The world's been there before and DS9 ultimately sorted the matter out in the way things went historically when the Dominion wiped out the Bajoran colonies as a statement and pour encourager les autres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas (Whoot, referenced twice in one day!).AllanO wrote: ↑Sat Apr 28, 2018 10:56 pm Note that the Federation can not be taking whatever some interstellar power says as gospel with regards to what belongs to who etc. Otherwise the Dominion could just win the war with the Federation by saying "We claim all Federation territory, no touch backs." and the Federation would have had to surrender. So the Federation knew that the Dominion "claimed" all that space, but it may well have viewed the claim as unjustified and therefore they could ignore it. After all some of the planets the Dominion claimed were completely uninhabited with no evidence of any kind of Dominion presence or that the Dominion had ever visited, others were in open rebellion against the Dominion, some planets within the Dominion sphere appeared to have their own governments and military and just offer occasional tribute to Dominion forces and so on.
The reaction to the other nations of Europe was challenge the de facto reality of the treaty wherever they could and the two signatory powers expelled them where they were able to and had to accommodate them where they couldn't, which by the 16th century had become a position of attacking and expelling any weak settlements that weren't strong enough to resist, yet not major enough to cause a major incident (Spanish actions against the Scottish Darien colony being a good example).
