Earth, present geopolitical situation of;
If the late 20th century heralded the dawn of a truly global and technological age of mankind, the 21st was the harbringer of many of the troubles that were to plague it. By the 22nd century and the launching of the Copernicus, none can doubt the power of globalism - power that extends well beyond the globe, with colonies scientific and commercial scattered throughout the Solar System. But it had, as in all of humanity's history, found itself riven by division even as unity seemed possible.
The 21st century may be seen as the end of the Eurocentric, post-colonial age and the beginning of an Asian revival; increasingly China and India played a greater part than Europe or North America in world affairs - the former riven by divides between globalists and nationalists, the latter turning inwards and against its hard fought status as a superpower. As the 22nd century dawned, even the fabled European Union had de facto dissolved, as crises of migration, economics and identity forced the redrawing of borders and the reformation of armed conflict between state actors - the Hungaro-Romanian Border War being the first, but by no means last, manifestation of it. NATO, the alliance that had outlasted the Cold War it was formed to fight, soon fell apart as Russia became another former world power that turned inward.
So the 22nd century seemed set to see the dominance of Asia across the globe; with demography and economics on her side. It was not, alas, to be - for poor governance and political turmoil prevented first China, and then India, Japan and Iran, from asserting any real power projection beyond their local arenas. Africa and South America, long backwaters, also moved on from their formerly less developed state; with the lack of a Third World, resource scarcities became a greater problem. So humanity, hungry for resources, turned skyward for her resources. And from that hunger, came conflict.
The Coalition for the Exploitation of the Inner System, and the International Alliance for the Advancement of Space travel, were not initially - as their names suggest - vehicles for conflict, or indeed aggressive politicking. They were merely two groupings of space agencies, formed to take advantage of advances in rocketry, artificial habitats and extraterrestrial mining that had heralded the new space age. The Coalition found itself primarily formed from the Chinese, Korean, North African, Iranian, North American, pan-European and Brazilian space agencies; the Alliance was formed from the collection of Russian, Japanese, sovereigntist European, South African and Indian agencies. As competition over the Asteroid Belt, Mars and even the Moon heated up, and climate change continued unchecked to cause chaos across the globe, the Coalition and Alliance became ever-more opposed rather than aloof of each other, and their functions moved from the technical to the political, to the stage where by 2136 military and foreign policy functions were increasingly under a unitary umbrella - whether as a consensual confederal model in the case of the Alliance, or a more strict common governance model in the case of the Coalition.
From that initial second space race, colonists, came decades of cold war, and in recent times, a heating up of tensions unseen since the 20th century. From the competing sleeper ships racing out to different systems, to the commercial wars raging in the Kuiper Belt, the lessons of our insatiable appetite for division and competition are ones we hope you need not have to relearn. But know that as well as the lessons learnt from the failure of your ancestors - so too are there lessons of greatness, or enterprise, of courage and of valour to be learnt. Remember these lessons as you further the cause of humanity, good colonists of the Copernicus!
