Howling:51st century Earth political structure

In "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", Magnus Greel comes from the year 5000, where he was the Minister of Justice of the Supreme Alliance on Earth, and started a war with the rival Icelandic Alliance. Why is Earth divided into opposing national alliances at this stage in its history? Other stories set before that timeframe have presented Earth as being united under a global goverment. What could've happened to make it revert to such an archaic mode of politics? 82.2.136.93 21:14, August 11, 2011 (UTC)

There are some hidden assumptions in your question, such as the use of the word "archaic." I won't attempt to justify the change in the governance of the Earth, but notice that in 100 AD, much of Europe and the Near East under one government, the Roman Empire. A thousand years later, there were dozens, if not hundreds of effectively independent states. How did it happen? Try reading THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Bear in mind that there were no repeated invasions of Daleks of the Roman Empire, no solar flares that rendered it uninhabitable and the technological changes that occurred were, to modern eyes, fairly subtle -- things like the stirrup and the horse collar. As someone who likes to read history, I find your question enormously complicated and subject to no single explanation under about ten million words. Boblipton 21:32, August 11, 2011 (UTC)

Besides, Dr. Who has never been really consistent about future history. It's actually pretty amazing that there were references to time agents from the 51st century as early as that episode. I wonder if they were actually thinking about that when they introduced the character of Captain Jack, or if Greel's reference to time agents is just a coincidence.Gowron8472 04:47, August 12, 2011 (UTC)

RTD has explicitly said that he was thinking about Weng-Chiang when he came up with the idea of Jack, and that he went back and read the novels featuring Time Agents from the 49th and 50th centuries (in The Year of Intelligent Tigers, one of those Time Agents even talks with the Doctor about becoming a companion). When the show manages to be consistent, it's usually intentional. Especially during that era; RTD was an obsessive fan who tried to explain away discontinuities between different sources before he ended up in charge of the show.

Anyway, all we know about the Supreme Alliance and the Icelandic Alliance is what Greel said. There's no reason to assume that they're rival national alliances akin to NATO and the Warsaw Pact (and some reason to assume they're not—there was no Minister of Justice of the Warsaw Pact, for example).

To me, the most likely possibility is that the Supreme Alliance was a corrupt world (or multi-world) government, and the Icelandic Alliance was the nucleus of a rebellion against them. The novels tell us that such revolutions happen many times in the future, and the very fact that there's a "Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire" implies that something happened to the first three. It's not at all uncommon for a rebellion to have, and be (popularly or officially) named after, a geographic center. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in the 2000s, the South in the US in the 1860s, the Benghazi Council in Libya in 2011, the Warsaw Uprising in Poland in 1794 (or 1944), the Icelandic Alliance on Earth in 5000…But this is just one of many possibilities. --173.228.85.118 05:03, August 12, 2011 (UTC)