Bottom-Up Governance

Lenin in Zurich

I was recently in a café-turned-expensive-restaurant in Zurich poring over the overpriced menu, with prices at least triple of those in a place of equivalent quality in the United States. The world’s recent crisis had made Switzerland even more of a safe haven than it had ever been, causing its currency to rise dramatically—Switzerland is the most antifragile place on the planet; it benefits from shocks that take place in the rest of the world. The friend, a writer, pointed out to me that Lenin, who lived in town, used to play chess in the café with the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. Yes, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, spent some time in Switzerland concocting his project of the great top-down modernist state and largest human experiment in centralized state control. It hit me that there was something eerie in Lenin’s presence there, for, a few days before, I had been at a conference in Montreux, on Lake Geneva, that took place in the same lakefront hotel where Vladimir Nabokov, the émigré Russian aristocrat and victim of Lenin, spent the last couple of decades of his life.

It seemed interesting to me that sheltering the reds and the whites, both the Bolsheviks and the aristocratic White Russians they later displaced, seems to be part of the primary business of the Helvetic Confederation. The main cities such as Zurich, Geneva, or Lausanne bear traces of the political refugees who went there for shelter: émigrés, from the Iranian royals thrown out by the Islamists to the latest African potentate executing “plan B.” Even Voltaire spent some time hiding nearby, in Ferney, on the French side of the border near Geneva. Voltaire, the perfectly protected gadfly, would rush to Ferney after insulting the king of France, the Catholic Church, or some other authority—what people don’t usually know about him is that he also had an incentive to seek protection there for financial reasons. Voltaire was a self-made man, a wealthy merchant, investor, and speculative dealer. He started building his fortune during his early exile—another example, in my view, of benefiting from stressors.

So, like Voltaire, there are refugees of other types: financial refugees coming from places of turmoil, recognizable by their expensive and boring clothes, bland vocabulary, contrived decorum, and expensive (shiny) watches—in other words, non-Voltaires. Like many rich people, they feel entitled to laugh at their own jokes. These (dull) people are not looking for personal shelter: it is their assets that are seeking refuge. While some political persons might prefer to hide from the risks of their national regime in France or England, more exciting places on Saturday night, it is most certainly in Switzerland that their checking account wants to be. It is economically the most robust place on the planet—and has been so for quite a few centuries.

This great variety of people and their wallets are there, in Switzerland, for its shelter, safety, and stability. But all these refugees don’t notice the obvious: the most stable country in the world does not have a government. And it is not stable in spite of not having a government; it is stable because it does not have one. Ask random Swiss citizens to name their president, and count the proportion of people who can do so—they can usually name the presidents of France or the United States but not their own. Its currency works best (at the time of writing it proved to be the safest), yet its central bank is tiny, even relative to its size.

Do these politicians biding their time before (they hope) returning to power notice such absence of government, accept that they are in Switzerland because of such absence of government, and adapt their ideas on nation-states and political systems accordingly? Not at all.

It is not quite true that the Swiss do not have a government. What they do not have is a large central government, or what the common discourse describes as “the” government—what governs them is entirely bottom-up, municipal of sorts, regional entities called cantons, near-sovereign mini-states united in a confederation. There is plenty of volatility, with enmities between residents that stay at the level of fights over water fountains or other such uninspiring debates. This is not necessarily pleasant, since neighbors are transformed into busybodies—this is a dictatorship from the bottom, not from the top, but a dictatorship nevertheless. But this bottom-up form of dictatorship provides protection against the romanticism of utopias, since no big ideas can be generated in such an unintellectual atmosphere—it suffices to spend some time in cafés in the old section of Geneva, particularly on a Sunday afternoon, to understand that the process is highly unintellectual, devoid of any sense of the grandiose, even downright puny (there is a famous quip about how the greatest accomplishment of the Swiss was inventing the cuckoo clock while other nations produced great works—nice story except that the Swiss did not invent the cuckoo clock). But the system produces stability—boring stability—at every possible level.

Also note that the hideously glitzy scenes one encounters in Switzerland, in all of Geneva, in some parts of Zurich (the center), and particularly in the ski resorts such as Gstaadt and San Moritz are not the direct product of the country nor part of its mission, but the result of its success, as Switzerland acts as a magnet for the ugly rich and tax refugees.

What interests me is the authority left to cantons and municipalities, in contrast to the centralized nation-state.