In the wake of the worldwide Great Depression, the United Nations was on the verge of collapse.
Asia was engulfed in a multi-front war; China and Japan were forcing nations such as Korea, Malaysia, the islands of the Philippines and more to align with one or the other, while corporations based in the region fielded their own militarised defense forces to ensure continued operation.
Russia had removed itself from most political engagements, unwilling to enter into the chaos that would have cause even further problems for its already damaged economy as it dealt with multiple internal rebellions and regional attempts to secede from the faltering Russian Federation.
Europe had begun to enter the Pan-Asian conflict in a desperate attempt to de-escalate and bring some semblance of balance to a war that continued to spread, using this 'humanitarian action' as a way to ignore their own increasingly uncertain economic situation.
The North American Alliance's economy was in crisis as the NAA stock market bottomed out, resulting in panic and suicides akin to the 1920s, while refusing to engage in the conflict that was rapidly bringing in the rest of the world.
Peoples from across the globe, if they could afford to, began to abandon the planet and strike out to the few extrasolar colonies such as Centauri or New Earth, with a few hyperrich communities even managing to secure the remaining completed colony ships (or stealing them), until things became so bad that the governments of the United Nations were no longer able to contact their lost colonies.
As the crisis continued, the wars slowly ended as one side or another stopped being able to defend, but all nations on Earth ended up struggling. The United Nations was eventually able to re-establish contact with their colonies beyond Centauri, and after hearing of their success hoped that their resources could assist in rebuilding the broken worldwide government. The newly formed AEU disagreed, and the first interstellar war began hot on the heels of the last major planetary one.
After the AEU victory, the United Nations was in crisis, but the Hispanic bloc - partially untouched from the worst of the Great Depression - seized control and began a several years-long campaign to reform the UN into a true interstellar government, looking to what they knew of the AEU to do so.
Individual nation states were restructured and their borders changed - not without difficulty, but after a global economic crash and both a planetary and interstellar war most nations were unable to offer much in the way of resistance to this - creating the current continental 'zones' of Earth: the Amerzone (America), the Eurozone (Europe/Russia), the Sinozone (Asia), Oceania (Australia and the 'nesian islands), and Africa. As they did this they also brought in the previously mostly powerless Lunar and Martian colonies, creating actual local governments as opposed to simply having them be colonial projects, dictated to by Earth with no voice of their own.
The President retained ultimate power and term limits were abolished, due to the reconstruction of parliament itself being an attempt to make complete control of government more difficult. Even with the reforms, this new League of Earth Democracies was still heavily weighted for Earth representatives over colonial ones - it took near-rebellion from Centauri (the first extra-solar colony) and both Vesta and Callisto (worlds colonised in the second wave that would eventually form the Fringe) before another restructuring gave the second solar system colonised by the League a say in their own governing. The League of Old Earth Democracies had been formed.
After decades of reforms, the League of Old Earth Democracies became a true interstellar government, but power is still even today massively held by representatives of Old Earth. The President also retains a significant amount of power and in many cases utilises whips and spin to force Congress to follow their decisions.
