States, or cantons, in the shape of narrow pie-wedges, with borders cutting straight across rivers and mountains, are obviously impossible to administer.
For a lively introduction to the failure at Versailles, I can recommend John Maynard Keynes' Notes on the Peace.
Because it is not German propaganda from a century ago. It is a peace plan from a century ago, that imagined a world in which the Second World War never need have happened.
I'll take that as a sarcastic response and that you doubt that reducing the influence of nations would promote peace.
Tribalism (Nationalism) is the cause or justification for most wars, no? Us against Them. Whether it's Nations or Religions or Races. I think tribalism is so deeply rooted in most of our cultures, that ideas that challenge it are hard to process for most people. I think there's a lot of value in challenging assumptions. This specific proposal has a whole host of problems with it, but there is still merit in the idea of dealing with the cultural forces of nationalism.
I think it's fair to say that the root of most/much war is greed in one form or the other.
But it doesn't work without being able to convince other people that they'll benefit from joining that cause, based on being members of your group/nation. Those wars are justified typically by generating a shared sense of fear and/or hate for the other side. If people's ties or shared identity to that group were weaker, it would be harder for people to buy into that propaganda.
I find this interesting, because without some unifying forces I don't think our modern society would be able to function well. I'm just not sure Geography and national identity/culture are the best way to unify people. Can't say that I have any better alternatives though, other than thinking that if our personal identities were less tied to our national identity, the world might be a little friendlier place.
Persuading masses, that there's some higher good worth pursuing is how all ideologies work (including religion).
For creating a us/them group, any shared/diving trait can be used. It can be tribal, religion, or it can be class (bourgeoisie vs workers), or ahem intersectional.
Nationalism is drawing borders around preexistent tribalism to keep it contained.
It is exactly violations of those borders which got us wars in Europe. Sometimes for the sake of colonization, sometimes for the sake of unification, sometimes for the sake of ill-conceived peace, and almost always a bad idea in the end.
I'm not even that much optimistic about the future of the EU, to be honest.
Well, I never head of that plan before, but if it is a peace plan, it is one that gives thought to the ethnicity of occupation troops.
When you have occupation troops, you not always have peace, last time I checked.
Is that German propaganda? Sankt Stephan is at the center of the realm, Berlin is drawn just as just another province. Sankt Stephan would be the center of Vienna, correct me if I am wrong. Someone was trying to make the Habsburg empire great again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Stephen%27s_Cathedral,_Vie...
Austria is basically the German-speaking part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was even briefly called the "Republic of German-Austria" after the empire's dissolution in 1918: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_German-Austria
Because Austria was a German state. We are talking 1920, mind. A national Austrian identity separate from the wider German one did not develop until after the second world war.
Germany wasn't a country before 1871. However, Germany existed as a cultural region. Austria was always considered to be a part of Germany, even the leading part. When Germany united, there were two options, the small-Germany (kleindeutsche) and large-Germany (großdeutsche) solution, the latter including either the whole Austrian empire or just the German-speaking parts in the unified country. The reason why this did not come to pass was that Bismarck and the Prussian rulers (Hohenzollern) wanted to control Germany, not share the rule with the competing Habsburh family, the rulers of Austria-Hungary.
Even if this was propaganda (in the pejorative sense), I doubt any other medium or outlet will be taking this Sunday off.
When I need a break from the propaganda I always switch on [streaming service] and watch [latest hip series starring biracial protagonist with quirky LGBTIQ best friend in semi-fictional borderless country].
Even if this was propaganda (in the pejorative sense), I doubt any other medium or outlet will be taking this Sunday off.
If you need a break from the propaganda, you can always open [streaming service] and watch [latest hip series starring biracial protagonist with quirky LGBTIQ best friend in semi-fictional borderless country].
I also first thought it looked like a German-centric idea of a "united" Europe after most of it had been joined to Germany. But I think it's probably actually a highbrow vision of (Central) Europe amalgamated into a union where the supposed peace comes from the amalgamation rather than from subversion.
The radial "kantons" in the map, for example, have been denoted as having a military presence of various ethnic groups, not just Germanic, and the various ethnic groups maintaining a military presence are all over the place and alternating over each neighbouring sector/"kanton".
I also don't really think a German propaganda map would include things such as present southern Italy being assigned as part of Greece when Greece was actually neutral or Allied during World War 1 (and invaded by Nazi Germany in WW2, in case you'd think the map was from Nazi Germany age.)
Edit: The metadata also says it's from 1920, as the title indicates
Edit 2: Most people outside of the British/US world probably also wouldn't even know it's a particular day there. Have a good one, though.
It’s a very out of the box idea (one of the recommendations is to abandon national languages and compel the widespread adoption of Esperanto, another one is the designation of most of the Italian peninsula as “Churchland”), but it’s impressive that people could seriously entertain such out of the box ideas as recently as 100 years ago.
The radial approach is really an interesting one. Imagine what all the border crossings would look like? All of the villages that would end up split. How would this territory defend itself, with these borders the are irreverent to topography and natural resources? What would the apparatus of state look like?
It probably would cause as many new conflicts as it would solve. But it’s impressive somehow to see such a weird plan so deeply-developed. One can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be immediately shot down before it could be developed, today.
It’s reminiscent of that famous plan suggested by a school teacher, to dam the San Francisco Bay, which was taken seriously enough to be modeled to scale by the military.
> It’s reminiscent of the plan suggested by a school teacher, to dam the San Francisco Bay, which was taken seriously enough to be modeled to scale by the military.
For those unaware, I learned of this plan via this short Tom Scott video. Fascinating.
I think the impracticality of the borders is purposeful, a suggestion that you might want to leave room for some cultural differentiation here and there, but not really have border checks or any other limiting elements that give them any kind of practical importance.
Villages and towns are split now. There are hundreds of locations around the EU where different sides of a street are in different countries - or (worse now) straddling the UK/Ireland border.
Which is not to suggest that pie-shaped political geography is a good idea. But splitting towns is much less of a show-stopper than old-fashioned tribal and religious affiliations.
It's not just Ireland. There are towns crossing the English-Welsh border and English-Scottish border which has been an issue with the increasing fragmentation of the UK in the last year. Particularly in lockdowns people officially can't go to their local shops as it's "over the border". Pretty ridiculous but it reinforces the idea that UK is looking more and more like separate areas -- an idea that the present government appears to want to support?
I don't think it's just the lack of respect for the Good Friday Agreement (I wonder if Raab has read it yet) the unity of the UK as a whole is looking quite strained to me.
This caught my eye last week, since the football stadium is built over the England/Wales border, and the two places have different rules on using indoor toilets at public events during lockdown:
I mean, there are dopey ideas galore, starting with the wedged sectors, and then married women over 20 cannot vote, Sweden took a sizeable chunk of Finland, and Norway got the Kola Peninsula, Finland took East Karelia and then some, Estonia and Latvia are part of Greater Russia, the Hebrew Nation encompasses the area all the way north of Beirut, that massive neutral zone in Sinai, Greece takes south Italy and Sicily, Sardinia belongs to Spain, Serbia and Albania are joined, and so on.
The colonial map (#2104.02) is also something.
It's too bad one cannot simulate this to know if the ideas would actually had had an effect in the upcoming WW II and so on.
When this was written a married woman was required to obey her husband in all matters. This meant that she would vote for whomever he told her to vote for, effectively giving each man two votes. So it made sense to disallow this.
However, it sounds like an unenforceable thing. As secret votes have been around since ancient Greece, one could have said "I voted for X" when the real vote went for Y, and no-one would've been any wiser.
> but it’s impressive that people could seriously entertain such out of the box ideas as recently as 100 years ago.
I don't know if there was any other period in history than 1920 when this sort of thing could have popped up. It was exactly the period of time when people seemed to have been swept up by all sorts of incredibly idealistic/weird/outrageous/revolutionary/utopian ideas. This is the period when things like Communism, Anarchism, and places like Fordlandia seemed like a good ideas. Also notably League of Nations itself came from that period.
Also I'm not sure how seriously this idea was really entertained even at the time, and how much it was just regular crackpottery that happens to have survived.
This was just to get the conversation started. It was very accurate that the Treaty of Versailles was inadequate, but us evaluating this concept is the same as people 100 years from now evaluating some random map on a Medium article that got 2 claps. Its relevance is not worth entertaining, while it can be used to see the sentiment of the day.
As a Swiss I find this interesting, but I think it misses an integral part of what is a ‘Kanton’, at least most of them: A former city state that has joined the confederation on ‘its own will’, however that worked for the local government at the time of joining. By becoming a ‘Kanton’, the main form of governance of the confederation has become mandated, direct democracy.
IMO this requires a coherent existing local government that is representative of local culture to the point where a majority of its inhabitants at least agrees with how they’re governed. Note that this doesn’t necessarily imply homogenous ethnicity, language or religion (although in Switzerland it did separate into catholic vs. protestant regions). A brain-child like this map could never work in this way. But I have some hope that a Kantonal / confederate system could prevail if there was a collapse in European nation states. Switzerland, if it still exists at that point, could serve as an example that has proven itself stable since 1847. While that doesn’t match the age of the US system, it’s still older than most continuous European republics.
I live here for >10 years, but not a citizen. Yet, I read some laws and learned some history b/c I'll be applying for citizenship soon.
It's a story of gradual centralization since mid-19th-century at least. It had pretty much only common currency then, but now many more things are common: criminal code, military, national bank, elements of civil law, constitution, organization of highways, the last final judicary instances, personal taxes + VAT + import duties at the federal level, common national security agency, many federal laws, types of immigration permits, laws wrt naturalization (with some regional changes).
It goes only one way, pretty much every federal law leaves some space for cantons and for communes to specify details, but the trend is that this space left for cantons/communes shrinks over time.
E.g. the naturalization law which I'm interested in says on the federal level that applicants should be able to communicate at least at B1 (speaking/listening) / A2 (reading/writing) level of the cantonal official language. Most cantons leave it as is, but some (e.g. canton Thurgau) increased it to B2/B1. My canton (Zurich) leaves only little space for communes to influence the naturalization process (pretty much they can only check whether somebody is integrated, as in if they have Swiss acqauintances and visit local events and know something about the commune). Other cantons can leave communes more flexibility, e.g. to set higher level of language requirements or time someone lived in them.
This is a massive problem for federalism, something that is cherished heavily here in Canada too as our provinces can each be quite different and autonomy is defended quite strongly in debates (at least historically).
But it always seems to continually centralize more and more.
I feel like this is one of the biggest driving forces for partisanship in a massive country like the US. Of course you can’t achieve cohesion across such a massive country. It’s much easier for smaller states.
That’s also why it bothers me when people point to tiny European countries like Scandinavia as examples of how the entire US should be. Nothing scales that easy.
There needs to be some clearly defined things that are federal (natsec that is entirely external, currency, healthcare insurance gov monopoly, trade pacts along logical trade routes - something India is dying for where apparently Trucks transporting goods need to stop at each local powerblock with paperwork/taxes and it’s slows everything to a grind, etc).
You can see the downsides of centralization in things like the drug war clashing with states who want to legalize or decriminalize. Clearly this should be up to the states. And many more things too.
Instead there are countless US federal agencies doing who knows what. I’ve heard some huge numbers.
And the push politically always seems to
more and more power not only federally but more dangerously in the executive branch (which we saw a massive rise in during the post 9/11 Bush years and continued in Obama’s term).
We need a rebirth of federalism globally and a push back against everything going federal and centralized. Especially with populations continually growing.
Let's take the US as we know it, the 1780s constitution granted the Federal government power over interstate commerce, like a glue between the states, by the 20th century all commerce was interstate commerce and the "New Deal" in 1930 leveraged that to assume control over all facets of life in the US, with the Supreme Court finalizing the subjugation of all the states shortly thereafter (for example with rulings that a farmer's crop in one state affects the national market of that crop and therefore can be regulated by the federal government). All autonomy of states is merely tolerated by the Federal Government to maintain easier compliance. A pacifier in the mouth of a dependent which could realistically be removed at any time.
Things like guns and drugs are contentious though, because availability in one state of an "open borders" zone enables smuggling into other states, where they might be banned.
One could hope that the system would tend towards overall liberalism, but IME with the EU it's the opposite.
Over recent years, we have got mandatory registration of SIM cards right as an influential neighbor state did the same (official explanation by our government: because of terrorism threat, which is essentially nonexistent here), EU-wide ban on many useful chemicals which have been used in terror attack mostly in Britain and France, and I'm hearing that the Swiss (a Schengen member) are having their own problems with the EU over firearm regulations, even if they aren't an EU state.
On the contrary, I'll argue the partisanship is not due to the size of the nation; if it were, you could draw simple geographical lines separating the different regions, and the further apart two regions are, the more likely they would belong to different parties. But that quickly becomes messy when you realize even the reddest states are 25-30% democrat, and rural areas in blue states are almost invariably republican. How do democrats (or republicans) manage such uniformity across the nation, if it is the massiveness that thwarts cohesion? Wouldn't we see states that are 100% D/R up to a rounding error?
I propose that the massiveness is not spatial. It is ideological. Draw a straight dividing line in ideology space, and you can cleanly cleave US society. Project it onto a map, and it looks like a fuzzy boundary between urban and rural. But I think it's clear that the partisanship is generated by ideology and has reflections in geography, rather than the other way around.
So consider federalism that isn't based on states/territories of land, but rather based on ideological space. If we used a Proportional Representation system, I might have some ideological representatives in congress. As it stands, my representatives represent their party and my physical location, but not the thoughts and ideas of voters like me.
The Swiss Confederacy and the US Confederacy are both inspired by and contain patches to the US constitution for overlapping reasons. Pretty much all constitutional democracies over the last 150 years looked at the US Constitution and said “yeah that part doesnt make sense scratch that, patch this, keep the rest”.
The Swiss patched theirs after a comparatively small physical fight for direct democracy at the federal level.
The US contains representative democracy over concerns about the speed of communication over a long distance, even though they were referring to 13 states on the east coast in 1780 (admittedly the western borders of those states were practically infinite), Switzerland is not that large and would fit inside of Pennsylvania so the rationale against direct democracy could not be maintained, but as they learned, representative democracy is too convenient for a central organization to relinquish and direct democracy is a threat to it. The people of Switzerland won though, and good for them.
The federal government in Switzerland does grow, but very slowly and the loose confederation has an understanding that any canton can make a law and it is honored simultaneously by all the other cantons and inherits the brand of Switzerland. It could get complicated with conflicts of law but it doesnt because the reality is not that much happens.
> Pretty much all constitutional democracies over the last 150 years looked at the US Constitution and said “yeah that part doesnt make sense scratch that, patch this, keep the rest”.
Where can I read more about this in short-form (not a college Politics textbook).
hmmm maybe others can chime in but its hard to say, and I don't have a simple answer
but to help maybe you can corroborate the following:
there is an ancestral lineage to the founding documents and frameworks of countries, with branches also connecting and merging
most countries in the form and shape that we know them today have had a major revision in or replacement of their constitution over the last 100 years. so even though people say the US is "young", many old world countries are younger or are operating under a framework which is much younger
when people say the US has been exporting democracy, this would be true. The US has a habit of creating temporary vassal states without really taking any resources or expanding its territorial boundaries, thats kind of new on the world stage, and in parallel the concepts have been inspirational to other states.
and of course its not all related to the US and supernational institutions as it all evolves in parallel, but they do all influence each other.
In another example of strange parallels with the US, the shape of modern Swiss federalism was also decided by a civil war in the mid-19th century.
Like the US civil war, a faction of Southern states broke away to protect regional independence. This was triggered by the election of a pro-centralization party to the federal government. Underneath it was an ambiguity about the full extent of the power granted to the federal government by the Constitution, and whether individual states were free to leave the union.
However very characteristic of the differences between Switzerland and America, only about 100 people died in this war before the matter was settled.
* authority over schools and the school system is almost entirely Kantonal
* tax authority is mostly regulated on a communal and kantonal level. the feds just get sort of a fixed share of what the kanton collects, but it’s itemized separately on each tax bill
* authority over all roads, with some concessions regarding highways
* autonomy over how kantonal subdivisions are organized
* like in the US or Germany, Kantons have their own justices and police departments
while that may all sound kinda time, keep int mind that we have 26 kantons and 8M inhabitants. So, if you compare to the US, it’s probably more like a county than a state, size wise.
I’m mostly kidding, but not entirely. The point is that they work (only?) when there are no cultural/religious/tribal implications and are merely for administrative purposes. It’s really the reason why the borders on the east coast of the USA are so messy compared to those past the Mississippi.
I don't think it is really about straight lines, most borders are probably where they are due to some circumstances involving lots of violence. It's just that straight lines are a modern concept, so the related violence is more present in our minds.
Yea, but just as an example, determining that the Rhine forms the border between Germany and France probably goes back to Roman times, and probably also involved a lot of genocide.
Land doesn't vote - has there ever been a serious attempt to allow political representation by chosen group, no matter where you are? I guess the difficulty would be enforcement of laws - "I'm not bound by those rules, I'm bound by these rules"
I can almost imagine it working with a computer system, but then I think about the problems and weaknesses with the World Wide Web, and I get a little sad.
""I'm not bound by those rules, I'm bound by these rules"
I don't think that makes much sense.
Imagine people coming to your house and declaring you, they are not bound by your home rules, but rather their own rules - so they start a trash party now.
In other words, I think it very much makes sense to bound land and rules. Exception might be nomadic people, like beduins travelling through the desert: when you come to their tents, you are bound by their rules, even though the tents change place.
> Exception might be nomadic people, like beduins travelling through the desert: when you come to their tents, you are bound by their rules, even though the tents change place.
And dispossessed peoples like the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Kurds who live in 3 different countries and are not particularly well liked by any of their 'hosts'; the Uyghurs in China.
But people have to live somewhere, and places have governments, and governments may not like some people.
"But people have to live somewhere, and places have governments, and governments may not like some people. "
Which is a reason I like the idea of federalism with much more power on the base. Basically, small, but connected states, so chances are higher, the local government represents the local people.
Well, I think this so nicely points out the differences between a solution that comes from the top versus one that comes from the bottom.
It could almost even illustrate the pitfalls and hopes of someone architecting without the details, and saying "just make it work!"
When you plan from the top, you leave the details (and pain) to someone else to work out. There are 10,000 little problems that you don't have time to think through and delegate it down to the people day-by-day to figure out how to fit into your symbol of clean order. (and often don't or can't, leading to anger at the top when details don't cooperate)
Versus when people work out their patchwork of little agreements with each other to their temporary satisfaction to get on with life every day, it works but has no coherent direction to it. Like a coral reef figuring out how to grow -- somehow every little piece figured out how to live, but no one exactly told it how to do so.
It is to be marveled at in the rare cases when someone from the top designs something with the reality of the bottoms-up in mind, and can make it work.
99 years of avoiding major power wars from Napoleons defeat to the Kaiser. There were lesser wars to assemble the modern republics from feudal antecedents.
68 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadFor a lively introduction to the failure at Versailles, I can recommend John Maynard Keynes' Notes on the Peace.
Huh, how peaceful.
Tribalism (Nationalism) is the cause or justification for most wars, no? Us against Them. Whether it's Nations or Religions or Races. I think tribalism is so deeply rooted in most of our cultures, that ideas that challenge it are hard to process for most people. I think there's a lot of value in challenging assumptions. This specific proposal has a whole host of problems with it, but there is still merit in the idea of dealing with the cultural forces of nationalism.
No. It may be a banner under which a specific group is united, but it is never a cause.
The urge to take over resources that someone else controls is.
But it doesn't work without being able to convince other people that they'll benefit from joining that cause, based on being members of your group/nation. Those wars are justified typically by generating a shared sense of fear and/or hate for the other side. If people's ties or shared identity to that group were weaker, it would be harder for people to buy into that propaganda.
I find this interesting, because without some unifying forces I don't think our modern society would be able to function well. I'm just not sure Geography and national identity/culture are the best way to unify people. Can't say that I have any better alternatives though, other than thinking that if our personal identities were less tied to our national identity, the world might be a little friendlier place.
For creating a us/them group, any shared/diving trait can be used. It can be tribal, religion, or it can be class (bourgeoisie vs workers), or ahem intersectional.
It is exactly violations of those borders which got us wars in Europe. Sometimes for the sake of colonization, sometimes for the sake of unification, sometimes for the sake of ill-conceived peace, and almost always a bad idea in the end.
I'm not even that much optimistic about the future of the EU, to be honest.
I'm going to guess that might have to do with GP's assumptions…
Yeah this makes sense.
When I need a break from the propaganda I always switch on [streaming service] and watch [latest hip series starring biracial protagonist with quirky LGBTIQ best friend in semi-fictional borderless country].
If you need a break from the propaganda, you can always open [streaming service] and watch [latest hip series starring biracial protagonist with quirky LGBTIQ best friend in semi-fictional borderless country].
The radial "kantons" in the map, for example, have been denoted as having a military presence of various ethnic groups, not just Germanic, and the various ethnic groups maintaining a military presence are all over the place and alternating over each neighbouring sector/"kanton".
I also don't really think a German propaganda map would include things such as present southern Italy being assigned as part of Greece when Greece was actually neutral or Allied during World War 1 (and invaded by Nazi Germany in WW2, in case you'd think the map was from Nazi Germany age.)
Edit: The metadata also says it's from 1920, as the title indicates
Edit 2: Most people outside of the British/US world probably also wouldn't even know it's a particular day there. Have a good one, though.
The radial approach is really an interesting one. Imagine what all the border crossings would look like? All of the villages that would end up split. How would this territory defend itself, with these borders the are irreverent to topography and natural resources? What would the apparatus of state look like?
It probably would cause as many new conflicts as it would solve. But it’s impressive somehow to see such a weird plan so deeply-developed. One can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be immediately shot down before it could be developed, today.
It’s reminiscent of that famous plan suggested by a school teacher, to dam the San Francisco Bay, which was taken seriously enough to be modeled to scale by the military.
For those unaware, I learned of this plan via this short Tom Scott video. Fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i70wkxmumAw (4:33)
Which is not to suggest that pie-shaped political geography is a good idea. But splitting towns is much less of a show-stopper than old-fashioned tribal and religious affiliations.
I don't think it's just the lack of respect for the Good Friday Agreement (I wonder if Raab has read it yet) the unity of the UK as a whole is looking quite strained to me.
[Just my private opinion.]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/24/cross-border-t...
I mean, there are dopey ideas galore, starting with the wedged sectors, and then married women over 20 cannot vote, Sweden took a sizeable chunk of Finland, and Norway got the Kola Peninsula, Finland took East Karelia and then some, Estonia and Latvia are part of Greater Russia, the Hebrew Nation encompasses the area all the way north of Beirut, that massive neutral zone in Sinai, Greece takes south Italy and Sicily, Sardinia belongs to Spain, Serbia and Albania are joined, and so on.
The colonial map (#2104.02) is also something.
It's too bad one cannot simulate this to know if the ideas would actually had had an effect in the upcoming WW II and so on.
However, it sounds like an unenforceable thing. As secret votes have been around since ancient Greece, one could have said "I voted for X" when the real vote went for Y, and no-one would've been any wiser.
I don't know if there was any other period in history than 1920 when this sort of thing could have popped up. It was exactly the period of time when people seemed to have been swept up by all sorts of incredibly idealistic/weird/outrageous/revolutionary/utopian ideas. This is the period when things like Communism, Anarchism, and places like Fordlandia seemed like a good ideas. Also notably League of Nations itself came from that period.
Also I'm not sure how seriously this idea was really entertained even at the time, and how much it was just regular crackpottery that happens to have survived.
IMO this requires a coherent existing local government that is representative of local culture to the point where a majority of its inhabitants at least agrees with how they’re governed. Note that this doesn’t necessarily imply homogenous ethnicity, language or religion (although in Switzerland it did separate into catholic vs. protestant regions). A brain-child like this map could never work in this way. But I have some hope that a Kantonal / confederate system could prevail if there was a collapse in European nation states. Switzerland, if it still exists at that point, could serve as an example that has proven itself stable since 1847. While that doesn’t match the age of the US system, it’s still older than most continuous European republics.
I’m interested in the Swiss system. How much autonomy do the Kantons have?
It's a story of gradual centralization since mid-19th-century at least. It had pretty much only common currency then, but now many more things are common: criminal code, military, national bank, elements of civil law, constitution, organization of highways, the last final judicary instances, personal taxes + VAT + import duties at the federal level, common national security agency, many federal laws, types of immigration permits, laws wrt naturalization (with some regional changes).
It goes only one way, pretty much every federal law leaves some space for cantons and for communes to specify details, but the trend is that this space left for cantons/communes shrinks over time.
E.g. the naturalization law which I'm interested in says on the federal level that applicants should be able to communicate at least at B1 (speaking/listening) / A2 (reading/writing) level of the cantonal official language. Most cantons leave it as is, but some (e.g. canton Thurgau) increased it to B2/B1. My canton (Zurich) leaves only little space for communes to influence the naturalization process (pretty much they can only check whether somebody is integrated, as in if they have Swiss acqauintances and visit local events and know something about the commune). Other cantons can leave communes more flexibility, e.g. to set higher level of language requirements or time someone lived in them.
This is a massive problem for federalism, something that is cherished heavily here in Canada too as our provinces can each be quite different and autonomy is defended quite strongly in debates (at least historically).
But it always seems to continually centralize more and more.
I feel like this is one of the biggest driving forces for partisanship in a massive country like the US. Of course you can’t achieve cohesion across such a massive country. It’s much easier for smaller states.
That’s also why it bothers me when people point to tiny European countries like Scandinavia as examples of how the entire US should be. Nothing scales that easy.
There needs to be some clearly defined things that are federal (natsec that is entirely external, currency, healthcare insurance gov monopoly, trade pacts along logical trade routes - something India is dying for where apparently Trucks transporting goods need to stop at each local powerblock with paperwork/taxes and it’s slows everything to a grind, etc).
You can see the downsides of centralization in things like the drug war clashing with states who want to legalize or decriminalize. Clearly this should be up to the states. And many more things too.
Instead there are countless US federal agencies doing who knows what. I’ve heard some huge numbers.
And the push politically always seems to more and more power not only federally but more dangerously in the executive branch (which we saw a massive rise in during the post 9/11 Bush years and continued in Obama’s term).
We need a rebirth of federalism globally and a push back against everything going federal and centralized. Especially with populations continually growing.
One could hope that the system would tend towards overall liberalism, but IME with the EU it's the opposite.
Over recent years, we have got mandatory registration of SIM cards right as an influential neighbor state did the same (official explanation by our government: because of terrorism threat, which is essentially nonexistent here), EU-wide ban on many useful chemicals which have been used in terror attack mostly in Britain and France, and I'm hearing that the Swiss (a Schengen member) are having their own problems with the EU over firearm regulations, even if they aren't an EU state.
I propose that the massiveness is not spatial. It is ideological. Draw a straight dividing line in ideology space, and you can cleanly cleave US society. Project it onto a map, and it looks like a fuzzy boundary between urban and rural. But I think it's clear that the partisanship is generated by ideology and has reflections in geography, rather than the other way around.
So consider federalism that isn't based on states/territories of land, but rather based on ideological space. If we used a Proportional Representation system, I might have some ideological representatives in congress. As it stands, my representatives represent their party and my physical location, but not the thoughts and ideas of voters like me.
The Swiss patched theirs after a comparatively small physical fight for direct democracy at the federal level.
The US contains representative democracy over concerns about the speed of communication over a long distance, even though they were referring to 13 states on the east coast in 1780 (admittedly the western borders of those states were practically infinite), Switzerland is not that large and would fit inside of Pennsylvania so the rationale against direct democracy could not be maintained, but as they learned, representative democracy is too convenient for a central organization to relinquish and direct democracy is a threat to it. The people of Switzerland won though, and good for them.
The federal government in Switzerland does grow, but very slowly and the loose confederation has an understanding that any canton can make a law and it is honored simultaneously by all the other cantons and inherits the brand of Switzerland. It could get complicated with conflicts of law but it doesnt because the reality is not that much happens.
Feel free to correct anything inaccurate.
Where can I read more about this in short-form (not a college Politics textbook).
but to help maybe you can corroborate the following:
there is an ancestral lineage to the founding documents and frameworks of countries, with branches also connecting and merging
most countries in the form and shape that we know them today have had a major revision in or replacement of their constitution over the last 100 years. so even though people say the US is "young", many old world countries are younger or are operating under a framework which is much younger
when people say the US has been exporting democracy, this would be true. The US has a habit of creating temporary vassal states without really taking any resources or expanding its territorial boundaries, thats kind of new on the world stage, and in parallel the concepts have been inspirational to other states.
and of course its not all related to the US and supernational institutions as it all evolves in parallel, but they do all influence each other.
Like the US civil war, a faction of Southern states broke away to protect regional independence. This was triggered by the election of a pro-centralization party to the federal government. Underneath it was an ambiguity about the full extent of the power granted to the federal government by the Constitution, and whether individual states were free to leave the union.
However very characteristic of the differences between Switzerland and America, only about 100 people died in this war before the matter was settled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War
* authority over schools and the school system is almost entirely Kantonal
* tax authority is mostly regulated on a communal and kantonal level. the feds just get sort of a fixed share of what the kanton collects, but it’s itemized separately on each tax bill
* authority over all roads, with some concessions regarding highways
* autonomy over how kantonal subdivisions are organized
* like in the US or Germany, Kantons have their own justices and police departments
while that may all sound kinda time, keep int mind that we have 26 kantons and 8M inhabitants. So, if you compare to the US, it’s probably more like a county than a state, size wise.
I’m mostly kidding, but not entirely. The point is that they work (only?) when there are no cultural/religious/tribal implications and are merely for administrative purposes. It’s really the reason why the borders on the east coast of the USA are so messy compared to those past the Mississippi.
I can almost imagine it working with a computer system, but then I think about the problems and weaknesses with the World Wide Web, and I get a little sad.
I don't think that makes much sense. Imagine people coming to your house and declaring you, they are not bound by your home rules, but rather their own rules - so they start a trash party now.
In other words, I think it very much makes sense to bound land and rules. Exception might be nomadic people, like beduins travelling through the desert: when you come to their tents, you are bound by their rules, even though the tents change place.
And dispossessed peoples like the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Kurds who live in 3 different countries and are not particularly well liked by any of their 'hosts'; the Uyghurs in China.
But people have to live somewhere, and places have governments, and governments may not like some people.
Which is a reason I like the idea of federalism with much more power on the base. Basically, small, but connected states, so chances are higher, the local government represents the local people.
It could almost even illustrate the pitfalls and hopes of someone architecting without the details, and saying "just make it work!"
When you plan from the top, you leave the details (and pain) to someone else to work out. There are 10,000 little problems that you don't have time to think through and delegate it down to the people day-by-day to figure out how to fit into your symbol of clean order. (and often don't or can't, leading to anger at the top when details don't cooperate)
Versus when people work out their patchwork of little agreements with each other to their temporary satisfaction to get on with life every day, it works but has no coherent direction to it. Like a coral reef figuring out how to grow -- somehow every little piece figured out how to live, but no one exactly told it how to do so.
It is to be marveled at in the rare cases when someone from the top designs something with the reality of the bottoms-up in mind, and can make it work.
When you finish the game and roll the credits it shows a map of europe over most of the last century. The map borders frequently change.
(this is probably why europeans have a good grasp of privacy laws)
EDIT: here are the credits (low res)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eLhDN3qKE0