A permanent and quantum-verified file containing all speeches and documents from this event can be accessed in person or via verified telepresence at the regional UN HQ in Copenhagen, East Zealand, reference number UNCphS2MÖ47-55.
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Dear colleagues and friends, thank you, and please allow me to reiterate the regional president’s welcome to all of you.
Southeastern Scandinavia is not at all the region under United Postnations jurisdiction which is most beset with urgent problems—indeed, we daily count that to be among the many privileges that pertain to us—but we seneschals and factotums of the region nonetheless strive to deliver on the promises implicit in the UP mandate. As has been argued by my esteemed colleague Emma Jørgensen in her earlier address to you, the perceived legitimacy of the UP’s work worldwide—particularly but not exclusively with regard to reappropriation—depends greatly on its perception among former citizens of the so-called Developed Bloc. Any argument for the peaceful transfer of power and access to resources must rest on successful examples thereof.
As such, it is my great honour to have not only the opportunity to address an audience comprised of our most esteemed policymakers and postnational representatives, but also the opportunity to talk about the small corner of the planet for which the responsibility is mine, and my experiences during one of my more recent expeditions.
A little background, then, for those of you as yet unacquainted with the region! Blekinge was the smallest of the administrative regions of the former state of Sweden, and retained a strong sense of local identity throughout the rather troubled first half of the twenty-first century, despite (or perhaps due to) its economic travails. This was the standard story, of course: local industrial champions offshored, diminishing opportunities, unpleasant rivalries and scapegoating deployed for political advantage... and all that before the climatic shifts really got going in the late 2020s. Nonetheless, we’ve had a fair bit of success here since the UP mandate was established at the end of the War That Never Was. Improving transport connectivity across the region has been very well received, and has helped with getting younger people out of the big cities and back into smaller rural settlements, where their energy is sorely needed. In a region such as this, where functional infrastructure has been in place for a century or more, the challenge has been on matching regional standards to enable inter-regional exchange of resources, as well as on improving maintenance regimes and imposing efficiency. You learn some surprising things in this line of work, too, and my engineering team never tires of bringing me their latest discovery. For example, the southern counties of Sweden have always been fairly well provided when it comes to water, whether from surface sources or aquifers, but the usage statistics for the early half of the century make very little sense until you actually get boots on the ground—at which point you start to notice how popular it was for even the more modest middle classes to have their own private swimming pools!
(Needless to say, it is very rare to find one of these still in use for its original function… though it seems that a number of houses now have a suspiciously rectilinear pond in their back garden.)
We UP representatives are still not quite so welcome in the more rural parts of Sweden as one might hope—you may or may not recall the partisan troubles thereabouts in the late 2030s—but when the first thing local people say to a visiting seneschal is in praise of recent upgrades to the transport network, I take it as an indicator that we’re getting things right. Transparent governance takes a while to settle in regions where it was previously honoured more often in the breach, and trust is hard won, as well you know. There is some satisfaction, then, in finding that we seem to be winning it, at least here. Anyway, Blekinge always attracted a lot of tourists—predominantly but not exclusively domestic—and much of the archipelago along the southern edge of the county got bought up at the start of the century by financial speculators and other such high-rollers. Which is to say: every former state has a few little geographic pockets where the old economic elite retreated to their properties after the reformation of the UP, and the Blekinge archipelago is one pocket. It’s a long way down the list for reappropriation, however—under the new systems of accounting, there’s very little economic value to these tiny little islands, as you couldn’t really farm them even if you wanted to, and their energy capture potential is limited by their relative size and isolation. As their now-illegitimate possessors weren’t giving us much trouble, and we had plenty of other more pressing problems to deal with, they were given the standard ultimatum about reapproriation proceedings and invited to turn the land—and themselves—over to UN governance, by means of liaison with local representatives, etcetera etcetera.
(From this point onward, I will refrain from reciting policy boilerplate to an audience made up of the persons most likely responsible for drafting it!)
Now, it turns out a lot of the Blekinge elite have decided to hang on to their islands: UP governance is not something they’re going to submit to willingly, it seems. That’s hardly unique challenge in its own right! We’ve seen some serious resistance to reappropriation in recent years, and the campaigns around Klampenborg and the so-called “Whisky Belt” north of Copenhagen are a time I’d rather not dwell upon—though by comparison with the struggles for the Seychelles, for instance, or the de-corporatisation of the Amazon basin, we have had it very easy here.
Nonetheless, the archipelago presents a logistical challenge. Usually we can just surround a property with blue helmets and turf them out, politely but firmly—but the UP did not inherit any naval power from its predecessor, which means we’re somewhat at sea (if you’ll excuse the awful pun) when it comes to trying to evict people from little islands that they know much better than we do.
Truth be told, the entrenched archipelagans were not really the problem I was called upon to deal with. The local factotum had rather requested assistance with what turned out to be a division in the local populace over how the archipelagans should be treated. I’m given to understand that the grandfathered local laws are in complete concurrence with the UP framework on matters of this sort: in rather more words, you leave them to stew in their own juices, and don’t interfere until the reappropriation regiments turn up. But the locals were developing a range of their own ideas, leaving the factotum uncertain as to how they should respond, if at all.
I arrived in Blekinge—by rail, of course!—on a Wednesday evening, and the following day’s weather rather precluded any archipelagan activities: the wind off the Baltic can be merciless, and (so I’m told) not conducive to littoral sailing. However, this delay gave me the opportunity to have the factotum’s team give me a tour of local development projects. It was far from being the most exciting day of my life, in truth—and I’m sure I find myself addressing an audience even more intimately acquainted with the minutia of regional policy delivery!
Nonetheless, I would argue that we should take that as another marker of success. It’s actually quite pleasant to be shown around a school which is making zero effort to impress you as a visiting dignitary, and as someone schooled in the old ways, back in the 2010s, it’s still a shock—albeit a very pleasant one—to see that so much learning is done outdoors. Hardly a screen in sight!
Elsewhere, despite the fierce wind, Karlskrona was a-buzz with activity: the market was busy, and it looks like local agriculture is thriving. (Goodness knows I was fed very well—though I don’t think I’ll ever appreciate smoked fish quite so much as the locals seem to.) There’s a shortage of housing, I’m reliably informed, thanks to a steady flow of new arrivals, but it’s being addressed—and meanwhile there’s no shortage of work for those that want it.
The archipelagans, meanwhile, were the talk of the town—quite the hot-button topic, in fact, though the disagreement had been mostly good-natured thus far. With apologies for the necessity of being reductive, there were two polar positions. On the one hand, you had those we might call the Legalists, who advocated for a strict isolation of the archipelagans as the UP mandate advises: no contact, no exchange, no nothing. On the other hand, you had those we might call the Gifters, who argued that the islanders were starving, and that it was a human duty to take basic provisions over to them, regardless of their legal status.
The conflict, which by this point had expressed itself only in a few heated exchanges of words on Karlskrona’s harbourside, was between these two extreme positions, with the latter group unilaterally sailing supplies to the islands, and the former group trying to convince them not to. As one might expect, the majority were strung along a range of opinions somewhere in between the activist positions. The factotum’s concern arose less from any extremity of feeling, and more from its sustainment: they felt it unusual for an issue to occupy the area quite so totally, and potentially disruptive to the wider peace. And, as the factotum rightly pointed out, it hinged on an interpretation of the mandates—the purpose for which my own role, that of the seneschal, was created.
The various landside factions, having been made aware of my arrival, requested a few days to put together representative delegations who will make their cases to me as ombudsperson. So I spent the Friday being taken about on a small boat with the aim of meeting with any islanders who were willing to talk. Now, it bears noting that their isolation was to some extent self-imposed: dominant factions among the archipelagans went so far as to dynamite the road-bridges connecting the larger islands to the mainland when the mandate was announced, perhaps envisioning some sort of glorious armed stand-off or secession. But after a few years without the reappropriation regiments appearing, they were getting rather bored of their confinement—and had lost a lot of their former staff, who began drifting away to the mainland once the supplies started running low.
The ones I spoke to had the air of people who knew they’ve lost, but who were waiting for a way out that might save them a little face; I forwarded their details to the regional Ministry for Reappropriation, who I am given to believe are always grateful for being pointed toward the easy wins! For the most part, these were also the main beneficiaries of the charity of the Gifters, and it seems plausible that their weakening resolve had been eroded by repeated encounters with cheery, healthy mainlanders who not only had enough to share, but who were happy to share it with people whose money no longer counts for much.
As for the others, well: I endured being yelled from the shore at by angry, rake-thin people, and in one case was shot at with what we presume was a small-bore hunting rifle of considerable vintage. These more stubborn characters had treated the Gifters in much the same way, and decided that their only moral recourse in the circumstances was something akin to piracy: they mounted night-time raids on the mainland, using what I’m told were highly unsuitable boats, in search of food and other supplies. But they would not accept charity, which for them would be tantamount to “giving into the criminal communist superstate”, or something like that.
(One rather wanted to explain to them that life in “the communist superstate” was clearly rather easier than the life they’d chosen—not least because they would be issued a basic allowance of resource credits, just like everyone else. One must further presume that they are blissfully unaware that the sites of their few repeatedly successful raids are being regularly restocked by Gifters… but then, thinking about logistics has rarely been a strong-point of the wealthy, in my experience.)
There followed a weekend in which I was able to indulge my passion for hiking in an area highly conducive to such activity—though I was, of course, not able to entirely escape being steered toward a number of other local redevelopment sites. Joking aside, however, it’s fascinating and gratifying to see the system working mostly as intended.
Blekinge has a fair amount of managed forest, but the plantations are having to readjust to the new imperatives of the global system. It’s easy enough for them to know where to send the lumber, of course: orders from the managed market come in and wood goes out, in a manner which (so I am assured) maintains a fair balance between levels of extraction across the planet. In truth, the logistical planning systems seem completely arcane to this lowly bureaucrat: how one can devise algorithms to coordinate regions as distant and disprate as Blekinge and the Brazilian hinterlands is quite beyond my power to grasp. But the workers seem to understand it, and it seems to be working—much to the chagrin of the former landholders, a few of whom have taken to hanging around outside their former estates and haranguing their former employees.
But the young forestry workers are mostly too busy trying to work out how to apply regenerative principles to forests that until recently were little more than machines for pine production: you can see them stomping around out there, often accompanied by some wildly gesticulating academic, trying to work out how to balance the global need for lumber with the local need for ecosystemic diversity, and how to combine the patchwork of plantations into something larger and more self-sustaining. Important stuff—but I’m glad it’s not my job!
I dare say they’d have said the same of mine—which was a bit ironic, really, given how things were turning out on this particular expedition. After some further discussions on the Monday morning, I really didn’t think my presence was necessary for resolution, except inasmuch as people still appear to feel that there should be some neutral official or representative adjudicating a dispute—which is no bad thing, I suppose.
It was very obvious to all concerned the Gifters were not about to stop giving supplies to the islanders. To some extent, I regret the narrative necessity of having named the faction at all, because it suggests a level of formal organisation that simply wasn’t present: it was small groups and communities, predominantly in locations close to the islands that they were helping, refusing to let people starve. As one of them put it, “the mandate says we’re supposed to be sharing resources fairly with everyone on the planet; how could that not apply to people right on our own doortsteps?”
I asked the factotum’s office to run the numbers as best they could on the demography of the dispute, but if you’ll accept an estimate from an experienced seneschal, then the Gifters trended slightly younger—but only a little! The Legalists, meanwhile, trended older—but that’s much as you might expect. Indeed, when seen from a distance, I think this particular dispute can be taken as a positive sign in the greater scheme of things. If we’ve got older residents, most of them long-term residents of the region, arguing for a stronger interpretation of the UP mandate when it comes to refusal and reappropriation and refusal… well, that’s a reassuring pattern, to say the least. If only the early campaigns along the Mediterranean coast had gone so easily!
But those were early interventions, of course, made at a time when the mandate was still fresh and untested, and we’d not yet had time to make the interventions in infrastructure and governance that we’ve been able to roll out around here. Whether Blekinge will come to look in hindsight like a pivotal moment, who knows? My point being, the Legalists seemed to me to be mostly motivated by a sense that they’d made their sacrifices to the new system and received fair treatment, but that the archipelagans were getting a free ride without having made the sacrifice. Of course, the resources the archipelagans were receiving from the Gifters were all coming from the same place they’d be getting them if they had surrendered, namely the local commonwealth. Plus it would probably have cost more in resources in the long run if the archipelagans got really sick, because then there would have had to be a rescue operation.
I had no need of making these obvious points, however, because various speakers for the Gifter side of the debate made them without any prompting—and they made many more nuanced points, too. It was hard to tell where the audience stood before the discussion, but it was pretty clear that afterward there was greater sympathy for the Gifters and their number included a good number of formerly staunch Legalists, too.
To conclude the proceedings, I stated for the record that reappropriation would be enacted in accordance with the mandate at our soonest opportunity (though I had to admit we couldn’t promise a date), and that the mandate insisted that anyone subject to reappropriation is nonetheless due the same suite of rights as any other global citizen—we’re all equal under the law, etcetera etcetera. It was moved that the factotum’s office will provide some administrative support and help the Gifters formalise the flow of aid to the more cooperative archipelagans. The Legalists, meanwhile got the concession that a handful of blue helmets will be loaded onto a local coastguard boat, which will patrol to prevent further shore raids from the hardcore secessionists; the latter will have to either accept formal aid processes, surrender their islands, or go hungry.
A fairly satisfying outcome, I hope you will agree. To be honest, I think that the discussion would have carried much the same result even without my intervention… though I should perhaps be careful of making such claims before an audience like this one, lest they be interpreted as a plea for the redundancy of the seneschal’s role!
I jest, of course—you are all acutely aware of the necessity of seneschals to the administration of the fragile but persistent peace that has resulted from the establishment of the mandate, and of the UP itself. My intention in taking this opportunity to talk about a calm and peaceful resolution to a reappropriation dispute was not to pretend that there are not more serious problems elsewhere, or that the seneschal system is superfluous. Rather, I hoped to provide you all with a reminder of what it might look like when the mandate, fully established, is operating as planned and intended—and in so doing, provide a little hope for us all that such a goal is achievable.
Thank you for your attention, dear colleagues and friends, and good night.
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Source Scenario
Future 3 - Global Cooperation in the Name of Sustainability
The year is 2050. Due to the ecological crisis, economic collapse, wars, and a growing scarcity of natural resources, the world government has drastically changed. Based on former institutions such as the UN, EU and the African Union, a powerful global government has formed and is re-organising and re-regulating the economy as a circular system with a focus on de-growth and sharing of resources globally.
This government gets its legitimacy from solving peoples’ critical problems, transparently and at scale. The economic system is now demand-based rather than supply-based. The former economic elite has retreated, and a new governing class has emerged, working with real problems and critical global infrastructure. While there are some aspects of the government that are top-down, the new system relies heavily on local engagement and a deep democratic debate about how to allocate and utilise shared resources.
In Southern Sweden, people are part of this global governance system, no longer part of the nation of Sweden. Life and work are focused on global systems and general benefits. We do not compete with other nations. Instead, we share natural resources across the world, as these are seen as the most valuable. The balance between different kinds of labour or markets have changed. Farming and wellbeing are seen as essential, while banks have been replaced by a public resource credit system.
Green infrastructure is a truly valuable resource, belonging to the global community. There are dedicated areas for greens and wildlife. Regulation and maintenance is based on "blue-green ecosystem thinking", in which the interconnectedness of water and green ecosystems are taken into account.Overall, greens and blues are seen as "global" reserves that can only be used when there is a real need. Destruction of this infrastructure is prohibited.
Soft infrastructure is also highly valued. Education is free and regulated according to general needs. Everyone learns the basics about human-centred systems, circularity, and ecology. Generally, all services are demand-based rather than supply-based. Intellectual property is shared for free and globally. The work or services that had been part of the "dark" or "hidden" sector, such as home care, local sharing of resources and knowledge, are now seen as the most essential work and are valued higher in the credit system, than for example financial services or product sales.
Hard infrastructure, such as roads, major buildings, and public transportation, is streamlined and organised around the global economy and general needs. All critical hard infrastructure, such as public housing, roads or treatment-plants, is collectively owned. As transportation is seamless and there are no formal boundaries, people living in Southern Sweden travel and move anywhere they like. There is little that stops the individual, family, or organisation to relocate to another part of the world. This freedom of movement means that housing becomes "clustered" in certain places where people think it is suitable. Also, infrastructure such as roads have been removed from the areas that are better suited for wildlife or agriculture.
Digital infrastructure is based on collective ownership and standards. We use fewer devices and share devices while overuse is regulated. There are systems for re-use and repair of devices. At the same time, as part of the global system, all devices collect data from all users for the public resource credit system. When necessary, digital infrastructure is reduced, relocated, or enhanced depending on its current usage and how much energy it needs to work sufficiently.
