Star Trek is often seen as being about an inherently optimistic future... but no one seems to have noticed that The Federation seems to be some manner of inherently undemocratic organisation.

It seems that the Federation Council is some monolithic and detached government run by people in ivory towers. Willing to agree to such monumentally unpopular ideas as the DMZ after the Cardassian war which resulted in dozens of worlds being on the wrong side of the border. When Picard goes to protest the seemingly arbritrary relocation of native Americans (IN SPACE!) he's pretty much told "the Federation Council says we're doing this" and it hardly sounds as if the people were taking it lying down either.

Not to say that this kind of thing doesn't happen in real life - doubtless any sufficiently informed person could rattle off a dozen things which have gone against the collective will of the people... but these things can often be appealed and protested. Here the impression was given that the big boys had decided what was happening and everyone else just had to take it. It seems fairly obvious the move wasn't popular as the formation of the Maquis suggests.

In fact, there is perhaps no greater demonstration that the democratic process has failed to accommodate people satisfactorily than said people taking up arms... and the Maquis seemed to enjoy widespread support throughout all the worlds in and around the DMZ. While it seems likely that they were wiped out by the Dominion... the fact that people in a time so apparently enlightened resorted to such methods - and enjoyed support and even defection from more than a few high ranking starfleet officers - speaks volumes about the Federation that are never spelt out.

Perhaps this is all made rather more strange by the fact that Earth seems to be some kind of veritable paradise - and in fact, is described in just that way in DS9 - whereas the colonies are generally shown as pretty poorly developed... Not that we really get a very good idea of how things are in the Federation... still, it seems that the Federation Council pretty much runs the show... and we've never really heard talk about elections or anything like that. It seems that the Federation is run more by some people deciding what's best for everyone more than anything - although, this would hardly be the first time that accusations of communism had been levelled at the show.

It simply seems ironic that a programme which supposedly espouses such an optimistic and bright future seems so utterly devoid of the trappings of democracy - or indeed anything other than some form of benign oligarchy. That couple with the fact that the Federation has had a rather troubled history - war and conflict with pretty much all their neighbours... many more than once - and the problems of discrimination that we've seen - Data was going to be dismantled because he was initially considered property rather than a person, Doctor Bashir risked expulsion from Starfleet simply because his parents had him genetically augmented and The Doctor on Voyager was ostensibly treated as a second class citizen because he was a hologram... and he was the lucky one, the copies in the Alpha Quadrant got stuck working in mines. Taken as a whole, the Federation hardly seems like some kind of utopian ideal it's often portray was as - in fact, in some aspects it seems worse than contemporary Western society.