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During one of my recent curiosity attacks, I did a search on the Swiss style of government and came across this excellent (to me) article by a Gregory Fossedal who's the former chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville institution. I think he has put forward a very interesting and possibly workable idea: the unique Swiss style of government for Iraq. To us, Switzerland today is the epitome of quality, efficiency and non-controversial (boring in other words) government. But as it seems that only bad news make it to the papers, no news is good news. But prior to the mid 1800s, Switzerland like Iraq today was a country that was divided by religion, language and ethnicity. It wasn't rich, was threatened by various powers and had suffered from dictatorships. When Napoleon occupied the country in 1798, he rammed a modern and democratic constitution down the Swiss throat. It didn't work, and after a few years of unrest, he drafted another constitution. This time with the collaboration of the Swiss themselves and put it to a national vote. Voila! That did the trick. As some of us know, Switzerland is a country composed of French, Italian, German and Romansh speaking cantons that are also divided along protestant-catholic lines, so how did they manage to cobble together a country that is so unified, stable and patriotic now? I think one of the reasons could be their very direct form of democracy. The Swiss are politically informed and involved and vote up to several times a year on federal legislations and just as many times on canton level laws. This makes every citizen virtually a member of the local and federal legislature. Furthermore, their central executive is not vested in a singular Prime Minister or President but in a board of seven members where the chairmanship rotates among each of them yearly. Decentralisation in politics and governance seems to be the key principle here. I admit the above may be a bit simplistic, but the point is that the world doesn't just operate on either the Westminster or Presidential style of government. There are other systems to be considered. Of course some may argue that this would bring more instability to Iraq since the country is not ready for democracy. But don't you think the best way to make a country ready is to have the people practise it themselves? Call me naïve, but I honestly think Gregory's idea for Iraq seems to be the most logical so far. (* Motto of Indonesia in old Javanese, loosely translated as "Unity in
Diversity")
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