Ridnezite society, and in fear of murmurs of establishing a republic within the court, King Floriano lent support to the Estredenan Empire's rump-state of Estandria to launch counter-revolutions in the Solmaran region, ironically using Ostalia as a base. Likewise, the Bocacci ruling house supported the conservative faction (the Blades) in the Solian parliament to forestall any further reforms, such as eliminating restrictions on the franchise, increasing religious and press freedom, and permitting free travel between the Magnifican and Solian Crown Lands. As Ridnezite involvement in Solmara dragged on into the 1820s, widespread popular discontent continued to mount, and the liberal faction (the Quills) took the initiative. King Floriano reluctantly gave his assent to a law which reduced property requirements for voting. Shortly afterwards, Floriano passed and was succeeded by the more progressive-minded Queen Salvatrice, who refused to meddle with the rule of parliament, insisting that the place of monarch should be merely to uplift the people of the realm through exhibition of personal virtue.
In 1834, the Solmaran Federation dissolved amidst infighting of rival military factions among the Tomesian revolutionaries. Ridnez reoriented her focus to the penetration of the South Usean interior, which became more feasible with technological and medical advances. Azaraa-speaking tribes were brought under the jurisdiction of the so-called "Ridnezite Empire", though in fact all colonial possessions were considered an extension of the Crown of Il Sole. In some places, such as those countries which would come to be known as Qurar, Khoumariya, and Talgerria, guerilla warfare between nomadic tribes and the Ridnezite military would continue in an on-and-off manner for decades, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Azaraans by the end of the 19th century. Throughout the colonial empire, but especially Halus Ayer, the Corpus Maris was extended massive tracts of land to build new temples on. Not coincidentally, these tended to be the most arable and productive lands in the region, allowing the prelate families to profit from exclusive access to the choicest locales for agriculture, hunting, fishing, etc. Many times, Asconeans and Azaraans would be forced into indentured servitude to the temple in order to secure the means of basic subsistence, breeding contempt for the Ridnezite occupiers but also for the Ziconean population of Ridnez, which remained disproportionately represented within the Corpus Maris clergy.
In the 1850s, during the premiership of Tammaro Fallaci, Viscount Fallaci, the Solian Parliament extended the franchise to "religious dissenters", including not only Terrae Elementalites, but Axonites and Zawasulis. This was enacted partially to improve the loyalty of traditionally monotheistic ethnic minorities, such as Shahis, Heisenians, and Azaraans, towards the Crown, but also to integrate the influx of Ziconeans fleeing ethnic cleansing in Kanten from the Abenzian settler-colonial states of Merconia, Corpala, and Salcanceacy. These Ziconean immigrants arrived in expectation of easy assimilation into the prosperous communities of Ziconean-Ridnezites, fostered by their close ties to the Maris prelate families, though the recent immigrants had themselves largely converted to Cruciate Axonity in reaction to justifications by Abenzian Stellate Axonites for their persecution. Thus, two separate but intertwined populations of Ziconeans were formed within Ridnez: the Old Ziconeans, who were descended from the insular Ziconean communities that emerged from the Era of In-Between nearly 2000 years ago; and the New Ziconeans, recent arrivals from Kanten whose sentiments and cultural attributes were alien to the Ridnezite social fabric.
Starting in 1874, civil war broke out to the north of Ridnez following the death of King Arnott II of Heisen (ruled of natural causes, but suspected by the public as a poisoning). An alliance of commoner merchants and industrialists in that country, referring to themselves as the Circle of Progress, condemned the Heisenian absolute monarchy and declared in open war against it, inspired by the Tomesian Revolution of decades before. This conflict divided the Solian Parliament once again, with the Quills and the Blades breaking into factions. While the Quills unanimously declared spiritual support for the Circle of Progress, the faction was divided between those who were wary of further military adventurism and those who believed it to be Ridnez's celestial responsibility to erect "enlightened" government in place of "savagery". Likewise, most of the Blades declared in favor of the newly anointed Heisenian monarch King "Little Jimmy" James I, but a minor clique remained which put special emphasis on the religious differences between Ridnez and Heisen and essentially opposed both sides of the Heisen Civil War.
Ultimately, neither parliamentary faction gained absolute headway in advancing their agenda due to fragmentation of opinion, and Ridnez remained neutral in the civil war. Nevertheless, many Ridnezite volunteer battalions and medical missions visited Heisen without government endorsement or approval, largely on the side of the Circle of Progress. By 1877, the Circle of Progress leader Emmanuel Goldstein negotiated the surrender of the Heisenian royalists and the establishment of the democratic Republic of Heisen, though the first round of parliamentary elections were riddled with irregularities favoring Goldstein and other Circle candidates. The large amount of Ridnezite popular participation in the Heisenian struggle was deeply disconcerting among many in the Blade faction, as it seemed to indicate to them popular acceptance for republican ideals applied domestically. Queen Salvatrice, who had become well-known and well-loved throughout Ridnez for her royal charities, died of old age the following year. This was to prove the turning point for the Ridnezite monarchy, as thousands of republicans took to the streets nationwide to protest the separate conditions of the Solian and Magnifican Crown Lands and the persistence of wealth-based tiered voting.
The Ridnez Imperial Army retaliated against these protests with gratuitous force, massacring anywhere between 1000 to 1500 unarmed civilians. It was this inauspicious event which accompanied the coronation of King Rudolfo IV, whose impressions of democratic government were strongly colored by this incident. Nevertheless, Rudolfo IV saw a need to ameliorate some of the liberal republicans' concerns and so inaugurated the beginnings of the Ridnezite welfare state, executing laws bringing into being state-managed old age pensions, public unemployment and disability insurance, and strong protections for the rights of trade unions. The unequal electoral system still remained a fixture of the Solian parliamentary system, however, and status-based distinctions on voting lists were further entrenched and reinforced, largely in response to the growth of the middle class and the impoverishment of several of the lesser noble houses.
Rudolfo IV's reign also saw episodes where the King disregarded the actions of parliament entirely and even harassed standing deputies. When the Kingdom of Shah made war against Ridnez in 1896 for control of the Straits of Cocytus, Rudolfo recalled the incumbent Prime Minister Angiolo Buccio and his Cabinet to install General Edoardo Lettiere as the new head of government by unilateral decree. Dozens of deputies of the Quill faction threatened to resign their seats in protest; in response, the King dissolved the entire parliament and formed a purely military administration loyal to the Crown directly, simultaneously conducting mass arrests of Quill politicians on charges of "treason". Although the war with Shah ended with a Ridnezite victory in 1900, Rudolfo IV did not declare an end to martial law and begin new general elections, instead retaining his military Cabinet as a puppet-instrument towards establishing a royal dictatorship. In 1908, a Heisenian-Ridnezite republican terrorist Ira Shevchuk assassinated Rudolfo with a homemade impact bomb, causing the throne to pass to his son, who was crowned as Rudolfo V.
Over the following years, Rudolfo V would sink Ridnez deeper into reactionary despotism, enforcing his will through the arm of the military and police. In several major Solian cities, random purges would be conducted of communities and populations stereotypically thought to be "unreliable" towards the Crown, principally Heisenians, but to a degree also Terrae Elementalites and Zawasulis. Rudolfo V considered involving Ridnez in the Noskyavian Great War on the side of the Xaviet Empire; however, he determined there to be no strategic benefit. In 1912, Terrae Elementalite poet Ambroglio Palladino founded the Palladino Club of Magnifico as a literary and philosophical society, which came over the next few years to attract the creme-de-la-creme of Ridnezite dissident writers and freethinkers. In February 1916, the Palladino Club published a pamphlet using an illegally acquired printing press, advocating for the institution of a strong written constitution that would check the King's power and correct the inequalities of Ridnezite society. In response, the Club's members were arrested en masse and their printing press was confiscated. On March 4, 1916, during a visit by the royal family to Magnifico, Alberto Castellano, a stalwart for the republican cause, bombed the viceregal palace in revenge, killing several members of the royal family.
This incident led to an escalating series of bloody reprisals by the royal authorities, sparking off the First Ridnez Revolution later the same year. One of the first overtures of the Revolution was the occupation of Magnifico by the Republican faction and the reopening of the Palladino Club to serve as an impromptu base of operations. Various dissident intellectuals and scholars were convened in the Club to set about drafting a suitable constitution for the "new" Ridnez to come, while Republican and Royalist factions shed one another's blood throughout the cities, towns, and villages of the country. The leading Republican philosopher, former lawyer Pasquale Amalfi, contributed the largest piece to the constitutional project, summarizing the ethos of the Ridnez Republic in one succinct phrase: "Hereafter, this Republic shall be ordained, to last forevermore a testament to public virtue..." After 8 years of fighting, the Republican faction occupied Il Sole and thusly legitimized their new government form. King Rudolfo V was executed by the victorious revolutionaries, and the Republic of Ridnez was formally established over the entire peninsular landmass.
The concept of "virtue", as an attribute of discipline, honesty, and rectitude in one's dealings with others, was long held in high esteem by the Elementalite faith as the chief contributing factor to the status of one's future reincarnation. Moreover, before the time of the Revolution, it was also held as a justification for hierarchy in political and religious institutions: those with greater virtue than others were presumed to have an obligation to lead and be visible in order so that this virtue could be reflected onto others. By contrast, "public virtue" was enshrined as the ultimate principle of the ideology of the Ridnez Republic, referring to a notion that it is not sufficient for the many to kowtow to the privileged few in presumption of their higher virtue status, but rather for each and every man to strive to be an exemplar of virtuous conduct in his own right. Pasquale Amalfi considered that realizing this ideal of public virtue was necessary for Ridnez to develop a true citizen body (as in a people actively engaged in the governance of their own state) and not just a mass of passive subjects. Furthermore, Amalfi considered the establishment of the Republic to be the completion of a stalled process, that being the true unification of Ridnez as a nation-state.
While Ridnez had been nominally unified under a single monarchical lineage, it still remained split between two crowns, each according different customs and laws which had been distorted grossly beyond their originally intended purpose. In the Amalfian conception, for all Ridnezites regardless of province, creed, or dialect to be equally members of the Ridnezite nation, they would have to enjoy the same rights and liberties, be responsible to the same legal order, and have an equal stake in the governance of society. After the Revolution, the Constitution was adopted, and over several months, conditions had regularized domestically enough that nationwide elections could be held. According to the new Constitution, there could be no eligibility criteria for casting a vote, whether on the basis of wealth, title, gender, ethnicity, or religion. The Republican faction divided into cliques based on what policies and ideologies they generally supported, further complicating matters. The Committee for Restitution and Social Justice (CRSJ) and the Committee for Democracy and Entrepreneurial Freedom (CDEF) emerged as two major factions representing the center-left and center-right of the Assembly, while minor factions of the far-left and far-right organized as the Committee for Workers' Sovereignty (CWS) and the Committee for Preservation of the Empire (CPE).
As Ridnez was still too deeply divided and publicly unstable to unite under any one group, Amalfi stepped up as an independent representing no faction and received an absolute majority of the national vote. Consequently, Amalfi became the first President of the Republic. Among his first actions was to renounce any claims by the Republic on the Ridnezite colonial empire, leaving the Ridnezite populations in those colonies (and largely Royalist-sympathetic garrisons) to fend against various national independence movements in South Usea. This was a highly controversial act and deeply unpopular with the military, whose officer corps was still largely aristocratic. Afterwards, Amalfi enacted laws to rescind royal monopolies, charter corporations, and land grants to the Corpus Maris. This cut off the revenue streams of many entrenched interests including the well-to-do prelate families and the mercantile elite; an assassination attempt was made on Amalfi's life by the military, followed by a coup plot in 1926.
Amalfi thwarted the coup by urging groups of civilian revolutionaries to form "people's militias" and attack the official army and navy. The Kingdom of Shah saw this discord as a moment of weakness and launched a surprise invasion of Ridnez, forcing both sides to put aside their differences in the name of national defense. As part of this truce, it was decided that the civilian government would not interfere with the management of the military and in return the military would swear an oath of loyalty to Ridnez. However, a loophole was found by the royalist military holdovers, that the oath concerned "Ridnez" -- as in referring to a political and/or national community -- and not specifically to the Republic. Being attacked and invaded made Amalfi paranoid, and when he found further initiatives of establishing a secular bureaucracy to manage public religious life blocked by the National Assembly, he relied on his informal system of people's militias to initiate a self-coup. From then on, Amalfi governed essentially as a sort of dictator, instituting income, corporate, property, and value-added taxes by fiat, implementing a regime of strict price controls, and disregarding the written constitution which he had largely written himself.
Amalfi was decided that Ziconeans couldn't be trusted to assimilate into the "new" Ridnez because of their community's ties to the Corpus Maris, so an executive order was made to the effect of suspending the right of Ziconeans and people of Ziconean descent to participate in elections for 5 generations. Amalfi also decided to attack members of the old nobility and the prelates by sending the people's militias to harass them in a concerted campaign. In many cases, this harassment escalated to lynching. By the 1930s, it was decided by the other factions that split from the victorious revolutionary party that Amalfi couldn't be allowed to continue in charge, for the sake of upholding the Republic and sanitizing the historical narrative surrounding it. They, with the support of the military, forced Amalfi with an ultimatum: he would restore the normal state of affairs, tell his people's militias to disband, and step down voluntarily to be remembered in the official history as the founding father of the modern Ridnezite nation-state. Otherwise, they would overthrow and execute him, casting him aside as a madman who couldn't learn that the Revolution had ended. Amalfi retired from active politics and retreated to a quiet private life for the remainder of his days.
After the National Assembly forced Amalfi to restore the Constitution and step down from power, national elections were held and the center-right faction -- the Committee for Democracy and Entrepreneurial Freedom (CDEF) -- took the lead. This was largely due to a middle-class reaction to years of Amalfian "popular struggle" that brought Ridnezite society to a constant boil and nearly destabilized the new government. Many of the Amalfi-era "special" taxes were stricken down as being illegal to appropriate due to the unorthodox and extraparliamentary manner by which they were enacted, and Amalfi's price control regime -- which was effected to garner popularity with the lower-classes to which Amalfi appealed, but resulted in nationwide shortages and rising black market activity, was nullified. The economic conditions of the Amalfi era enabled the Ziconean mafia to make its first inroads into Ridnez, by superseding legitimate businesses and institutions to provide the amenities that many Ridnezites had come to rely upon. Principally, however, they founded a strong presence in the New Ziconean enclaves which formed in all the major cities, separate from the ethnic-Ridnezite majority, which Amalfi-era anti-Ziconean policies and attitudes had further driven a wedge between.
The sudden increase in prices among many products and services did not necessarily make the revocation of the economic controls enacted during Amalfi's state of emergency exceedingly popular among the lower-classes, some of whom agitated that the Revolution had been betrayed and lent their support for rival political factions, such as the center-left Committee for Restitution and Social Justice (CRSJ) and the far-left Committee for Workers' Sovereignty (CWS). On the foreign policy front, the CDEF President Raul Spina supported the spreading of liberal-democratic and republican ideals in the Usea-Kanten-Solmara region, which made sense both from a strictly ideological perspective but also from that of increasing Ridnezite geopolitical influence and reach in their metaphorical neighborhood
The new Ridnezite government was eager to prove that it had nothing to do with the old one and was quick to establish ties with the independent regime of Halus Ayer, which enacted anti-Ziconean policies paralleling those of Ridnez itself due to backlash against the domination of the prelates in the colonies. In addition, Ridnez lent assistance to the Karlacian Revolution, as the people of that colony rebelled against the Redian Empire during the latter's waning fortunes amidst the Great War. As a consequence, Ridnez entered the esteem of the Karlacian people for several decades, only interrupted by the later inauguration of the New State regime. In other areas, the results of Ridnezite foreign policy produced less sanguine relationships. Reports of independence wars in some parts of the former colonial empire such as Khoumariya reached Ridnez; there, the entire Ridnezite (and Ziconean) populace was slaughtered by fanatical nationalist revolutionaries. Incidents such as this bolstered the popularity of the Committee for the Preservation of the Empire (CPE), which, while supportive of the abolition of the monarchy and the disestablishment of the temple, viewed Amalfi's granting of independence to the colonies as a mistake, arguing that they provided invaluable economic and strategic benefits for Ridnez.
In Amalfi's time, the colonies were seen as a drain on the Ridnezite economy, and his renunciation of the colonies was viewed as consistent with his own principles of popular sovereignty and the right of a nation to self-determination. However, the massacre of Ridnezite people by the less disciplined revolutionary movements and groups, as well as a readjustment of the Ridnezite economy caused by decreased barriers to capital investment, led to a rise in public support for, at very least, intervening in South Usea to protect Ridnezite people and interests. In the early 1940s, President Natanaele Trevisan attempted to keep the war hawks in the National Assembly at bay, seeking to use diplomacy and foreign aid incentives to advocate for Ridnezite interests in South Usea. However, Trevisan's efforts were too gradualistic and saw small short-term yields, undermining faith in his government. The CPE leader Lorenzo Lo Duca led his faction in lodging a motion of no confidence against President Trevisan, which was supported by the left-wing parties opposite the CPE due to a mutual interest in breaking the CDEF's decade-long hold on power.
The subsequent snap election allowed Lo Duca to narrowly take the presidency and enact a more belligerent agenda, with the approval of the joint chiefs of staff, who had preferred the CPE the most among all of the parliamentary factions. Lo Duca dispatched the Ridnez Ground Force (as the Imperial Army was now named) to Qurar, Khoumariya, and Talgerria, ostensibly to "defend Ridnezite citizens and property" but in actuality to crush the burgeoning, newly independent republics formed in these areas and replace them with puppet-states. Meanwhile, the Xaviet Empire across the globe had induced Regna Loreau to join the Great War on their side by promising them possession of the island of New Lanstead, which had previously been jurisdiction of the waning Redian Empire. Simultaneously, the inhabitants of New Lanstead launched a rebellion against Redian authorities and sought to declare another independent republic, sending an envoy to Ridnez for aid and military protection. The Lo Duca government, in alliance with Grand Admiral Patrizio Bisogno, sent a flotilla to the islands to guarantee they would fall into the Ridnezite sphere of influence and ward off the Loreauans.
Although the Loreauans were inclined to cut their losses under the circumstances, the Imperial Navy orchestrated a false flag attack against one of their own ships as a cassus belli to initiate a war against Loreau, whose rapidly expanding navy was viewed as a threat to the regional dominance of its Ridnezite counterpart. Instead, the Loreauan navy defeated the Ridnezite fleet, and the Kingdom of Shah declared war again on Ridnez in retaliation for the latter's South Usean adventurism, characterizing the ultimate aim of such interventions as to engender encirclement of Shah. Following several humiliating Ridnezite military setbacks, the Lo Duca government was forced to sue for peace on unfavorable terms, paying an indemnity to both Shah and Loreau. Afterwards, the President resigned in shame, and another snap election was called which brought the CRSJ into power into the 1950s.
The Ridnezite economy had been destabilized by war reparations due to the strain many households and businesses were put under; taxes rose to pay off Ridnez's obligations and so too did prices and cost of living. Protectionist policies were implemented by CRSJ President Everardo Matera to prevent the flight of Ridnezite capital to less strained marketplaces and keep high levels of employment in the workforce. As prices continued to rise, the CWS, which saw a massive enlargement in its membership lists from these times of turmoil, began to push for the nationalization of major industries as a supposed panacea, implicating ostensible corporate greed as responsible for harsh economic conditions. Separately from the CWS's proposals, the General Ridnezite Confederation of Labor, an association of trade unions, launched a general strike in 1951, in actuality in conformity with an anarchist agenda, but regardless, this startled the incumbent administration into taking a harder interventionist line to defuse the far-left and capture the political moment. President Matera, who was re-elected in 1950, embarked on a platform of increasing the number of state-owned enterprises in each major industry and legally mandating profit-sharing schemes in the private sector. In addition, Matera founded the Ridnezite space program, launching the first unmanned satellites into orbit and theorizing about an era in which such objects could be weaponized to strategic advantage for Ridnezite defense.
At the same time, the military budget was slashed annually to divert funds to industrial subsidies, welfare, secular public education, etc., making the displeasure of the chiefs of staff who felt essentially disgraced by the developments of the previous decade. Matera served out his second term and stepped down as leader of the CRSJ in 1955, to be replaced by Fedele Giovinco, who likewise was elected as president as Matera's policies proved popular, at least in the short-term. However, President Giovinco, who largely continued these policies without much innovation, was unable to stop the creeping problem of capital flight as increasingly prohibitive costs of doing business led to further contraction of the economy. As the main priority of the CRSJ administrations was maintaining high to near-full employment and preventing fluctuations in salaries, this phenomenon was ignored. Businesses that attempted to transfer funds out of the country were simply made to pay steep fees, and SOEs were relied upon to provide a baseline standard of productivity. The 1950s were the decade that saw literacy in the Ridnezite population make leaps and bounds, rising from 72% in 1950 to 89% in 1960. Additionally, the financial value of benefits for salaried workers increased tremendously. The Giovinco government was the first to introduce the Ridnezite social security system. The 1950s was also the decade that saw the beginnings of modern Ridnezite popular culture, conveyed by such institutions as cinema, television, and pop magazines.
Despite the efforts of Presidents Matera and Giovinco, inflation continued to soar, and the bureaucratic overhead costs of SOEs ran up as they increasingly replaced, as opposed to supplementing, Ridnezite private businesses. Attempts to freeze nominal prices and wages simply created a gulf of demand which the black market stepped in to meet, further empowering the Ziconean mafia. The Kingdom of Ostalia partnered with organized crime to sell heroin and opiates on Ridnezite streets as a revenue-raising strategy. In 1960, the first female Ridnezite president was elected, Palmira Volta, representing a return of the CDEF to government. President Volta won on the premise that her predecessors' economic interventionist policies, though well-intentioned, had run past their expiry date and had become counterproductive, stating her goal as to loosen regulations and roll back tariffs in order to incentivize the return of private investment, in the belief that this would increase the taxable base of wealth and therefore allow Ridnez to pay off the rest of the indemnity with a minimum of prolonged hardship. In addition, she campaigned on the premise of restructuring the Matera-era SOEs -- mostly operating in fields of public utilities, telecom, petroleum, mining, and healthcare -- into corporatized firms, with the aim of making them more market-competitive, without fully privatizing said SOEs.
In the field of social policy, President Volta dedicated more funds to national police agencies to counteract the reach of the mafia, and attempted to compete with the mafia for the "hearts and minds" of the Ziconean-Ridnezite minority by financing outreach programs in schools and authorizing primary schooling instruction to be performed optionally in Ziconean language. Furthermore, the High Panel of Cassation appointed by President Volta reviewed the long-standing Amalfian proscription against Ziconean voting and ruled it unconstitutional, striking it down and enfranchising a population of 10,000,000 people all at once. This act instigated a new wave of anti-Ziconean fear and resentment that would find its ultimate expression in Zendirism, though the immediate ramifications were unclear as the nationalistic far-right no longer had an organized parliamentary faction to represent their interest with the fall from grace of the CPE. While many Ziconeans successfully integrated into the Ridnezite social and political system through dedicated community-centric outreach, many Ziconeans still remained tied by blood, debt, and loyalty to the mafia, thereby allowing mafia figures to corrupt the political process more easily for the next few decades.
In 1967, the Volta government had finished paying off the remainder of Ridnez's war obligations from 20 years ago and had commenced with further market liberalization, attempting to split a state-owned national credit bureau founded by the Matera government into 5 regionally operating joint-stock corporations, with sales from issuance of shares intended to raise more government funds. The same then followed with Ridnez's oil and natural gas reserves; three titanic corporate entities (Northstar Fields S.p.a., Ridcom, and Stratos Oil) were founded by breaking up and selling off the CRSJ-era state monopoly enterprise. Wealthy elites, some of Ridnezite origin, but many from West and East Heisen, which had far outstripped Ridnez's economic growth and GDP by this time, snatched up these assets. The justification used was that the state monopolies, while established to ensure a consistent stream of revenues to pay off the indemnity and guarantee workers' paychecks, had become sclerotic and mismanaged, whilst the issue of the indemnity no longer remained on the table so the contingency of having the SOEs in the first place had passed.
The Volta government, in large part, aimed to use these revenues to bolster the police, to fight the Ziconean mafia and Ostalian drug cartel, and also to modernize the military, whose loss to Loreau in the late 40s was still incredibly alarming in the Ridnezite zeitgeist of the time and signaled weakness before the traditional rival of Shah. Due to public pressure and protests from the broad alignment of the Ridnezite left following these liberalization measures, President Volta consulted with Fedele Giovinco, still the CRSJ chairman in his post-presidency life, and agreed to compromise by directing a substantial part of the raised revenues towards bolstering the CRSJ-era welfare programs as well as rehabilitation of urban infrastructure. This damaged some of the momentum behind the protest movement which the leader of the CWS, Alfieri Onio, had hoped to inflame into an outright insurrection for his party's benefit. Onio hatched a plot to bomb another general strike by the General Ridnezite Confederation of Labor held in Il Sole, blaming the incumbent administration for seeking the suppression of the workers and accusing the CRSJ of collaborating with the so-called "capitalist oppressor".
Il Sole became engulfed for months in rioting and street violence between socialists and anarchists affiliated with the Confederation of Labor on the one hand, and the police on the other hand. President Volta and the National Assembly urged the military to intervene directly, which they eventually did, brutally liquidating hundreds of the insurrectionists, albeit not before chunks of the city had been occupied and held off as small-scale anarchist communes for a number of weeks. Nevertheless, Onio was successful in portraying the events as having been provoked by the government and consequently framed the CDEF and CRSJ as complicit in military atrocities. Onio collapsed the Volta government with a vote of no confidence amidst an all-time popularity nadir. Subsequently, Onio won snap elections as the only viable candidate remaining and immediately conducted mass firings of the bureaucracy, police, courts, etc. His objective, however realized through treachery, was to convert Ridnez into a socialist state built on similar lines to that proposed by Dmitri Novikov, who contemporarily fought in East Noskyavia to install one such regime in Daulmark.
Perhaps ironically, some of President Onio's bitterest opposition was among the very trade unionists that he manipulated in order to take power; this is because the popular Ridnezite left had never been given strongly to party politics and generally sympathized with anarchism and total rejection of hierarchical systems, which included a top-down government machinery of social engineering, as while Ridnezite small businesses did not appreciate being bullied and/or expropriated by the Onio government, neither did they have any recourse to fight back. Furthermore, as time went on and cooler heads prevailed, public suspicion began to fall on Onio for having caused the Riots of '67, as they are known, as his was the only party which benefitted. After three years of corruption, creeping authoritarianism, and random bouts of disorganized terror, the military took action again, this time when the Onio government moved to seize the petroleum assets of Northstar Fields, S.p.a. The joint chiefs of staff accused President Onio of being an "enemy of the Ridnezite nation" and disappeared him, trying him in a secret military tribunal. He was then deposited in a maximum security prison on a barren island in the Golden Sea known as the Rock of Eternal Torment
Against widespread expectations, the military did not usurp power in a junta for many years or restore the defunct monarchy, but rather sought to gain the gratitude of the civilian politicians as a means to an end of securing larger budgets and greater involvement in geostrategic planning. As such, General Davide Sciabarra, chief of army, supervised a transitional martial law period towards the normalization of the domestic political scene. The first party system, or Committee System, had come to an end, as all of the factions which splintered from the original National Assembly that founded the Republic had discredited themselves or gone extinct. The second party system was thusly inaugurated. In essence, the two major political tendencies in the country, representing the broad coalition of the left and the broad coalition of the right, coalesced together into the Popular Progressive Rally (PPR) and the Center Progressive Rally (CPR), respectively. Both parties held differing interpretations of the events between the Riots of '67 and the military coup d'etat in 1970.
The PPR generally saw the ease and simplicity with which the military crushed Alfieri Onio once one of the newly privatized oil industry giants was threatened as a sign that the true institutions holding power behind Ridnez were undemocratic and unaccountable to the body of citizens, with general elections serving as little more than bread and circuses, and that far-sweeping constitutional reforms were needed in order to put the reins of power back in the hands of the people. The CPR saw Alfieri Onio as a terrorist and a crook whose ascendancy was a sign that Ridnez had become decadent and corrupt and had deviated from the Republic's founding Amalfian conception of "public virtue" being supreme; as such, they generally favored heavy military spending, a "vigilant" foreign policy, and robust law-and-order policies as key to reviving the Ridnezite national spirit and checking the proliferation of organized crime and terrorism.
WIP...
The Presidency:
Per the Constitution of the Republic of Ridnez, the head of state and government is the President of the Republic, who is elected by a direct majority vote of all Ridnezite citizens within the state without regard to gender, ethnicity, race, or religion. There is no system of electoral college; rather the tally of overall votes regardless of location determines the winner of national elections. The President is the head of the executive branch of government and appoints his cabinet (the General Directorate) comprised of ministers (directors) supervising the fields of foreign affairs, justice administration, national defense, industrial policy and labor relations, government finance and management of state-owned enterprises, agricultural policy and regulation of land use, and enforcement of pollution standards and environmental hygiene.
The President is not, notably, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces ex officio. Rather, historically, the Ridnez Armed Forces were permitted an unusual degree of autonomy among developed nations, and the officer corps were permitted to observe their own traditions and procedures, which as such remained unaltered from the time of the Dual Monarchy, resulting in the perpetuation of former nobility into positions of authority within the general staff. The Armed Forces thus had the privilege of internal selection of its own Supreme Commander, over whom the Ridnezite civilian government had a comparatively weak level of control. This peculiarity was ultimately fatal to the Republic during the Second Ridnez Revolution, as the military leadership had the leverage to sit the conflict out and de facto favored the insurrectionist forces represented by Andreas Bombardone.
The President has the right to nominate and dismiss directors of the government at will, but all nominations must be confirmed by a general majority vote of the Chamber of Delegates, the lower house of the National Assembly. In addition, the President has the power to unilaterally issue memoranda establishing internal regulations and guidelines for the civil service, which need not be subject to any vote. In practice, these sorts of memoranda have a larger weight than they would seem to imply, as they could be used to nullify the effect of certain active policies and regulations while selectively strengthening the enforcement of others. The President also possesses a largely unchecked amount of immediate control over civil service appointments and dismissals, ensuring on the one hand that bureaucratic "lifers" did not emerge under the First Republic, but on the other, diminished the degree to which the civil service could modulate the implementation of an elected government's policy decisions.
Nearly every elected presidential administration has been corrupt to the extent that immediate presidential control over civil service makeup was used to further the entrenchment of party-based patronage networks on the one hand, but on the other, these networks would just as quickly be uprooted and replaced with new webs of relationships after the changeover of governments. One important ramification was that employment in the civil service was notoriously uncertain in the First Republic, hampering the development of a culture of elite insider bureaucrats as previously mentioned, but on the flipside, preventing the development of a professional civil service culture as well. As a consequence, while the bureaucracy was never exactly "bloated" during the First Republic, it was certainly inefficient just the same.
The President possesses the power of veto over any and all legislation drafted and ratified by the National Assembly and also has the ability to establish the official legislative queue, effectively burying disfavored legislation or forcing the National Assembly to first address other issues.
While the President did not historically act as commander-in-chief, it still remained the President's responsibility to coordinate strategic goals of the Republic with the chiefs of staff, who would invariably select the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces from among themselves (traditionally, the patriarch of the Bisogno dynasty, due to historical Ridnezite naval dominance)
In practice, the President retained the ability to substantially direct military policy by holding the military budget hostage; furthermore, it was also exclusively the President's right to declare war and sign treaties with other nations, ensuring that the military could not act in a wholly renegade manner lest they be branded traitors and precipitate a civil war or a coup d'etat. The appointed Director of National Defense, serving under the President, was meant to act as official mediator between the priorities of the military command structure and the civilian government, guaranteeing that both parties remained on the same page at all times.
The President does not have the power to open or close sessions of the National Assembly. Instead, the timing of legislative sessions is governed by the Constitution, that the Assembly must convene biannually for a period of no fewer than four weeks to address all items on the legislative agenda. However, tabling discussion of certain bills until the next session is permitted if an accord cannot be reached by a majority of Assemblymen.
The National Assembly:
The National Assembly consists of an upper house, the Chamber of Deputies, and a lower house, the Chamber of Delegates.
The Chamber of Deputies is heterogenous in its makeup, with one-third of the seats being directly appointed by the President, one-third of the seats equally apportioned among the eight provinces and elected directly by the provincial population, and one-third of the seats elected by statutory constituent assemblies that nominate their own membership and ostensibly exist to represent special interest groups (trade unions, women's groups, the Heisenian and Ziconean communities, farmers, artists, academia, industry leaders, etc.). The House of Deputies is frozen at 120 seats in total, meaning 40 are by presidential appointment, 40 are by provincial election (5 per province), and 40 are for special interest groups (2 per constituent assembly).
While the Chamber of Deputies contained the kernel of the corporativist idea that would later attain greater precedence in the Zendirist era as the Council of Corporations, the upper house was functionally powerless except to review legislation that passed the Chamber of Delegates and recommend changes to the bill before sending it back to the lower house for a second vote. The Chamber of Deputies was also nominally intended as a nonpartisan chamber, though in practice the sympathies of a majority of the Deputies fell in line with one major party versus another in a given era, with an overall center-left lean due to the seats of the constituent assemblies.
The Chamber of Delegates was elected by proportional representation per electoral district, with the Constitution stipulating that the eight provinces of the Republic each had to be divided into twenty electoral districts of equal territorial area. Due to the fluctuations in the Ridnezite population over time, there is no fixed number of Delegate seats. In practice, while this system has always favored the population-dense coastal zone over the historically oppressed inland zone, the inland Ridnezites considered this method a victory in the time of Amalfi due to the fact they were now represented at all.
In practice, the Chamber of Delegates holds all substantive legislative power within the National Assembly, having the exclusive right to lodge new bills on the floor and ratify them by general majority. While the bill then passes to the Chamber of Deputies, which can stall legislation by sending it back down to the lower house with suggested changes, the Chamber of Delegates reserves sole power to actually implement these changes in the final bill (or not) and ratify it by a repeat vote with a general majority. Discipline and conduct are preserved in the Chamber by the influence of the Speaker, who summarizes the deliberations of the Delegates at the end of each session, censures Delegates for poor conduct or rowdy behavior, opens and closes each session in line with constitutional stipulations, and maintains the order of the legislative queue instituted by the President. While it is required that the National Assembly meet biannually, the Speaker of the Chamber may determine to open a session of the Assembly at an expedited date no sooner than 4 months after the previous, and in instances where a single continuous session drags on to beyond the six-month mark, the Speaker is under obligation to close the session and table all further discussions until the date 6 months after that.
The Chamber of Delegates has the power to override an executive veto and initiate impeachment proceedings against the President or any director in his or her government, although either process requires a 2/3 supermajority as well as the approval of a general majority of the Chamber of Deputies, making such incidents arduous and frankly unlikely.
The Chamber of Delegates also has the power to form subcommittees to conduct official investigations into civil society and recommend regulations and policy measures using their findings. These subcommittees do not require executive approval.
Finally, the National Assembly possesses the ability to dissolve the government with a vote of no confidence requiring a 2/3 supermajority of the Chamber of Delegates and a general majority of the Chamber of Deputies. As this has the effect of terminating the mandate of an elected government without the drama and fuss of an impeachment trial, this was the method historically favored by the Assembly to depose an unpopular President. Any circumstance that prematurely ends the term of an incumbent government, whether impeachment or vote of no confidence, as well as more unorthodox circumstances like assassination or incapacitation, requires the Assembly (primarily the Chamber of Delegates) to form and authorize a caretaker government within 6 months and begin organizing the new round of national elections to begin within 12 months.
National elections require the simultaneous election of both the government and the Assembly, although the two belong to independent government branches under the Amalfian constitutional system (that is to say, the executive is not fully "responsible" to the legislature in the same way as a true parliamentary system), making the entire ordeal burdensome in any respect.
The Judiciary:
The Ridnezite legal system utilizes an inquisitorial method. Within those constraints, there is a hierarchy of 128 local tribunals under 32 courts of appeal under the High Court of Cassation, which acts as the Ridnezite supreme court with respect to matters of civil law, criminal justice, and constitutional and administrative matters. Justices on the High Court of Cassation are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Chamber of Delegates, just as judgeships of lower courts are appointed by the elected leaders at the municipal and provincial government levels and confirmed by the relevant legislative apparatus at that given scale. However, while the executive can made appointments to the judiciary, these judges cannot afterwards be dismissed.
The High Court of Cassation has the power of judicial review, with which to offer official interpretation of the written law to be observed or to strike laws down if found to be unconstitutional.
During the Zendirist era, a judicial reform was enacted, increasing the minimum number of judges to hold court at even the most local level from one to three. This was touted as a means of improving the fairness of the justice system by ensuring that two out of three judges had to agree on guilt and sentencing, lest the defendant be acquitted or a mistrial be declared. However, in practice, this innovation was of very little to no use since the New State enacted its policy largely extralegally and extrajudicially, and no courts in the land had any power to stop the regime's interventions regardless of their implications for human rights. Furthermore, as the Constitution and large sections of the wider legal code was suspended during the New State, decisions by courts had barely any recourse to either written law or prior legal precedent to draw from, and in general, justices were appointed directly by Bombardone and only ruled in such a manner as to advance the implementation of Zendirist ideological goals.
