Part Three: The Modern Era: Postwar Order

【Overview of the Era】 Modern historians generally regard the period from the end of the Second Stargate War to around Stargate Calendar 12760 as the principal era of modern history. Hengguang survivors, Alliance members, and reformists in the defeated regions adopted different institutions in different places, but protecting ordinary people, constraining the arbitrary power of the strong, and opening access to learning and public life gradually became the broadest shared points of reference in postwar politics.

After the Second Stargate War ended, the worlds did not suddenly enter a fully formed new order. The wartime Alliance still had to deal with refugees, remnant gates, military gates, defeated regions, missing populations, reparations, garrisons, local reprisals, and the differing political demands of its members. Many practices later described as "postwar institutions" had in fact emerged as emergency measures before the war was over; only after the armistice did they gradually become disentangled from military affairs and pass into local administration, universities, hospitals, trades, and long-term treaties.

The relative peace of the modern era's more than ten thousand years arose from multiple conditions: stargates, trade, education, and migration bound an ever-growing range of interests together, while memories of the devastation wrought by the two wars made most members wary of total war. Long-standing checks and balances among local governments, orders, labor unions, universities, and member worlds also made it difficult for any apex being or great world to dominate the entire Alliance alone.