Adammia and the Grand Unified Micronational

The Empire of Adammia and the GUM

Grand Unified Micronational membership
Membership	Full member
Since	17 December 2017 Originally: 9 June 2013
GUM delegation	Emperor Adam I Hermione Peace Will McCracken

The Empire of Adammia is a full member of the Grand Unified Micronational, first becoming a full member on 9 June 2013. It has been a full member since then, except for the period from 2015-16 when the GUM existed only as an association of micronationalists, and a second period in 2017 when it voluntarily downgraded to observership due to inactivity. It has continuously been a full member since 17 December 2017. Adammia is one of the GUM's longest-serving and most influential member states, with its primary delegate, Emperor Adam I, serving a record five terms as Chair of the Grand Unified Micronational. For most of Adammia's history, the GUM has been central to Adammic foreign policy as its primary means of projecting influence.

History

Early membership

When Adammia began to make its first forays into Skype-based intermicronational diplomacy in the days and weeks following its foundation in April 2013, it first made contact with the Principality of Monovia (at the time its geographically closest micronational neighbour), and from there Adammia was put in contact with Jonathan I, Emperor of Austenasia, who forwarded their membership application to the Grand Unified Micronational. Adammia became a provisional GUM member on 12 May 2013. Through this, Emperor Adam I was introduced to many GUM delegates from around the world, and marked the beginning of his general participation in the MicroWiki community. As a result of connections made through the GUM, Adammia began to sign its first mutual recognition treaties with other nations, such as Burnham, Ashukovo and Wyvern. On 9 June 2013, Tatsumiya was relegated to provisional membership due to inactivity, and at the urging of Libereco delegate Leon Williamson, Adammia applied for and was granted full membership.

Shortly after Adammia joined the GUM, the organisation began to fall into inactivity. In December 2013, Adam I alerted to the organisation to the fact that the scheduled elections were not proceeding. Ciprian I of Juclandia won the subsequent election for Chair and proposed Adam I as Vice-Chair, which was passed by Quorum, giving Adammia its first executive position in the GUM. In the same election, Adammia was elected to the GUM Advancement Council, and Adam I subsequently became Secretary of the Advancement Council. Ciprian's term saw the introduction of a new Charter, replacing the original 2009 Constitution; Adammia's Ruling Council ratified the new Charter on 9 February 2014. The new Charter abolished the Advancement Council, making Adam I its final Secretary. On 16 February 2014, as acting chair in Ciprian's absence, Adam I became the first Adammic citizen to chair the Quorum of Delegates, presiding over the first Quorum session under the new Charter.

First term as Chair

Following the end of his (so far only) term as Vice-Chair in March 2014, Emperor Adam joined the GUM's new secretariat as Secretary for Science and Research on 13 April 2014 (Adammia's first Foundation Day) after John Gordon of Bysalia was removed for inactivity. However, due to his ongoing macronational GCSE exams, Adam himself was ineffectual in the role and failed to be elected to a full term in June 2014, losing three votes to twelve against Karl Friedrich of the Empyre of Slin. In the following term, in which Brooklyn Hewitt of Ashukovo served as Chair, Adam I frequently acted as an unofficial assistant or chief-of-staff to Hewitt during Quorum. A Quorum motion to recognise the Adammic emperor's role with an official position was voted down, with delegates reasoning that Adam was only carrying out what were ultimately the Chair's direct responsibilities. Adam also sat on the ultimately unsuccessful mock trial committee during this term.

In the September 2014 election, following an unprompted nomination from Richard I of Clyro, Adam I stood against Hewitt's re-election bid, and was ultimately successful, winning by seven votes to five to become the first Adammic Chair of the Grand Unified Micronational. The controversial decision of the Wurtige Bloc - led by Hewitt's Vice-Chair, Arthur I - to back Adam over Hewitt, secured his victory, and he assumed office on 13 September 2014. He nominated Fionnbarra Ó Cathail of Leylandiistan as his first Vice-Chair. During his first term, he oversaw an overhaul of the organisation's internal administration, bringing many records up to date. He oversaw the creation of Junior Secretaries to assist the elected Secretaries, the creation of a directory of delegates, and the expulsion of three inactive member states. Several projects begun under previous administrations, such as the Mock Trial Committee and the GUM Library, continued to be officially supported under his leadership, although they did not make much progress.

Second term as Chair

Emperor Adam I's first term ended on 13 December 2014, giving way to Taeglan I Nihilus of Reyla, under whom activity in the organisation began to plummet. Adam I stood for a second term as Chair in the March 2015 election against James I of Mancunia, running on a platform of restoring the GUM's activity. Despite Adam I nominally leading James I by four votes to one, the election was declared invalid due to insufficient turnout, and was re-run. Adam stood unopposed in the second round and received 11 votes, winning his second term as Chair, but by this point there was a growing consensus amongst delegates that it was time for the GUM to be dissolved. The Austenasian delegates in particular had suggested transforming the organisation into a semi-formal association of micronationalists in the form of the GUM Lounge, and Adam eventually agreed to this. On 1 April 2015, Quorum agreed to his nomination of Brooklyn Hewitt as his Vice-Chair, and on 12 April the Quorum agreed to his motion to summon an Extraordinary Constituent Quorum.

The Extraordinary Constituent Quorum would not actually convene until 14 June 2015, when it revoked the vast majority of the 2014 Charter, except for clauses that allowed the Chair to moderate the GUM Lounge. Under the remaining provisions, Adam I could have remained in office as Chair virtually indefinitely, but he announced his resignation on 16 July 2015, triggering the only election under the rump Charter, in which he endorsed Jonathan I to succeed him - which he did, unopposed.

2016 GUM revival

In April 2016, members of the GUM Lounge began to discuss reviving the GUM as an organisation. In response to questions about what the purpose of the revived organisation should be, the Adammic Ministry of Foreign Affairs began work on an internal report to set out its official stance on the role of the GUM. Although the report was never completed or published, it would influence Adammia's attitude to the GUM for years to come, envisaging the GUM as an "ambitious" organisation whose purpose was to provide services to the micronational community. The parts of the report that were written condemned bureaucracy in the GUM, arguing that creating new departments and working groups were not an effective way to create activity, whilst backing projects such as GUM-endorsed guides to micronationalism and in-person summits. Many of these concepts would be advocated by the Adammic delegation for years afterwards, and arguably still influence it to this day.

When the new Charter of the revived GUM was put out for ratification, the Ruling Council ratified it on 4 June 2016. However, under the terms of the new Charter, only the first 18 nations to ratify it would gain automatic membership. Monovia beat Adammia to be the 18th ratification by just a few hours, meaning that Adammia was forced to apply for membership; it was accepted as a provisional member the following day, and confirmed as a full member on 19 June. On 31 July 2016, Adam I was appointed by Quorum as the GUM's first Statistics Secretary. In this capacity he circulated a statistical survey to GUM members in October 2016, although it is unknown whether the results of this were ever published.

Following the election of King Adam I of Uberstadt in December 2016, Emperor Adam I was nominated to serve as his Vice-Chair. However, due to most member states choosing to abstain for unclear reasons, the motion failed, and Shiro Mephistopheles of Zenrax was appointed Vice-Chair instead. This event soured the Emperor's view of the GUM at the time, and on 11 March 2017, as part of a wider package of measures announced by the Office of the Emperor in response to inactivity within the Empire, Adammia requested a downgrade to observership. This was granted by Quorum on 27 March (however, Adam I would not be formally replaced as Statistics Secretary until almost a month later).

Adammia's internal inactivity came to an end later in 2017 with the transfer of the central government offices to Serkatia in South Adammia, the beginning of the Second Era, and the election of Lord Alex Helliker as Prime Minister. Adammia re-applied for GUM membership, being granted provisional membership on 17 December 2017 and being confirmed as a full member on 14 January 2018. However, by this point in time, the GUM itself had again slipped into inactivity. Supreme Judge Bilal I of Shorewell left office on 11 February and was not replaced for over two months, and when King Adam of Uberstadt (now serving a second term as Chair) finally proposed appointing a new Supreme Judge on 14 April 2018, Emperor Adam I was easily able to attain the position, making him one of the very few people in GUM history who has served in all three positions of Chair, Vice-Chair and Supreme Judge.

Third and fourth terms as Chair

Emperor Adam I stood unopposed in the June 2018 Chair election, securing a third term amidst very low turnout, with six votes for him against a single vote for none of the above. He was abroad in Malta when he officially assumed office on 7 July 2018. Upon assuming office, he did not immediately propose any executive or judicial appointments, instead taking direct responsibility for matters such as public relations as a way of avoiding the problem of inactive secretaries; he only nominated Horatio Eden of Amissopia as his replacement as Supreme Judge on 8 September, two months into the term. On 15 September 2018, during his visit to Wrythe as part of Austenasia's tenth Independence Day celebrations, he signed the Wrythe Convention on behalf of both Adammia and the Grand Unified Micronational, the Quorum having authorised him to do so for the latter a week earlier. On 27 November 2018, he set up the Grand Unified Micronational Discord server, and oversaw the migration from Skype to Discord over the following weeks.

Emperor Adam's third term as Chair, and the migration to Discord in particular, was associated with a sharp rise in GUM membership against the historic low he inherited at the start of the term, and it was against this backdrop that he sought re-election in the December 2018 election. He was opposed by Nicholas Randouler of Posaf, a relatively new nation which had been a member for less than a year at that point. Randouler argued for more executive roles to be appointed to encourage wider participation, and although Adam was re-elected by 12 votes to 7, he was forced to commit to appointing new secretaries, forfeiting what had been almost total personal control over executive power. Voting had taken place along generational lines, with almost all the pre-2018 members voting for Adam I, and almost those joining in 2018 voting for Randouler. Nonetheless, Adam became the first person to ever be elected to consecutive back-to-back terms, and matched Jacob Tierney's overall record of four terms as Chair. Shortly after his term began, he led the third 24 Hour Quorum in celebration of the GUM's tenth anniversary. Other developments during Adam's fourth term included the introduction of Executive Proclamations on 20 January 2019, and his hosting of the 2019 GUM Birmingham Summit, at which the Quorum had authorised him to sign the Edgbaston Convention on behalf of the organisation. In the year between July 2018 and June 2019 when Adam I served his third and fourth terms, GUM full membership almost doubled from 16 to 30.

Shortly before leaving office, Adam sought to create the position of Head Technical Administrator, a permanent position for himself intended to reflect his position as owner of the GUM Discord server and its effective guarantor; this met significant opposition at Quorum, and only passed on the condition that the role not be publicly listed on MicroWiki. Adam still holds the role to this day.

2019-2021

During the following term, in which Bradley of Dullahan was Chair, Adam served as the inaugural Micronational Development Secretary. As part of an executive reshuffle in November 2019, he became Secretary for Public Relations and Press. He would manage the GUM's Wordpress blog (apart from a period in early 2020, when Zabëlle Skye stood in for him as he finished his Masters dissertation) until July 2020, when he returned to the position of Micronational Development Secretary.

After a fairly inactive term as MDS, Adam stood for Chair in the December 2020 election, but lost for the first time to Jack Dean of Essexia; nonetheless, he secured the most votes ever cast for an unsuccessful candidate in GUM history. Following the election, he continued to oppose many proposals put forward by the Dean administration. This trend continued into the subsequent Anthony Clark administration, where he became an Associate Justice after narrowly failing to be elected as Supreme Justice. During this time, Emperor Adam acted as an opposition figure and came to be seen as increasingly conservative when it came to the GUM's Charter and its various traditions.

Fifth term as Chair

Emperor Adam stood against Isaiah David, Simon Reeve and Christina I in the December 2021 election on a platform of "putting the Quorum back in charge", an implicit rebuttal of Clark's constitutional reforms which had arguably made the Supreme Court the most powerful it had been since the Lethler era. With former opponent Jack Dean as his running mate, he won by a landslide and began his record-breaking fifth term as Chair on 1 January 2022. However, plans for reform were interrupted by "Black January", a period of unprecedented chaos in the MicroWiki community triggered by the unbanning of a controversial individual from the wiki. Despite signing the petition which opposed the unbanning, Emperor Adam quickly distanced himself from the more extreme opponents of the MicroWiki administration. When GUM Supreme Judge Abrams I used a back-door exploit to effectively destroy the MicroWiki Discord server, he supported the vote of no confidence against Abrams. He then set out to mediate between the MicroWiki admins and the petitioners, and announced plans to compile a report on the "politicisation of safeguarding" in the MicroWiki community. In the course of this he conducted several one-to-one interviews with community members, but as the heat died down from the situation, this report was eventually abandoned.

In the middle part of his fifth term, Emperor Adam received some criticism for inactivity as he focussed on his campaign in the 2022 UK local elections. Dean resigned as Vice-Chair on 23 March, and in an effort to revive his administration, Emperor Adam brought in his old ally Brooklyn Hewitt to replace Dean. Due to drama involving Hewitt, she faced a no confidence vote and resigned on 17 June 2022, and an emergency Quorum appointed Newton von Uberquie to replace her as Adam's third Vice-Chair of the term. Despite the drama of the term, Emperor Adam was able to end the term by hosting the second annual GUM Development Awards on 30 June.

Recent

In February 2023, in response to a membership application from a "Third French Empire", Adammia demanded that Chair Shiro Mephistopheles reject the application due to the fact that the applicant's territorial claims, which encompassed all of France, overlapped with the Adammic colony of Xanada, citing the Edgbaston Convention. Anthony Clark then submitted a court case aiming to prevent application rejections on the grounds of geographical overlap, and to force the GUM to rescind its signature of the Edgbaston Convention by arguing that it was unconstitutional. The Adammic delegation submitted a lengthy amicus curiae brief on the case. Later, when Adammia drafted a Charter amendment which would introduce a new "territorial integrity" clause which seemed certain to pass, Clark resigned as Director-General and New Florence withdrew from the GUM. Widely perceived as the only person who could realistically replace Clark, Emperor Adam was appointed by Quorum as Director-General shortly afterwards.

Positions

Delegation

Current

• Emperor Adam I (since 12 May 2013)
• Colonel Sir Will McCracken (since 14 August 2019)
• Lady Hermione Peace (since 6 January 2021)

Former

• Lord Alex Helliker (19 April 2018 - 27 November 2018)
• Colonel Sir Will McCracken (c. 4 June 2016 - 22 August 2017)
• Lord Grant Hawkins (26 April 2016 - 14 October 2016)