Reasonable Nation Theory

Reasonable Nation Theory is a concept in WA legislating whereby proposal authors operate under the assumption that most nations in the WA are sensible and fair-minded (i.e., are "reasonable nations") and will exercise good faith in implementing the legislation, should it pass. This means that authors, when trying to close up loopholes in their proposals, need not account for every ridiculous, unrealistic or unlikely situation or scenario that could occur within an uncooperative member state. Possibly the most oft-cited example of this principle is the necessity of a universal age of majority. Since lowering the national age of majority (for example, to get around laws on child labor) would also mean removing many legal protections afforded to minors under national laws, it is unreasonable to assume that a member state would seriously consider doing so to avoid complying with one resolution. Therefore, an author would generally be excused from trying to craft a complicated, universally applicable definition of age of majority to accommodate such an extreme unlikelihood. Moderators will often invoke Reasonable Nation Theory during proposal drafting, although it has never been established as an official rule.

While no official definition of reasonable nation has been adopted, most subscribers to this theory assume that a reasonable nation is relatively realistic and modern, ruled by humanoids and not inordinately vast to the point of enveloping multiple star systems. This effectively rules out most objections to legislation based on the fact that it is supposedly "human-centric" or "Earth-centric" (see Tech-wank).

An excellent summation of Reasonable Nation Theory comes from Kelssek, in a WA guide written for The East Pacific forum:

Another unwritten rule: The Reasonable Nation Principle

Basically, this means that while resolutions must be universally applicable, there is no need to accommodate or entertain objections based on highly unrealistic and/or unreasonable scenarios. Also known as the DemonLordEnigma Rule, after a player notorious for roleplaying highly unusual circumstances within their nation to argue against any given proposal, usually having to do with how future-tech and vast her interstellar empire was. In my personal experience, someone tried to argue against my resolution "International Emergency Number" by inventing a telephone system for their country which only became more ridiculously convoluted as the debate went on; it was clearly being deliberately made up to make the proposal inapplicable to it. Doing this is extremely poor etiquette. I also once had a very testy argument over a proposal regulating time travel, of which I won't say more than that it's best to assume the laws of physics as we know them apply.

...and another from Game Moderator Ardchoille, during a legal discussion:

[Age of majority] falls under the aegis of the "Reasonable Nations" convention. This assumes that, where a loophole exists that could only be exploited at considerable cost to the exploiter, or by extraordinary twists of special pleading, most Reasonable Nations dismiss it. Thus, the legislation continues to apply to the majority of the General Assembly, since that body is, as we know, always composed of extremely Reasonable Nations.

The convention is usually applied to situations where a painfully new nation's delegate exclaims, "But your foolish environmental legislation is illegal because it is useless to us, the Nation of Sapient Rocks, and should therefore be resisted by all right-thinking WA members." Senator Sulla's well-known bored mutter, "R's'n'ble Nayshns," is usually enough to get debate back on track.

In the case of Child Labor, any country attempting to evade it by lowering its legal Age of Majority to its race's equivalent of, say, three human years would be faced with the task of similarly changing all its legislation that distinguished between minors and adults. Faced with the possibility of inducting three-year-olds into their army and allowing them to drink, vote, bear arms, vote, drive, vote ... most Reasonable Nations recognise that the outcomes are not worth it for the sake of chaining three-year-olds to the looms again."