Sernic diarchy

The Sernic diarchy is a political system and conceptualization thereof in eastern Ausarea, specifically Serony where orders most influenced by the idea prevail, in which politics and authority is divided into two 'official' and 'non-official' spheres. In the Austral world, using the political wheel, the two are named instead as hub and spoke respectively. It is closely connected to the history and idea of the compact. The relevance of the diarchy in local political theory has diminished in the contemporary period, because of the part of life formerly thought of as being under the non-official sphere becoming seen as preceding and all-encompassing (and the basis for a single undivided body politic), even when reforms actually occurring appear to empower the arms of politics that were traditionally put under the official.

Official
The official sphere is associated with the center of the polity. From the 14th to 19th centuries (the 'first era' of the compact) it was the domain of an elite that descended from the formal, stately authorities, associated with the traditional monarch of Sernic culture, or the bureaucracies developed to serve them. In effect it was the realm assigned to those who arrogated rule by the same traditions and authority as previous states, or simply occupied similar positions as which, as a result of their struggles or alliances with sadans. As with practically the rest of the world, the traditional state in Serony recognized more or less divine kingship, and officials were noticeably closely involved with matters of ritual, conquest, and other representationalist endeavors. More importantly, by this divine origin of state, they exclusively held transcendent and exceptional power over society, able to decisively intervene and calm its conflicts, something that was not only considered common sense for intellectuals but also became realistically important due to the social conflicts of the late Liong Empire. With this long-standing part of politics self-evidently valid and unable to be left vacant, those who previously held it charted out their role in the new compact-based order according to it as well, constituting its central and official authorities, and acting as arbitrator, celebrant, and war-leader to the compact. Of course these officials were not just ceremonial authorities, retaining and employing policymaking capabilities via bureaucracies at their command, the formation of which was sanctioned by the compact, again within the limits of and fundamentally to exactly fulfil the official sphere's particular role.

In the 18th century a corollary to the ideas about the official had entered the scene, as the compact became discussed as an object of interest of its own in political theory. In these arguments the compact itself was assigned to the sphere of the official, an idea that both consolidated the widely assumed character of the official as the part of life and politics that was rational, defined, and signifying, and established the common position that compacts ought to not interfere with how their constituents regulate members' lives. It also bound the compact itself to those that represented its center more closely, paving some foundations for 19th century developments.

The internecine warfare of the late 18th century and the conquests and collapse of the Yiu Empire delivered a shock to political thought in Serony; in the 19th century those that held the official sphere of power were re-examined and critically reflected on. Theorists blamed the vainglory of the officials, and the imperfect means of using their power, for the collapse of the first era of compacts. A renovation to the structure was needed, one that was found in Vasarean political theory, as the Silent Conquest brought Serony under intellectual-cultural as much as politico-economic hegemony of the Vasarean magocracies. Though its rationalistic premise and drive for efficiency seemed at surface contradictory with the Sernic focus on tradition and consensus, the powerful Vasarean state-machine was actually seen as something that could perfectly wield the power of the official sphere, and expedite perfection of the compact. Combined with kungho, which sought to rationalistically delineate compacts into something directly responsible for the public, nationalism, which imbued compacts with grand historical-cultural teleology, and the nearby centralizing influence of happon, the expansion of official power again took place with nominal approval of the non-officials. A less frequently articulated idea was that with the Silent Conquest the Vasarean hegemons in Serony such as Aluaria had assumed the official sphere to some extent.

Criticism of centralizing, Vasarean-style reform only emerged in the second half of the 20th century. New trends in political theory in this period started to seriously question the diarchy, especially if the official sphere had any reason to exist on its own, or if it was ever valid. The 'dissolution' of the official into an idea of a single body politic (with the non-official holding primacy and precedence), or into a particular product of a system of relations between sadans, became an increasingly fashionable idea; the Mammoth School has popularized the latter. However, this has lent to reforms in both directions, with both expansive sangam co-optation, as well as renewed centrifugation of central authority back to the sadans, appearing since the Meltdown on such premises. The shupai of Ding, on the other hand, have been unique in espousing supremacy of the official sphere instead. But in any case the popular idea of the official sphere has become far more restricted, with the disappearance of the class and power structures tied to it, and the transformation of its related offices into those at least conceived of as contingent on collective approval, if not entirely instantial. Now, official authority is generally discussed as the narrow range of criteria central government and offices in a compact should fulfil – in Mammoth School parlance, the ideal of 'patrimony' – and at a wider level such conceptions are very much connected with the perception or prescription of compacts as minarchistic constructs.

Non-official
The definition of the non-official sphere has been considerably more ambiguous. Though as its name suggests it is strictly speaking taken as any part of society not wielding official power, what this category amounted to has shifted over history. For the first compacts, they were the sadans party to the pact's text and merely that, who accepted various obligations and circumscriptions, and such a status was simply a procedural state of affairs the sadans entered out of necessity. The full establishment of the diarchy, however, made them become recognized as units and leaders of an entire aspect of society that was beyond but also below (and hence having to appeal to) the official, something they had held a reputation of in the centuries prior but never really able to reconcile the existence of officials with. The sadan became associated with the traditional, customary, and popular part of life, and more philosophically something never quite graspable by reason or authority alone, the opposite of the highly formal and ostentatious official. Analogies and allegories of the period used religion to illustrate this idea, with images either from traditional religion, where the tutelary spirits individual sadans appealed to for protection was contrasted with the great gods officials sacrificed to, or from the elaborate hierarchies of sects like Hainism, with sadans analogized with the basic, local unit of communion that kept the tradition and practice alive, and the officials the powers with exclusive universal authority and prophecy that made such doctrines known in the first place.

Even if sadan life progressively became the regularly interacted-with for the average person as their reach expanded, this sphere of the compact was not quite thought of as 'popular' in itself in the first era. That the sadan exclusively regulated its members' life with little reference to the compact was also taken as a reinforcement of the idea that the compact as an object itself belonged to the official. In practical terms the explicitly non-official of the first era was perhaps more of a semi-nobility that the official answered to, or more generously a proto-sangam, given that only sadan leaders could come to make policy at the compact level.

The collapse of this order and the restoration of compacts in the Great Sernic War revolutionized thinking in this area, as the role of sadans in organizing rebellions had made obvious their importance in the local order. Now the aggregate of these societies were becoming regarded as the public in its entirety, and a fundamental, even primordial, underlying unity was the inspiration for kungho and nationalist ideas that rethought the compact in grand, holistic terms. Under these teleologisms, the non-official sphere thus became a public sphere or civil society servicing and representing abstract collectives and ideals. That the sadans had claimed military prerogatives and the power to ratify the pact by themselves in the Great Sernic War also called the distinctness of the official into question, and alongside the shrinking of the stature of the official, the non-official grew into something thought of to underly every aspect of the compact, and a true body politic. Developments by the Mammoth School mostly undone the concept of society under teleologism in favor of exclusively viewing the non-official as sadans and other direct providers of order, but its primacy over any sort of in-principle official assertion has been enshrined.