[T]he Border Worlds were simply a region of Confed . . .
The Border worlds were not a region of confed.
True.
Those views sum up the situation in the early 2670s quite well. (And remind me of the debates that still occur to this day over the American Civil War.)
Certainly the planets rounding out Confed’s borders are “border worlds”, and there was probably a time when the term (spoken) meant only that, but still often means just that, similar to the way that “core” and “colonial” worlds, for example, are distinguished in
Fleet Action.
There’s also a good reason to make the distinction. It’s surely no coincidence that in addition to a UBW there’s a Landreich, and that Tolwyn’s description of the BW in
The Price of Freedom as “a wild lot–full of rogues, privateers, and the Border Worlders themselves” could be easily amended to fit Gemini Sector too. Human history is full of examples of how settlements or colonies tend toward independence, and how the more distant they are from the “homeland” (or the more distressed they are compared to it), the greater that tendency.
So I think we can at least agree that the dispute over the BW generally begs the question of what was happening in Gemini and how Confed managed to “hold on” and keep it from going the way of the two other infamous “frontiers”. (I mean, there
must be a story there; Gemini Sector
is a civil mess in 2669-70.)
Nevertheless, I don’t see how we can presume a relationship between the UBW and Gemini just because they comprise “border worlds”. WC4 offers no support for the proposition; the “trouble” in the game is clearly focused in or around the systems that the later (and not much later) Prophecy map identifies as belonging to the UBW.
Moreover, the name “Border Worlds” in WC4 is formal, not generic, and thus must refer to a particular set of planets. By the same token, such a distinction wouldn’t arise from sudden mass whimsy. Like the example of Deneb Sector being another name for Epsilon Sector, there must be a reason or event–specifically a
history–back of it, and AFAIK the name “Border Worlds” is never used in Privateer or RF despite a smorgasbord of conversations about Gemini and its political and social troubles.
Finally, human history again teaches that conspiracy and rebellion require a compelling set of shared interests, and I can’t think of anything that “compelling” that the frontier planets of Gemini would share with the mostly frontline worlds in Vega, Epsilon, or Enigma.