Most of the feedback to the latest G-File has been very positive. But a sizable number of skeptics have offered arguments along the lines of this reader’s:

As a constant reader of your “stuff”, I found myself waiting for the punchline of “Exporting Switzerland” and being amazed that it never came. I lived in the Middle East for 10 years and just returned here less than 2 years ago. If you honestly think you can compare the disparate groups that eventually became a united Switzerland with anything the Arab, Turkish, or Kurdish empires have produced, you prove yourself to be much more naive than I ever thought.
I am not an Arab or Islam basher but feel I do have a much deeper understanding of how these groups think and function in society. The concept of “armed pacifism” would be laughed out of any tent you chose there. Power, force, and honor are the stock in trade of these cultures and very little else speaks to them.
Alas, I fear we will never see an Iraqi Switzerland – or any other Western model.
Wishful thinking keeps us all going sometimes.
Sincerely,
[Name withheld]

My response: This is certainly a fair point and it’s hardly as if I haven’t made much the same argument about the Middle East many times before. However, I think there’s a bit of revisionism going on. Lots of readers complain that Muslims –Shi’a and Sunni — believe they adhere to the one true faith which would make a diverse tolerant society like Switzerland’s impossible. Maybe so, but the notion that Europe and Christendom didn’t have similar problems — enforced at the sword — is just fantasy. Even adorable Switzerland was a blood mess for centuries.

James Q. Wilson wrote a wonderful essay suggesting that European tolerance was simply the only option available after the bloodshed stopped working. Indeed, the very idea of tolerance as a political doctrine could arguably be the result of the fact that so many Europeans believed they were adherents of the one true faith and were willing to fight and die to uphold it. If it costs more to kill religious minorities than to tolerate them, monarchs learned, toleration became the best option.