Carver's Maxim

"Spacefaring civilizations will always expand beyond cultural or political cohesion."

- Doctor Elias Carver

Carver's Maxim is a social science theory concerning the eventual collapse of large spacefaring states. It was one of the component elements of.

Description
Influenced by the outcome of the Inner Colony Wars and the colonial tensions that predated the Insurrection, Carver's Maxim preached that ethical and cultural divergence between a polity's people and their government would always result in strain between the two groups. When this cohesion reaches a certain critical low point, he predicted that various groups would attempt to fragment off from the main polity, forming their own distinct societies. If it is not properly controlled, then the rate of splintering would quickly exceed the rate of reintegration, leading to the destruction of the political state.

How fast this development happens, or how widespread it is, depends on the technological level of the civilization in question—namely, the speed of travel and communications—as well as the cultural underpinnings of their political system, and by extension the legitimacy that system enjoys. It should be noted not all spacefaring civilizations care about cohesion, and only shrug as elements of themselves splinter away. This is particularly true with the several nomadic civilizations that exist in the galaxy, which is seen by some as one of the more reasonable paths for interstellar civilizations to take. But splintering is a concern to many in the interests of, among other things, security: a one-time splinter culture might one day return as a challenger, or a foe.

There were four factors that determined the success of interstellar polities (insofar as unity is taken as a measure of success):
 * 1) How mobile and/or decentralized they are
 * 2) To what extent are values and goals shared among them
 * 3) How functional are communications and travel within their territory
 * 4) To what extent are they capable of policing themselves

UEG
The pre-war UEG was at the cusp of failure because it was lacking in all of these areas, though factors 1, 2 and 3 were perhaps the most pointed issues. The UEG was heavily centered on Sol and the Inner Colonies, with both the infrastructure and power being physically fixed, and supply chains were exceedingly distributed and very rigid. Making the Inner Colonies reliant on resource-gathering outposts light-years away was simply poor optimization borne out of inexperience, rush and immature technology, when the goal should have been to make planets/habitats—or at most, star systems—self-sufficient.

The UEG had an ideology, it just couldn't keep up and credibly renew itself as humanity expanded. Grandiose colonial-era manifestos about humanity's destiny in the stars and "Pax Humana"—the purported era of prosperity under the UEG's auspices—had by the latter half of the 25th century become woefully outdated in the minds of anyone but some Earth and Inner Colony romantics. And while interstellar travel was slow, that would still have been manageable had communications been faster.

But it was perhaps this point, which directly fed into B, which doomed human unity by the advent of the 26th century: worlds weren't talking with one another, policymakers weren't talking with one another, and alienation set in on all sides. Outer Colonies might feasibly be able to talk with nearby Outer Colonies, within a matter of days at best, or Earth might talk with the closer Inner Colonies. But you still had an empire of islands where messages took weeks or months to reach their recipients. And the bulk of the colonial populations would've only been talking among themselves, or at most the local star system and its neighborhood. This isolation bred estrangement and resentment, and caused a breakdown of any sense of collective identity, tenuous as it may have been to begin with. And while the UNSC could send ships and troops to police their colonies, they were virtually irrelevant in the face of the causes that had given rise to the problems in the first place.

Covenant
While the Covenant couldn't prevent any and all divergence, it was exceptionally successful in many respects. Their closely-guarded technological hegemony, limited allotment of technological expertise, as well as means of physical enforcement were a factor in this, but not as much of one as one might think. For an authoritarian empire that hasn't won over the hearts and minds of its subjects is bound to fail. The main reason for the Covenant's lasting success was their all-pervasive sense of purpose provided by their common mission, as well as the divine legitimacy of their system of governance. While some divergence and evolution happened within the religion, apostasy was rare, and confined to insignificant fringe cases. Another factor was the lack of a definite center, and the mobile capital: when belief in the Great Journey was at its lowest ebb, the emergence of High Charity over one's world was usually certain to rekindle the locals' faith.

There was consistent peripheral bleed-off, as well as schisms and civil wars, but never enough to negate the momentum of what had been set in motion by the Writ of Union; and indeed, it took the sundering of that writ as well as the fall of High Charity to finally bring down the Covenant as a unitary polity.