US model best for Cyprus, what about the Jim Crow laws?
I’m all for a solution to the Cyprus problem, however the author seems to be omitting a ton of weaknesses with the proposed US constitutional federal legal panacea he is proposing.
One being future potential expediency in regaining or maintenance of power by one political entity or party. The Jim Crow laws that heavily retracted the ability of black populations to play a significant role in shaping the current US political system, were applied by the Nixon administration in the late 1960s, not after the Civil War of the 1860s.
They were policies that enabled Nixon to regain a foothold in southern states after the Republican and Democrat parties faced a paradigm shift in their stance on racial inequality in those aforementioned southern states.
His ‘Southern Strategy’ enabled State Houses throughout the south to apply sometimes draconian racial divides under the ‘every day’ state functions, drivers licensing and land ownership to name but a few key examples.
As a result this enabled further applied divides by local politicians such as Gerrymandering (the geographically sectioned populations that had trends of voting for one party or the other).
The Confederate battle flag (that is literally in the picture at the head of this article) was not the official battle flag of the south. It was the product of revisionist historical and political factionalism that was born out of the ‘Southern Strategy’.
To say that political opportunism will not find a foothold in an ethnically divided country such as Cyprus, especially when such a federalist system has clearly been used to racially divide the world’s current super power seems beyond naïve to me.
Perhaps from a purely legal perspective it is a potentially functioning solution. However from a practical political stand point, the history of the United States has clearly shown that any divide can be used and abused.
By using American Exceptionalism as an example also comes across as incredibly short sighted. Their exceptionalism was born out of their ability to shape world events. A nation that was above and beyond the petty divides that plagued Europe. Not some ethereal idea of a population that wishes to live in peace.
SB