by Tim Drayton » Mon Jan 19, 2009 2:55 pm
One thing interests me, Kikapu. You know two federations, the USA and Switzerland, very well. I am curious as to why you have looked to the former, rather than the latter, as your model. The USA, while certainly a successful working federation, is very different from Cyprus. It is the size of Europe and the individual states themselves are the size of European countries. In terms of size, Switzerland comes closer, and its individual cantons are even smaller than the proposed constituent states in Cyprus. The USA is a very multicultural place, but English is the official language and it is assumed that immigrants will melt into the wider American culture - that is the dream, at least. The Swiss constitutional order, on the other hand, manages to balance the interests and aspirations of different ethnic and linguistic groups and fuse them into a single nation. I have known Swiss Germans. They consider themselves to be different from French, Italian or Romansch-speaking Swiss, and are proud of their German cultural identity, but on the other hand most definitely consider themselves to be Swiss and not Germans (or Austrians). Does Switzerland not provide a better model for a place like Cyprus where the two main communities have a dialectical sense identity in which they are torn between the two conflicting poles of different motherlands and a shared Cypriot home?.
A map of the Swiss cantons:
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Suisse_cantons.svg/400px-
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