Learning through experience: The limitations of a consociational solution to the Cyprus issue

This thesis explores the notion of consociationalism and also focuses on the reasons why the consociational model failed in Cyprus. The literature on the consociational model is explored. While Arend Lijphart's consociational democracy model offered a comprehensive solution for deeply divided societies, efforts to implement the Lijphart's model with the 1960 Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus and the Annan Plan in 2004 failed to unite the two communities on the island. In this study; in-depth case studies of Austria, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Lebanon are also conducted with a focus on the factors that lead to the failure and success of the consociational model. The study attempts to identify the missing components of the model in the case of Cyprus by comparing the constitutions of the four countries chosen as case studies. The four case studies show that even a well-written constitution can culminate in failure if favourable conditions of consociationalism are not met.