My Dear Kaharagians,
Sixteen years ago today, Kaharagia was founded. At the beginning there was an idea, a name, and little else beyond the wish to find out whether the idea would last. There were no institutions to inherit and no settled path to follow, so we worked things out as we went.
Some of it came quickly. Much of it took years. We changed plans, set projects aside, and rebuilt more than one institution after learning that the first attempt was not good enough. That is part of our history too, and I see no reason to be embarrassed by it. What matters is that Kaharagia lasted, and it lasted because people kept coming back to the work: the drafting and the teaching, the record-keeping, the long and unglamorous administration that almost no one sees. Today I want to thank those who did that work, and those who are doing it still.
This anniversary is also a time to take stock. In the past year we have made real progress in opening the State to the Kaharagian people.
The Royal Kaharagian Gazette now carries a proper public record. Sovereign decrees, appointments, honours, statements, official correspondence and travel notices, once scattered across private files or known only to those who happened to be in the room, are published together and kept where anyone may consult them. Kahalex has begun the connected task of drawing the Nation’s law into one place, its codes and its sovereign decrees set out article by article. Law is hard to respect when it is hard to find, and a government cannot call itself open while its own rules sit behind its own doors. The ePortal takes this furthest. Its first services are already in use: a national can register a birth, a marriage or a death, petition for nationality, apply for an identity card, register travel abroad, or correct the details we hold, and then follow each request through to a decision.
None of these systems is finished. There are gaps, unfinished pages, and services still to be connected, and I would sooner say so plainly than pretend the work is done. What has changed is that the groundwork is in place, and we can see far more clearly what has to come next.
There is a wider reason for this. Trust in public institutions is under strain across much of the world, and Kaharagia has chosen to go the other way: to make its own workings more visible, and to give nationals a clearer way into the life of the State.
I do not use the word authoritarian lightly. Yet in one country after another, movements have won support by teaching people to distrust elections, courts, journalists and public servants, and to distrust anyone who will not offer personal loyalty to a leader. Many of the strongest of them come from the populist right, turning real hardship into anger against minorities, migrants and supposed enemies within, and offering humiliation in the place of policy while calling it strength. The danger is not confined to one party or one tradition. Any movement can turn authoritarian once it decides that law is an obstacle, that opposition is treachery, and that power need no longer answer to restraint. We should know the pattern when we see it.
We are a people scattered across the world. Kaharagians live in many countries and under many governments, and that reach is part of who we are. The United States is home to a great many of us, to our families and to people we love, and its people are not our enemy; the same holds true wherever Kaharagians have settled. But neither friendship nor residence obliges us to approve of everything done in a country’s name. Talk of annexation, of acquiring territory, of spheres of influence has brought an old imperial language back into ordinary politics, and even when it is offered as bargaining or as theatre it is dangerous, because it treats the future of smaller peoples as something the powerful may settle among themselves. Kaharagia should say so without hesitation, and should oppose the urge to dominate wherever it comes from, in Washington, Moscow or Beijing alike.
A large state is more powerful than a small one, and it would be idle to pretend otherwise. But power is not the same as right. It gives no people ownership of another, and it makes no smaller nation’s identity less real. We know that belonging can be carried in memory, culture and service, and that a people can remain whole without holding a single piece of ground.
That places a duty on us: to seek out other small nations, Indigenous peoples, stateless and cultural communities, and others whose voices are easily missed. We will not agree with all of them, and friendship does not ask us to. It asks that we listen, and that we not mistake size for worth.
Four years from today, Kaharagia will reach its twentieth anniversary. I do not want us to drift towards that date, adding a year to our history without deciding what to do with it. So today I am launching Kaharagia20, a programme for the years up to 16 July 2030. It is a direction for our work over those four years, and a standard the public can hold that work to. Each Foundation Day the State will report what has been done, what is behind, and what has changed, because there is little point in setting goals if we later hide the results.
Our first task is to build relationships beyond ourselves. Over the next four years Kaharagia will make real contact with nations and peoples around the world, giving priority to smaller national communities and to organisations working in education, culture, humanitarian service and the defence of human dignity. This is not to be vanity diplomacy, and its success will not be counted in the seals shown on a webpage or the letters politely exchanged and then forgotten. A relationship worth having leads somewhere: a shared project, a cultural or educational exchange, mutual advice, humanitarian cooperation, or an honest friendship kept up over years. We will meet others as equals, describe Kaharagia without exaggeration, and listen without assuming that our experience is the only kind. By 2030 I want Kaharagian nationals to know more of the world, and more of the world to know us at first hand rather than by claims made from a distance.
Education is the second part of Kaharagia20. Geography, cost and fixed timetables still keep too many people from study, and Kaharagia is well placed to lower some of those barriers, since so much of our national life already happens across distance. The Royal Army College will go on developing, as a military institution and as a school of leadership, public service and practical learning, and its schools will widen their work in history, law, government, communications, humanitarian action, emergency response, technology and ethics. Courses will stay largely asynchronous, so that a national can study around work and family. A Kaharagia Open Learning Library will gather reading lists, lectures, guides and selected course materials that anyone may use without enrolling in a full programme, and we will look for teachers and partners beyond Kaharagia willing to share what they know. Openness is not the same as ease. I want the College to keep its standards, because a fair chance at serious study is worth far more than an easy pass. By the twentieth anniversary, every Kaharagian national should be able to find a real route into further education, training or private study through the Nation.
Kaharagia20 also asks us to take environmental stewardship more seriously. Having no large territory to administer does not mean we leave no mark. The State runs servers, buys goods, prints and posts documents, and holds events, and each of these has a cost, however small. In the coming year we will begin an environmental review of how the State operates, from the energy our digital systems use to our purchasing, printing, shipping and waste, and from it we will set a Kaharagia20 Stewardship Standard for government offices: favouring durable, responsibly made goods, cutting needless printing and packaging, and weighing environmental cost before we buy. We will publish what we can measure and be honest about what we cannot, and never dress up a few symbolic gestures as real achievement. Much of the useful work will be local, where our nationals actually live: conservation, clean-ups, more careful consumption, and help for people caught in environmental disasters.
The open systems built this year are another part of the programme. By 2030 the ePortal should be the ordinary front door to the State, so that a national need not know which office keeps a record or which system performs a task. Government is complicated on the inside; it should not feel complicated to the person using it. The Gazette will go on publishing the official record, and Kahalex will grow into a dependable home for the Nation’s law. I also want the State to get better at owning its mistakes: when a service fails or a project falls behind, the first instinct should be to explain the problem and put it right, not to protect appearances.
The programme must also give more nationals a place in the work. Public service too often looks as though it demands a formal appointment and an open-ended commitment, which shuts out people who have useful skills but little spare time. Under Kaharagia20 we will open clearer ways to volunteer for a single project, teach a short course, or help at an event. Not all of it needs to be permanent to be worth doing. This is about making it easier to take part, not about handing out titles.
I know that not all of this will go to plan. Four years is not long, and much can change inside it. We will learn as we go, as we have since the beginning. What I ask is that we spend these four years on purpose, so that more Kaharagians feel the State is within their reach and that there is a place for them in what comes next.
Our Six Principles, set in the six points of the star on our flag, are Sovereignty, Dignity, Peace, Charity, Honour and Stewardship. They should show in what we decide, not only in what we say on ceremonial days. Sovereignty ought to teach responsibility rather than the wish to dominate; Dignity should govern how we speak of other people, and Charity how we treat them; Peace should restrain us when anger is the easier politics; Honour requires that the government tell the truth; and Stewardship asks us to think past the present day.
May God bless the People of Kaharagia, wherever in the world they live, and may He guide us in the work ahead. Happy Foundation Day.
Prince of the Kaharagians