United Earth Government

The United Earth Government (UEG) is a human supranational governing entity which acted as the government of the vast majority of human worlds up until the Human-Covenant War, which saw its effective authority restricted to SolCore.

The UEG was formed as a reorganization of the United Nations at the close of the Interplanetary War in 2170 to facilitate more effective response to crises on Earth and its off-world colonies, as well as to provide a more effective civilian authority to oversee the newly-formed United Nations Space Command. Throughout the next two centuries, the UEG was forced to tackle an ongoing ecological crisis and overpopulation on Earth, exacerbated by devastation caused by the Rainforest Wars; this prompted the increased development of the interplanetary colonies as well various breakthroughs in terraforming and climate engineering. The 23rd century saw the UEG's prominence growing across the Sol system as both a facilitator of inter-colonial dialogue, and regulating various corporate entities operating in the expanding frontier of the Outer System. Following the development of the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine, the UEG spearheaded Mankind's expansion beyond the Sol system throughout the 24th and 25th centuries; this saw the creation of the Colonial Administration Authority as a secondary entity to govern the extrasolar colonies.

The first major conflicts outside the Sol system occurred around the late 24th century with the Inner Colony Wars, an irregular set of hostilities in seven systems of the burgeoning Inner Colonies; the conclusion of the wars in the 2390s saw the UEG consolidating its power over the colonies through the CAA, followed by several decades of expansion and relative peace - a period of history later known as the Pax Humana. However, this was not to last. The colonies' lackluster representation in the UEG, along with various other issues such as tariffs, corporate overreach and a draconian court system led to widespread dissent among many colonists, particularly in the Outer Colonies, and by the 2490s, dozens of rebellions had sprung up across the colonies, giving rise to the series of conflicts known collectively as the Insurrection.

The onset of the Human-Covenant War saw a radical change in human governance; upon witnessing the severity of the Covenant threat, the civilian government near-unanimously agreed to cede unprecedented emergency powers to the UNSC. This effectively limited the UEG's reach to Sol, with the UNSC acting as an emergency military government throughout the rest of the colonial sphere. The CAA presented considerable resistance against this shift, and was subsequently stripped of its power and reconstituted as the "UNSC Colonial Authority" as a result.

In the postbellum years, the UNSC made several attempts to cede its power back to the UEG, with limited success. In the vastly changed political landscape of the post-war era, the UEG was deemed ineffectual and anachronistic, unable to adequately answer to the pressing challenges of that era such as rebuilding humanity's economic base and military power, relocating the millions of refugees displaced by the war, or establishing effective diplomatic bridges to sympathetic post-Covenant polities. These challenges eventually prompted the creation of the Phoenix Initiative, an interim treaty organization formed between the UNSC, the colonies, and various corporations and consortia to oversee the reconstruction process. Although the UEG became a member of the Phoenix Initiative, it would not regain its pre-war authority over the extrasolar territories.