The Late Republican Age covers the period from the end of the Oceanykan Civil War in 1946 to the Oceanykan Revolution of 1961, a span of fifteen years during which the institutional promise of the Early Republican Age was comprehensively squandered. Where the founding generation of Oceanykan statesmen had built the legal and social infrastructure of a functional federal state, their successors dismantled it from within with equal efficiency, though considerably less purpose. Historians of the period are unusually united in their assessments: the Late Republic was defined above all by the transformation of The Oceanykan Council from a governing body into a vehicle for private enrichment.
The mechanism of this transformation was not mysterious. The Oceanykan Civil War had been won largely on the strength of private industrial capital: the factory owners and corporate directors of Cestlep had converted their production lines to wartime output, furnished the Federal Army with its weapons and vehicles, and received in return a degree of political influence commensurate with their material contribution to victory. The post-war period formalised this arrangement. Council appointments became increasingly tied to corporate backing. The founding statesmen died or retired and were replaced by individuals less concerned with governance than with the maintenance of their own positions, many of whom owed their offices directly to the private interests they were nominally supposed to regulate. Australian Anarcho-Capitalism had always theorised a minimal state, but what was delivered in reality was a corporatocratic regime. At the forefront of this transformation was the Badfellow political dynasty, since every President of the Oceanykan Federation in this period belonged to it. Most notable are its two last holders; Thomas Badfellow, who held office from 1955 to 1961, and Jonas Badfellow, his teenage heir-to-be, who only held office for a couple of months.
The consequences were predictable. Public institutions that the Early Republican Age had carefully constructed saw their funding redirected or embezzled. The Department of Knowledge continued to function in name, but its federal influence contracted as individual Sovereignties assumed greater de facto authority over their own territories. National unity, already a fragile achievement in a continent-wide confederation of deliberately decentralised polities, declined steadily through the late 1940s and 1950s as regional powers pursued their own interests with minimal interference from Cestlep. Armed conflict between Sovereignties, which the Early Republican Age's legal mechanisms had brought to an all-time low, resumed at an escalating rate. The Federal Army remained effective but was increasingly deployed to suppress internal disputes rather than defend the nation's external interests.
Two areas in which the Late Republican Council exercised genuine political will were the suppression of nuclear proliferation and nuclear research, a legacy of Oceanyka's first-hand experience of atomic weapons during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the atomic bombings of Operation Downfall. Thanks to its quiet traditional awareness of the dangers posed by sorcery, legitimised by the Schutzstaffel (SS) sorcery program and the subsequent struggle of Task Force THAUMIEL, they also pursued psionic research and a national Masquerade program. Thus, in 1948, the Federation began Project GREYMAN, alongside its subprojects in Project LIBERTY and Project TYRANT, and instituted the Masquerade as national policy. These projects had resounding success, beginning with the discovery of the White Rabbit Trail in 1955 and the establishment of Outpost Apple beyond it, the development of nuclear weapons, titanic advances in Psionic Theory, the foundation of the Federal Special Research Division, and as its crowning achievement, the development of micro-fission technology in the form of the Microfission Cell.
The period's collapse was triggered by a sequence of crises in rapid succession. In 1958, the Blackburn Incident made the realities of the paranormal impossible to contain within the FSRD's existing frameworks. Shortly thereafter, the New Caledonian War ended in outright military defeat, the first territorial loss in the Federation's history, and the Council's response, characterised by evasion and recrimination rather than accountability, deepened the humiliation considerably. The German Strike on Farenday followed, demonstrating that Oceanyka's adversaries had lost their fear of the Federation's deterrent capacity. Each of these events, taken individually, might have been weathered. Together, they made the case that the Council had lost not merely the public's trust but the basic competence to govern.
Civil unrest had been building throughout the late 1950s in forms the Council largely refused to acknowledge. Fascist Guerrillas, the unresolved inheritance of the Civil War's right-wing factions, gained recruits as economic frustration mounted. Labour movements, spearheaded by the Australian Workers' Union, threatened to paralyse the Oceanykan economy should their demands went unmet. It was not these forces, however, that brought the republic down. The Oceanykan Revolution of 1961 was led by Alan Redfort through his Oceanykan Peoples' Party, which found its moment in the wreckage of the Council's credibility and swept to power on a platform of total state reconstruction. With the Revolution, the Old Republic ended and the Crimson Age began. With it, Oceanyka drifted from being loosely aligned with the Western Bloc 🦅, to being a staunch ally of the Eastern Bloc ⚒️ in the context of the ongoing Cold War.
Economic history: