Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 October 9

= October 9 =

Switzerland = Oligarchy?
The sovereign nation of Switzerland seems to be lead by the Swiss Federal Council. The article on the Council says that leadership rotates among them and that they collectively make up the "head of state" and "head of government". The President of the Swiss Confederation is described as "first among equals". My question is. ..

Would this make Switzerland an Oligarchy? &thinsp;&mdash; Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)&thinsp; 02:03, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I would say no. Generally, oligarchy isn't just about having a leading group, it is also about the degree to which complete governing power is concentrated in that group.  To draw an analogy, just because a country has a strong, single leader doesn't necessarily make that country a dictatorship.  For example, the American President is powerful, but that power is not unlimited.  He has to deal with Congress, an independent judiciary, and ultimately the voters.  Similarly, the Swiss Federal Council has a lot of power over running the government of Switzerland, but they still require the Federal Assembly to pass new laws, and are limited by Switzerland's unusually strong practice of direct democracy via popular initiative.  So, while the head of government in Switzerland is shared by a small council, I don't think their role should be described as rising to the level of an oligarchy because substantial political power is still distributed at other levels.  Dragons flight (talk) 05:59, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Dragons flight seems to explain it well, oligarchy means direct rule by a small aristocracy. Switzerland has none of that.  List of forms of government doesn't seem to have any listed forms that describe Switzerland's executive by a specific term.  If we were to invent one, "executive committee" seems to meet the requirements well, in the British parlance the term "executive commission" maybe reasonable, compare to Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, which is how the former office of Lord High Treasurer is held in modern British convention, not by a single person but in commission.  However, in Switzerland, the Federal Executive is comparitively weak compared to other levels of governance; Switzerland like the U.S. or Canada is a federal republic, however in Switzerland the balance of power is shifted in favor of the Cantons of Switzerland over the Federal Government, and even moreso towards the people.  Switzerland makes extensive use of the referendum for governance.  You can read more at Politics of Switzerland.  If you want the details of the written law itself, Swiss Federal Constitution will start you off.  -- Jayron 32 12:50, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Jayron32, the aristocracy concept typically translates to concentration of power at the hands of a ruling class. Oligarchy translates to "rule of the few", and implies that power is concentrated at the hands of "a small number of people". How these people got to power is not part of the typical definition, though Aristotle (who coined the term) was speaking about the power of the wealthy: 'oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands... wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy'." Dimadick (talk) 19:33, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, and? -- Jayron 32 10:51, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Why are there so many countries now than in the past?
I mean, a long time ago, there were huge empires that spanned across a continent. These empires often were created by fighting and uniting several peoples into one society. And they could claim such a big territory because they had the military power to do so. Now, the world seems so fractured. And somehow a country can exist without a military as long as it makes arrangements with another country to supply a military. Eh? Is this a country or not? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 03:13, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Empires come and go. Look on the internet for the way Europe looked 400 years ago, and you'll see a whole mess of little countries. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:25, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * 50.4.236.254 -- I'm not sure there's any long-term consistent trend. The result of the Napoleonic wars was to reduce the number of autonomous political units in Europe, but increase the number in the Western hemisphere.  The late 19th century and early 20th century had a relatively low number of autonomous political units, but it started increasing with the new nations created after WW1, then the independence of Indonesia, Burma, India, Pakistan, Israel etc. after WW2, general decolonization beginning in the 1950s, and finally the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
 * If you go back more than a few centuries, then there will be many independent tribes who were not part of any centralized national government as we would think of it... AnonMoos (talk) 11:56, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * It's hard to say that is strictly true, depending on how one defines "country" which is not all that simple; the earliest such attempt was defined by Westphalian sovereignty in the 17th century. Indeed, arguably after the Thirty Years War, all of the various component States of the Holy Roman Empire were functionally independent, as the post-Westphalian emperor was reduced to a meaningless title as the individual states essentially managed their own domestic and foreign relations without him.  States with Imperial immediacy in the HRE numbered in the hundreds; and included large important states such as the Kingdom of Bohemia as well as tiny territories like the Principality of Anhalt-Köthen.  It wasn't until the German mediatization of the 19th century that the number of German states was reduced considerably.  Arguably, since these could be considered as independent countries (depending on your definitions), there were many more countries in the 17th century than today.  -- Jayron 32 13:00, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * And Italy was pretty much the same-i.e. divided into a large number of small independent states - until Italian unification in the 1860s. --Xuxl (talk) 02:19, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Some of the OP's confusion may stem from a misunderstanding of what an empire was or is. An empire by definition contains more than one country, nation, or state (note the multiple political meanings), and may contain many (as Jayron points out for the Holy Roman Empire), so comparing numbers former 'empires' to present day 'countries' is misleading. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.217.210.199 (talk) 14:15, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Also important that the modern definition of a country (which in common understanding is synonymous with a sovereign state) is a very modern idea indeed, and that drawing simplistic comparisons to earlier time periods when such a concept doesn't make sense is a foolhardy venture. To put it simply, the very things that go into defining a "country" today were not applicable in earlier time periods or in different parts of the world, and as such, we can't "count" countries like this, since counting "countries" in the 21st century is not the same as doing so in 1400's Europe or 1200's Africa or whatever.  The rather simple way we look at the world as divided up into neat little packages of land with clearly delineated borders that mark the limits of a government's jurisdiction is simply not universal, and is a fairly recent invention.  -- Jayron 32 15:45, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

Our List of states in the Holy Roman Empire is not even certain how many states and subdivisions the Holy Roman Empire actually had. By an estimation, there were 1,800 of them by the end of the 18th century.

By the way, the "long time ago" of the question's premise is a bit misleading. World War I (1914-1918) famously led to the dissolution of four different empires: Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. About a century has passed since their fall. And World War II (1937/1939-1945) led to the dissolution of the Empire of Japan. This empire is still within living memory. Dimadick (talk) 19:57, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * As others have said, empires come and go. At the begining of the 20th Century, there weren't that many countries, because European empires had taken over most of the world (because they had the Maxim gun and their enemies did not, among other reasons).  However, fighting two world wars in succession weakened or destroyed most of those empires, encouraged their subject peoples to demand or fight for independence, while also undermining the moral justifications (or excuses) for empire.  This resulted in lots of new countries forming - see Decolonization for more detail.  Iapetus (talk) 21:01, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Even as recently as 1990, it wasn't really clear how many countries existed in the world. The Soviet Union was, for most purposes, a single centralized country, but some of its constituent republics still sat on the UN independent of the USSR - the Ukrainian SSR and Byelorussian SSR (Belarus) even had their own defense and foreign ministries. Conversely, Czechoslovakia was nominally independent from the USSR, but its attempt to actually assert that independence was brutally crushed. Smurrayinchester 08:24, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

Has a city or town ever turned off it's lights for tourist or cultural reasons?
Lots of these are bright: fireworks, Christmas lights, Diwali, bonfires, Times Square, East Asian lantern festival.. Does the opposite direction exist too? i.e. the few seconds of Easter Vigil before the fire comes in but I am not aware of the electricity being turned off for this in an area wider than a church. Lonely Planet® said Mongolia's capital turns off its streetlights at 3am but that's just to save money. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:45, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Not sure it meets the definition of "tourist or cultural reasons", but Earth Hour may be of relevance? Eliyohub (talk) 07:31, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes, but not quite the way you want. Lights of most public buildings, roads and bridges, and even some ships are turned off in Budapest during the big state-funded fireworks, so that the fireworks look better.  Such fireworks are usually after midnight in New Year's Eve, and the evening of August 20.  – b_jonas 12:48, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Yes. The town of Laon, situated on a strategic hillock on a French plain, planned for thousands of visitors to the Solar eclipse of August 11, 1999. When the atmosphere darkened mid-day and the birds, all perturbed, flew home to roost, a manual over-ride prevented the street lights from turning themselves on, as they would in a dark daytime rainstorm. OR: Probably lots of places do this for any eclipse that's coming their way. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 22:01, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * There are natural darkness preserves in various parts of the world, where lights are deliberately kept dim and rare in order to enhance the visibility of the night sky. Southeastern Quebec, near the border of Maine, where the Mont Mégantic Observatory is located, is one of these, and the fact is used to attract tourists. --Xuxl (talk) 02:24, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * To follow up: the official name is Dark Sky Places. Dark Sky Places are supposed to try to keep dark year-round.  I don't know of any that are temporarily dark for festivals, as the original question posed.  --M @ r ē ino 14:42, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Not the whole town, but Mousehole turns its Christmas lights off each 19th December in memory of the Penlee lifeboat disaster of 1981. —Arwel Parry (talk) 19:12, 10 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Reykjavik turned off its lights for two hours (10pm - midnight) on 28 September 2016, "to allow people to view a spectacular Northern Lights display". ("Iceland turns off street lights in Reykjavik so city can enjoy Northern Lights" The Independent) I couldn't find whether this was the first time and whether it has been or will be repeated. ---Sluzzelin talk  19:41, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

See Mercury-Atlas 6; the residents of Perth, Western Australia turned on their lights to greet the spaceship. I'm not clear if they turned off their lights beforehand (so that turning them on would be particularly spectacular), or if the effect were performed in some other manner. Nyttend (talk) 23:39, 11 October 2017 (UTC)


 * See also Dark-sky preserve - regions that manage artificial lighting in order to attract amateur astronomers. Most are quite remote, but some - such as Uplands Park in Victoria, British Columbia - are very urban. Smurrayinchester 08:18, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

G. K. Chesterton story
Can anyone tell me in which of G. K. Chesterton's stories there is a chacterter who always contrived to bring any conversation round to the subject of the Roman Catholic Church? Thanks.--Shantavira|feed me 08:18, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Here are some observations from Father Brown, who features in his stories: . 82.14.24.95 (talk) 09:07, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks but that doesn't seem to be relevant.--Shantavira|feed me 10:30, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I've only lightly skimmed it, but The Ball and the Cross has two main characters, an atheist and a Catholic, who are both rather obsessive, and apparently could talk the hind leg off a donkey... AnonMoos (talk) 19:52, 9 October 2017 (UTC)