Are the existence of a prime minister, government and leadership necessary for a nation's efficiency? Are the Swiss deluded in believing that their country can survive with its inchoate constitutional arrangements, the invisibility of its political class and its reliance on law to keep internal peace? Or were British pundits right to be alarmed about the hiatus in government?
According to the World Bank, in 2008 gross domestic product per capita was $64,327 in Switzerland, compared with $44,508 in France, $44,446 in Germany and $43,541 in the UK. On the face of it, Switzerland was not disadvantaged by having a president with little personal power. Indeed, with living standards almost 50 per cent higher than the UK's, its efficiency as a nation seems — if anything — to have been enhanced by the lack of a single "political leader" or "leadership".
The British media's obsession with the individual chosen as prime minister misunderstands the nature of political organisation in pluralistic societies that respect the rule of law. The PM does not control the nation of Britain after the fashion of a plc chief executive, a ship's captain or a headmaster. To use Michael Oakeshott's terminology in his 1975 On Human Conduct, a company, a ship and a school are "enterprise associations", in which "agents are related in the joint pursuit of some imagined or wished-for common satisfaction". By contrast, a nation is better understood as an example of "civil association", the essence of which is the freedom and equality of individuals under the law with no substantive end in view.
Switzerland is fortunate to come closer to the ideal of a civil association than Britain. Even so, Britain, like all nations, is better interpreted constitutionally as a civil association than as an enterprise association. Would the UK's GDP in 2010 have been affected if there had no prime minister for three months, six months or a year? Hardly at all. Most of what happens in liberal law-constrained democracies proceeds regardless of the identity of the political leadership. That is a strength, not a weakness, of societies of this kind.
