Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

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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.

To be fair you could argue that the US has only been stable since the end of the US Civil War in 1865.

I’m interested in the Swiss system. How much autonomy do the Kantons have?

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.

Feel free to correct anything inaccurate.

> 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.

Look at how many European constitutions were (re)written in 1848. Using that year you should find plenty.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_War

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.

> It goes only one way, pretty much

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.

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.

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.

A fair bit. Some examples:

* 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.

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