4 ms·

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

by jagrsw 6y ago

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.

dmix 6y ago
> 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.
- vmception 6y ago
  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.
- tsar_bomba 6y ago
  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.
- xvedejas 6y ago
  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.

by jagrsw 6y ago

dmix 6y ago

> 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.

vmception 6y ago
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.
tsar_bomba 6y ago
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.
xvedejas 6y ago
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.