The Very Definitely Independent States

The Very Definitely Independent States are the most visible embarrassment to the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns' global mandate. After the admittance of the Hegemony of Whales into the Assembly revealed a thousand-year-old loophole in the charter that gave the Hegemony a third of the votes in the Assembly, the former Union of Benric States, the country that covered the entire continent of Benri, was suddenly plunged into the Benric Civil War — named so not because it was a war within a single state, but because it was civil: there were zero deaths and only twenty injured across the entire continent, and none of them were combat injuries. After this sham of a civil war, half of the federal government of the UBS "collapsed" (read: retired with severance pay), and each of the constituent states' governors applied for admittance into the Assembly, insistent on their independence from each other. The other half of the federal government rebranded itself as the Camaraderie Committee of Benri and took the official stance that it was an international orgnaization dedicated to advising the newly formed and very definitely independent states of Benri. The first "non-binding recommendation" of the Committee to the Independent States — which was accepted without question by every State — was the creation of the Yggdrasil Project, ensuring the support of the ascendant Hegemony.

To the credit of the Very Definitely Independent States, the States do not always vote in accordance with the Committee's "recommendations", and these differences are even sometimes plausibly because of the differing interests of the States. But these VDIS splits are seemingly always proportioned to the degree of support the Committee has for a measure. Whenever the Committee has no recommendation or recommends abstention, the States somehow manage to always end up splitting their votes 50-50.

This state of affairs is tolerated by the rest of the Assembly, but at a diplomatic cost to the VDIS; generally, the States find it hard to advance their common interests in the Assembly beyond the immediate power they have as a voting bloc, and consequently they remain closely allied to the Hegemony to safeguard their international (and Assembly-procedural) interests. The limits of this tolerance were tested in 961, when Illithor claimed that the Don't Think I Won't Act had caused a civil war and it had to split into three independent countries. On the suggestion of the Flandrean General "Ripper" Gorson, The Assembly, minus the Hegemony, unanimously voted to send an occupying force to restore peace to the war-torn nation. The governor of Illithor then immediately announced that a legal team had solved the problem and ended the civil war. Occasionally, a sovereign will motion to have international forces unify some of the Independent States, but the States involved invariably claim that an ethnic war has just broken out and reunification is inadvisable.