//------------------------------//
// May 11th, 2011 
// Story: Sovereign Objection 
// by hahatimeforponies 
//------------------------------//


"Luna! Good morning. Care to join me for a little breakfast, or are you heading to bed?"


"We believe the scent of this so-called coffee is already enough to prolong the royal rest for another hour."


Celestia giggled. "Sit down. Have some juice. Share with me, your company."


"We suppose it is worth spending some sisterly bonding time."


"Now, Luna, dear sister, I don't mean to nitpick…"


Luna's eyebrows leapt.


"It's the we-I thing. I know you're still adjusting to how language has changed in the time you've been away, but that feels like a relatively important one. For clarity, you see."


"We… I must wonder about this particular development of the tongue."


"It's fairly straightforward, over time there became a need to distinguish between the singular and the collective first person. I, and we."


"Of course, dear sister, but… I, have questions about the consequences of such a shift."


"The shift was hardly intentional."


"I am aware, but just because the great Ursa does not intend to cause harm by its passage close to town, does not mean that the behaviour of the people is unaffected."


"A fair point."


"So then does language set the boundaries of our thought. It is incredibly difficult to grasp concepts for which there is no name."


"Up to 20th century philosophers already, I see?"


Luna snorted. "Hardly. They may return to us when they can explain their thoughts without the use of the ten bit words. Perhaps then they can demonstrate that they understand them themselves."


"A bold accusation from one pontificating about the psychological ramifications of a finite vocabulary."


Luna scowled, then a smirk crept into the side of her face, and both Princesses laughed.

"Anyway. Such an observation is blindingly obvious to one in ou- my unique position, encountering a…" She smirked again. "... cavalcade of new expressions in quick succession. Words like 'microwave' and 'assembly line' and 'superglue'. Prior to my banishment I would hardly have believed that these things were possible, and yet today they are ordinary."


"I'm confident that the name 'superglue' followed the invention, not the other way around."


"But…" Luna clicked her horseshoes together rapidly. "The assembly line! There was no reason that in the tenth century we could not have arranged our production capacities in such a way. All we would have needed to switch from the artisanal mode of production to one where workers pass baskets and pots and carts along line to increase efficiency is to have thought of it. Whether they would have benefited from such a change is another matter, but it could have been tried!"


"I still think you're reaching a little bit, but continue. Let's see where you're going with this."


The presence of a plural first person in Celestia's reply did not evade Luna's notice. "When one thinks in terms of 'we' and 'our' and 'us', we bind ourselves to the collective. We are constrained to considering the group as a whole. Thinking in terms of 'me' and 'I' and 'mine' creates… an individualistic perspective. You separate yourself from the group and allow your conception of your needs to diverge."


"That is… interesting to think about, but I'm fairly sure that selfish ponies existed in our childhoods as much as they exist now."


"True, we suppose."


Celestia smiled, and proceeded to her eggs before they got cold. "So. Have you had any thoughts about returning to civic life yet?"


"The subject has been gathering increasing amounts of my attention lately, though we are aware there is… hesitation among the population around a restoration."


"That we are. Don't worry, I'm sure they'll come around."


"After a thousand years on the moon, a few more for public opinion to change is hardly worth fretting about. Still," Luna paused, hoof in the air while her thoughts caught up. "I thought I would put any such sabbatical to good use and use this time to familiarise myself with the events that transpired during my exile. Study the context of the current political moment."


Celestia's eggs briefly went down the wrong way. "You've got a lot to catch up on there, sister."


Luna chuckled. "I can imagine."


"The palace libraries are of course completely open to you, and if you like, I can request a tutor for you. I'm sure there would be many who would be eager for such a position."


"Actually, before I commence any such studies by myself, I wished to ask for your perspective, my beloved sister whom I trust the most in the whole wide world."


Celestia giggled bashfully. "I… how to put this without being rude. I am of course, dear sister, eager to spend the time with you that I so neglected in the past. But for such a large span of history, wouldn't you benefit from the attention of a full-time scholar to get you through the basics? If you were relying entirely on me for the fundamentals, between my appointments, and court hours, and foreign visits, it could take… months!"


"Well, if you are unavailable, I suppose I could see what this supposed 'internet' can teach me. I hear it's a marvellously complete archive."


"Okay. We're doing this right now. I'm cancelling my 10 o'clock."


Luna rested on a hoof with a sly grin. "So. What happened?"


"Where would you like to start?"


"Well, I keep hearing about this 'parliament' around the palace, but I've hardly seen a single owl outside the zoological gardens. What is it?"


Celestia looked at her empty coffee mug, and considered cancelling all of her morning appointments. "The Parliament is a representative elected body. All of Equestria is divided into constituencies - areas with roughly the same number of people according to the census - and each one elects a representative to send to Parliament. Then, Parliament makes the laws that govern the land."


"Oh. So we… do not make the laws?"


"I know, I know, it's a pretty substantial change. Don't worry, it's been there for about four hundred years, and it hasn't gotten us into too much trouble. Think of it like the old Advisory Council, but with a few hundred members instead of just a half dozen."


"Then… the people have rejected us?"


"Oh, hardly. My role - and, presumably, in time, yours - is as the Head of State. We still represent Equestria, and its values of harmony and friendship. Our opinions still matter a great deal to the public, we meet foreign leaders, we generally bind society together."


"That would make us little more than performers."


"Well, we are still the two most powerful living mages on the planet. We delegate our legal power to Parliament, backed by our physical power."


Luna looked deep in thought.


"After the Nightmare Moon crisis of 1010, there was a lot of collateral damage. It was the first time I had exercised the full power of the sun to such an extreme degree. I knew that I could not exercise this power again unless it was an absolute emergency."


"So… why did it take you six hundred years to set up Parliament?"


"Because parliamentary democracy wasn't the first thing I tried. The first thing I did was delegate more legal power to the provinces. Provincial advisors gained noble titles like duke, baron, count - and under them were created knights, who held smaller amounts of land, and peasants worked on the land. Each tier of society swore fealty to the tier above, with me at the top. This was the feudal system."


"Seems sensible. Princess, then governors, then equites, then the plebeians."


The image of someone in 2011 calling the feudal system 'sensible' caught Celestia with a breathy, nervous chuckle. "That's what I thought at the time, but in hindsight, it had a lot of problems. The local lords, with a high degree of autonomy, were prone to fighting each other. And of course, I couldn't step in to stop these squabbles personally, because I didn't want to reduce wide portions of the countryside to ashes. The least worst solution was to try and lead diplomatically, and where that fails, lead the most loyal dukes and barons, and their sworn knights, to put an end to fighting that was getting out of control."


"Oh." Luna's nose wrinkled. "That's barbaric."


"Is it more barbaric than controlling a wayward province by incinerating it?"


"A difficult question."


"Anyway. Another problem, besides the constant infighting, was what I came to call le monde créé."


"The created world?"


"Even under this system of delegated power, I was still the most influential person within it. Which meant that the nobles absolutely fell over each other to try and be close to me - to promote their own interests. Within the aristocracy there condensed a circle around me of obsequious toads who… exploited my guilt. There's no other word for it. They knew that my heart was heavy with the consequences of the Nightmare Moon crisis and the bloody side-effects of the feudal system, and used that to keep me contained. Oblivious to reality. You want to talk about being a mere performer, that's how I felt in the 13th century. This alliance of landed gentry told me whatever was useful for them to keep me as la Princesse en Deuil, always in her white veil, obsessed with the past, never-"


Luna gently touched a hoof to Celestia's. She stopped. Part of the tablecloth had begun to char.


"My apologies."


"Are you alright? Do you wish to continue another time?"


"No, I'm fine. It was a long time ago. Let's carry on."


"Are you certain?"


"Yes. Thank you, Luna." Celestia smiled, and sniffed. "Le monde créé was the web of distortions that isolated me from contemporary reality and allowed the aristocracy to entrench their delegated power. This was what allowed resentment to fester among the peasantry. They had it the worst, you see. But being a starving underclass, there was very little they could do about it. This was until the rise of the merchant classes."


"But we have always had merchants."


"Yes, but with the advance of technology, there came more opportunities to accumulate wealth outside of the feudal hierarchy. Merchants gained wealth comparable to that of the aristocracy without having noble titles, but they lacked the political authority of those noble titles."


"I see where this is going."


"Indeed. By the 16th century the feudal system was crumbling. Wealthy merchants could afford armies of sellswords to compete with the sworn knights of the aristocracy, and the invention of the printing press meant the spread of literacy outside of the wealthiest and most powerful."


"A disenfranchised peasantry becoming increasingly informed, an absentee monarch, a self-absorbed patrician class, and the rise of dual power."


"This was the crucible of liberalism. All it took was a little crisis to knock it all over. A poor harvest, a plague, international troubles. Funnily enough, you might like to know that you were a symbol of some of these movements."


"Oh?"


"Yes! Being that I was the Mourning Princess, who never showed her face or seemingly did anything, one folk idea that went around was that Nightmare Moon was right. That the little sister who just wanted to be loved was right to stand up and demand it, because that's how people felt at the time. That's how the word 'republic' entered modern Equestrian. Because obviously, you weren't around to lead a state, so the liberal thinkers of the time began to devise a new form of governing, without a Princess or nobility, called the republic - the New Lunar Republic."


Luna chuckled. "A contradiction in terms, I would have thought. Did you… Let this happen?"


"It was a close thing. This was around the time that I was breaking out of my Created World. A regent can mislead their charge when they are an infant or senile, but a presumably immortal being like myself-"


"Did anyone ever find out whether or not that's the case?"


"- no. But over time, the contradictions in the Created World began to pile up, just as the contradictions in feudalism were straining that system. And very well that they were, because I shudder to think what would have happened if a revolution had progressed to the point of attempting to depose me. No, I stepped in quite early to try and prevent bloodshed. The New Lunar Republic was never more than a thought experiment."


"A shame."


"I had no choice but to call a constitutional convention. The compromise struck was that we would create the body known as Parliament with two houses, a lower house with members elected by the people, and an upper house taking the place of the Advisory Council, on which the hereditary leaders of the provinces and sovereign cities would sit. Parliament writes laws, both houses approve them by majority vote, and then they pass by my desk for approval."


"And you must approve everything they send you?"


Celestia curled her lips. "No."


"That does not sound particularly… democratic, considering that prior to your intervention these people were presumably ready to do unspeakable things to you, and the nobles."


"This was part of the compromise. See, remember that the upper house at the time was all the nobles who put me in a cage. As soon as things were beginning to unravel, I distanced myself from them as much as I could, and I was the threat of force bringing everyone to the negotiating table. If the people had an ally in the constitutional convention, it was me. So they were more than happy to grant me this veto power within the system. We call this the Right of Sovereign Objection. But that's not the best part."


"There's more?"


"Early parliament is at a deadlock.  The two houses can't agree on anything. The lower house are writing liberal reforms, and the upper house are sending back conservative reactions. The lower house want freedom of speech and habeas corpus, the upper house want to go back to how it was two hundred years earlier. In four years, two bills crossed my desk."


"A year?"


"Total."


"Stars above."


"The innovation that follows is the Tyrian party - after Parliament, the nobles and the wealthy merchant class I mentioned earlier found they had a lot of things in common - they had wealth and power they wanted to protect. So in the election of 1634, with the public tired of this Parliament they'd worked so hard to build, apparently doing nothing, the Tyrians took power in the lower house."


"I thought this was supposed to be the best part. This sounds like the liberal experiment was failing at the first hurdle."


"It was - but for one thing. So. On with the story. The Tyrian parliament basically wants to dismantle the thing from the inside. They have no interest in representative democracy and start sending me all sorts of reforms that would all but abolish the lower house, election maps designed to entrench them in power, all sorts of things." Celestia paused, and licked her lips. "In its original form, the Right of Sovereign Objection had no caveats."


Luna burst out laughing.


"Every single one of these ghoulish bills went straight into the trash."


"But surely they would have spun that as autocratic?"


"Oh, they did. So then they started sending me bills to remove Sovereign Objection."


"Which went in the trash," Luna snickered.


"Then amend it."


"Which went in the trash."


"Eventually the Prime Minister had to come over and beg me to approve literally any kind of limitation on Sovereign Objection, at which point I knew I could effectively write the bill myself. Which is how we get the version we still use today. Three stages of objection - first it goes back to Parliament for reconsideration, then if I'm still not happy I can refer it to the judiciary who ensure that the law is constitutional, and then if I'm still not happy-"


"It goes in the trash?"


"No. It goes to a referendum. The general population votes on it."


"Celestia, you sly old witch. 


"When you're over 1600 years old, you get very good at this sort of thing."


"I'll wager the Tyrians hated it."


"Oh, absolutely, but they knew they weren't going to get anything better, because I'd just strike it down, and the alternative was violence, which they knew would be unpopular, and probably result in some sunburned estates."


"So that is how Parliament works today, then? Elected representatives, a body of the gentry, and your approval, subject to judicial and popular assent?"


"More or less. It became quickly apparent that the lower house was the fulcrum of power, so nobles started losing interest in the upper house, especially when provinces started getting the idea of shedding their hereditary titles as well. It became very unpopular to hold bills up in the upper house, so these days it's largely a meeting body of governors and mayors where they advise on how national and local affairs intersect."


"Like an Advisory Council is supposed to do."


"Exactly. Since then there have been minor reforms to expand suffrage, amend the constitution, it was redrafted in 1878 but is substantially the same document in more modern language…"


Bells could be heard. "Is that eleven o'clock?"


Celestia snapped her hooves together. "Good heavens, it is. Luna, I should scurry on to my appointment, and you should probably sleep."


"I should… this has been enlightening, sister."


Hurriedly checking her face for crumbs, Celestia flashed a warm smile. "I look forward to next time."