Republican political titles

In republican politics, "President" is a very important term IRL, so much so that it's a normative one: the opposite of a parliamentary system is, for instance, a presidential system. And yet it's enormously contingent on the rise of the United States, and even more specifically on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 - which, just over 700 years after Andalusada's history is cut adrift from the anchor of IRL, is guaranteed not to happen. (And even that, according to Wikipedia, derives from the Commonwealth of England - which is pretty much guaranteed not to play out the same way either.)

This wouldn't be so much of an issue, except that a learnéd friend of mine, after reading about Cabralia's Three Wise Men last night, asked me a question about how republican governments work in Andalusada - and I didn't have a ready answer. After much derping, he pronounced my thoughts "a bit much to keep track of," which was my cue to blog about it today.

Republicanism in Andalusada is a pretty diverse thing; without the American (or French) experiences to color everybody's perceptions of what it can (or should) be like, there are several distinct currents and flavors of it, which merit discussing more at some later point.

But that's for later; for now, I'm going to stick to the question of what you call the person the buck stops with.

"Premier" as a generic alternative

"Premier" seems like a nice, flexible term. IRL its use is restricted to heads of government rather than heads of state, but there's no reason that's foreordained (if you can't un-foreordain something with 700 years to work with, allohistory may not be for you.) It's just Frenchish enough for a world where French is still a language of diplomacy; and given that directorial governments may be a bit more common than I'd originally thought, calling the primus inter pares "Premier" would be an obvious honorific without actually conveying any significant power over the others.

But if directorial systems are more common, that leads to the next possibility...

"Mr. Director"

Part of the reason I like "Directorate" is because it's not overtly sinister in-verse, but still has un certain je ne sais quoi. And that kind of executive government could plausibly evolve organically; it sorta did IRL, which is where junta governments came from. (I'm not sure that it would in Andalusada, Spanish history being far gone - but that's a worry for another day.) And if the executive branch is the Directorate, an obvious corollary is to name its top dog "the Director."

And let's be honest, if you're in some of those places where the buck stops with the guy wearing the peaked cap, the Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, whose bodyguards just machine-gunned another free and fair election because the subversives would've won? "Mr. Director" fits perfectly - that nice blend of formality, gravity, and naked truth about the power dynamics at work.

Of course, m'sieur le Directeur may be dressed nicer than that - perhaps, say, a uniform jacket with enormous epaulettes and lots of gold braid. In that case, he probably also has a longer title, on which see below.

Lots of civilian Lieutenants- and -Generals

Etymologically, "Vice-" and "Lieutenant-" are equivalents: they're the guy who acts while the guy who should be acting is somewhere else. Historically, they were used pretty much interchangeably for the guy at the very top of the colonial administration; the Iberian empires favored viceroyalties, whereas Great Britain generally favored lieutenant-governors. (Although even then, Great Britain did have some viceroyalties too, and Iberia some lieutenants.) "Governor-General" is also a typically British term (although again, Spain and Portugal had theirs too.)

Equivalence isn't interchangeability, though, because Governor-General and Lieutenant-Governor aren't neutral terms (even counting out their colonial legacy.) "General" and "lieutenant" register as military, and a state that has lots of officers-general and lieutenant-officers will be perceived differently from one that doesn't.

And that's fine with me, because a lot of Andalusada's republics were baptized in fire, and do blur the lines between civilian and military rule more than we'd be comfortable with. (Baltazar, of the Three Wise Men, was probably the pioneer of this; legitimately popular and populist he may have been, but he was a raised-from-the-ranks general before he was a politician, and even if he became a civilian leader he actively involved himself with the war effort.)

This is probably also typical of Baltic-style republicanism. Pomerania, especially when it reestablished itself during the Burning Thirties, had been through one or two Polish-style national restoration attempts before; by the time they pulled themselves up again, they'd established that in addition to a recognizably Prussian military style (aggressive, balls-out and relying on total mission clarity to achieve same), they needed a lot of well-established fallbacks in the chain of command, so that no individual loss could disrupt the working of the entire machine. I'm pretty sure that Hispano-Baltic Texas, and the breakaway Lusophone states of north Cabralia, are similar in that respect.