The Dominion of Upper Columbia -- Nation Overview

Upper Columbia, also referred to as Columbia Montagne and officially the Dominion of Upper Columbia, is a uniparty, unitary state in northwestern South America, occupying the IRL territories of western Colombia and Ecuador.

Etymology

The term Columbia is derived from the last name of the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus (Italian: Cristoforo Colombo, Spanish: Cristóbal Colón). It was conceived as a reference to all of the New World. The name was later adopted by the short-lived Columbian Republic following the region's initial independence from Great Britain in 1780. Upon Columbia's reentry into the British Empire in 1784, the term remained, with the region assuming the name "Dominion of Columbia" from its independence in 1835 to the secession of Peru in 1934. As part of the 1936 peace agreement between Thomas Le Roux's provisional Dominion and the secessionists, Columbia was rechristened Upper Columbia to reflect the Dominion's ceding of territorial claims to Peru.

The standard way to refer to a citizen of Upper Columbia is is as an "Upper Columbian," or simply "Columbian." The term "Dominionist" or "Dominioneer" is uncommon, and most often used in an exonymic sense by residents of other states in the region.

History

First founded as a colony in 1611 by British Crown-backed merchants seeking lands for sugar and tobacco cultivation, Upper Columbia quickly became a society dominated by landed interests and freebooters seeking to profit from the wealth of the surrounding Spanish Main. By the 1700s, the diverging interests of settlers, indigenous peoples, and the colonial government led to two civil wars, and ultimately a war of independence waged in parallel to the American Revolution. Following the short-lived Columbian Republic, Upper Columbia returned to the British fold while retaining a degree of local autonomy until the 1830s, when disputes over the slave trade resulted in a second independence struggle.

After independence in 1835, Upper Columbia established itself as a competitive naval power in the Caribbean and a dominant power in the Pacific, holding both the Hawaiian Islands and portions of Melanesia and Polynesia for periods throughout the 19th century. Upper Columbia remained predominantly agricultural through this period, and the tight hold on power that landowners possessed rendered core institutions incapable of responding to tumultuous economic circumstances. In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, a chaotic civil war erupted, leading to the secession of Upper Columbia's largely indigenous southern regions and the rise to power of Thomas Le Roux, an engineer turned militia commander.

Continuing through Le Roux's passing in 1953, Upper Columbia would experience unprecedented levels of growth in its productive sectors, alongside a degree of totalitarian repression unseen in the region to that date. Declaring himself Lord Protector of Upper Columbia and First Apostle of the House Triumphant -- a nominally Christian denomination inflected by 19th-century occultism and founded by Le Roux himself -- the leader revolutionized Upper Columbia. Civil society was characterized by mass action and participation in a range of House Triumphant-affiliated groups not dissimilar to those of China's Cultural Revolution. What emerged was a relatively egalitarian nation characterized by numerous public works projects and a thriving academic ecosystem, but also one that was unmoored from its earlier history and isolated in global affairs.

Le Roux's long-lived successor, Davis Abbott, presided over a gradual reopening of society. Many regions of the country reverted to traditional Protestant beliefs, and by 1969 the House Triumphant was in effect little more than a state church. The radical and militarized character of civil society was also relaxed, with state-backed clubs and traditional schools replacing the youth militias and temple-schools of decades past. Economic development continued apace, with the Dominion embarking on a successful civilian nuclear program which capitalized on Upper Columbia's base of engineering expertise and wealth of mines.

By Abbott's death in 1981, the Dominion's political structure had also shifted. Rather than choosing to retain Le Roux's one-man rule, Abbott devolved executive and legislative authority to a seven-member Council of State chosen by lot from the executives of Upper Columbia's leading state corporations and universities. Matters of internal and external security were delegated to a Proconsul, a position alternating triennially between the ranked chiefs of the Dominion's military, national police, and covert service. Abbott planned to craft a national judiciary on the American model, but died before that authority could be delegated.

Lacking any guiding document for the Dominion's various political interests to cohere around in Abbott's absence, the Council of State became increasingly characterized by infighting and jockeying for influence over the ad-hoc judicial process. In 1983, following riots which stemmed from a contentious 4-3 ruling on land rights, then-First Apostle of the House Triumphant Martin Schall effectively declared the national temple network a parallel state by way of offering binding legal rulings grounded in a combination of secular Columbian and religious House law. Weary of seemingly capricious and arbitrary decisions by the Council's ad-hoc judiciary, Columbian institutions and individuals defaulted to House rulings, forcing the Council to incorporate the House Triumphant as not only a state religion but the sole legal authority in the Dominion.

Today, Upper Columbia is characterized by a relatively open society and high levels of human development, especially in the Andean Highlands and Pacific coast. Interior regions of the country are comparatively less well-developed, and retain more of an indigenous character compared to the Europeanized periphery. The Dominion possesses a mixed economy dominated by a small number of horizontally integrated state corporations, though smaller private enterprises and public-private partnerships are increasingly common.

Since the House Triumphant's return to government in 1983, Upper Columbia has remained peaceful internally, though tensions between religious conservatives, secular socialists, and free-market liberals have been slowly building. Thanks to the Internet, Upper Columbian politics have been increasingly characterized by the global ideological competition between the socialist and capitalist blocs. This is in contrast to earlier Upper Columbian political disputes, which ran more on a religious/authoritarian-secular/liberal axis.

Geography

Upper Columbia is characterized by extreme geographic diversity, ranging from tropical savannah on the northern coastal plain and Amazonian jungle in the southeast to temperate valleys between its three primary mountain ranges: the Cordillera Occidental, Central, and Oriental. Aside from Port Verdant on the Caribbean coast and Lewiston on the Pacific, the bulk of Upper Columbia's population resides in the long north-south valley systems formed by these mountain ranges. Major settlements in the valleys include the capital of Lightwater and the cities of Armagh, Exeter, Bristol, Brest, and Westminster.

INSERT MAP

Demographics

Population
Upper Columbia's population was estimated by the Dominion Census of 2010 as 47,735,000.

Language
Columbian English is the official spoken language of Upper Columbia. The language is largely descended from West Country dialects spoken in the 17th and 18th centuries, though continuing contact with the broader Anglophone world and immigration from Ireland and North America has kept Columbian English relatively close to the common English spoken in the British Isles today.

Linguistic minorities within the settler population remain, especially along the Caribbean coast, where French and West African creoles emerged as the result of early French settlement in the area. As of 2010, 7 percent of Upper Columbia's population claimed French as their primary spoken language in the home, with the census term "French" encompassing both a base-French tongue spoken among Upper Columbians of European extraction and an Afro-Columbian creole derived from West African languages.

Indigenous linguistic minorities are prominent along the Pacific coast and the Upper Columbian southeast, and especially east of the Andes. As of 2010, 9 percent of Upper Columbia's population claimed an indigenous tongue as their primary spoken language in the home.

Religion

Approximately 92% of Upper Columbians are formally counted as baptized members of the House Triumphant, an autochthonic religion drawn in equal parts from Protestant Christianity, indigenous Amerindian and African practices, and the Western occult tradition. However, the contentious political status of the House Triumphant as Upper Columbia's state church is widely thought to obscure the true diversity of religious practice in the Dominion. Unofficial estimates and academic surveys of Upper Columbia have cited a range of figures for sincere participation in the House Triumphant, from as little as 40 percent of the population to as much as 88 percent.

Religious minorities in Upper Columbia include a variety of mainline Protestant and Evangelical sects, with Pentecostalism being the most rapidly growing faith in recent decades due to missionary activity. Derivations of mainline Episcopalianism are common along the Caribbean coast, especially in formerly enslaved Afro-Columbian communities.

Race
Upper Columbia is an ethnically diverse nation, with the majority of citizens sharing a common European ancestry alongside significant Amerindian heritage. Historical African settlement was concentrated on the Caribbean coast, where a plurality of Upper Columbians possess significant African heritage; and the southern edge of Upper Columbia's Pacific coast, where a sizable majority of Upper Columbians have heritage from Europe, Africa, and indigenous populations.

The Dominion Census of 2010 listed Upper Columbia's European population as 71 percent, with 11 percent claiming Indigenous ancestry, 12 percent claiming African ancestry, and 6 percent claiming Other -- mostly Upper Columbians of Asian extraction and those of mixed heritage. These ethnic labels are thought to be inaccurate by independent researchers, given the widely held belief that most Upper Columbians possess heritage from at least two of the three major ethnic groups present in the country. A 2011 genetic study by the University of Armagh concluded that at least 80 percent of European-identified Upper Columbians possess Amerindian heritage, and 32 percent possess African heritage. The same study found 97 percent of Afro-Columbians possess either European or Amerindian heritage, while only 23 percent of Indigenous Columbians possess non-Amerindian heritage.

The bulk of Upper Columbia's population in the valley systems of the Northern Andes is predominantly European, with ancestors hailing predominantly from the British Isles, western France, Spain and Portugal, Germany, and the Low Countries. Much of this population claims some descent from The Ten Thousand, a term given to the approximately 10,300 European settlers present in the territory at the time of the Columbian Charter's first census in 1642. Smaller numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Levant also settled in Upper Columbia, with significant populations of Levantine-derived upper Columbians in Port Verdant, and sizable numbers of Yugoslavs and Greeks in Lewiston.

Upper Columbia's Afro-Columbian population descends in large part from West African slaves either brought to the colony directly or taken from raided settlements in the Caribbean and Spanish Main. Upper Columbia retained chattel slavery as a legal institution until 1867; however, in practice the labor arrangement was largely limited to coastal regions where cash crop cultivation was economically viable. Following emancipation, the Afro-Columbian population became more widely distributed throughout the country, with significant populations now found in Freewater and Bristol in addition to the coasts.

Upper Columbia's Indigenous population is descended from the Amerindian tribes present in the region prior to European colonization. Disease, genocide, and assimilation greatly reduced their numbers in the centuries following initial settlement, with most Amerindian communities now found in the Amazonian southeast.

Largest Cities

Government

DESCRIBE GOVERNMENT

The Dominion of Upper Columbia is a uniparty, unitary state with a limited democratic franchise. Division of power is customary rather than constitutional, with most executive and legislative authority held by a seven-member Council of State. Judicial authority is wielded by the Temple Courts of the House Triumphant, with ultimate legal authority invested in the First Apostle of the House.

Executive and Legislative
Members of the Council serve seven-year terms, and are chosen from the senior leadership of the Dominion's leading state corporations and administrative agencies via secret balloting. Councilors may serve for no more than two seven-year terms, consecutive or otherwise. One seat is up for election each year. Each year following the single-seat election, the full Council votes on which of their number is to possess the titles of First Councilor and Second Councilor, who oversee foreign relations and economic planning, respectively.

The remaining five councilors divide their areas of responsibility into set portfolios by way of unofficial yearly negotiations between the offices of each councilor. Often, a new councilor will receive a portfolio similar to that of their predecessor, but those duties and responsibilities are modified as needed based on the councilor's competencies and their status within the Council's unofficial hierarchy.

Some two million Upper Columbians are eligible to vote in the yearly single-seat Council elections through a limited democratic process. The Dominion Census allocates voting power each decade through a weighted lottery system designed to reflect the nation's ethnic diversity and economic structure, with an eye toward limiting disproportionate political influence on the part of landed or urban elites.

Judicial
The status of the Temple Courts as the Dominion's primary domestic judicial infrastructure is a matter of some controversy. Rather than being an official component of the Dominion state apparatus, the Temple Courts are independently funded through tithes and House-run commercial enterprises. The Temple Courts are administered solely by the House Triumphant, with the Council of State possessing no oversight authority or means of redress regarding final Temple decisions except by way of ad-hoc negotiations with the House Triumphant itself.

This unusual arrangement has proved deleterious in matters of international law, with judicial systems in a number of countries refusing to recognize the validity of Temple Court rulings. Recent legal innovations -- including the creation of a secular Trade Court under the suzerainty of the House -- have assisted in attracting foreign investment to Upper Columbia, but legal matters remain a key pain point for foreign corporate operations in the country.

DESCRIBE DIPLOMACY

Military
The Council of State is responsible for funding and structuring the Upper Columbian Armed Forces, which include both the Dominion Police Service and the Ministry of Security, the country's internal intelligence service. Those UCAF organizations commonly considered to be full branches of the military are the Upper Columbian Army, Navy, Air Force, and Covert Service -- the latter of which is an agency holding the portfolios of foreign intelligence and special operations. The UCAF has 349,455 active-duty servicemembers, of whom approximately 79,100 serve in law enforcement capacities. A further force of 124,000 UCAF reservists is maintained in support of internal, external, and law enforcement operations.

A Proconsul serves as operational commander under the authority of the full Council of State. This position alternates triennially between the ranked chiefs of the Dominion's army, national police, and covert service.

Existing under the Proconsul's authority -- but separate from the UCAF command structure -- is the Temple Guard, a paramilitary force funded by the House Triumphant and normally deputized to House-priority missions including internal security and law enforcement. The Guard has an official force structure of 45,900 active-duty servicemembers, but is thought to number more than 100,000 when reservists and dual Guard-UCAF members are counted. Although largely a ground force with capabilities analogous to the gendarme services of other states, the Guard maintains small air, sea, cyber, and special operations assets.

Economy

Traditionally agrarian, Upper Columbia industrialized and urbanized rapidly in the 20th century. By 2010, just 13 percent of Upper Columbian workers were employed in agriculture, generating just 6.6 percent of GDP. 19.4 percent of the workforce was employed in industry and 67.6 percent in services, generating 33.4 percent and 59.9 percent of GDP respectively. Industrial production is dominated by foreign demand, especially in heavy industry, project engineering, mining, and machining.

Upper Columbia's economy is largely composed of state-owned corporations controlled via a combination of state planning, pensioner voting rights, workers' councils, and common stock ownership. DomX, Upper Columbia's sole stock exchange, is a financial infrastructure provider and securities insurer with foreign ownership limited to 25 percent of total equity on the exchange.

An outsize component of Upper Columbia's industrial sector is mining: particularly coal, copper, bauxite, iron, and uranium. In the 1950s and 1960s, Upper Columbia capitalized on its proven fuel reserves and mining infrastructure by embarking on the world's first civilian nuclear program. Upper Columbia's first commercial reactor, Billingsley Unit 1, was completed in 1967. Since then, Upper Columbia's nuclear services sector has grown considerably, including through commercial arrangements with other nations. Today, Upper Columbia's TexAtom nuclear consortium operates domestic 21 reactors and 15 foreign reactors, and has built an additional seven foreign reactors operated by host countries.

Other major Upper Columbian industrial ventures include global logistics firm Hartland-Moynihan, beverage company Burstful, orbital launch firm BrightSky, offshore technologies firm Qasm, and industrial tooling supplier GnosTek.

Upper Columbia's service economy is oriented toward domestic consumption, though a growing IT and digital services sector has gained global market share within the English-speaking world. Notable firms in the sector include international legal services provider Salem & Savage, IT channel distributor C0DA, and digital payments infrastructure provider MachOne.

Prominent within the Upper Columbian economy is Sunrider Equity, a holding company controlled by the House Triumphant. Sunrider has amassed over $320 billion in assets under management, the majority of them in the domestic Upper Columbian market. While the extent of Sunrider's influence on Upper Columbia's economy is the subject of some debate, in 2019, whistleblower and former SRE fund manager David Amalfi revealed internal SRE estimates point to firm activities accounting for at least 13 percent of the Dominion's GDP.

Culture

Upper Columbian culture is characterized by a wide range of influences, drawing aspects from traditional European, indigenous, and African practices. These cultures are present to varying degrees in different regions of the country, but a distinct Upper Columbian culture exists throughout the territory.

In broad terms, Upper Columbians of all ethnic groups share a common tongue in education, politics, and trade -- Columbian English -- and a generally Protestant Christian religious background, though many scholars dispute the House Triumphant's claim to be the sole legitimate successor to the early Christian Church.

Upper Columbian culture includes a musical tradition influenced by syncopation and asymmetrical rhythms drawn from the traditional music of the English and Scottish Borders, Ireland, and Brittany; as well as vocal harmonies and a call-and-response format derived from African techniques.

Rural Life
Upper Columbian society is deeply marked by the legacy of European-directed conquest and settlement: despite longstanding and often violent campaigns by the post-1934 Dominion government to redistribute productive land away from the ownership of the colonial elite and toward local co-ops and family farms, arable land use patterns in much of the country remain characterized by plantation-style operations run by state corporations. Settlement patterns reflect this economic arrangement, with most Upper Columbian families no more than three generations removed from a rural sharecropper existence. This settlement pattern predominates along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts.

Small private family farms are most common in the Andean highlands, where initial European settlement saw colonists of British and French extraction establish independent settlements along a frontier that moved progressively southward as the centuries progressed.

Urban Life
Upper Columbian traditions of urban living vary widely between its regions. In the north, the country's largest city of Port Verdant is deeply influenced by the broader Caribbean cultural sphere, especially in its traditional cuisine, music and ethnic makeup. In the central highlands, Upper Columbian towns and cities were largely built on the British model and settled by those of Western European extraction. Along the Pacific coast and in Upper Columbia's primary western port of Lewiston, urban settlement patterns and traditions contain elements of both the Caribbean and Western Europe.

Infrastructure

Upper Columbia's mountainous geography historically made travel within the country an arduous undertaking, and nearly impossible when travelling along an east-west axis. Until 1870, the Magdalene River and parallel road systems were the primary means of long-distance travel in Upper Columbia, linking Port Verdant and Westminster in the north to Orcadie and Brest in the south. A road crossing through Bacon's Pass connected Orcadie with Freewater and the greater Freewater Valley, which included the towns of Armagh and Exeter. Travel further south was conduct on little more than footpaths through the Andes, eventually reaching Bristol, Lewiston, and New Danzig near what would become the border with Lower Columbia.

Dominion Consolidated Freightways established the nation's first railroad system in 1870, linking the towns of the Freewater Valley with Port Verdant via a new northern route cut through the Cordillera Occidental. Rail connected the Freewater and Magdalene valleys by 1876, and eventually reached Lewiston in 1897. New Danzig would not receive a rail link to the rest of the nation until 1941.

Today, Upper Columbia has a large and thoroughly integrated cargo rail system linking most major population centers to both the capital and port facilities on each coast. Upper Columbia's passenger rail system was similarly extensive in design and use as late as the 1980s, but has fallen into increasing disuse due to a lack of state investment. In 2015, only three passenger rail lines are in operation: an extensive north-south route connecting Port Verdant to Freewater and eventually to Lewiston, a much shorter route connecting Freewater east to Orcadie, and a route paralleling the Magdalene River northward from Orcadie to Port Verdant.

Passenger transit is most commonly conducted by road, via a comprehensive network of highways constructed between 1937 and 1962.

There exist more than two dozen municipal airports across the country, carrying both regular domestic routes as well as frequent charter flights into the interior. Four international airports serve Upper Columbia: Halifax Freewater, Armagh International, Scott Lewiston, and Dominion Caribbean near Port Verdant. A fifth, as-yet-unnamed international airport is under development near Brest, with the aim of serving the upper Magdalene and east-central Andes.

Energy
Upper Columbia's electric grid is managed by the Dominion Transmission and Distribution Authority (DTDA), a national agency which coordinates the national energy sector and employs more than 37,000 for the maintenance of power line and substation infrastructure. The DTDA administers a common market mechanism by which local generation co-ops, private merchant power providers, and regional utilities (both state and investor-owned) participate in yearly power supply auctions. Currently, seven percent of Upper Columbia's electricity is provided by co-ops, 15 percent by merchant power providers, 57 percent by state utilities, and 21 percent by private utilities.

Nuclear power accounted for 68 percent of Upper Columbia's electric generation in 2012, followed by non-hydroelectric renewables at 14 percent, hydroelectric at 11 percent, and fossil fuels -- primarily coal -- at six percent.

Template by The Free Republic of Ponderosa
Template may be found here.