The UCNA, ash-Shamal and aboriginal politics

The UCNA has neither a manifest destiny nor a Wild West. It has ash-Shamal: "The North."

ash-Shamal is a concept that's as old as Moorish civilization itself. Spain stabilizes on the Tagus, with Christians to the north of it and Moors to the south. (And Toledo, which changes hands several times.) In  between is ash-Shamal,"the North" - the edge of the Moorish world, where the borders are permeable, fluctuate, and are defined by a certain amount of lawlessness. (Think of the Anglo-Scottish Border Marches and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it can be like.)

700 years later, that spatialization of the world is entrenched enough to transition to the New World. The heart of the Moorish New World, during the golden age of the empire, was in Mexico, defined by its northern border with France-Outremer and various aboriginal nations; after the fall of the empire, the UCNA (rising in what was formerly France-Outremer) has a clearly defined southern border (claimed by Mexico) and a very nebulous northern border.

The UCNA is extremely expansionist, but it claims no God-given mandate to do so. Also unlike America, its identity doesn't have a hugely ethnic national component; Moorish racial taxonomy is rather different from the historic Spanish casta, and even if it wasn't the experience of Maghrebi diversity left the Moors used to being a plurinational state. As long as they learn to speak Moorish and behave themselves in public, tribes are actually rather cute.

The one sticking point is the tribes in The North.

ash-Shamal in New Andalusia diverges from ash-Shamal in one critical respect: it's a lot less static. As far as the Moors are concerned, a certain amount of low-intensity warfare is typical and acceptable in The North; the only problem is that the location of The North is going to change over time, and the Shamali tribes aren't necessarily going to agree with changes in psychogeography.

There probably won't be a Trail of Tears in the UCNA. But a conscious collapsing of the southern bison herds? I wouldn't rule it out.