We've been getting a lot of Inner Sphere mashup tribbles, so this one won't be too original. I hope to give this idea a more thorough treatment some day, which might flesh out some additional quirks in the setting. But still, for what it's worth, here's...
#540
Even in already-established Battletech canon, Katrina Steiner wasn't the first Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth to send out a general peace proposal. In late 2864, a newly-ascendant Elizabeth Steiner also broached the subject of a wind-down to the Succession Wars.
The hard-charging Captain General Gerald Marik had just died in 2861, and with him died his implacable determination to carry on the Second Succession War until his Free Worlds League had reclaimed every world it had lost while under ComStar Interdiction in the 2830's. It was none-too-soon. Not only had the FWL lost nearly a score of worlds in the Second Succession War (and didn’t have any real chance of retaking them in the immediate future), but the industrial base of the nation was shot through; heavily damaged by objective raids and the unseen assassins of ComStar’s Operation Holy Shroud. The nation was in no fit state to continue fighting, and everyone but Gerald knew it.
Fortunately his replacement, his sister Philippa, did recognize the true nature of the situation. Despite having been a fairly successful military commander in her own right, she now advocated for peace, desperate for the Free Worlds League to get some breathing space to rest, rebuild, and try to at least make good in part its devastating losses. Early correspondence between Philippa and Elizabeth had been positive - both had remarked privately that the other seemed a nice enough sort - and a general detente seemed to be in the offing. Moreover, both sides hoped to build on this foundation, leading to the first real bouts of optimism seen in either capital for years. And so, after an initial exchange of envoys, Philippa Marik dispatched her charming son James, only 6 years Elizabeth's senior, to personally lead a negotiation team heading to Tharkad to see if the young Archon’s desire for peace was any more than wishful thinking.
In canon, Philippa sent James with instructions to aim for the stars. Rather than simply negotiating a bi-lateral treaty between the Lyrans and Free Worlds League, the Captain General ordered her diplomats to press Elizabeth. Philippa wanted a general conference of the powers to negotiate a formal end to the Second Succession War, and possibly reach some sort of sustainable modus vivendi between the five great Houses of the Inner Sphere. Elizabeth, whether out of shared idealism, naivete, or desperation, agreed, and thus was born the ill-fated New Earth conference of 2865.
The conference was a disaster from the get-go. The Kurita delegation felt insulted by the hotel rooms they had been allocated, and still acted surly even after the Marik delegation offered to swap lodgings. The representatives from the Cappellan Confederation refused to back down from the demand that peace would only be possible if they were granted the immediate return of all worlds conquered from the Confederation by any other power since the fall of the Star League. The Kuritans smugly chimed in to say, not that it would have any practical relevance in relation to the Cappellan demand, but they were only observers and didn’t have the authority to commit the Draconis Combine to any action at all. The final straw on the camel’s back was First Prince Luther Davion, attending the conference in person, who only wanted to talk about how everyone else should obviously be listening to him…after all, he was First Lord of the Star League.
At least the Marik and Steiner delegations got to blow off a little steam by framing the smug Kurita representative for espionage and getting him picked up by Lyran Intelligence.
That’s where things ended in canon; a broken-down peace conference, both Elizabeth Steiner and Philippa Marik deeply disappointed, and the Free World’s League and Lyran Commonwealth doomed to fight another two destructive Succession Wars. So badly did things go awry, that only four years after the breakdown of the New Earth talks, Philippa Marik ordered an assassination attempt against the Archon; one which very nearly succeeded (it was only stopped by the ever-present Griffin Battlemechs flanking the throne). No reason is ever given for such a rapid decay in personal relations between Philippa and Elizabeth, and the supposed real politik concern behind the attempt - courting the Draconis Combine, still smarting after the Snow Fox affair - is not given any greater detail in any of the sourcebooks that I have been able to find.
But what if it didn’t end that way
In canon, the good feeling and rapprochement between the two female leaders somehow disintegrated so badly that three years after they both were calling for Sphere-wide peace and at least partial disarmament, Philippa Marik was launching surprise attacks into the Isle of Skye and sponsoring assassination attempts against Elizabeth Steiner in order to win the favor of the Draconis Combine, of all people. Not to question the wisdom of the sainted Herb, but this reeks of a missed opportunity.
Even though the general peace conference failed to hash out germs, there was no reason why the FWL and LyrCom shouldn’t have, at the least, signed a bilateral agreement, just as they had at the close of the First Succession War with the Bella Accords in 2821.
Moreover, the incentives were positively aligned for such a deal to actually have a fair bit of staying power. Both nations were at their wits’ end, desperate to stop pouring resources into crumbling militaries, and spend some time regrouping and restoring their shattered economies. In both cases, large political forces were baying for demobilization and a peace dividend; after the tyrannies and torture chambers of Cruel Claudius Steiner’s tenure in office and then the power-vacuum of Elizabeth’s regency, the Lyran Estates General was feeling its oats and (unusually for that august body) actually wielding significant influence and power. In the Free Worlds League, factions in parliament besieged the Captain General with demands to roll back the federalization of provincial military units, or even step down and return power to the Parliamentary Executive Council.
While a deal between the two nations would certainly have encountered sticking points – the status of the worlds taken by the LyrCom during the late war, for example, and possible Marik reparations for the Lyran factories destroyed by Leaguer objective raids – a bright future was certainly possible; a possibility where, at the very least, the Marik/Steiner border is mostly demilitarized, leaving the LCAF free to whole-heartedly oppose the swift and savage Draconis Combine offensives that kicked off the Third Succession War, and the FWLM to focus on battering down the Liaoist threat to the galactic “east.” Had the goodwill between the two rulers taken any deeper root in the two nations, there was much more to gain.
We need not even imagine an immediate Steiner/Marik Federated Commonwealth avant la lettre, with James Marik marrying the young Archon (though such an outcome might well have occurred; James Marik did canonically marry a Lyran member of the Estates General that he met on his diplomatic trip to Tharkad, which caused no small scandal when he eventually succeeded his mother to the Captain-Generalcy). At the very least, trying to figure out how to create a portmanteau of Archon Captain-General would be a nightmare. Archon-General? Captarchon? Yuck.
It is merely enough to imagine the two largest economies of the Successor States forming a single free trade zone, with the capital-heavy Lyrans rushing to speculate in cash-poor but resource-, market-share, and know-how rich FWL industries. Of the Lestrades and Kelswas finally getting to scheme and plot with their true kinsmen, the Halases and Humphreys. Of the Lyrans not being so achingly dependant on Hesperus for their miltech, and the Mariks actually having resources. Culturally, the match is a good one; both nations are full of fierce regionalisms, are quite diverse, are politically fairly decentralized, and generally prefer making money to military conquest. They even complement each other’s weaknesses; though LOKI can be overzealous and brutal, SAFE can use all the help it can get. And FWLM officers have been used to making mountains out of molehills, and pulling shining victories out on a shoe-string. Imagine what they might do when allowed to train under less-pinched fiscal constraints! I also imagine Trace Coburn salivating at a hypothetical aerosquadron where Lyran Seydlitz ran interference for Marik Stingers and Reivers, with Chippewas relegated to dedicated fire-support.
Even an outright merger between the two nations would produce interesting (but not munchy) results. The awkwardly-named Free Commonwealth would be an economic and technological titan, but rife with factionalism and grift, militarily defensive and unimaginative (though with aggressive frontier march lords in Tamar and Oriente liable to hare off on wild schemes), and full of enough corporate espionage (and even minor inter-provincial warfare) to keep legions of Shadowrun fans in campaign material for decades. The political leadership would be, by turns, hilariously inept and hard-headedly realistic, but with that splash of naive idealism that grows from idle prosperity. A true burgher nation.
Besides, just imagine the sheer joy of an alternate Concord of Kapteyn with Takashi Kurita, Maximilian Liao, and *gulp* Hanse Davion?!? :D :D :D
