By "the Swiss model" I mean devolving almost all decision-making to as local a level as possible, leaving the central government in charge of very little other than military and foreign policy. This seems to have worked very well in Switzerland, which despite being divided in various ways (French- vs. German-speaking, Catholic vs. Protestant) managed to weather the age of nationalism without much trouble. (I'm not counting the Sonderbund War, since it lasted less than a month and saw fewer than 100 casualties.)
Do people here think that such a system of government would have had similar success with the big empires as well (Austria/Austria-Hungary, Russia, the European colonial empires)? Or would there have been factors preventing it from working on such a large scale?