Hey all! It was taking too long to get the new chapter ready, so I thought I'd just throw this at you in the meantime.

Enjoy.

Politics was never a simple thing, but magical politics was probably more of a tangled mess than a jellyfish.

Simply speaking, the power in Magical Britain was shared between the ministry and the Wizengamot. The truth of this statement was anybody's guess, but it worked, and therefore was accepted.

Naturally, the next question to arise was just which of the partners had how much power, and who was the more powerful of the two. The answer to this varied from scholar to scholar, but by and large most people conceded that the Wizengamot's power was greater, by however small a margin it may be.

The Wizengamot itself was divided in numerous committees. There was the committee for educational affairs, the committee for national defence management, the one for the disposal of dangerous creatures, and so on.

All these committees controlled the various aspects of life in magical Britain, and their grip over it was very, very firm. Several of these committees had memberships and even chairmanships that were hereditary, but the vast majority was ofwere elected ones. For example, the committee for Azkabanian affairs carried an inherited chairmanship, belonging to the House of Peverell. True, in absence of a Duke of Azkaban the Chief Warden was appointed Acting Chairman, but the thing to remember was that removing the 'Acting' from the title went against one of the founding tenets of the constitution. On the other hand, no member of the All-powerful Committee for Judicial Affairs could be appointed in any way other than a direct majority from existing members (this was something that had puzzled a lot of scholars, given how closely the two committees worked).

The actual method by which these committees worked with the ministry was dependant on what many called the 'analogue' system. That is to say that, with some exceptions, all of the committees had analogues of their own in the various bodies that comprised the Executive. The Azkabanian affairs committee had the Office of Azkaban management Management (headed by the Chief Warden, which was always the Duke), Budgetary Allocations ran the whole of the Department of Magical Finance, The Chairman of the Committee of Quidditch Regulation and Management was almost always the same wizard who was the Director for Magical Games and Sports.

The Chairman of the Committee of Educational affairs was always either the Headmaster of Hogwarts or the Head of the Examinations office (while both positions carried automatic memberships in the committee).

The list went on.

Naturally, the committees didn't all have equal power. There were the committees, the ones which everyone and their crup had a cousin on, and then there were the committees.

To those who saw superficially, there was absolutely no doubt that the most powerful of them all was the committee of Budgetary Allocations. It was a simple conclusion, money was powerful, and therefore the men who oversaw who got how many galleons were the most powerful of them all.

Simple, but wrong

To be honest, there was no real way to clearly list the various committees in terms of power. Budgetary allocations was powerful, very much so, but then the committee of Esoteric Arts management (in other words, the controlling council of the DOMDepartment of Mysteries) controlled a wealth of magical knowledge that could destroy the Earth a thousand times over.

Of course, the power of the latter was somewhat in question, as their founding charter itself stated clearly that they couldn't, under any circumstances whatsoever, make even the slightest use of that awesome knowledge without a direct Royal Decree (which, given the absence of a king, called for interesting legal convolutions).

Transcending the whole mess of the committees, however, were a few things. First of all, was the council Council of Chairmen. As the name suggested, it was a council made up of the Chairmen of the committees, itself headed by the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. In emergencies, this council had enormous discretionary powers, able to take just about any action that wouldn't change the constitution.

Counterbalancing them was the Council of Elders, which currently boasted names as famous as Griselda Marchbanks and Tiberius Ogden. It was strictly an advisory body, made to serve just about anyone willing to take their advice. There were other councils, but relevance was a rather uncommon feature among them.

Reigning supreme over the mess, however, was the mightiest of them all, the group of people called simply the Council of Fifteen. Consisting of the Heads of the Nine Ancient and Noble families and the Six Eldritch families, the members of the council controlled One one hundred and eight votes, out of the three hundred, total in their names alone, making it a complete impossibility to pass a law without their concurrenceconsensus.

And that was without taking into account the fact that they controlled almost just as many more votes more in the form of their Vassals.

That wasn't even the height of their powers. The council of fifteen could, by a simple majority, impose or repeal any law they chose, as long as it didn't mean changing the constitution. Not that they couldn't change it. They could, with a unanimous vote (there were exceptions to this, but they are covered later).

In case of a direct conflict between the councils, the Fifteen always won, aided in no small way by the fact that more than a few people were actually members of several of the Councils.

Under normal circumstances, this wasn't all that big a problem, as it was a significant achievement to get the pureblood Lords to agree on the colour of snow. But the times it did happen, it showed the reason why a lot of people still regarded democracy as a passing fad. Entire administrations had been booted out, broken, ruined and very soon dead to the last man, when they made the mistake of thinking they could take on the 'Greater Fifteen'.

After all, just what would Budgetary Allocations be distributing, if the men who paid Sixty-Three percent of the National revenue Revenue refused to pay taxes? A huge fraction of the libraries of the DOMDM consisted of books on loan from these very families, and each controlled vassal populations that, were they to be shaped into a militia, would probably require a sum total of ten minutes to overrun the entire DMLEDepartment of Magical Law Enforcement.

So, anyone in the know agreed on the simple fact. The wizengamotWizengamot itself was fearsome, but you never messed with the Fifteen.

And the final, most important consideration of them all was the constitution. Written seventeen hundred years ago, it was without any doubt the most important and powerful document in the whole of Magical Europe, and quite possibly the world.

There were several parts of it, but for our purposes all one needs to know is that a few sections of it, namely the comprisal of the wizengamotWizengamot and the various committees along with other odds and ends, were termed 'Unalterable', except by direct Royal decree.

They were divided in two categories, the Royal decrees issued by Uther or Arthur, and the Merlinian clausesClauses. One of the most important of the clauses was the part about the reestablishment of the Crown of Camelot, which ran something along the lines of

'Seven are the Royal houses of Camelot.

Pendragon, supreme of them all

Peverell, kings already of all that is gone

Gryffindor, Noblest and bravest none more are

Slytherin, for cunning in royalty is always admired

Ravenclaw, for wisdom is the greatest indeed of all treasures

Hufflepuff, as to rule is the hardest work of them all.

And Sharr, as it in storms that a true king is formed

Were the day to come,

that That a king be needed again at the helm,

these These are the houses, that one must turn to first and foremost.'

It went on and on in the same flow, but the crux was that a king had to either come from one of the seven houses, or with their consent.

That all said,Having said that, the complexity in the British system paled in comparison to the levels of twists involved internationally.

Simply speaking, Britain was the most powerful nation in the world. This was due to the fact that ten primary Ley lines lay within its control, vast territories of Africa and the Americas were still under its direct rule, with their lines being her own, and that there were no less than Six Eldritch Houses and Nine Ancient and Noble Houses listed as its citizenry.

This was the simple view, and like most simple views, it was, at best, only partially correct.

To get a thorough picture, one must first understand the major players that existed in World Politics at the time. The various countries were, of course, a consideration, but far from the only one.

Perhaps the most powerful organization in the world was the Conclave of Hundred families. A union of the oldest, wealthiest, and (most importantly), the most knowledgeable families in the world, the group that met once every year was something no one in the world was foolish enough to challenge. The reasons for this power were many-foldmanifold.

First of all, there was 'sovereign right'. A lot of the families that were members of this association were Royalty in countries that were very much still absolute monarchies.

Then there was the matter of money. Between them, the families controlled roughly fifty-five percent of the total wealth currently in circulation in the world, and that fact alone granted them unbelievable power. After that there were their militias, their controls over trade, and other such considerations, .but But these those facts were what mattered the most.

After the conclave, there were the guilds. These too, once again, wielded enormous powers. Though it had decreased in strength severely after the establishment of schools, they still held an enormous degree of control over Magical Education.

After all, one could study magic all they liked, but Mastery could only be awarded by the appropriate guild, not to mention that being comprised of highly intelligent people not all of who were scholars, the guilds all boasted of significant military capabilities.

Given the magical preference for power to be consolidated, there existed a council of Grandmasters, which ranked on the top five most powerful institutions in the world.

Apart from the guilds, there were the secret societies. Much like how Harry's Ouroboros Alliance controlled a significant portion of Britain, other nations were held tight in the grip of secret societies. It was a known fact that the last twenty Ministers of Magic in Germany had been all members of the Thule Society(which Harry's own maternal great grandfather had been Grandmaster of), just like no one these days expected a Spanish minister who wasn't a Knight of Aragon.

By no means can it be said that the secret societies were in absolute power, but it seemed close, at times.

And then, of course, there was the Church. Ruling with absolute power over the whole of Italy and a significant portion of the neighbouring areas, the church truly was a force to be reckoned with.

Unlike most of the others whose military powers were tampered with other features, the church's international power came solely from its ability at war. There were two sources that it was derived from.

One was the monkhood.

There existed within control of the church, a group of ridiculously powerful, and severely augmented warriors who had forsaken all Earthly attachments. They were trained from young ages in all sorts of combat, magical and otherwise, and underwent a level of training daily that would (and had) left anyone elsemany weeping.

Their sole purpose was the will of the Pope (the Magical one), and there was no extent to which they would go in order to enforce it. They would kill at the drop of a hat.,they They would burn down entire cities with themselves still inside, all at the merest command from their master.

They were not many, roughly thirty or so in number, but the levels they worked at meant that they would be able to slaughter just about anyone who came in their way.

Such was their power that Harry, as he was at fourteen years of age, who had undergone a truly ridiculous level of training for the last several years would, at best, be able to evenly match (and maybe kill) the best among them. At worst, well, there was always the option of hiding till they went away.

This was the part of the Church's military that was focused on quality.

There was the other, which focused on raising large masses of soldiers with little to no actual skill, and whose powers lied in the sheer inhumanity and brutality it was capable of, coupled with its humongous numbers.

It was called the Inquisition.

And finally, after all was said and done, there were the non-humans. Vampires ruled a significant portion of the globe, including a large chunk of Eastern Europe, while the Alps were as near to being sovereign territory of the Giants as it ever got for a race of Neanderthals. Goblins still held the whole of Europe by the balls. Then there were the hags, trolls, minor demons that had a nasty tendency to pop up every now and then, Lamia (very powerful in Asia, even worshipped as Icchadhari nags.), Yetis, (who were currently tame, ever since the greatest among them, the one called Hanuman, had sworn eternal loyalty to the Suryavanshis), and so on.

Naturally, as things were, the non humansnon-humans were deemed as threats by the humans, and measures were taken by the humans to keep them in control.

This was done by every country, from the various groups of families, (names like Winchester and Van Helsing come to mind) to the Knightly Order of the Watchers back in England. Nor were they wrong to do so, ;given that even after their efforts, vampires were still a major threat.

Indeed, the one race that had truly fallen to incomparable depths were the dwarves. Once they had been a warrior race, mighty and proud, successfully taming regions as inhospitable as the Beor mountainsMountains and Moria.

Now…

Now they were reduced to delivering musical valentines to schoolchildren.

Still, the dwarves were another story for another time.

Of course, all but a few of these factors played second fiddle to the ICW, which had power enough to keep even the Conclave in check unless they were particularly angry. The ICW, unlike its muggleMuggle counterparts the UN and the EU (which were, frankly speaking, quite a bit pathetic), held an enormous amount of power.

It was the body that supervised all international trade (with the Trader guilds' power having been broken long ago), the body that oversaw nearly all Magical-muggleMuggle interactions, the body that was empowered to regulate all international magical sport, and so on.

The ICW even had powers to require, and receive without demur, any number of armed forces it deemed appropriate from its members. There were limitations on this power, the greatest of which was that it could only do so in an emergency, but they were few and in far between.

Given all these considerations, it was no wonder that scholar after scholar turned more than a little whacky trying to get it straight just who controlled what.

But tangled as it was, the system had worked for a fairly long time, and would have continued, if it was not for one thing.

And that was corruption.

At first sight, the ridiculous tangling even appeared to be a good thing, given that it prevented the power being accumulated too much. But once one looked deeper, the reality emerged. The whole system was bloated, with its original values long forgotten.

It was an unfortunate fact, but simply speaking, the magical world didn't 'do' democracy well. Not at all.

Originally, the system was meant so that a sufficiently powerful and intelligent mage could rise to true greatness and bring his/her own nation into dominance. As it was currently, there were a hundred self interest groups, with their sole purpose being to maintain the status quo, and keep themselves in power.

Still, it would be changed soon enough.