Written By: Kazaman
Note: This article was planned and written prior to the publication of the EuroWeekly article, "The Concerning Rise of Defenderism." Similarities in theme are a reflection of whatever has recently been added to the water in Arnhelm.
It’s sometimes too easy, when faced with a complex issue, to speak in terms of two opposites to lend credence to a breezy solution. About ten years ago, when talk of official Independence began, Oliver and NES criticised the Raider/Defender spectrum. In a famous post on the NationStates Gameplay forum, Oliver wrote:
The goal here was both descriptive and political. The analysis of NationStates politics in terms of Raiders, Defenders, and “in betweens” had not adequately explained the course of NS history or the shape of contemporary politics. Thinking of warfare or diplomacy in terms of Raiders and Defenders acting out archetypes abstracts away from the motivations and concerns of the specific actors and the shifting circumstances that they have to take into account when they make decisions. That much is true, but the issue isn’t merely academic. These distortions of events have been used as a cudgel by propagandists to poison the well and discredit their political rivals.
Consider what happened last week during discussions about Commend King HEM. The newly minted Partnership for Sovereignty, in their official statement, said:
Here, the PfS implicitly rejects any conception of regional politics that tries to escape the Raider/Defender spectrum. Europeia’s attempt to charts its own path according to its self-determined interests is a “smokescreen.” Official Independence is misinformation meant to protect and advance Raider objectives. The PfS can’t say that Europeia hasn’t conducted any recent defensive operations, so they add the little but hardworking modifier, “of non-allies.” Rather than engage with the views of their political rivals, the regions within the PfS ignore all argument and policy and focus instead on maintaining their frame: our friends are Defenders, our enemies are Raiders.
The North Pacific’s quorum raid dispute with The South Pacific saw similar rhetoric. Take Unibot’s response to Europeia’s statement:
Again there are accusations of deceit. This time, it’s Europeia’s concerns about fascism that are supposedly a front for promoting Raider activity.
These examples are recent, but the rhetoric is spent and tired. Common to most instances is a simple but mistaken premise: all raids must be motivated by Raider disrespect for regional natives. Reasonable minds can’t differ about the morality of raiding, and honest people don’t ask questions about what it means for regions to hold and exercise sovereignty.
It’s striking that Defender attacks on Independence have hardly changed in the past decade. Defenders pretend they still live in a world where their main opposition are Raiders who do what they do because it’s fun, and who insist that natives should simply care less about the game if they get upset. In the past, Raiders would often say that the most active and successful players have a right to assert themselves and seek power as part of enjoying the game. That “might makes right” attitude was what Defender ideology was born to counter in the earliest years of NationStates.
But the landscape has changed. Rhetoric about power for fun’s sake has whittled down to rhetoric about fun for fun’s sake, and in a much narrower scope at that. The impact of Raider operations has declined: occupations are temporary shows of force done in a spirit of sportsmanship, while ejections of natives are done sparingly to get a response from Defenders and make the occupation more exciting. Why have things changed in this manner?
One reason is the rise of Independence. Many of the world’s competent militaries today are Independent or otherwise unaligned, partly vindicating Oliver’s prediction in 2011. This has somewhat crowded out the Raider scene, leading them to moderate their policy in order to have viable military partnerships with other regions.
The moderations have been significant. We focus more on Defender opposition to Independence (rightly, since Defenders are still a major political presence), but it’s good to remember that Raiders were once just as vitriolic. Following the liberation of Feudal Japan in September, 2009 from two years of oppressive occupation by The Blades of Conquest, President Pope Lexus X said:
Independence hadn’t been formulated explicitly at that point, but Europeia and another region, The Commonwealth, pursued a kind of proto-Independence in their foreign policy. Rather than viewing all raids as morally indistinguishable (either all good or all bad), and rather than viewing raiding as a core part of their identity, those regions varied in their reasons for conducting different sorts of raids.
The Raider response to Feudal Japan, as well as a smaller intervention by The Commonwealth in Iran, was desperate and deranged. It’s worth looking at it briefly to show just how wrong Defenders are to paint all raiding activity with the same brush. The perfect example of this was an RMB post in Iran, October, 2009, by a DEN splinter member (quoted here in full as a screenshot, because otherwise I doubt it would be believable or make the right impact):
Antipathy toward the NationStates mods, and conspiracies about Defender-Mod psyops, would continue prominently until 2016. After the Predator scandal of that year, dozens of Raiders were permanently banned from the game for using an illegal script to select and tag targets. Regions which had been leaning or nominally Raider before were now considering other options. The Raider organisations that remained had low morale, reduced personnel, and an identity crisis. How could they separate themselves from the rule breakers?
The solution was to create the scene we see today: circumscribed operational practices and more proactive diplomacy with the wider NationStates world. No more bared teeth and snarls: they filed them down and started shaking hands.
These changes have been welcome. They have made the game a safer place while enriching the political lives of many regions by introducing new, robust ideological stances to the world. Another trend, though, poses new threats to regional self-determination: the rise of the Gameplay community.
After the decline of Raider ideology, there was a gradual rebranding of raiding as a fun, inconsequential game. This owes something to the earlier Raider belief that activity and the enjoyment of power were ends in themselves, but has a decidedly social rather than political emphasis. Raiding today is about bringing a group of friends together, not about expressing a personal right to power. Even some Defender militaries have begun to view chasing and liberations as more competitive sport than political action, although ideological Defenders still hold most of the power.
The new state of affairs poses problems for Raiders, Defenders, and Independent regions alike. Defender leaders would be right to worry about the attitudes of future citizens. Will they maintain their past strong moral stance, or will their own ideology become as watered down as contemporary Raiders? Maybe this partly explains the push to build a more visible ideological coalition with the Partnership for Sovereignty. On the other hand, Defender diplomats and intelligence officers are able to exploit Raiders’ investment in the Gameplay community. There is an incentive for Raiders to ignore any slights that are “in character” and deemphasise the impact of subversive Defender activities on their operations, in order to maintain position and popularity in different Discord and forum communities. Independents, meanwhile, may find themselves with a citizenry that doesn’t keenly identify with “regional interests,” and which sees little point in taking clear, principled stances on interregional politics.
It’s tempting to suggest the solution to all of this is just to return to pure politics, but that would be a mistake. If we can learn anything from the rise of Independence over the past decade, it should be that regional action should never be hemmed into a simplistic two-dimensional spectrum. The attempt to do that is itself an affront on the independence of sovereign regions. Any region today which attempted to remove itself completely from the Gameplay community would be starving itself of important allies and resources. The playing field in NationStates is rich enough to allow for creative solutions to this problem, solutions which adapt our political projects to the social realities of the day with a keen eye to promoting our interests. It’s up to us collectively to bring those solutions to life.
