PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE FRANKFURT
Bruno Schoch
Switzerland – A Model for Solving Nationality
Conflicts?
Translation: Margaret Clarke
PRIF-Report No. 54/2000
© Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF)
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Summary
Since the disintegration of the socialist camp and the Soviet Union, which triggered a new
wave of state reorganization, nationalist mobilization, and minority conflict in Europe,
possible alternatives to the homogeneous nation-state have once again become a major
focus of attention for politicians and political scientists. Unquestionably, there are other
instances of the successful "civilization" of linguistic strife and nationality conflicts; but
the Swiss Confederation is rightly seen as an outstanding example of the successful political
integration of differing ethnic affinities. In his oft-quoted address of 1882, "Qu’est-ce
qu’une nation?", Ernest Renan had already cited the confederation as political proof that
the nationality principle was far from being the quasi-natural primal ground of the modern
nation, as a growing number of his contemporaries in Europe were beginning to believe:
"Language", said Renan, "is an invitation to union, not a compulsion to it. Switzerland...
which came into being by the consent of its different parts, has three or four languages.
There is in man something that ranks above language, and that is will."
Whether modern Switzerland is described as a multilingual "nation by will" or a multicultural
polity, the fact is that suggestions about using the Swiss "model" to settle violent
nationality-conflicts have been a recurrent phenomenon since 1848 – most recently, for
example, in the proposals for bringing peace to Cyprus and Bosnia. However, remedies
such as this are flawed by their erroneous belief that the confederate cantons are ethnic
entities. All in all, the interest in "applying" the pattern appears to stand in gross disproportion
to the exiguous knowledge about the political system and history of
Switzerland. But you have to know and understand what you want to apply. That is why I
begin by explaining how and why the political integration of the disparate parts of
Switzerland works. Despite many internal tensions in the age of nationalism and during
the two world wars, linguistic strife and ethnic hatred remained unknown in Switzerland.
This has to do not only with the specific conditions out of which Switzerland developed,
but also with the complex institutional apparatus and political culture of the modern federal
state.
The birth of Swiss quadrilingualism can be dated precisely. It began with the Helvetic
Republic in 1798. The process of state-formation, which began much earlier, has exclusively
German origins. The fact that the confederates launched out over the Gotthard
Pass in the late Middle Ages, and that mighty Bern in particular penetrated deep into
French-speaking territory, in no way contradicts this. These areas were either allies with
lesser rights, or else subject territories – perhaps belonging to a canton, as was the case
with Bernese-ruled Vaud, or being ruled as "joint dominions" by the all the confederates in
rotation, as were Ticino and the Aargau. Only when the French revolutionary troops
marched into the country did the principles of modern democracy triumph over the ancient
republican oligarchies. Switzerland entered an age of political upheavals which was to last
for fifty years, ending only with the adoption of the modern-day constitution in 1848. One
peculiarity of Swiss development is that the revolutionary principles of popular sovereignty
and political equality did not have to battle it out with divine right or the institution
of bondage. As a result, they were able in many respects to link back into the traditions of
the old confederation and republics, ignoring the patrician overlords of the ancien régime.
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III
Apart from the tussles over political equality and universal (male) suffrage, the prime aims
of the decades of contention between the forces of revolution and the forces of Restoration
in Switzerland were the emancipation of the allies and subject territories and their promotion
to the status of sovereign and equal cantons, and the creation of a centralized
executive.
The true act of constitution of the modern, multilingual nation came in the early stages of
the half home-grown, half imposed revolution: the élites in the French- and Italianspeaking
areas opposed annexation to, respectively, the French and Cisalpine republics and
determined to stay within the confederation. Specifically, Ticino and Valais decided
against the nationality principle and in favour of Switzerland. They reckoned that, as sovereign
and equal cantons, they would enjoy a greater measure of political participation than
they would as outlying districts of homogeneous, hypercentralistic nation-states. Democratic
self-government was still distinct from the narrow ethnically based right to selfdetermination
that emerged later on.
In the Sonderbund war of 1847, the radical and liberal cantons, having triumphed over the
traditional-cum-Catholic forces who sought to hold on to their old particularist sovereignties
and privileges and opposed any kind of standardization, went on to found the
modern federal state. This anticipated developments in Europe’s Year of Revolutions:
with the creation of its federal state in 1848, Switzerland, as is well known, won itself a
place in the vanguard of the democratic advance in Europe. The equal status of French and
Italian as national languages has been constitutionally recognized since that date.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the ethnically diverse composition of Switzerland
played a remarkably minor political role. It was only after the formation of the Italian and
German nation-states that multilingualism began to be depicted as an intrinsic and almost
sacred attribute. As a counter to the power of ethno-nationalism, which was then mushrooming
all over Europe, attempts began to be made to portray the political "nation by
will", transcending language and nationality, as an antithesis, or even to recast the lack of
an "objective nation" as a virtue, as a specifically European, civilizatory "mission" entrusted
to Switzerland.
What has probably always been the most problematic of Switzerland’s linguistic-cumethnic
differences – the contrast between the Alemannic majority and French minority –
has, naturally, always come under the greatest strain when Germany and France have gone
to war with one another. For, though it may be natural for most Swiss to understand
nationality simply to mean their shared citizenship, it is equally natural for the French
Swiss to look culturally and intellectually to Paris, and for the German Swiss to look to
Germany – though this link has always had many more facets to it, and has always been
more tense, particularly in this century. Whereas the Franco-Prussian War produced only
rudimentary antagonisms in Switzerland – ultimately assuaged by pan-Swiss irritation at
the triumphalist German Reich – the four-year struggle between Germany and France after
1914 tore open the "rift" between French-speaking Switzerland and German-speaking
Switzerland to a perilous degree, at least within the political and military élite. According
to many historians, the internal split during the First World War, when the military threat
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to Switzerland was not so great, was immeasurably more dangerous than in the Second,
which posed the greatest-ever military threat to its existence.
In 1938, under the banner of the so-called "intellectual defence of the country", RaetoRomansch,
then still not a standardized language, was solemnly elevated to the status of
fourth national language, as a deliberate attempt to distance Switzerland from ethnicist and
nationalist currents. Since Raeto-Romansch is spoken only in Graubünden, and is one of
three languages used there, the number of official languages at federal level was left at
three, for practical reasons.
However important the equality of all four languages in Switzerland is, the answer to the
puzzle does not lie – as is often claimed in the specialist literature on nationality and
minority conflicts – in the relationship between the country’s different ethno-national parts.
There is no mention in the constitution either of the latter’s autonomy or of any guarantees
or safeguards for minorities. If, as is often claimed in Swiss self-portrayals, special
provisions are unnecessary because the language and minority issues were settled before
ever they could become a problem, this points to the real key to an understanding of
Switzerland: the cantons. From the time they came into being out of the federative
association of independent cities and mountain cantons, the 23 sovereign cantons (26 if one
counts the six half-cantons separately) have retained what is, in comparison with almost all
other federalistic state-structures, an extremely high degree of sovereignty and independence
as constituent states. And it is to them that political identification has primarily
continued to relate right up to the present. Cantonal particularisms and identities are, at all
events, more decisive than ethnic affiliation. This applies generally to the whole of
Switzerland, but is particularly important in the six French-speaking cantons and the multilingual
cantons.
The proverbial exception that makes the rule is the Jura. Here, the desire for a separate
canton fell back on the usual strategies of ethno-national mobilization. An immensely
complicated procedure, involving a veritable cascade of plebiscites at various levels, was
needed before an independent canton of Jura was finally created, in 1979.
The relationship between the German Swiss majority and the French- and Italian-speaking
minorities is not without its tensions and sensitivities. Because the decline of RaetoRomansch
has accelerated dramatically over the last few decades, the federation was called
upon to introduce language-related measures to help preserve Swiss quadrilingualism. In
the 1980s, the attempt to revise the so-called language clause in the federal constitution
provoked a wide-ranging debate about current language-problems in Switzerland. These
were examined from every angle by a committee of experts. It concluded that RaetoRomansch
was in its death-throes and that even the Italian language was not beyond
danger. In addition, the experts claimed that the rapid advance of English and also the
Mundartwelle – the penetration of the media, and to some extent also the domain of the
written word, by Swiss German dialect – marked a trend that put the Swiss national
identity in jeopardy: four-language Switzerland was in danger of becoming two-and-a-halflanguage
Switzerland. This may have meant the reduction of Italian to internal use,
alongside German and French, or the prospect of English becoming the language of
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communication between Swiss people of differing language-groups who had only
rudimentary knowledge of another national language besides their own.
However, the extensive debates and parliamentary deliberations about the language clause
then revealed how complex and fraught with contradiction was the task of balancing
differing – indeed, opposing – principles for preserving linguistic harmony in Switzerland.
Anyone who is familiar with this great national challenge – which is far from being finally
resolved – will take care not to go around hawking multilingual Switzerland as a readymade
blueprint for solving nationality conflicts. The revised language clause, which was
eventually adopted in a referendum in 1996, leaves almost everything as it was.
Since it is impossible to ignore the way in which Switzerland came into being, or its
democratic institutions, or its political culture, geared to compromise and balance, any
attempt to distil a few "inexpensive" remedies from it, for use on differently configured
situations, is precluded. To this extent, the question in my title must be answered in the
negative. None the less, study of Switzerland, and a knowledge of the country, will
provide some helpful stimuli and pointers for the international debate about nationalism.
The most important of these are probably the following:
– Where religious, territorial-cum-cantonal, and ethnic affiliations are not congruent, but
cut across each other in multiple ways, the ethnic majority–minority dividing-line is
broken; this puts almost every grouping (depending on the constellation) in a minority
in the political decision-making process; it creates pressure to enter into comparatively
flexible compromises and coalitions and arouses the expectation that the majority –
which the party concerned may well form part of on the next occasion – will take
political account of others.
– A comparatively well-developed form of federalism, which guarantees a high degree
of individual self-government and democratic participation, can weaken the pull of the
nationality-principle, especially when the neighbouring nation-states are extremely
centralistically structured.
– Combined with extensive power-sharing, the very marked ideological handing-down
of historical particularisms and heterogeneous peculiarities within the framework of
the whole helps prevent democracy from being reduced to the majority principle, and
the majority culture from being asserted to the detriment of the others. Switzerland
has developed numerous forms of over-representation and active economic and
cultural support for minorities as a way of ensuring their integration.
– Switzerland’s concordance-based democracy differs not just from the Westminster
model of parliamentary rule, but from many others too, by virtue of its extensive and
much-used instruments of direct democracy. The way in which the federal state came
into being, the federalist institutions, and the constraints of concordance democracy
have generated a political culture which, on every issue, aims at power-sharing. This
is articulated not only in the territorial, religious, and ethnic differences; it also shows
in the balance of power between cantons, federation, government, and people, which is
geared to compromise and coalition, and in social bargaining – as witnessed in the
collective labour-agreements in the metal-working and watch-making industries.
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– The territoriality principle, which defines the limits of linguistic freedom in
Switzerland, has been one of the major methods by which linguistic harmony has been
preserved. But it is no cure-all – as the debate about the revision of the language
clause in the constitution revealed. Where the survival of minorities is under threat,
the territoriality principle has to be applied in a flexible way.
– Last but not least, the cultivation of historically generated cantonal particularisms in
the face of national trends towards standardization compelled the Swiss very early on
to seek compromises and maintain a liberal and tolerant stance. One dimension of this
is the recurrent and challenging experience, known to every Swiss child, of realizing
that there are people who, though linguistically different, are unquestionably also part
of its own world, and must therefore be respected.
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3
Contents
Preface 4
Introduction 3
1. Multinational State or Multilingual Nation? More Than
Just A Question of Terminology 8
2. Multilingual Switzerland Today 11
3. How Quadrilingualism Came about 18
3.1 German Origins 18
3.2 Political Beginnings: 1798 22
3.3 From the Restoration to the Modern Federal Constitution 25
3.4 Factors in National Integration 31
3.5 The Promotion of Quadrilingualism to Intrinsic National Characteristic 35
4. Switzerland Is Founded on Sovereign Cantons, not on Nationalities 40
4.1 "Peoples and Sovereign Cantons" 40
4.2 Multifarious Romandie 43
4.3 The Multilingual Cantons 45
4.4 The Canton of the Jura: A Difficult Birth 50
5. The Laborious Revision of the "Language Clause" 54
5.1 Linguistic Freedom versus the Territoriality Principle 54
5.2 Confederation Help for Raeto-Romansch and Italian 60
6. Not a Model, but a Useful Object of Study 60
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"The Swiss example shows that it is possible for language groups and
religious groups to grow together into one nation, without destroying the
individual culture of any. It is not possible for other peoples to adopt,
ready-made, either the geographical situation or the historical experience
of the Swiss; but other nations, both new and old, can learn from them."
Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), 7.
Preface
The idea that Switzerland is a political entity in a class of its own, unique and
incomparable – the Sonderfall Schweiz ("special Swiss case"), as it is indeed called – has
become a cherished motif of the country’s self-image, often coupled with arrogance.
Distaste for this kind of "self-adulation"1
probably means there are few critical Swiss who
would not involuntarily shy away from extolling their country as a model. By contrast, for
a Swiss person who has been living and working in Germany for many years, the
enterprise is an enticing one. As soon as the talk turns to nation, nationality, and language,
the Swiss person always notices contrary reflexes at work: in Germany, ethnic difference is
almost unconsciously assumed to be a cause of conflicts and potentially violent escalation;
the no less pre-conscious reflex of the Swiss person is to ask, along precisely the opposite
lines: Why should people of differing ethnic affiliation not all live together in a single
state?
This report, then, has been written from a distance. It is said that the view from outside
sharpens up a person’s thinking on his or her origins. But we also know that with distance
comes the danger of seeing one’s native country in a rosy light. Whether or not I have
managed to avoid this pitfall must be left to others to judge.
I should like to thank my colleagues at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt for their
meticulous review of my first draft. Their forbearance had been severely tested by the time
the report was finally complete. Individual thanks are due to Sabine Fischer, Rexane
Dehdashti, Peter Schlotter, Stephan Nitz, Bernhard Moltmann, and Hans-Joachim Spanger
for their criticisms, dauntless questioning, and suggestions for change.
1 Fritz René Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (Munich: Piper, 1965), p. 579. For an incisive account, see
also Peter Bichsel, Des Schweizers Schweiz (Zurich: Arche, 1969).
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3
Introduction
If one is going to ask whether Switzerland makes a good model as a country, some sort of
critical explanation is in order, because at first sight the question is bound to come as a
surprise, or even to appear as a piece of unwitting sarcasm. Switzerland is, after all, under
fire at present – and from a number of quarters.
As far back as 1991, the official attempts, made as part of the foundation celebrations, to
foster the stereotype of the well-ordered model-state had repeatedly elicited blunt
disapproval and rejection. It was not just that these attempts fastened on to the flimsy
legend of continuity according to which Switzerland was founded on the Rütli Mountain
some 700 years ago. It was more that the confidence of the Swiss in their body politic had
been shaken by a series of political scandals. At just the time that bloc confrontation was
coming to an end, it emerged that, in the shadow of this confrontation, democratic
Switzerland had violated the principles of the rule of law to an extent that defied the
imagination. The sequence of events opened with a blunder by the first woman to occupy
a seat on the Federal Council (Bundesrat – the Swiss government): Elisabeth Kopp was
forced to resign because she had warned her husband that one of his foreign-currency firms
was to be investigated for money-laundering. The parliamentary commission of inquiry
then unexpectedly stumbled upon information of a quite different kind. In its report in
November 1989 it exposed the so-called Fiche affair: for years, federal police snoopers had
secretly spied on about 900,000 individuals and organizations – out of a total population of
something over 7 million – and had painstakingly recorded their details on index-cards
(called Fichen in Switzerland) stored in the inmost recesses of federal police headquarters.
Shortly after this, the cover was blown on a sort of underground army, which for years had
operated outside any kind of parliamentary control, but with the knowledge and financial
assistance of the top military brass, making preparations for political eventualities.
All this fuelled a lasting mistrust on the part of the Swiss in regard to their political leaders.
However, the roots of the crisis of legitimation go deeper than this. In the shadow of bloc
confrontation, Switzerland had closed its eyes to far-reaching changes in its international
environment; but the international upheavals caused by the momentous events of 1989–90
have also struck at the pillars that support the traditional Swiss self-image. What was
previously beyond question has now lost its self-evidence. What point is there, for
example, in neutrality? And why does this small state still need an expensive 400,000strong
militia-army? The Austrian accession to the EU in 1995 means that all Switzerland’s
neighbours are now members of the union. On top of this comes the troubling
question of whether Switzerland can continue to remain aloof from the process of union in
Europe. Whereas business has been flexible enough to adapt to the rapidly changing
environment, political Switzerland has rolled itself into a ball with its past successes and
the Sonderfall myth for comfort. But what may have worked, after a fashion, in the
shadow of the seemingly adamantine East–West conflict fell to pieces once this came to an
end. What had been pushed out of mind now returned; the old certainties crumbled and
gave way to self-doubt. In a referendum held on 6 December 1992, the unnerved country’s
fears about the future were made manifest when entry to the European single market – a
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sort of red carpet rolled out by the EU for the remaining members of a crumbling EFTA
who were hesitating over entry – was rejected.
Since that black Sunday, the uncertainty has become even greater. The controversies that
have arisen about the lucrative involvement of the Swiss banks in the looted Nazi gold and
about their silence on unnamed runaway accounts make it clear that we now have to talk in
terms of a full-blown identity-crisis for Switzerland. The broad mass of the Swiss public
had repressed the darker side of the price which Switzerland had paid for coming through
unscathed, all too eagerly accepting the myth of effective military deterrence as the whole
truth. This goes some way to explaining Switzerland’s inability to respond rationally to
the charges made against it; but there is more to it than this, as the editor-in-chief of the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung notes: "It is because the country as a whole is uncertain of its path
into the political future that the questions about Switzerland’s role in the Second World
War touch us so deeply. This is one of the main reasons the debate about our past has got
large sections of the public so agitated."2
Against this background, any kind of self-satisfied flirtation with the idea of Switzerland as
a paradigm is ruled out. Attempts by the Swiss to project their political system as the
object of some kind of moral mission, or to present the alleged "special case" as an
international model, have, in any case, frequently drawn criticism. In his late novel Martin
Salander, Gottfried Keller – probably the most Swiss of all the great Swiss writers – had
already issued a riposte to national arrogance and Helvetian narrow-mindedness in the
comment "C’est chez nous comme partout" – a resigned inversion of his radical credo of
1848, which claimed it would one day be possible to say "C’est partout comme chez
nous."3
This criticism targets an image of Switzerland, common both at home and abroad,
as a "blessed nation".4
Only a few months after the outbreak of the First World War, the
writer and Nobel prizewinner Carl Spitteler counselled humility:
"These patriotic fantasies about Switzerland having a mission to serve as a
model (or an arbiter) – let us tone them down. Before we can serve as a
model for other nations, we have to make an exemplary job of our own
affairs. As I see it, we did not exactly pass the latest test of unity with flying
colours."5
The common talk about Switzerland as a model has a number of very different conno-
tations.6
First, there is the landscape phenomenon. Whenever anyone wants to describe a
2 Hugo Büttler, 'Verunsicherung und politische Führungsschwäche. Zur gegenwärtigen Lage der
Schweiz', Neue Zürcher Zeitung [NZZ], 14–15 June 1997.
3 Adolf Muschg is always quoting this – e.g. in his collection of essays Die Schweiz am Ende. Am Ende
die Schweiz. Erinnerungen an mein Land vor 1991 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 179.
4 As in the revealing title of a book by Denis de Rougemont, La Suisse ou l’histoire d’un peuple
heureux (Paris: Hachette, 1965).
5 Carl Spitteler, Unser Schweizer Standpunkt (Zurich: von Rasher, 1915), pp. 22 ff.
6 An extensive selection of these has been assembled by Helmut Goetz: Der Schweizer Bundesstaat als
Vorbild für Europa und die Welt? Eine historisch-politische Betrachtung zum Friedensproblem
(Frankfurt/M.: Haag und Herchen, 1996).
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landscape – not completely flat and if possible with lakes – as particularly impressive, no
matter where in the world it happens to be, the Swiss topos immediately suggests itself.
We have all come across them – the so-called Franconian, or Saxon, or even Chinese
Switzerland. Next to the Bundeshaus in Bern, the seat of the confederate parliament, an
artist has created an arrangement that neatly records all these metaphorical Switzerlands.
There are said to be over 150 of them. Little Switzerland finds this flattering.
Curiously intertwined with this mythologization and romanticization of the landscape is
the topos of the political model. Here again, the ways in which this has been interpreted in
the recent history of political ideas have varied greatly. In the travel literature that was so
popular during the eighteenth century, the experience of the Alps – newly discovered by
the Enlightenment, and the object of hymns of praise from every quarter – was merged
with the romanticizing projection of an unbowed and blithe-spirited mountain people. The
herdsman, Alp-dweller, or simple farmer was, as it were, transfigured into the inherently
good ideal human being of the Enlightenment, a blank sheet on which to project love of
freedom, the work ethic, utopian existence, and ancient Roman virtues.7
This combination
of a mythologized Alpine world and projections of plain and virtuous living is tangible not
only in Schiller’s William Tell, but also – as every child will tell you – in the accounts of
the homesickness of Johanna Spyri’s famous children’s-book heroine, Heidi, during her
stay in Frankfurt.
All this has something to do with the fact that Switzerland falls outside the bounds of the
familiar in recent European history. For one thing, in the midst of a Europe of grand
monarchies and extravagant royal courts, the tiny Landsgemeindekantone (cantons with
their own popular assemblies) and city-republics seemed to come closest to the ideal of the
polis of ancient times. In this sense, for many followers of the Enlightenment they became
the embodiment of buon governo. Secondly, the republics and the confederation, and later
also the forms of direct democracy at commune, canton, and confederation level,
predestined Switzerland to become a yardstick for republicans, democrats, and federalists –
and occasionally still for grassroots movements. Thirdly, the process by which pre-modern
Switzerland emerged as a federal state figures as a model in those tracts – from the
writings of Abbé de Saint-Pierre to those of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi8
– which
propose that the way to safeguard peace is through a grand league of nations. The
American political scientist John Lukacs advised Europeans to gear themselves not so
much to American developments, but more to the historical experience of the Swiss.9
The
7 On this, see Ulrich Im Hof, Mythos Schweiz. Identität – Nation – Geschichte 1291–1991 (Zurich:
Verlag NZZ, 1991), pp. 106–11. On the Appenzell 'Suisse en miniature', see Peter Faessler, 'Die
Zürcher in Arkadien. Der Kreis um J. J. Bodmer und der Appenzeller Laurenz Zellweger', in
Appenzellische Jahrbücher 1979, pp. 3–49; also id., Bodensee und Alpen. Die Entdeckung einer
Landschaft in der Literatur (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1985).
8 See Abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre, Der Traktat vom ewigen Frieden (Berlin: Reimar, 1922), p. 5 and
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Vom Ewigen Krieg zum Großen Frieden (Göttingen/Berlin/Frankfurt:
Musterschmidt, 1956), p. 133; also Goetz: Der Schweizer Bundesstaat als Vorbild (fn. 6 above).
9 John Lukacs, 'Die Schweiz als Vorbild. Europasymbol und Europagedanke', Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung [FAZ], 15 Dec. 1990. In his 1993 book The Wrath of Nations, Lukacs argues in similar
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editor-in-chief of the journal Kommune also sees Switzerland as a "model" for the EU, and
sees "a kind of Swissification of Europe" as a "hopeful path" – meaning an alternative to
the classic nation-state.10
Fourthly, critics of permanent and professional armies have
pointed eagerly to the Swiss militia. Even Machiavelli had enthused about it as the
cornerstone of true patriotism. Fifthly, since the Second World War, Switzerland has been
seen as an embodiment of political stability and prosperity – for example when there has,
at least temporarily, been talk of Cameroon as the "Switzerland of Africa", or of Uruguay
as the "Switzerland of South America", or of Lebanon as the "Switzerland of the Middle
East". Sixthly, critics of nation-state power-politics are not infrequently attracted by Swiss
neutrality. And last but not least (my seventh point): in the age of triumphant nationalism,
multilingual Switzerland has appeared – depending on one’s political point of view – either
as a medieval curiosity projected into the modern age, or as a pioneering example of how
nationality conflicts and linguistic quarrels can be settled.
Only this last area concerns us here. With the reconfiguration of nation-states that has
accompanied the end of international bipolarism, reflection on alternatives to the ethnically
homogeneous nation-state have acquired renewed relevance. The current interest in the
Swiss constitution of 1848, which formally gave equal status to several national languages,
and in the fact that Switzerland was spared the linguistic and ethnic conflicts that were so
widespread in the nineteenth century, marks a renewed focus on distinctive features of the
Swiss Willensnation ("nation by will") that had already attracted attention and interest on
several occasions in the past. These features had, for example, figured in a series of
proposals, put forward after the Völkerfrühling (the "peoples’ spring" – the revolutionary
upheavals of 1848) as to how to deal with the nationality question in the Austro-Hungarian
empire; they had surfaced during the First World War; reference was made to them in the
arduous reconfiguration of the European order in the Versailles treaties; and, lastly, they
had played a part in the efforts to ensure adequate minority-protection in the ethnically farfrom-homogeneous
nation-states that arose out of the ruins of the great pre- or supranational
empires in east-central and south-eastern Europe. To quote a specific example:
the act establishing Czechoslovakia, and the way in which its borders were drawn, were
influenced in no small measure by the promise of the Czech delegation to Paris in 1919
that the minorities would be guaranteed equal rights and full protection, on the Swiss
model.11
Since then, the promising idea of settling nationality conflicts by adopting the
Swiss model has been advanced time and again – most recently in relation to the Cyprus
question and to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In 1958, the historian Theodor Schieder – a highly influential force in German research
into nationalism – wrote an essay entitled "Die Schweiz als Modell der Nationalifashion
for a democratic Europe that could play the same kind of role on the word stage as
Switzerland played in historical Europe.
10 Joscha Schmierer, Die neue Alte Welt oder wo Europas Mitte liegt (Klagenfurt-Salzburg: Wieser,
1993), p. 39; also id., Mein Name sei Europa (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1996), p. 51.
11 Erwin Viefhaus, Die Minderheitenfrage und die Entstehung der Minderheitenschutzverträge auf der
Pariser-Friedenskonferenz 1919. Eine Studie zur Geshichte des Nationalitätenproblems im 19. und
20. Jh. (Diss. Köln, Marburger Ostforschungen, 11; Würzburg, 1960), p. 51.
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tätenpolitik" ("Switzerland as a Model for Nationality Policy").12
This idea was taken up
again by the constitutional lawyer Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde in 1991: Switzerland, he
said, had succeeded in getting several cultural nations, each with their own ethnic-cumcultural
identity, to live together in a single state set-up. In doing this, he said, it had
performed "a unique cultural feat"; it had created a model not only for the many peoples of
Europe who were having to reinvent their political systems, but also a "model and
example" for Europe itself, and its process of integration. For it was only by "following
the [Swiss] cue that Europe…could prevent itself from once again slipping into – and
possibly being destroyed by – the sorts of conflicts and hostilities between nationalities
that had characterized the nineteenth century".13
This grand claim will here be subjected to critical scrutiny. Many of the misunderstandings
in this area – for example, the notion that the Swiss cantons are ethnic entities –
are due to a lack of factual knowledge. It therefore seems indispensable that we should
begin with the "proper explanation and elucidation"14
of multilingual Switzerland, of the
specific way in which it came into existence, and of the concrete conditions and factors
that have governed its operation since then.
Against this background, I shall then critically examine the question of Switzerland’s
potential as a model for the settlement of nationality conflicts. Anticipating the findings, I
can say: Switzerland as a multilingual nation owes much too much to its historical
development and political culture for it to be "applied" ready-made and without more ado
to other constellations. The most one can do is to highlight, with all due caution, one or
two aspects that may be useful in processes of supranational integration or in the resolution
of minority problems.
12 Also pub. in Otto Dann and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (eds.), Nationalismus und Nationalstaat. Studien zum
nationalen Problem im modernen Europe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991), pp. 303–
28.
13 Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenforde, 'Die Schweiz – Vorbild für Europa?', NZZ, 13 Dec. 1991.
14 Ibid.
8
1. Multinational State or Multilingual Nation? More Than Just A Question of
Terminology
According not only to a large section of the media but also to many social and political
scientists, the 1990s mark our entry into an age of ethnic conflicts. Whereas previously the
kaleidoscope of political conflicts was perceived and interpreted almost exclusively
through the bipolar prism of East–West dissension, nowadays it is ethnic affinity and
identity – in short, ethnicity – that appears at every turn as the new paradigm for
interpreting conflicts and wars. In a burgeoning literature on ethno-nationalism, writers
evoke the "ubiquity of ethnic conflicts" or the "global political power of ethnic consciousness
and conflict".15
And yet a degree of circumspection would seem to be in order in regard to "ethnicity" and
its sudden elevation to the status of conflict paradigm of the nineties. It is far from certain
that reality itself has changed – rather than just the perception of it. Linguistic strife and
nationality conflicts are anything but new in twentieth-century Europe. What is more, on
closer inspection, "ethno-nationalism as a global phenomenon"16
can be seen to embrace a
host of different situations and conflict constellations. More grave than this, however, is
the fact that it often carries with it the insinuation that variety in ethnic affinity necessary
generates conflicts and violence. But such a claim obscures many an aspect of these
conflicts. What nationalist agitators and players deem to be the cause of their hatred must
not be taken at face value; it has to be explained in the context of social changes and
distortions. Where political ethnicization of social reality produces an erroneous
appearance of naturalness, it is the task of critical scholarship to decode this. This is a
must for any intellectual enquiry that is not content simply to describe ethno-national
conflicts, but also seeks to understand their causes.
The now popular category of "ethnic identity" – a very vague entity – does not provide this
kind of elucidation. It does not even enquire about the reasons for the recent virulence of
ethno-nationalism. Although ethnicity and nationality are now only rarely defined in terms
of primordial characteristics, "ethnic affiliation" as a "basic human need" not infrequently
has what amounts to the status of a natural right conferred upon it;17
or again, "ethnic
identity", as opposed to tangible material interests, is credited with the inherent potential to
"confer meaning" on a collectivity.18
But in adopting such an approach, one runs the risk
of endorsing "ethnic identity’s" stylization of itself as an existential, non-negotiable
category. Hence, practical considerations also dictate that ethnicity and nationality should
15 John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary (eds.), The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation. Case Studies
of Protracted Ethnic Conflicts (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 2 ff.
16 Christian Scherrer, Ethnonationalismus als globales Phänomen. Zur Krise der Staaten in der Dritten
Welt and der früheren UdSSR (Institut für Entwicklung und Frieden der Universität-GH-Duisburg zur
wissenschaftlichen Begleitung der Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden: INEF-Report 6; 1994).
17 By Norbert Ropers and Peter Schlotter, for example, picking up on John Burton: Die KSZE.
Multilaterales Konfliktmanagement im weltpolitischen Umbruch. Zukunftsperspektiven und neue
Impulse für regionale Friedensstrategien (HSFK-Report, 11–12; 1992), p. 38.
18 e.g. by Dieter Senghaas: Friedensprojekt Europa (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 117–21.
9
9
not be viewed as constants, but should instead be examined from the point of view of what
has, historically, been their manifestly mutable status. However ahistorical an image they
project of themselves, their virulence is none the less the result of specific social and
political constellations.
For a long time – particularly in Germany and eastern Europe – "nation" and "nationality"
were viewed as classificatory entities that could be defined in terms of objective
characteristics. More recent research into nationalism rejects these kinds of classifications.
It is broadly agreed that nations are not objective, natural entities, and that – contrary to
their claims of a continuity stretching far back into history – they are social and intellectual
constructs that first came into being on the threshold of the nineteenth century. The
modern nation is not a pre-political entity as suggested by the Romantic notion of
folkhood; it is a modern artefact generated by collective self-interpretation. It is an opined
or "cognized order",19
or, as aptly expressed by Benedict Anderson, an "imagined political
community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign".20
Now, the construction of nation can occur in two distinct ways. Ernest Renan’s oft-quoted
classic definition of the nation as "un plébiscite de tous les jours" – a daily expression of
popular will21
– is the most succinct formulation of the classic Western understanding of
the nation, as it developed historically in the bourgeois revolutions in Britain, Holland, the
USA, France, and also Switzerland. "Nation" here means a politically constituted people
of free and equal citizens who participate in the political institutions, demonstrate their
allegiance to them by an act of will, and assume responsibility for them. The gap between
this and Herder’s notion of a people – an organic commonalty based on an entity rooted in
distant origins – marks a crucial difference, the difference between demos and ethnos. It is
mirrored in the distinction between Staatsnation and Kulturnation ("political nation" and
"cultural nation"). It recurs as an ideal-typical contrast throughout the literature on
nationalism, in various terminological permutations: on the one hand, we have a Western
subjective or political concept of nation, tied to the sovereignty of the people as a
politically constituted entity; on the other hand, there is an understanding of nation that
became popular in central and eastern Europe and was actually a constitutive element of
the "age of nationalism" – this is the objective or ethnic nation, defined by factors such as
19 Emerich Francis, Ethnos und Demos. Soziologische Beiträge zur Volkstheorie (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 1965). The author takes up Max Weber’s idea of nations as 'cognized communities' (p. 50).
20 Benedict Anderson, Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines erfolgreichen Konzepts
(Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1988), p. 15.
21 Ernest Renan, 'Qu’est-ce qu-une nation?', in id., Œ uvres complètes, (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), i.
p. 904. Since this remark has now degenerated into a bit of a greetings-card jingle, whilst the
substance of Renan’s essay is mostly ignored, I cite the passage in full: 'A nation is thus a grand
affirmation of solidarity, based on a sense of the sacrifices one has made and those one is prepared to
make in the future. It presupposes a past; but it is encapsulated in a tangible fact in the present: the
consent, the expressly declared will to continue to live together. The existence of a nation is (if you
will allow the metaphor) a daily expression of popular will, just as the existence of the individual is a
constant affirmation of life.'
10
origin, language, culture, race, or – simply – ethnicity.22
M. Rainer Lepsius summed up
the distinction in his contrast between Staatsbürgernation and Volksnation ("citizen
nation" and "ethnic nation").23
Switzerland is a Staatsbürgernation par excellence. During the second half of the
eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, in its specific permutation of Helveticism – as
inspired by the Helvetic Society, founded in 1761, in the wake of the three-hundredthanniversary
celebrations of the University of Basel – aimed to emancipate the individual at
the same time as awakening a patriotic public spirit. This latter sought to overcome both
the traditional privileges and the ancient confederate particularisms. The Italian historian
Federico Chabod saw in this the origins of the modern nation as such.24
Be that as it may,
what was ultimately decisive for modern-day Switzerland was that the modern federal state
of 1848, shaped from the ancient confederation of independent Landsgemeindekantone and
city-republics in a fifty-year-long period of travail, pre-dated the age of nationalism.
The federal constitution of 1848 guaranteed political freedom, equality amongst citizens,
and equal political rights for all cantons irrespective of religious and linguistic borders.
Accordingly, the Swiss concept of the nation is an exclusively political one, and nationality
a synonym for citizenship. From a central and eastern European perspective, however, the
situation appears very different: because nation and nationality have a cultural or linguistic
connotation there, Switzerland, as these countries see it, is not a nation in the proper sense,
but is, rather, an entity made up of several nationalities. As the ethno-national understanding
of nation spread throughout Europe, following Italian and German unification, the
ethnic-cum-linguistic diversity of Switzerland was frequently perceived as a shortcoming.
This political shift was matched by the semantic shift in the concept of the nation-state: at
first this signified the legitimation, based on the sovereignty of the people, of all things
political emanating from the formally constituted nation; then it was increasingly identified
with the state belonging to an ethnically defined people. Thus, Friedrich Meinecke wrote:
"The true nation-state springs…like a flower out of the unique soil of the
nation…it is not, and does not become, national through the deliberate will
of the government or the nation; it does so in the same way that language,
22 The now-classic distinction between Staatsnation and Kulturnation goes back to Friedrich Meinecke:
Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates, 6th ed.
(Munich/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1922). The contrast between a western and a central/eastern European
nationalism derives from Hans Kohn: Die Idee des Nationalismus. Ursprung und Geschichte bis zur
Französischen Revolution (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1950). Eugen Lemberg, meanwhile, sets
'the birth of the nation out of the territorial state' and its birth 'out of language, culture, and ideas'
alongside one another as 'subjective' and 'objective' concepts of nation. See his study Nationalismus
(Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1964), i: pp. 86–164. See also H. A. Winkler (ed.), Nationalismus (Königstein:
Athenäum, 1978), pp. 5–46.
23 M. Rainer Lepsius, 'Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland', in id., Ideen und Institutionen
(Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1990), pp. 232–46.
24 Federico Chabod, L’Idea di nazione , new ed. by A. Saitta and E. Sestan (Barin: Laterza, 1993), p. 26.
11
11
customs, and belief are, and become, national – through the unseen
workings of the spirit of the people."25
Whereas in the Europe of the Völkerfrühling Switzerland was widely regarded as the
embodiment and paradigm of the modern nation, since the late nineteenth century it has
been viewed, at least from outside, as a multinational state. It is quite common nowadays
to hear talk of "multinational" or "multicultural" Switzerland.
By contrast, within Switzerland itself the political concept of nation retained its predominance.
This is also reflected in the terminology: whereas those looking in from
outside ask what integrating forces have helped transcend the different "nationalities",
"cultural segments", or ethnic cleavages26
, the Swiss talk, less grandly, of shared interests
across linguistic frontiers. In essence, however, these are one and the same: where
nationality and ethnicity are determined by linguistic-cultural commonality, the task of
transcending them is identical with that of – to put it in Swiss terms – preserving linguistic
harmony (Sprachfrieden). Hence, to object that, because what follows here deals only with
language, my overall title is a sham, would be wrong. Seemingly purely terminological
issues of this kind conceal implications and judgements of a political kind. If use is made
here of the terminology current in Switzerland, this does not just have to do with the
author’s origins; it is a conscious choice. Terms such as "multilingualism" and "linguistic
harmony" suggest a whole; those such as "nationalities" and "ethnic cleavages" suggest
fragments needing to be pieced together. That said, in Switzerland national affinity is one
thing; the affinity of the French Swiss, the Ticinese, and the German Swiss, to French,
Italian, and German culture respectively, as it has come to be taken for granted in recent
history, is another. To put it in Meinecke’s terms: political nationhood and cultural
nationhood are two separate things. When eastern or central Europeans ask a Swiss person
what nationality he or she is, they are met with total incomprehension. Multiple,
overlapping identities are at the heart of the Swiss self-image, which resists the inclination
of the modern nation-state to ethnic homogeneity.
2. Multilingual Switzerland Today
Switzerland’s quadrilingualism is today regarded as one of the country’s "intrinsic
attributes", in fact almost as a "national hallmark",27
along with direct democracy and
neutrality. Associated with this, one not infrequently finds three misconceptions. First, the
unquestioning conviction that every Swiss person is endowed with a quasi-natural fluency
in, or mastery of, four languages. The presence of this belief can be detected, for example,
in the observation of the American political scientist Karl Deutsch that Switzerland has
25 Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (fn. 22 above), p. 14.
26 See Arend Lijphart, 'Consociational Democracy', World Politics, 21 (Jan. 1969), pp. 207–25, and the
overview by Franz Lehner – Grenzen des Regierens. Eine Studie zur Regierungsproblematik
hochindustrieller Demokratien (Königstein/Ts.: Athenäum, 1979), pp. 185–204.
27 Comment of the Federal Council in its 'message to chambers' (Botschaft) of 4 Mar. 1991 concerning
the revision of the language clause in the Swiss constitution (Art. 116 BV).
12
managed to create a shared national character, a shared political culture, a cohesive people
that speaks four languages.28
Secondly, many believe the number of languages spoken in
Switzerland is four. In fact, because of the high levels of work-related immigration that
Switzerland has experienced since the late nineteenth century, the number is much greater.
At the end of 1995, the population of Switzerland, numbering a good 7 million, comprised
1.3 million (19.3 per cent) foreigners – proportionally twice as many as in the Federal
Republic of Germany. Thirdly, there is, in many quarters, a lurking notion that the Swiss
cantons are linguistic or ethno-national entities.
Let us begin by looking at the citizens of Switzerland. Despite many a wondrous phenomenon
in this country, even Swiss citizens mostly grow up speaking just one mothertongue,
and have to acquire other languages by learning. This requires just as much effort
on their part as it does for anyone anywhere else in the world. As a result, the majority of
Swiss speak only one language. Swiss multilingualism is therefore not individual, but a
feature of the polity as a whole. The peculiarity lies in the fact that, rather than there being
one single national language, there are four languages with equal status. For obvious
political reasons, the teaching of foreign languages is particularly promoted. The smaller
the linguistic region and the nearer the linguistic frontier, the earlier that teaching begins in
school. This is why there are comparatively few Swiss who only understand their
language of origin. But the number of those who can communicate without difficulty in
more than one language is – as it is everywhere – a minority dependent upon educational
level:
"The inhabitants of Switzerland…do not consist of bi- or trilingual
individuals in the traditional sense of the word. What we have in our
country is a societal multilingualism – in other words, although the country
is made up of four linguistic regions, the inhabitants of these regions are
mostly monolingual."29
This unspectacular reality can be summed up in figures. Since 1860, regular censuses have
reported on language distribution in Switzerland. Traditionally, this has involved asking
about the language in which a person thinks and which he or she has the best command of.
28 Karl W. Deutsch, Die Schweiz als paradigmatischer Fall politischer Integration (Bern: Paul Haupt,
1976). This is not the only misunderstanding in this text, which answers useful questions about the
evolution of Switzerland with outlandish-seeming theories such as that of tracing medieval modes of
assault against fortified places to the climbing-ability of the mountain farmers: before there was
artillery, says Deutsch, rock-climbing was the only way of seizing fortified places (ibid. p. 27). An
abridged and revised version of the text may be found in Volker Matthies (ed.), Der gelungene
Frieden. Beispiele und Bedingungen erfolgreicher Konfliktbearbeitung (Bonn: Dietz, 1997), pp. 65–
87.
29 Zustand und Zukunft der viersprachigen Schweiz. Abklärungen, Vorschläge und Empfehlungen einer
Arbeitsgruppe des Eidgenössischen Departements des Inneren (Bern, 1989) [hereinafter 'Zustand und
Zukunft'].
13
13
According to the last national census, held in 1990, the distribution of languages amongst
Switzerland’s 5.6 million citizens is as follows:30
German 73.4%
French 20.5%
Italian 4.1%
Raeto-Romansch 0.7%
This means that three-quarters of all Swiss people speak German – or, more precisely,
Swiss-German dialect. About one-fifth – just over a million – speak French. Compared
with 1960 and 1970, this number has risen slightly. By contrast, the proportion of Italianspeakers
has declined slightly. The proportion of speakers of Raeto-Romansch, which has
always had no more than regional significance, is in marked decline.
If one looks at language distribution historically, one immediately notices that there has
been very little variation in this during the present century. The proportion of Germanspeakers
has fluctuated between 72.7 per cent (in 1910) and 73.9 per cent (in 1941).
French reached its highest level in 1910, with 22.1 per cent, and its lowest in 1970 and
1980, with 20.1 per cent. Italian has oscillated between 3.9 per cent (in 1910) and 4.5 per
cent (in 1980). Raeto-Romansch declined slowly but steadily to begin with, from 1.2 per
cent (in 1910) to 0.9 per cent (in 1980), but very swiftly after that, dropping to 0.7 per cent
in 1990 (see Sections 4.3 and 5.2 below). Disregarding the latter decline for a moment, it
would be fair to say that Swiss linguistic harmony shows a remarkable degree of stability:
despite the fact that the population has doubled over the last 70 years, "the four linguistic
regions have persisted in a remarkably constant state".31
One reason for this – though it is
undoubtedly not the whole story – is that in the nineteenth century, Switzerland embarked
on a political path different from that of its powerful neighbours. Its key idea was not the
ideal of linguistic-cum-cultural homogeneity, but the political resolve to forge a liberal
republican polity in despite of varying traditions, cultures, and languages. That is why the
Swiss describe themselves as a "Willensnation" ["nation by will"] – even if conscious will
was in fact secondary to the realization of the need for a partnership of convenience".32
A
core component of this approach is equality of status for several languages – something
that has had constitutional force since 1848 (see Section 3.3 below).
30 Figures from the NZZ’s reports of 15 and 19 May 1993 on the evaluation of the national census of
1990, and from Statistisches Jahrbuch der Schweiz 1994, pub. by the Federal Office of Statistics
(Bundesamt für Statistik) (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1993), p. 353.
31 Robert Schläpfer, Sprachen in der Schweiz, Nationales Forschungsprogramm 21: Kulturelle Vielfalt
und nationale Identität (Basel, 1992), 2. The fact that the linguistic distribution has remained largely
constant over a period of 100 years is also cited by Hans Kohn as one of the main reasons why Swiss
multilingualism works: Der schweizerische Nationalgedanke. Eine Studie zum Thema 'Nationalismus
und Freiheit' (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1955), p. 102.
32 Iso Camartin, 'Die Schweiz: Ein mehrsprachiges Land. Eine multikulturelle Nation?', in: Kurt R.
Spillmann and Rolf Kieser (eds.), Blickpunkt Schweiz. 27 Ansichten (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1995), p.
224.
14
Of course, if one looks at the totality of Switzerland’s inhabitants, a very different picture
emerges. This is because – according to 1995 figures33
– 1.3 million (19.3 per cent) of the
Swiss population are foreigners (this does not include diplomats, seasonal workers, shortstay
visitors, cross-border commuters, or asylum-seekers). Taking the total population into
account, the language distribution turns out as follows:34
German 4,374,694 63.6%
French 1,321,695 19.2%
Italian 524,116 7.6%
Raeto-Romansch 39,632 0.6%
Non-Swiss languages 613,550 8.9%
In the case of Raeto-Romansch, the circle of speakers was always a small one; but in 1990
the number of people speaking a language other than one of the four national languages
also overtook the number of Italian-speakers for the first time. The main languages
concerned were: Serbo-Croat (1.9 per cent), Spanish (1.7 per cent), Portuguese (1.4 per
cent), and Turkish (0.9 per cent). But in the meantime even English (0.9 per cent) has
overtaken Raeto-Romansch.
Another reason why the findings of the last census, in 1990, are particularly interesting is
that it was no longer based on what, in terms of linguistic statistics, is the dubious question
about mother-tongue. Instead, people were asked about their main language, the one in
which they thought and which they had the best command of. It is to this that the above
figures refer. A supplementary question asked about colloquial languages – that is to say,
the language or languages people used on a regular basis. (More than one answer could be
given here.) According to this, of the total population of Switzerland, the following
percentages speak the specified languages regularly in their everyday lives:
German 72 %
French 33 %
Italian 14 %
Raeto-Romansch 0.91%
English 10.9%
Other languages 11.2%
Hence, French, Italian, and, above all, English are much more important in the colloquial
everyday world. According to the Swiss Statistical Yearbook (Statistisches Jahrbuch), the
lower the percentage of speakers of a language, the more rarely that language is a language
of sole use. Only 20 per cent of speakers of Raeto-Romansch get by with just their own
language; in the case of the Italian-speakers, it is 27 per cent; in the case of the Frenchspeakers
43 per cent; and in the case of the German-speakers as many as 65 per cent.35
These figures for the resident population as a whole show that the traditional stability of
the Swiss linguistic landscape has begun to falter in recent decades. A number of simul-
33 Fischer Weltalmanach ’97 (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1996), p. 575.
34 Statistisches Jahrbuch 1994 (fn. 30 above), pp. 352–4.
35 Ibid. p. 354.
15
15
taneous trends highlighted the need to reflect on these changes, and to envisage
reformulating the Swiss constitution’s language-clause in line with the times:
First: There were disturbing reports about the increasing extent to which Raeto-Romansch
was being squeezed out of the linguistic picture: by 1990, it was a main language for only
39,632 Swiss. The fear that this language might die out in the near future prompted
reflection on what might be done to bolster it. Although in principle legal regulations
about language fall within the competence of the cantons, help was also sought from the
federal authorities. In June 1985, a member of Switzerland’s National Council
(Nationalrat – lower chamber of parliament), Martin Bundi, put forward a motion, cosigned
by all the representatives of Graubünden in the National Council, calling for a
revision of Article 116 of the federal constitution – or, more specifically, for measures to
strengthen Switzerland’s fourth national language.
Secondly: The strong wave of immigration – deliberately driven by government and
business in the decades after the Second World War – brought radical changes to Swiss
society. The period of economic boom led to the creation of a modern consumer-society;
at the same time, the so-called guest-workers, soon to be followed by returnees, refugees,
and asylum seekers, wrought radical social changes. Over the last few decades, Switzerland
has, "whether it liked it or not – developed into a multicultural society".36
This is also
reflected in the changed linguistic landscape.
Thirdly: English is inexorably gaining ground. Apart from its attractiveness to young
people – whether in Geneva, Zürich, or Lugano – it is also becoming the medium of
communication in ever-wider areas of science, business, and leisure, and even quite
commonly now between Swiss people of differing languages. This development
undermines traditional practice, whereby, in the teaching of foreign languages, priority is
given to the national languages.
Fourthly: Communication within Switzerland is being rendered more difficult by the oftevoked
upsurge in dialect – the Mundartwelle. This does not refer to the fact that the
German Swiss use only dialect in their everyday speaking, and do so across all strata and
classes: this has been common practice since the First World War, if not before, and is felt
by the German Swiss to be part and parcel of their identity. Unlike the situation in Frenchspeaking
Switzerland, where local and regional idioms have all but died out, dialects in
German-speaking Switzerland have stubbornly held their ground. Most German Swiss
have no trouble at all passively comprehending standard German – at least the written and
official kind – and are very likely to have active speaking competence in it, with a marked
Helvetic intonation. Linguists describe this simultaneous use of two forms of the same
language – meaning here the cheek-by-jowl existence of dialect and standard German – as
diglossia. However, for most German Swiss, the regional dialect is the language in which
they can express themselves naturally and can feel at home. If they have to speak
Hochdeutsch (standard German), many of them feel they are already half in a foreign
country. Their eloquence, at any rate, usually becomes markedly constrained if they are
36 Camartin, 'Die Schweiz' (fn. 32 above), p. 224.
16
obliged, as one apt formulation puts it, to "speak written German". At the last census, 66.4
per cent of German Swiss claimed not to speak standard German.37
In fact, talk about a Mundartwelle – often also in relation to the spectre of a politically fatal
"Hollandization" of Switzerland – refers to something else: the massive incursion which
dialect has made over the last twenty years into areas formerly reserved to Hochdeutsch.
This includes, first and foremost, the use of dialect in advertising and the mass media.
Anyone living in Germany can wax lyrical on this subject, given that hundreds of
programmes broadcast on 3SAT are subtitled. Even in the area of written language – in
letters to family or friends, for example – the use of dialect is on the increase. This trend
towards the omnipresence of Swiss German makes communication across internal Swiss
borders more difficult and is a constant cause of complaint from members of the minoritylanguage
groups. The knowledge of German they have acquired in school, in adult
education, or elsewhere, is of precious little use to them in Swiss-German-dominated
everyday communication – and this does not exactly increase the motivation to learn.
Fifthly: At federal level, the equal status of the various languages of Switzerland has, in
any case, been more of an ideal-typical objective. Italian has been virtually non-existent in
this area – not to mention Raeto-Romansch. The two chambers of the federal parliament
generally communicate only in two languages. During proceedings, members of parliament
from Ticino have to battle their way through with German or French drafts of bills;
an Italian version is only available at the final vote. Again, in the National Council – the
representative chamber – and, since very recently, in the Council of States (Ständerat), in
which the 26 cantons each have two seats, regardless of their size, simultaneous translation
is provided in only two languages – German and French. In general, the members from
Ticino say one or two introductory words in Italian, for the sake of the television, and then
also speak French or German. The parliamentary committees, meanwhile, do without
simultaneous translation, relying on passive linguistic competence. Over the last few
years, the need to ensure a greater presence of all four languages at federal level has made
itself increasingly felt.
These trends prompted proposals for a revision of the clause in the Swiss constitution that
deals with language. In 1986, when the National Council and Council of States had
referred Martin Bundi’s motion to the government, the head of the Swiss Interior Ministry
appointed a group of experts (called the "Saladin Commission" after its chairman) to "carry
out a legal, historical, and linguistic evaluation of the issues raised by the proposal to
revise Art. 116 of the federal constitution; and to draw up a wording for a revised version
of this so-called "language clause". The terms of the commission’s task were set
deliberately broadly and sought to take maximum account of the intensive discussions that
had recently taken place about Swiss quadrilingualism. 38
In August 1989, this commission
published its report of over 400 pages on the "Current State and Future Prospects of
37 Statistisches Jahrbuch 1994 (fn. 30 above), p. 354.
38 Message to chambers previously referred to (fn. 27 above), p. 354.
17
17
Quadrilingual Switzerland"39
– an encyclopaedic compendium of Swiss linguistic
problems. The report also served as a basis for the extensive deliberations on the revised
version of the language clause, which was finally adopted by the electorate in March 1996
(see Section 5 below).
Despite all these worries about the preservation of quadrilingual Switzerland, it should be
remembered – in view of the many newly erupted linguistic disputes, bloodily fought-out
nationality-conflicts, and "ethnic cleansings" – that Swiss linguistic harmony is not in any
real danger. Despite notorious evocations of a gradual drifting-apart of the German Swiss
majority and French Swiss minority – a phenomenon for which the term Röschtigraben
("fried-potato divide") has widely established itself, though the differences in potatopreparation
in the two communities are minimal – the relationship of the Swiss to one
another "[is] not characterized by marginalization of a racist kind or of a kind based on
folkloristic ideology". Even the term "ethnic group" is not in common use in Switzerland.40
The exception was the period of the First World War. The way in which the war was
deliberately charged up, at the level of ideas and ideology, into a struggle between Western
civilization and German culture presented at least the élites of German and French
Switzerland with what was probably their toughest-ever test. As a rule, however,
categories such as ethnic or linguistic minorities are devoid of even the slightest pejorative
undertone – one need only think, for example, of Welschland – French Switzerland (where
the German welsch might otherwise suggest dubious character but here means only
"French Swiss"). Nor do they play any kind of prominent role legally or emotionally, as is
often supposed. In Switzerland, there are hardly any federal-level regulations concerning
minority protection – either in the constitution or in the law in general.41
When Federal
Councillor Felber opened the CSCE’s expert meeting on national minorities in July 1991,
he commented crisply that: "Swiss federalism is not grounded in the concept of a linguistic
community…Rather than solving a minority problem, it has prevented one ever arising."42
This highlights the radically federalistic structure of the Swiss state, and also the fact that
the primary locus of political identification for most Swiss lies in the cantons. They are the
key to understanding Swiss Sprachfrieden.
39 Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), p. 236; see also the additional Materialienband zum Schlußbericht
der Arbeitsgruppe zur Revision von Artikel 116 der Bundesverfassung, ed. by the same
commission, Bern 1989 [hereinafter: Materialienband].
40 Camartin, 'Die Schweiz' (fn. 32 above), p. 236.
41 Paul Widmer, 'Neue Widersprüche. Die nationalen Minderheiten in Osteuropa', NZZ, 14 Feb. 1992.
42 NZZ, 3 July 1991.
18
3. How Quadrilingualism Came about
3.1 German Origins
Contrary to the erroneous modern-day doctrine of the homogeneous nation-state, Swiss
multilingualism, viewed globally, is not an exception; in world terms, it is the norm.43
What is special about the Swiss case is that the various languages of Switzerland were
guaranteed equal status in the constitution relatively early on.
Those who claim that multilingualism was already present at the birth of the old
confederation are doing exactly what the popular Swiss legends about continuity do: taking
modern nation-states and nations that are a good 200 years old and projecting them back
into history. The whole of history is viewed through the nation-state prism, as if in
permutation of a famous Hegelian dictum: "One only has to look at history in national
terms, and it too will appear national."
Paradoxically, it was during the exclusively German beginnings of Switzerland that the
foundations of its later multilingualism were laid. The confederation, in the form of the
alliance of valleys and cities that emerged and expanded across Alemannic Switzerland in
the late Middle Ages, defended the old traditions of local communal democracy against all
the territorially inspired attempts at unification initiated by either secular or religious
masters. Whereas most modern states took shape by combating the particularism of their
various parts, Switzerland came into being, conversely, by preserving and cultivating both
the particularism and the autonomy of its constituent elements. Until the Helveticism of
the Enlightenment, the confederation did not display any kind of comprehensive, inclusive
patriotism; each of the ancient Swiss localities (Orte or Stände – the original cantons) acted
and thought solely for itself. The thirteen Orte (Zürich, Bern, Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz,
Unterwalden, Glarus, Zug, Freiburg, Solothurn, Basel, Schaffhausen, and Appenzell) were
very differently constituted, politically autonomous, sovereign polities that were merely
linked to one another through bilateral or multilateral treaties and alliances pledging them
to mutual assistance in the case of attack from outside. This alliance had no fixed
institutions or bodies, only an assembly of delegates – the Tagsatzung or Diet – which was
not empowered to take binding majority decisions. It is in these beginnings that many
archaic-seeming Swiss traits and attitudes have their roots – from the cultivation of
particular customs, through the insistence on retaining very distinct individual political
constitutions and institutions, right up to the different dialects. The Swiss counterpart of
what is known in Italy as parochialismo or campanilismo is the much-derided
Kantönligeist ("canton spirit"), which involves much more than mere folklore.
In the confederation’s early history, now shrouded in legend, there was no multilingualism.
When Switzerland first took shape, there was, at most, the Latin in which the Bundesbriefe
– the original pact of mutual assistance that formed the core of the confederation – were
43 See Ernest Gellner, Nationalism und Moderne (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991), pp. 69 ff.; also Hans Maier,
'Die vielen Sprachen und die Eine Welt', in: Günther Lottes (ed.), Region, Nation, Europa. Historische
Determinanten der Neugliederung eines Kontinents (Heidelberg: Physica, 1992), pp. 45–55.
19
19
drawn up. Loosely allied to the old Orte or Kantone (the latter term gradually superseded
the older one during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) were a number of so-called
Zugewandte Orte ("allied localities"). They enjoyed the protection of the confederation in
their efforts to secure autonomy, but they had no political rights within the alliance. In
addition, the thirteen old localities owned a number of subject territories, which were
administered either individually or jointly. These were the result of conquests in the days
when, following the Burgundian wars at the close of the fifteenth century, the Swiss,
relying on their proverbial military strike-power, had engaged in expansionist European
power-politics.
Italian-speaking Ticino was a gemeine Herrschaft or "joint dominion" – that is to say, it
was subject to several cantons and ruled by them in rotation. Large tracts of present-day
French Switzerland were either linked to Bern by defensive treaty, as was, for example, the
independent city-republic of Geneva) or, like Vaud, were subject-territories of the Gnädige
Herrschaften or "Gracious Lords" in Bern. Politically speaking, there were two crucial
factors here. In French Switzerland too, the city-republics were present at the start of
political development, and this state of affairs only persisted in the face of the territorial
aspirations of the House of Savoy and the French crown thanks to the city-republics’
reliance on the confederates. In addition, Bern supported, or systematically advanced, the
Reformation in the French-speaking territories under its rule or influence. The
Reformation served to bolster territorial expansion, given that it put French-speaking
subjects into a position of religious opposition to their erstwhile masters, whose return
could then be demonized as the return of "Papism".44
At the same time, the French
monarchy dealt circumspectly with Bern, because the lords of Bern provided it with Swiss
mercenaries. In the joint dominions of the old confederation, the authorities granted
religious freedom, which was tantamount to encouraging the Reformation. Ticino,
however, remained true to the old faith. In this pre-national age, there was no nationality
problem in the modern sense. Subjects did not, in any case, have much of a say. As far as
Bern was concerned, they benefited from the fact that the Bern patriciate, who were fixated
on the French model when it came to political arrangements and power politics, frequently
spoke French. In Ticino, the successive governors from the different confederate localities
made efforts to rule the subjects in their own language. Neither direct subjects nor allies –
defensive allies with lesser rights – attended the meetings of the Diet45
on a regular basis.
The sole language of negotiation and correspondence for this assembly was German. The
claim that the multilingual confederation was created as far back as "the first few decades
after 1500"46
is therefore an ideological backward projection.
The German character of this political entity was also mirrored in its name: from the
fifteenth century, it was known by outsiders variously as gemein Eidgnossschaft des
44 See Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (fn. 1 above), pp. 155–8 and pp. 411–14.
45 See the condensed history of the confederation in the collection of essays originally published in
Theodor Schieder's Handbook on European History and now republished as Geschichte der Schweiz,
under the name of the authors Hans von Greyerz et al. (Munich: dtv, 1991).
46 Marcel Schwander, Schweiz (Munich: Beck, 1991), p. 48. The author is otherwise outstandingly wellinformed
about French Switzerland.
20
großen punds obertütscher landen von Stetten und lendern ("confederation of the great
league of cities and countries of upper Germany"), liga vetus et magna Alamaniae
superioris ("great and ancient league of upper Alemania"), and Alter großer Bund in
obderdeutschen Landen ("great and ancient league in upper German lands").47
This
character was reinforced by the successful wars which the "frommen tütschen" ("godly
Germans") – as the confederates styled themselves at that time – waged against mighty
Burgundy in 1476 and 1477. Their victories created that reputation for unbeatable military
efficiency which immediately made the term Schweizer or "Switzer" into a synonym for a
lansquenet or mercenary. Paradoxically, at that time, the French king – of all people –
ended up advancing the cause of the German confederation: the higher wages and various
other material privileges he granted to the Swiss lansquenets were not available to those
who "so usserthalb den Marchenn der Eydtgnossenschafft und einer andern Nation und
Sprach, dann tütscher unnd unss Eydtgnossenn nitt underwurffig sind" ("are from outside
the marches of the confederation, are of a nation and language other than the German, and
are not subject to us confederates").48
This had to do with competition. At that time, the
Swiss mercenaries were keen to demarcate themselves from run-of-the-mill lansquenets,
because to them – members of a rural population that had always been notoriously povertystricken
and prolific – Swiss origin was a guarantee of lucrative earnings. It is estimated
that about half the excess of births over deaths in the seventeenth century, and 35 to 40 per
cent in the eighteenth century, was trimmed away by mercenary service.49
Moreover, the
considerable sums which the European monarchies paid to Swiss councillors and
influential politicians to secure the recruitment of mercenaries were an important source of
the early accumulation of capital in Switzerland. It was during this period that the saying
"Point d’argent, point de Suisses" ("No money, no mercenaries") – commonly heard at the
European courts – was coined.50
As far as their documents and treaties were concerned, after the victories over Burgundy in
1476 and 1477, the confederates self-confidently drew these up exclusively in German –
even with Savoy, the Pope, Milan, and France. During the sixteenth century, bilingual
Fribourg pursued a course of active Germanization, in order both to demonstrate its
allegiance to the confederation and to profit from the advantages previously described. In
other words, irrespective of French-speaking and Italian-speaking subjects and allies, the
old confederation as it existed before the French Revolution unquestionably viewed itself
as a German polity.
There are two respects in which the genesis of the old confederation was of importance for
the future federal state despite the hiatus of 1798. For one thing, the way in which the
47 Im Hof, Mythos Schweiz (fn. 7 above), pp. 28–34. Also Hermann Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige
Schweiz. Eine Lösung des Nationalitätenproblems (Basel-Leipzig: Rhein, 1925), p. 50. This revised
version of a 1923 dissertation for the University of Kiel was the first detailed examination of the
theme.
48 Quotation taken from Walter Haas, 'Sprachgeschichtliche Grundlagen', in: Robert Schläpfer (ed.), Die
viersprachige Schweiz (Zurich-Köln, 1982), p. 66.
49 von Greyerz et al., Geschichte der Schweiz (fn. 45 above), p. 75.
50 Carl Hilty, Vorlesungen über die Politik der Eidgenossenschaft (Bern: Max Fiala, 1875), p. 107.
21
21
early confederate state took shape, only gradually establishing its independence from the
empire, was distinct from the development of the early territorial states that resulted from
the expansion of feudal-cum-patrimonial rule.51
The confederation developed according to
the associative logic that underlies unions of more or less independent agrarian or urban
republics. This league of small states was held together solely by its members’ shared
interest in affirming their independence. Combined with the republican or oligarchic-cumdemocratic
composition of its membership, the idea of confederation fostered a markedly
contractualistic political culture or "an intrinsically republican style of statecraft" from the
very outset.52
In the absence of the authority of powerful feudal princes – and also of the
protection these would have been obliged to afford – the cantons were forced, for good or
ill, to rely on themselves to reconcile the kind of conflicting interests and disputes which
not infrequently led to civil war. They had to negotiate alliances and treaties and, where
conflicts arose, submit themselves to jointly agreed arbitration procedures. Some have
sought to construe the old confederation as "an almost ideal embodiment" of collective
security.53
It is at any rate the case that peace-makers and examples of successful disputesettlement
began to play a prominent role in confederate tradition very early on, alongside
the heroic ancient battles. The Covenant of Stans (Stanser Verkommnis) of 1481, and its
broker, Niklaus von Flüe, are examples of this, as is the legend of the Kappeler
Milchsuppe, which relates how, at the height of the religious hostilities, Protestant and
Catholic Swiss set aside their confessional differences and sat down to a shared bowl of
soup. The defence of independence against external attack thus goes hand in hand with
respect for the "great compromisers", as American tradition calls them.54
Not the least of
the tasks in which this internal integration was required to prove itself was the difficult one
of striking a balance between town and country – one of the hallmarks of Swiss state
formation. The city republics for their part embodied the rational calculus of interests and
strategies, whilst the Landsgemeindekantone, with their free peasantry, contributed the
irrepressible agrarian might that proved so intractable to the medieval knightly armies and
thus created the basis for a gradual distancing from the empire.
51 Whereas earlier historiography viewed the emergence of the Swiss state as a case apart, attention has
recently been focused on European parallels – notably the Netherlands and Bohemia. On this, see
Johannes Burkhardt, 'Die Schweizer Staatsbildung im europäischen Vergleich', and the reply by
Volker Press, 'Die Schweiz – steter Weg zur eigenen Identität', in: Lottes (ed.), Region, Nation,
Europa (fn. 43 above), pp. 271–93. Karl W. Deutsch’s essay also relies on the notion of the special
case, seeking to use the outcome as a model. The striking thing about Swiss history, he says, is the
series of decisions that could have come out differently. And Swiss history, he says, is unique in that
people actually did the most sensible thing: Die Schweiz als paradigmatischer Fall (fn. 28 above), p.
39.
52 J. R. von Salis, Schwierige Schweiz (Munich-Vienna: Orell Füssli, 1969), p. 27.
53 Adolf Gasser, Geschichte der Volksfreiheit und der Demokratie (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1939), p. 107;
and now in systematic fashion Sabine Jaberg, System kollektiver Sicherheit in und für Europa in
Theorie, Praxis und Entwurf. Ein systemwissenschaftlicher Versuch (Diss. Münster, 1996), pp. 302–
60.
54 Deutsch, Die Schweiz als paradigmatischer Fall (fn. 28 above), pp. 39 ff.
22
The other aspect of pre-revolutionary confederate history that had a lasting effect was the
way in which the victories over Burgundy, and the resultant force of well-paid "Switzers"
or mercenaries, created the beginnings of a common bond between the very distinct
members of the confederation.55
These beginnings were strengthened in the Swabian war
of 1499 – known as the Schweizerkrieg in Germany.56
After a number of lengthy disputes
and wars between the Swabian League and the confederates, the Emperor Maximilian I
was finally forced to recognize the special development of the confederation. It was
during the violent processes of demarcation between the Swiss and their Swabian
neighbours that the stereotypes of the Kuhschweizer ("Swiss cow") and Sauschwaben
("Swabian pig") – still influential today – first emerged. And it was at this time that the
confederates first embraced the originally pejorative appellation Schweizer that had been
imposed on them by outsiders. At the end of the fifteenth century, the feeling of
confederate affinity was so strong that, despite profound religious dissension – which was
played out militarily on several occasions – the confederates managed to a large extent to
keep their territory out of the Thirty Years War, prompting Grimmelshausen’s
Simplizissimus to regard the place as "ein irdisch Paradis" ("an earthly paradise").57
3.2 Political Beginnings: 1798
The birth of Swiss multilingualism can be dated precisely. It began in 1798, with the
invasion of French troops and the half home-grown, half imported revolutionary upheaval.
The old confederate estate-based system of rule failed to put up more than isolated resistance
to the invasion, and the old political order collapsed. Revolutionary France
brought Switzerland individual political freedom, "the transition from oligarchic to
egalitarian democracy",58
and the liberation of the subject territories. With the République
Helvétique, it bestowed on it a short-lived, centralistic unitary state along French lines,
and, in constitutional terms, the start of multilingual Switzerland.
The Club des Suisses, founded in Paris in 1790, had carried the slogans of the revolution
out to all the cantons, and they spread like wildfire, particularly in the French-speaking
areas. Revolution, massively supported by France, broke out as early as 1792 in the
Republic of Geneva. Many of its protagonists came from the French-speaking subjectterritories
belonging to Bern. The pays de Vaud, in particular, was a hub of revolutionary
agitation during the eighteenth century. It was no accident that the transitional assembly
convened after the collapse of the old Switzerland met in Lausanne, in 1798.
The institution of the Helvetic regime marked the beginning of a paradoxical development
in which none other than the nationally unitarianist, centralist French Revolution presided
55 See Im Hof, Mythos Schweiz (fn. 7 above), pp. 34–53.
56 See Willibald Pirckheimer, Der Schweizerkrieg, newly ed. by Heinrich Scheel (Berlin: Militärverlag
der DDR, 1988).
57 Quotation from Muschg, Die Schweiz am Ende. Am Ende die Schweiz (fn. 3 above), p. 62.
58 Georg Kreis, 'Die moderne Schweiz als Produkt ihrer Geschichte', in: Spillmann and Kieser (eds.),
Blickpunkt Schweiz (fn. 32 above), p. 35.
23
23
over the emergence of multilingualism in Switzerland. And although the revolutionary
upheavals fell on particularly fertile ground amongst the non-German-speaking subjects –
as was natural – it was these very subjects who then resolutely campaigned to remain
within a newly fashioned Switzerland. The revolutionary uprising of the subjects against
their old masters was not aimed at securing union with the mighty neighbours whose
language they shared.
The process was set in motion by the Ticinese. In 1797, after Bonaparte had conquered
Habsburg Lombardy and the Cisalpine Republic had been proclaimed, Valtellina, Bormio,
and Chiavenna broke away from the Raetian leagues and declared union with the new
republic. But the Ticinese political élite preferred affiliation to Switzerland over what
amounted to annexation to their linguistic kin over the border. When, in February 1798,
partisans from the Cisalpine Republic advanced on Lugano, they were driven back by the
local population, who proceeded to proclaim Ticino a free and equal member of the
confederation, under the watchword liberi e Svizzeri ("free and Swiss"). Hans Kohn has
rightly underlined the political significance of this decision by a linguistic minority:
"Political loyalty and the ideal of constitutional freedoms were more important than
commonality of race and language, and more important than the new ideal of 'national
independence'"59
Developments followed a similar course in Vaud, where, in 1798, the invading French
troops were given a rapturous welcome. Once Bern had been occupied, and Vaud, Valais,
and the Italian provinces were to be taken out of the confederation – which would have
meant that Switzerland was squeezed back almost entirely to its German-speaking territory
– it was, of all people, the revolutionary Vaudois who resolutely committed themselves to
defending the territorial indivisibility of the Helvetic Republic created out of the ruins of
the old confederation. Frédéric César de Laharpe, who exerted a degree of influence over
the Directoire, managed to get the plan for division dropped.
The constitution of the Helvetic Republic was printed "synoptically" in French, German,
and Italian, and was distributed from Paris for propaganda purposes.60
It was adopted in
Aarau in April 1798, with the army of occupation in protective attendance and under
pressure from the French. Shortly after the unitary republic had been constituted, the
legislature decided that the law gazette, the official journal, and the individual laws that
were to be posted in the various communities, should be published in the three languages.
The Helvetic Republic’s Directory, formed on the French model, rejected the justice
minister’s proposal that a single binding text in one original language be agreed upon. The
ideal of equality was conscientiously adhered to, and efforts were made to ensure equal
status for all three languages. The Directory was served by one German-speaking and one
French-speaking secretary. For practical reasons of demarcation, German was decided
upon as the language of command for the Helvetic legion that fought on behalf of the
French. On the other hand, the first-ever pan-Swiss coinage to be introduced was inscribed
59 Kohn, Der schweizerische Nationalgedanke (fn. 31 above), pp. 32 ff; similarly, von Salis, Schwierige
Schweiz (fn. 52 above), p. 52.
60 Valentin Gitermann, Geschichte der Schweiz (Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1949), p. 355.
24
in Latin. "Helvetia" still appears on some coins today – offering a way round the problem
of their only having two sides, thus leaving one of the three languages out of account.
When the Ticinese joined the Helvetic Republic in July 1799, they had expressly insisted
that all Helvetic laws and resolutions should also be printed in Italian, at the state’s
expense. To begin with, however, this was not done; trilinguality was regarded as virtually
impossible.61
Whereas it is now blinkered German Swiss who champion Switzerland at any price,
historically speaking the exact opposite was the case: that Switzerland managed largely to
preserve its territorial integrity despite revolution and occupation, and that it went on to
develop into a state where language-differences were transcended, is, precisely, not
something which it owes to the majority. The credit for this must go, rather, to the
Ticinese and Romansch. In an astute essay, Herbert Lüthy rightly underlined on this fact:
"Here, at the moment of Switzerland’s greatest weakness, something of a
miracle occurred – probably the greatest miracle in Swiss history, and one
that we tend to overlook: for this was the true birth-date of modern
Switzerland – which we all too frequently confuse with the Switzerland of
ancient times – and it is from this that it has derived its legitimation for the
last century and a half."62
Underlying the decision to uphold Swiss integrity was the prospect of increased political
participation. The likelihood of this seemed greater within the context of a geographically
limited canton than on the periphery of hypercentralistic unitary states. In large swathes of
French Switzerland, Protestantism also played its part in establishing boundaries with
monarchist, Catholic France, and in promoting Swiss integration. Geneva, Neuchâtel, and
Vaud espoused the teachings of Calvin. From the time of the Second Helvetic Confession,
when these merged with Zwinglianism, which was also centred on the city-republic rather
than being a monarchical national church, "the distance between Geneva and Zürich was
less than that between Zürich and Wittenberg, or than that between Geneva and Paris,
despite the language barrier".63
Later on, as is well known, there would be the added factor
of opposition between republicanism and monarchical regimes.
Once French troops had left Switzerland on the orders of Napoleon, the collapse of the
Helvetic Republic came within a few days. The much-reviled Directory, which was
blamed for turning Switzerland into a theatre of war, was put into cold storage. A confused
power-struggle broke out between, on the one hand, followers of the ancien régime
and federalists, and, on the other, revolutionary unitarians and former members of subject
communities. Napoleon put an end to the ongoing turmoil by imposing a new constitution,
the so-called Act of Mediation (Mediationsakte), on Switzerland in 1803. This ended the
reviled centralism and re-established the old federation of sovereign statelets – prompting
the original Swiss cantons to fête the First Consul as a reincarnation of William Tell. At
61 Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige Schweiz (fn. 47 above), pp. 179 ff.
62 Herbert Lüthy, Die Schweiz als Antithese (Zurich: Arche, 1969), pp. 11 ff.
63 von Salis, Schwierige Schweiz (fn. 52 above), p. 43.
25
25
the same time, the emancipatory achievements of the revolution – political equality,
freedom of conscience and religion, universal male suffrage – survived. The former
subject territories, like those which had merely had allied status prior to 1798, were given
equal rights: Aargau, Thurgau, Vaud, Ticino, Graubünden, and Sankt Gallen were
established as sovereign members of the confederation, which now comprised nineteen
cantons.
As the rapid collapse of the Helvetic Republic demonstrated, the French model of a
centralistic nation une et indivisible was incompatible with the traditions of the old
confederate polities, with their multifarious forms of self-government. The long-term
political effect of the Act of Mediation derived from the fact that it reconciled the
structural principle of the old confederation – an alliance of sovereign city-republics and
Landsgemeindekantone (supplemented by the new cantons) – with revolutionary-cumegalitarian
equality and a new esprit national. As a result, the Act of Mediation served as
a reference-point which radicals and liberals could turn back to when the revolutionary
reshaping of the cantons began in 1830 – and indeed when the 1848 federal constitution
was drawn up. It is also because of this that, despite the humiliation of foreign occupation
and annexations, Napoleon was never demonized by the Swiss as the incarnation of all
things evil or Welsch:
"The intellectual climate in German-speaking Switzerland in 1813 was
radically different from that in Germany. In Switzerland there was no mood
of national renewal, no movement of national rebellion.…The Swiss
harboured no hostility towards Napoleon. The almost pathological hatred
which many German writers harboured towards the 'foreign tyrant' was
something that remained unknown in Switzerland. The educated Swiss
mostly shared the view of Goethe and Heine, and the common folk saw
Napoleon almost as a second William Tell."64
As far as the languages were concerned, during the Mediation period, German began once
again to move centre-stage – first, because parts of French-speaking Switzerland had been
annexed by France (the prince-bishopric of Basel in 1793, Geneva in 1798, the principality
of Neuchâtel in 1806, and Valais in 1810 – on account of the importance of its passes), and
secondly because the rejection of the revolution meant that Vaud declined in importance.
Besides this, because Fribourg was once again sending its German-speaking patricians to
the Diet, Vaud and Ticino became the two exceptions there. The final blow to equality of
status for the different languages came when, following the Battle of Leipzig and the
Congress of Vienna, the protagonists of the confederate ancien régime experienced an
upturn in their fortunes.
3.3 From the Restoration to the Modern Federal Constitution
Following its defeat, France had to return the annexed territories. Valais, Neuchâtel, and
Geneva now became sovereign cantons with equal rights. The Vienna Congress once
64 Kohn, Der schweizerische Nationalgedanke (fn. 31 above), p. 47.
26
again removed the mostly French-speaking former prince-bishopric of Basel from France
and attached it to Bern as compensation for the lost Vaudois lands. The territorial shape of
present-day Switzerland was now fixed. From that time, the country consisted of 22
cantons – 25 if each of the half-cantons of Nidwalden, Basel, and Appenzell are counted
separately.65
The Jura is an exceptional case. It became a source of conflict precisely as a
result of this territorial transaction, and in 1979 the northern part became a separate canton
(see Section 4.4). At the Congress of Vienna, many toyed for a time with the idea of
incorporating Switzerland into the German Reich. In the end, the big powers guaranteed
Switzerland its territorial integrity and pledged it to "perpetual neutrality".66
The so-called Federal Pact (Bundesvertrag) of 1815 – the term "constitution" was
deliberately avoided – was essentially a creation of the conservative Bernese constitutional
lawyer Karl Ludwig von Haller. As is well known, von Haller’s magnum opus –
Restauration der Staatswissenschaft oder Theorie des natürlich-geselligen Zustandes, der
Chimäre des künstlich-bürgerlichen entgegengesetzt, lent its name to this era. Whilst the
princes of Europe were busy reinstating the legitimacy principle, the Restoration in
Switzerland was returning to the old loosely-connected federation of states. This, of
course, now consisted of 22 rather than 13 cantons, as the subject territories emancipated
during the revolutionary period retained their political independence – and were soon to
form part of the spearhead of democratic constitutionalism. In the old cantons, the old
rulers returned to their posts; in the new ones suffrage was drastically curtailed via a
property qualification. The Restoration also brought with it a "romantic renewal of the
national language of the ancient confederation".67
But the use of German as the sole
national language was so uncontroversial that it was not even deemed necessary to mention
linguistic usage in the 1815 Federal Pact. Proceedings and resolutions were drawn up
exclusively in German; even the oaths had to be taken in German.
This was a world upside-down: whereas revolutionary French centralism had introduced
modern-day trilingualism into Switzerland, the return to the confederation brought with it a
return to a single language! Admittedly this did not make a great difference in practice,
given that the confederation could not force any of the independent cantons into the
majority's language. The official national language was German, but the representatives of
Geneva, Neuchâtel, and Vaud used their own language, whilst the Ticinese, in order to be
understood, used French. The confederation acted as a safeguard against homogenization.
The end result was that the proceedings of the Diet became de facto bilingual; in 1821 a
formal resolution was passed stipulating that in case of doubt the German text was the
decisive one. The equality of the languages was thus not completely abolished. This was
65 Constitutionally, the half-cantons have the same powers as the cantons. Where they are restricted is in
the Council of States, where all the cantons, whatever their size, have two seats, but the half-cantons
have only one.
66 Markus Kutter, Die Schweizer und die Deutschen (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1997), pp. 97–105.
67 Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige Schweiz (fn. 47 above), p. 203.
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27
particularly true of the official languages in the multilingual cantons of Graubünden,
Valais, and Bern.68
In the days of Metternich, which saw the withdrawal of all the civil rights secured during
the revolution, suppressing the spirit of freedom and equality awoken by the revolutionary
upheavals proved no easy task in Switzerland. Guaranteed neutrality, political diversity,
and the relatively minor potential for repression in the cantons turned the country into a
refuge for émigrés and victims of political persecution from all over Europe. These
included, to mention but a few: Ludwig Snell, Benjamin Constant, and the Magdeburg
teacher Heinrich Zschokke, who became perhaps the most successful artisan of Swiss
identity.69
To the liberal and radical forces in Switzerland, the advent of these mostly
ideologically trained kindred spirits was highly opportune. Centred around a handful of
outspoken newspapers, they formed a radical liberal opposition. Once again, the impetus
came from outside. After the July Revolution in Paris, the liberals in Thurgau made the
first move by demanding a plebiscite on a new constitution. Within a year the eleven most
populous cantons had revised their constitutions and had them endorsed by plebiscites.
Sovereignty of the people, freedom of the press, equality before the law, and the freedom
to exercise a trade or profession replaced the patriciate and guilds restored to power by the
Restoration. The fact that this movement named its own programme "Regeneration"
shows how great a desire there was to return to earlier, more just conditions.
Refugees from all over Europe flocked to the regenerated cantons. "During the 1830s, a
wanted notice issued by a princely house had [often] been enough to identify a foreigner as
a kindred spirit".70
The liberals in Switzerland, with their belief in technology and
progress, made a particularly important contribution to education. Drawing on many of the
ideas of Helveticism – for which, it must be said, no less a personage than Heinrich
Pestalozzi had served as a publicist – they introduced compulsory schooling and set up a
state education system comprising secondary schools, teacher-training colleges, grammar
schools, technical and industrial schools, and also universities (in Zürich in 1833 and in
Bern in 1834). In these new educational institutions in the "regenerated" cantons, political
refugees from all over Europe found numerous opportunities for exerting influence as
academics or journalists. Regeneration and democracy thus profited in no small degree
from censorship, professional exclusion, and intellectual repression – particularly in the
German-speaking countries.
Because the Restoration was being watched over internationally by the Holy Alliance,
Switzerland repeatedly found itself in difficulties. A number of radical newspapers were
forced to cease publication. Time and again, the big powers issued threats and ultimatums
demanding that the nidus of revolutionary activities be stamped on. In many cases, the
regenerated cantons were obliged to give in to the foreign pressure and expel those
68 See Ulrich Im Hof, 'Die Viersprachigkeit der Schweiz als Minoritätenproblem des 19. und 20.
Jahrhunderts', in: Beat Junker et al. (eds.), Geschichte und politische Wissenschaft. Festschrift für
Erich Gruner zum 60. Geburtstag (Bern: Francke, 1975), pp. 59 ff.
69 On this, see Kutter, Die Schweizer und die Deutschen (fn. 66 above), pp. 106–27.
70 Adolf Muschg, Gottfried Keller (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 128.
28
political refugees, who – like Giuseppe Mazzini’s national revolutionary movement
"Giovane Italia" – were organizing guerrilla expeditions against Savoy, or at least were
suspected of preparing further revolts. However, the pressure from foreign powers "helped
in no small measure to mobilize the population’s resolve to maintain independence."71
This, in its turn, proved useful to those national forces of liberalism and radicalism who
were pushing for the loose confederation to be done away with. The radicals in particular,
acting impetuously and with a markedly anti-clerical thrust, declared war on those in
power in the traditionalist cantons, and on the Jesuits and "ultramontanes" all over
Switzerland; their aim was to replace the Federal-Pact system with a modern state.72
As the political upheavals wrought changes in the composition of the Diet, so the linguistic
differences began to pose a problem for the confederation. This points up the nexus that
connects democratization and nationalism and makes the latter such a complex
phenomenon: so long as a section of the people is excluded from political participation, its
language remains irrelevant; but where governments depend on the nation in the sense of
the totality of citizens, language and ethnic affiliation acquire a higher status. With the end
of the Restoration came a return to equality between the languages. To begin with,
however, the gap between, on the one hand, liberals and radicals, who stood for the
democratic regeneration of the whole confederation, and, on the other, the conservatives,
who championed their own hereditary privileges, religious schooling, particularist
customs-tariffs, and restrictions on the free flow of traffic, grew visibly wider. The
political differences here mostly coincided with the old religious divide. When young
radicals began more and more frequently to band together and mount "guerrilla attacks" on
the bastions of Catholic conservatism and of the Jesuits, the three original cantons joined
with Lucerne, Zug, Fribourg, and Valais to form a separatist league – the Sonderbund. The
radicals were not willing to accept this blatant violation of the Federal Pact. With only the
slimmest of majorities in the Diet – 12 votes out of 22 – they secured the dissolution of the
Sonderbund (if necessary by force), the expulsion of the Jesuit order, and the revision of
the Federal Pact. A decisive factor in terms of the issues being considered here was that
the linguistic divide did not coincide with the political divide: two at least semi-Frenchspeaking
cantons – Valais and Fribourg – were amongst the members of the Sonderbund.
November 1847 saw the start of the Sonderbund war. The Genevan Guilleaume-Henri
Dufour was appointed general of the Diet forces – a move that soon proved extremely
felicitous. Dufour combined strategic skill and superior warfare with political-cum-
71 Beatrix Messmer, 'Die Modernisierung der Eidgenossenschaft – Sattelzeit oder bürgerliche
Revolution?' in : Thomas Hildbrand and Albert Tanner (eds.), Im Zeichen der Revolution. Der Weg
zum schweizerischen Bundesstaat 1798–1848 (Zurich: Chronos, 1997), p. 25. On the crucial part
played by German émigrés in Zurich’s educational system after 1830, see the informative study by
Gordon A. Craig, Geld und Geist. Zürich im Zeitalter des Liberalismus 1830–1869 (Munich: Beck,
1988).
72 On radicalism, see Peter Wende’s article in: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck
(eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in
Deutschland, vii (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 113–33; also Albert Tanner, 'Alles für das Volk. Die liberalen
Bewegungen von 1830/31', in: Hildbrand and Tanner (eds.), Im Zeichen der Revolution (fn. 71 above),
pp. 51–74.
29
29
psychological shrewdness; he frowned upon any kind of hatred and carefully avoided any
kind of rhetorical stigmatization of the enemy, instead encouraging his troops to adopt a
tolerant attitude to the Catholic religion. A skilfully conducted blitzkrieg against the two
Sonderbund strongholds, Fribourg and Lucerne, lasted 25 days and claimed only 98 dead
and 493 injured.73
Metternich and the French foreign minister issued several threats of
armed intervention, but it did not come to that. For the radicals in Europe, the Sonderbund
war was a signal: "The uplands heard the first shots fired", wrote the poet Freiligrath.
Metternich’s fears proved justified: only a few weeks after the Sonderbund cantons had
capitulated, street-battles broke out in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin.74
The big powers in the
Holy Alliance now had other worries to keep them from intervening.
When the Völkerfrühling broke out in the capitals of Europe, Switzerland remained calm.
A constitutional committee was convened as early as February 1848 – less than three
months after the end of the war. The Sonderbund cantons were represented on it on an
equal footing. Only six weeks later, the committee submitted a draft constitution. This
was adopted by the Diet in May and presented to the cantons to be voted on shortly
afterwards. The Diet established that fifteen and a half cantons had voted in favour of the
draft, and on 12 September 1848 the new federal constitution came into force. Thus, in the
midst of the revolutionary year of 1848, Switzerland managed, unmolested by the big
powers and of its own free will, to create a modern federal state based on the principles of
representative democracy and with its own central legislature and executive.
The US-style institutional combination of the democratic majority principle (as embodied
in the numerically based system of representation in the National Council) and federalism
(each canton sends two councillors to the Council of States) also made itself felt in regard
to the language issue. At the plenary session of the Diet at which the draft constitution was
deliberated, the representative from Vaud proposed the addition: "Les trois langues parlées
en Suise, l’allemand, le français et l’italien, sont langues nationales" ("The three languages
spoken in Switzerland – German, French, and Italian – are national languages"). No one
language, he said, must be allowed to claim exclusivity to the detriment of the others.
None of the parties objected to this proposal. The representatives of all 22 cantons initially
agreed on the following wording:
"The three main languages in use in the Confederation are declared to be
official; the Federal Chancellery is charged with ensuring that the decisions,
laws, and resolutions of the federal authorities are drawn up in German and
French, at Confederation expense."75
73 Carlo Moos, '"Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuß". Bemerkungen zu Sonderbund und
Sonderbundskrieg', in: Hildbrand and Tanner (eds.), Im Zeichen der Revolution (fn. 71 above), p. 169.
Slightly different figures are quoted elsewhere, e.g. in Gitermann, Geschichte der Schweiz (fn. 60
above), p. 472.
74 On this, see Werner Näf, Die Schweiz in der deutschen Revolution. Ein Kapitel schweizerischdeutscher
Beziehungen in den Jahren 1847–1849 (Frauenfeld-Leipzig: Huber, 1929); the appendix
documents numerous expressions of solidarity from Germany to the Swiss radicals.
75 Quotation from Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige Schweiz (fn. 47 above), p. 219.
30
The drafting committee ultimately opted for the simpler wording. On 27 July 1848, Article
109 of the federal constitution was adopted without further discussion:
"The three main languages of Switzerland – German, French, and Italian –
are the national languages of the Confederation."
In retrospect, it is astonishing how unproblematic multilingualism and the national
regulations concerning it were seen as being at that time, or were even felt to present any
kind of difficulty. The process of endowing quadrilingualism with intrinsicality, making it
into what the Federal Council in 1991 called an "intrinsic attribute" and a "national
hallmark",76
was actually a result of late nineteenth-century national ideology – albeit one
that continues to influence the Swiss self-image and perception. In view of this, it is
surprising there was so little fuss about the language question in 1848:
"What inevitably impresses one nowadays is not so much the awareness of
the differences that marked out those involved, but the confidence that there
was sufficient common ground for the union to be possible. Without the
crucial underlying ideologies of a free and progressive liberalism, the
Confoederatio Helvetica would probably never have come into being: the
youthful state had other things to worry about than the linguistic diversity of
its members."77
The fact that Switzerland at that time had anticipated the Völkerfrühling by several months
– indeed, by several decades when it comes to its creation of a democratic federal state –
did much to foster its political integration, and to render it immune to the allurements of
the nationality principle. As is well known, there was no lack of covetous feelings towards
Ticino in the Risorgimento; nor was the German nationalist movement devoid of
nationalist power-fantasies and greater-German leanings. In the Paulskirche in Frankfurt,
for example, there was talk of "winning back the renegade possessions at the source and
mouth of the Rhine"78
– though the first German national assembly did, at the time,
acknowledge "the destructiveness of politicizing the ethnic principle to such an extent as to
transform it into racial dogma".79
Allowance was already made for the linguistic minorities in the very first elections to the
Federal Council (the newly created executive), with a seat for one Vaudois and one
Ticinese representative. Even today, the French and Italian areas continue have a claim, by
custom, to two of the seven seats on the Federal Council. That said, after 1848 the primary
task of the confederation – whose official name, Confoederatio Helvetica (familiar from
the "CH" on car number-plates) rather obscured the break with the old confederation –
76 Message to chambers (fn. 27 above), pp. 2 and 6.
77 Camartin, 'Die Schweiz' (fn. 32 above), p. 225.
78 Wilhelm Mommsen, Größe und Versagen des deutschen Bürgertums. Ein Beitrag zur politischen
Bewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere zur Revolution 1848/49, 2nd ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1964), pp. 113 ff.
79 Hans Rothfels, 'Das erste Scheitern des Nationalstaats in Ost-Mittel-Europa 1848/89', in: Dieter
Langewiesche (ed.), Die deutsche Revolution von 1848/49 (Darmstadt: WBG, 1983), p. 231.
31
31
consisted not in overcoming oft-evoked ethnic cleavages, but in integrating the losers of
the civil war into the modern state.
A decisive role here was played by the so-called Neuchâtel Crisis. This canton had
belonged to Switzerland since 1815, but the king of Prussia also had sovereign rights over
it. The seizure of power by the radicals in 1848 was followed, in 1857, by a counter-coup
– which, however, failed. When the imprisoned royalists were not allowed to go free,
Prussia broke off relations with Switzerland and threatened to intervene. Switzerland
mobilized its forces, and the Federal Council once again appointed Dufour general.
Enthusiasm for the war stifled many of the differences that were continuing to smoulder
after the civil war80
– but it never actually came to hostilities, because the king of Prussia
gave way following the intervention of Napoleon III. Three years later, as a mark of
gratitude for Napoleon’s support against Austria, the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded northern
Savoy to France. Since Switzerland had for many years exercised a kind of droit de
regard over Savoy, many radicals once again tried – unsuccessfully – to fan the flames of
war: the Swiss government upheld the principle of neutrality.
3.4 Factors in National Integration
Universal equal (male) suffrage was introduced by the regenerated cantons in 1830–1, and
by Switzerland as a whole in the constitution of 1848. (Women have only been part of the
voting population since 1971.) Switzerland was thus the first country on the European
continent in which the principles of modern democracy were realized. Its new constitution
brought a high degree of political integration and identification at a time when, in the
countries round about, bourgeois movements were foundering, and, following the brief
Völkerfrühling, princes and monarchs were once again taking the helm. The forces of
republicanism, radicalism, and liberalism in Switzerland undoubtedly felt themselves
superior to these latter rulers, following their triumph. Democratic participation marked
Switzerland out from its neighbours; the democratic right to self-determination, in the
sense of being specifically centred on the demos, differed from the narrow ethno-national
version that was to emerge later. The way in which the confederation evolved is reflected
in the markedly federalistic structure of the state, based on communal and cantonal selfgovernment.
This is where the roots of Swiss citizens’ identification with their state lie.
The downside of the various particularisms is the ponderous, conservative undertone that
characterizes politics in Switzerland.
After 1848, as in the past, Switzerland’s pride in its achievements was endorsed by
countless individuals who took refuge there. This time, however, big-power pressure on
the "hotbed of revolution" persuaded the Swiss radicals to listen to the dictates of political
caution and curb their revolutionary messianism. Despite unconcealed sympathy for the
revolutionary movements in Lombardy, for the attempted uprisings by Garibaldi and
Mazzini, and also for the various German revolts, the Swiss government stuck to its
80 On this, see Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der Schweiz seit 1848 (Zurich-Leipzig: Orell Füssli, 1928), p.
85.
32
position of neutrality and, for fear of intervention by foreign powers, had several leading
revolutionary figures expelled. In contrast to what had happened before 1848, when
countless protagonists of the Vormärz (pre-revolutionary period) in Germany had fought
for regeneration in Switzerland, refugees in the 1850s were forbidden to organize
politically.81
Democratic radical solidarity dictated that precedence be given to
safeguarding Swiss interests. In the 1815 accord, the big powers had justified the
guarantee of Swiss neutrality on the grounds that such neutrality and "its independence
from any outside influence accorded with the true interests of European politics as a
whole".82
What the revolutionary radicals had only reluctantly acquiesced to before 1848
now became accepted as raison d’état. Neutrality in Switzerland serves a dual function:
that of safeguarding independence from outside, and that of promoting integration within.83
The first signs of a linguistic problem came in 1854. When the time came to set up the
national university which the education-hungry radicals had long called for and which was
provided for in the national constitution, a "Minority Front of French Swiss and
Conservatives of Both Confessions" was formed which proceeded to scupper the plan.84
This alliance, at first sight somewhat disconcerting, is highly revealing. One half of it was
defending the Catholic educational system against the onslaughts of the radicals – always
the most resolute campaigners against Jesuits and against ultramontane attempts to keep
the population in ignorance. The French Swiss, meanwhile, suspected that a national
university might leave them culturally and linguistically submerged and were therefore
equally doggedly defending their cantonal jurisdiction over education. This coalition
provides a good illustration of the way in which the various opposing currents in
Switzerland criss-cross one another and overlap at many points. Town and country,
highland and lowland, religious fragmentation, and multi-ethnic composition together form
what the historian Erich Gruner has called Kraftfeldervielfalt – multiple force-fields85
–
and what theoreticians of democracy have termed "overlapping memberships" or "crosscutting
cleavages".86
This shows that what marks out the Swiss nation is not homogenization
but, on the contrary, the pulling-together and political systematization of its
particularism:
"Almost every Swiss person is in some way or other a member both of a
majority and of a minority. The Protestant, French-speaking Valaisan
belongs to a majority religion and a linguistic minority at national level,
whilst at cantonal level he belongs to a linguistic majority but a religious
81 On this, see my essay 'Helvetische Abgrenzungen im 19. Jahrhundert', in: Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für
deutsche Geschichte, 26 (1997), Deutschlandbilder, pp. 25–60.
82 As quoted in Denis de Rougement, Aufgabe oder Selbstaufgabe der Schweiz (Zurich: Rascher, 1941),
p. 85.
83 Wolf Linder, Swiss Democracy. Possible Solutions to Conflict in Multicultural Societies (Houndsmills
and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 13 ff. and 36 ff.
84 Im Hof, 'Die Viersprachigkeit der Schweiz' (fn. 68), p. 62.
85 e.g. in Erich Gruner, Die Parteien in der Schweiz. Geschichte, neue Forschungsergebnisse, aktuelle
Probleme, 2nd ed. (Bern: Francke, 1977), pp. 18 and 30.
86 On this, see Arend Lijphart, 'Consociational Democracy', World Politics, 21 (Jan. 1969), p. 207–25.
33
33
minority. The Ticinese conservative is a member of a party of government
and at the same time belongs to a linguistic minority at national level, but
within the canton he is part of a political majority."87
In 1874, the constitution was completely revised. Requirements imposed by rapid
industrialization were one factor in this, but so were the radical changes that had occurred
in Switzerland’s power-political landscape in the wake of Italian and German unification
and, above all, of the surprisingly rapid German defeat of the French, resulting in a desire
on the part of the Swiss to modernize their army and place it under the control of the
confederation, which it had not been up to then. Joint stands against such a move were
repeatedly made by the rural conservative cantons and the French Swiss, who had very
different reasons for wanting to preserve their cantonal autonomy and were suspicious of
any kind of centralization. The draft revision failed to get through at the first attempt in
1872. After this, the liberals made hefty concessions to their fellow adherents of
federalism in French-speaking Switzerland, under the watchword "Il nous faut les
Welsches!" – "We need the French Swiss!" The 1874 version then secured the necessary
majority. The most significant amendment, apart from national jurisdiction over the army,
was the introduction – following the example of many cantonal constitutions – of the
optional referendum on legislation, thus hugely extending the scope for direct democratic
participation.
In its early version, the referendum constituted a popular "right of veto".88
Since the
people, in its capacity as sovereign, wielded legislative power, all laws passed by
parliament ultimately required its sanction. Thirty thousand signatures (in 1977 the
number was raised to 50,000) were enough to force a law to be submitted to the people for
consideration. This instrument of direct democracy in itself tempered the liberals’
predominance in party politics (also asserted via the majority-vote system in place until
1919); but it very quickly also produced, as an indirect effect, a huge pressure for
consensus. The opposition parties, and all the minorities, discovered the potential of the
referendum and used it as a weapon to wrest concessions from the liberal majority and to
push through their own interests. The liberals’ monopoly on power was successfully
broken both by the losers of the Sonderbund in the last century and by the social democrats
in this: in 1891, the liberals for the first time granted the Catholic conservatives a seat on
the Federal Council, and in 1919 a second; in 1929 a representative of the Bauern- und
Gewerbepartei (Farmers’ and Guildsmens’ Party, now known as the Volkspartei or
People’s Party) was elected to the Council; in 1943, the first social-democrat made his
entry there; and, finally, since 1959 the Federal Council has always been made up
87 Thomas Fleiner, 'Die Stellung der Minderheiten im schweizerischen Staatsrecht', in: Ulrich Häfelin et
al. (eds.), Menschenrechte, Föderalismus, Demokratie. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Werner
Kägi (Zurich, 1979), pp. 115–28.
88 In his history of Switzerland since 1848 (fn. 80 above, p. 105), Eduard Fueter has described the
referendum as Switzerland’s 'most original political invention', and it is now regarded all over the
world as a synonym for any kind of plebiscite. Fueter believed this popular right should be the focal
point of any history of Switzerland for foreigners. Wolf Linder took this recommendation to heart –
see his Swiss Democracy (fn. 83 above), pp. 84–137.
34
according to the so-called "magic formula" of 2:2:2:1, whereby the three large parties each
have two seats, and the Volkspartei one. The principle of collegiality within the executive
is, like the referendum, a peculiarity of Swiss democracy. In contrast to the Westminster
model, it precludes competitive confrontation between government and opposition. With
the help of the referendum, the role of the opposition is played by the people itself – in
other words, practically speaking, by shifting coalitions of interests.
As well as determining the composition of the executive, the pressure for consensus
produced by the referendum encouraged the development of various permutations of
power-sharing, political tie-in, and supra-proportional representation of religious and
linguistic minorities. The fact that since 1848 two Federal Council seats have been
reserved, by custom, to the Romance-speaking areas has never been called into question.
It is in any case one of the peculiarities of concordance-based democracy that, because of
the direct-democracy component, majority decisions are generally replaced by
compromises.
In keeping with this, political parties, and most types of associations, duplicate the
federative-cum-cantonal structure of the state: in most cases, national parties are merely
umbrella-organizations for strong cantonal associations. And in all the large parties,
political antagonisms have never run along language-lines, but have instead cut across
them. Apart from in the Jura, there are no parties with an ethno-national basis in
Switzerland. A whole series of major pan-Swiss associations – student groups, for
example, or military officers’ societies, or the Schweizerische Alpen Club – had already
adopted a rota-system or proportional arrangements for their national executives during the
nineteenth century.89
One last point that should be made is that the version of the Swiss constitution’s languageclause
that was in force until 1966 did not date from 1874. It was altered in 1938, as part
of the "intellectual defence of the country" through which Switzerland, fenced around by
the Axis powers, sought to confront nationalistically and ethnically justified annexations.90
Granting the status of an equal fourth national language-group to the tiny Raeto-Romansch
minority – which was confined to the canton of Graubünden and even there was in a
minority – was a highly symbolic token of Switzerland’s resolve to assert itself. It
deliberately pitted the Swiss ideal of the Staatsbürgernation – the citizen nation – against
the notion of the linguistically, tribally, or indeed racially construed community, and, in
doing so, affirmed Switzerland’s own federally based "diversity in unity". The Federal
Council’s message to chambers "On the Purpose and Mission of Switzerland" stated that:
"It is precisely because we reject the view that race can give birth to the
state or determine its borders…that we have the freedom and strength to
remain mindful of our cultural links with the great civilizations. The Swiss
notion of the state was not born of race, nor of flesh; it was born of the
89 Im Hof, 'Die Viersprachigkeit der Schweiz' (fn. 68), p. 64.
90 On this, see the lecture given by Karl Meyer at the 1938 international historians’ congress in Zurich:
'Die mehrsprachige Schweiz. Geschichtliche Voraussetzungen des eidgenössischen Sprachenfriedens',
in: Aufsätze und Reden (Zurich, 1952), pp. 355–78.
35
35
mind…Respect for the rights and freedoms of the human person is so
deeply rooted in the Swiss notion of law, culture, and the state that it can,
without fear of contradiction, be described as a common treasure of Swiss
thought. We recognize the human person as the supreme creative force in
intellectual life; and the state has, within its own legal sphere, set the kinds
of limits that flow from the nature of the human person and its rights."91
This stress on the political equality of all the languages spoken in Switzerland raised a nonstandardized
regional language, frayed into several dialects, to the status of a national
language. A new distinction was made between the four national languages, whereas, for
obvious practical reasons, the number of official languages was left at three. Until the
recent change in 1996, the article of the constitution relating to language (116 BV) read:
"German, French, Italian, and Raeto-Romansch are the national languages
of Switzerland. The official languages of the confederation are German,
French, and Italian."
3.5 The Promotion of Quadrilingualism to Intrinsic National Characteristic
Despite all this, political integration came under massive pressure at the end of the
nineteenth century. Switzerland unexpectedly found itself facing new challenges as a
result of the revolutionary shifts in power-politics that redrew the map of Europe after the
Crimean War. The successful unification of the belated Italian and German nations
brought a radical transformation in its geopolitical situation: in addition to its "archenemy",
the House of Habsburg, Switzerland now had three powerful nation-states as its
neighbours – from this point on, it really did become a "small state". Even though the
unifications had been imposed by the dynasties of Piedmont and Prussia, the nationalist
outlook began to gain ground. From then on, the nationality principle, or ethno-
nationalism,92
was credited with an almost intrinsic potency.
This could not but have an effect on Switzerland. Whereas, prior to this, the languagequestion
had not been a major source of conflict at the national level, it now threatened to
become one. Indeed, it was at this moment, when the existence of bilingual countries such
as Savoy/Piedmont, Schleswig, and Alsace seemed to have become outmoded, that "the
deliberate creation of a multilingual regime based on equal rights began in earnest in
Switzerland".93
Full equality was now established for the French language at national
level, and efforts were made to heighten the profile of Italian. When the federal
constitution was revised in 1874, it was also translated into Raeto-Romansch, at
confederation expense – albeit with the reservation that this version did not have "ultimate
91 As quoted by Kohn, Der schweizerische Nationalgedanke (fn. 31 above), pp. 113 ff.
92 For Ernest Gellner, nationalism and ethno-nationalism are one and the same thing: he defines
nationalism succinctly as 'a political principle that states that political and national entities must be
congruent' (Nationalismus und Moderne (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1991), p. 8.
93 Im Hof, 'Die Viersprachigkeit der Schweiz' (fn. 68), p. 63.
36
validity".94
The revised federal constitution also stipulated, incidentally, that all three
national languages were to be represented in the Federal Court. This was one of the few
formal regulations about minority protection to have been instituted at national level.
The 1874 revision of the federal constitution did not affect the language clause, which was
taken over verbatim as Article 116. In the same year, the confederation undertook a series
of measures designed to get the claim of French and Italian to equal status translated into
reality – in the military, in education, and in the administration.95
However, it is noticeable
that the ideological depiction of multilingualism as a core element of Swiss identity – if
not, indeed, as some kind of Swiss mission – came about within the historical context of
the power-political upheavals that first lent impetus to nationalism and the nationality
principle. The process was probably set in motion by Carl Hilty in his "Lectures on the
Politics of the Confederation":
"It is not by virtue of race, or language, or history that the peoples of the
present-day confederation form a long-established whole. Their union rests
upon a po-litical notion of more recent date; their nationality is, even today,
only the product of an idea.…All the powers of nature, language, blood, and
tribal distinction draw the Swiss apart rather than together – towards the
north, the west, the south, towards their tribal fellows, with whom they
were, after all, politically united for many centuries and who, in our day,
have everywhere revived these powerful old memories – a kingdom of Italy
and a German empire whose like has not been seen in world history since
Odoacer and the Hohenstaufens. What holds Switzerland together in the
face of, and in the midst of, these huge empires of its nearest blood-relatives
and tribal fellows is a touch of the ideal, the knowledge that, in many
respects, it constitutes a better state, that it is a nationality that stands far
above mere ties of blood or language."96
Hence, it was not until many years after the creation of the modern confederation in 1848
that Switzerland’s multilingualism began to be represented as a distinctive feature of the
Swiss self-image. Almost as a mirror-like counter-trend to the powerful nationalityprinciple
– whose logic threatened to tear Switzerland apart – and as an unequivocal
political-cum-ideological demarcation from modern ethno-nationalism, the quadrilingual
political nation was now increasingly acquiring identificatory significance: La Suisse à
contre-courant – Switzerland against the tide.97
94 Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige Schweiz (fn. 47 above), p. 221.
95 Ibid. pp. 63 ff.; also Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), p. 41.
96 Hilty, Vorlesungen über die Politik der Eidgenossenschaft (fn. 50 above), pp. 16 and 28 ff. (my
emphases).
97 Even in the pre-revolutionary period, the beginnings of a split had begun to appear between Swiss
radicals and German and Italian émigrés, who considered that Switzerland had no nationality 'in the
proper sense'. Like a number of others, Gottfried Keller, though all his life describing himself as a
German writer, none the less defended the republican Willensnation against the adherents of ethnonationalism.
On this, see my essay 'Helvetische Abgrenzungen' (fn. 81 above).
37
37
Another facet of this "construction of national identity"98
during the last third of the
nineteenth century was neutrality, which, from being a necessity imposed by the European
powers, was now reminted as a moral virtue. As a counter both to the centrifugal,
fragmentizing nationality-principle and to the narrowly ethno-national right to selfdetermination,
a view of neutrality was now offered in which the latter was projected back
into early confederate history and removed from the realms of time, to become "perpetual".
Neutrality and quarilingualism were intermeshed with one another as quasi-religious
elements: both were seen as safeguarding culturally heterogeneous Switzerland against the
ethnic or objective concept of nation that was then gaining the upper hand in Europe.
The attempt, in the age of triumphant nationalism, to endow the Swiss supra-national
Willensnation with a kind of intrinsicality, a sacredness almost, giving it the aura of
something better, something morally superior, was meant to offset a widespread feeling of
inadequacy. Devoid of any kind of unity of language, literature, religion, origin, or natural
environment, Swiss nationality – so concluded, for example, the influential constitutional
lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli in 186999
– had an aura of "incompleteness and
imperfection". Again, Pasquale Mancini described a state without the solid foundations of
the nationality principle as "un mostro incapace di vita" ("a monster incapable of life").100
In Switzerland, various contradictory strategies of idealization were employed to try to
remedy this shortcoming. These included raising the Swiss Willensnation to a sphere
above that of the merely natural, or depicting multilingualism as a historically momentous
corrective to nationalist hatred and as a precursor to European peace between nations.
Others raised neutrality to the status of ultimate peace policy – a process in which the Red
Cross, with its mirror version of the Swiss national symbol, played an important role. And
yet others engaged in a "nationalization of the masses",101
by repeatedly and very
effectively evoking – in songs, schoolbooks, celebrations of national heroes, Tellspiele
(pageant plays relating the deeds of William Tell), and patriotic speeches delivered on the
national holiday – the old, idealized foundation stories and legends, with the aim of
98 On this, see the two stimulating collections Guy P. Marchal and Aram Mattioli (eds.), Erfundene
Schweiz. Konstruktionen nationaler Identität (Zurich: Chronos, 1992) and François de Capitani and
Georg Germann (eds.), Auf dem Weg zu einer schweizerischen Identität 1848–1914. Probleme,
Errungenschaften, Mißerfolge (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1982).
99 As quoted in Guido Hunziker, Die Schweiz und das Nationalitätsprinzip im 19. Jahrhundert. Die
Einstellung der eidgenössischen Öffentlichkeit zum Gedanken des Nationalstaates (Basel-Stuttgart:
Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1970), p. 158.
100 As quoted by Schieder in Dann and Wehler (eds.), Nationalismus und Nationalstaat (fn. 12 above),
pp. 38 and 331.
101 George L. Mosse, Die Nationalisierung der Massen. Politische Symbolik und Massenbewegungen von
den Befreiungskriegen bis zum Dritten Reich (Frankfurt/M.-Berlin-Vienna: Ullstein, 1975), orig. pub.
in Eng. as The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). Recent research in
nationalism has shown that the 'nationalization of the masses' was a generalized process, by no means
confined to Germany. A pioneering role here was played by Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
(eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Paul Nora
(ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, 6 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–93).
38
straightforwardly equating freedom with the Swiss nation.102
When necessary, the Alps –
much mythologized since the Helveticism of the Enlightenment – were also enlisted, in
their capacity as a natural, God-given shield to the fatherland.103
These strategies were
indeed successful in compensating for the inadequacy in so far as Switzerland remained
unshaken by any centrifugal ethnic conflicts until 1914, despite sometimes powerful
linguistic disputes in neighbouring countries – from the dissension in Alsace to the Italian
Irredenta and the controversy over nationality that had exercised Austria-Hungary without
pause since 1848.
Notwithstanding all the strategies of demarcation, the Swiss élites also felt the pull of the
new concept of the national: in the age of nationalism and national literature, the Swiss
intelligentsia were powerfully attracted by their mighty neighbours. Gottfried Keller and
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, for example, numbered amongst the great novelists of German
literature, and both of them – albeit in contrasting ways – felt deep links with Germany and
German culture.104
Meyer did not really know what to make of the new federal state
created in 1848, but he was fascinated by Germany and its victories: "Now powerfully
seized by a feeling of kinship that had ripened imperceptibly [within me], I responded to
these momentous events by shuffling off my French nature."105
Politically in the opposite
camp to Keller, Meyer hated Swiss provincialism and was obsessed with the idea of
ardently lived-out historical grandeur. One factor in this obsession was that Switzerland,
having secured its confederate state, was now moving along in untroubled waters, whereas
Germany, with a failed revolution behind it, remained a restless country of perpetually
questing revolutionary upheaval. Meyer was not alone in his fascination. At the close of
the nineteenth century, for certain sections of the German Swiss élite, Germany’s
economic prosperity, outstanding universities, and cultural importance clearly tempered
the razor-sharp distinction between republican freedom and princely rule which had still
existed in 1848. The rapidly increasing numbers of Germans present in Switzerland during
the years of economic boom played their part in making the ideological demarcation from
Germany less clear and less certain than would appear from today’s perspective. In the
102 On this, see Marchal and Mattioli (eds.), Erfundene Schweiz (fn. 98 above); also the numerous studies
done as part of the research programme 'Cultural Diversity and National Identity' sponsored by the
Federal Council as part of the foundation celebrations in 1991.
103 Evidence of this is provided by the national anthem. The martial 'Rufst du mein Vaterland' was
translated into French and Italian during the Neuchâtel Crisis of 1857 and was adopted as the national
anthem. The second verse runs as follows: 'There where the Alpine ring, Thee no protection brings,
God-giv’n shield, Shall we like rocks stand fast, By danger ne’er downcast, ’Gainst all pain steeled.'
During the 1970s, the bellicose words were felt to be no longer appropriate to the times and the old
anthem was replaced by the Swiss hymn of praise 'When the Alpen firn grows red, pray, free people
of Switzerland, pray. Your godly souls divine the presence of God in your lofty fatherland.'
104 On this, see the classic study by Karl Schmid, Unbehagen im Kleinstaat. Untersuchungen über
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Jakob Schaffner, Max Frisch, Jacob Burckhardt,
3rd ed. (Zurich-Munich: Artemis, 1977; first pub. 1963).
105 As quoted in Hunziker, Die Schweiz und das Nationalitätsprinzip (fn. 99 above), p. 169.
39
39
larger cities, it seemed – incredibly in today’s context – that dialect was beginning to lose
ground to spoken standard German.106
Without this fascination for German culture, it would scarcely be possible to explain why it
was that the First World War took Switzerland almost to breaking-point. Sections of the
political-cum-military élite in German-speaking Switzerland felt an emotional affinity with
the German empire – on whose supplies of coal, Switzerland was, incidentally, materially
dependent. In contrast, the heart of French Switzerland beat as one with that of France and
the Entente. Even though sympathies were not perfectly congruent with linguistic
groupings,107
the totalized nature of the war made an inner taking-of-sides unavoidable.
This called into question the dual affiliation to, on the one hand, culture, and, on the other,
the republican Willensnation. In a lecture delivered to the Neue Helvetische Gesellschaft
in December 1914, the author and Nobel prizewinner Carl Spitteler – much read in
Germany at the time – attempted to reactivate this affiliation. He declared his allegiance to
Switzerland, making the patriotic distinction between, on the one hand, cultural-cumlinguistic
next-of-kin and, on the other, the Swiss brotherhood that transcended all
linguistic boundaries:
"Do we or do we not wish to remain a Swiss state, representing a single
political entity to the outside world?…But the difference between neighbour
and brother is a huge one. Even the best neighbour can, in certain
circumstances, turn the canons on us, whereas a brother fights on our side in
the battle. No greater difference can be conceived of than this."108
However great the "solidarity with German intellectual life", Switzerland, said Spitteler,
could not adopt a different stance towards the German Reich than it adopted towards any
other state – that of "neutral reserve at a friendly-cum-neighbourly distance". Hence,
Spitteler considered neutrality to be Switzerland’s "existential ground", even though this
straightforward fact had been complicated by war propaganda. "The dangerous hiss of an
evil temptation" is how Spitteler described "[appeals] made in the name of racial, cultural,
or linguistic affinity":
"[Such affinity], so we are told, should automatically lead us to identify with
the German cause in this war. As if this were a matter of philology! As if
every canon of every nation did not speak the same ghastly universal
language!"109
From the outset, French Switzerland harboured a deep mistrust of Ulrich Wille – appointed
general during this period. Wille had undergone part of his military training in Germany
106 Walter Haas, 'Die deutschsprachige Schweiz', in: Schläpfer (ed.), Die viersprachige Schweiz (fn. 48
above), p. 106.
107 On this, see the richly documented study by Jacob Ruchti, Geschichte der Schweiz während des
Weltkrieges 1914–1919 (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1928), i: Politischer Teil, pp. 98–266.
108 Spitteler, Unser Schweizer Standpunkt (fn. 5 above), p. 7.
109 Ibid. pp. 12 ff.
40
and was married to a woman from the Bismarck family. The fears were not unfounded:
the general not only moved in Germanophile circles within the military-political élite; he
also fantasized about abandoning neutrality and entering the war on the side of the German
Reich.110
In March 1915, serious riots broke out in protest at German Swiss circles sympathetic to,
or believed to be sympathetic to, Germany. At the start of 1916, it was the so-called
"Colonel Affair" that triggered a bout of unrest. Two Germanophile general-staff officers
had passed information to the Central Powers and had been only mildly reprimanded for
their actions; this provoked protests in the French part of Switzerland, and these, in their
turn, elicited counter-demonstrations in the German part.111
In June 1917, the foreign
minister, Federal Councillor Hoffmann, tried, with the help of the radical social-democrat
politician Robert Grimm, to persuade Russia to conclude a separate peace, and this fact
became known to the public. Western Switzerland, which, like France, feared that this
might free up Germany on the eastern front, indignantly denounced Hoffmann’s initiative
as a violation of neutrality. Only the resignation of Hoffmann and the election of the
Genevan Gustav Ador, president of the Red Cross, as his successor were deemed sufficient
proof of national reconciliation, and somewhat tempered the divide.
In the Second World War, Switzerland was better prepared. The military threat, it is true,
was infinitely greater, and the real balance of power obliged little Switzerland to tread an
extremely precarious path between self-assertion, co-operation, and complicity – a path
that is currently causing unprecedented controversy. But in contrast to what had happened
in the First World War, the political-cum-intellectual demarcation did not pose any major
problems. Sympathies with Fascism and Nazism were of limited extent in Switzerland.
And the so-called intellectual defence of the country could mesh in seamlessly with the
defensive constructions and moral hyperbole of the late nineteenth century.112
4. Switzerland Is Founded on Sovereign Cantons, not on Nationalities
4.1 "Peoples and Sovereign Cantons"
The Swiss confederation of Landsgemeindekantone and city-republics is centuries older
than modern nationalism, which only emerged hand in hand with democratization. The
Swiss cantons, formerly known as Stände (estates) or Orte (localities), are fundamentally
110 This is documented in the pamphlet by Niklaus Meienberg, Die Welt als Wille und Wahn. Elemente
zur Naturgeschichte eines Clans (Zurich: Limmat, 1987).
111 See Ruchti, Geschichte der Schweiz (fn. 107 above), pp. 157–95.
112 de Rougemont , for example (in Aufgabe oder Selbstaufgabe der Schweiz (fn. 82 above), pp. 57 ff.),
sought to transfigure Switzerland in a dark period of history, marrying together neutrality and
multilingualism in a kind of secularized doctrine of predestination and depicting them as the basis of
Swiss inviolability: 'Switzerland is truly inviolable only because it is the living witness, the promise of
a confederate Europe, the reality of which it demonstrates by uniting the three great civilizations – the
Germanic, the Italian, and the French – in a single state.'
41
41
different from the straightforward administrative districts of France. The thirteen ancient
Orte were not alone in affirming their sovereignty and peculiarities; the later confederates
or Zugewandte Orte were also self-governing polities with highly individual traditions.
The Republic of Geneva, which had no more than a defensive alliance with Bern but was
for a long time both the largest city in Switzerland and – as the "Protestant Rome" – the
most influential culturally, is a case in point; but so are Valais and Graubünden, strategic
masters of the major Alpine passes to Italy, and both products of alliances of their own.
An old joke relates how a Swiss schoolchild, being asked where babies come from, replies:
"Das isch vo Kanton zo Kanton verschide" – "It varies from canton to canton." Whatever
the truth of the matter, this witticism nicely sums up the diversity of the political systems
and peculiarities in the twenty-six cantons and half-cantons.113
Despite the great increases
in mobility, the cantons continue, even today, to be the prime political entity to which most
Swiss relate. That said, cantons are neither administrative sub-units of a centralized
authority, nor – as a widespread misconception would have it – linguistic-cum-ethnic
constructions. Most of them are, rather, independently operating political entities, formed
during the Middle Ages, which entered into alliances with one another of their own accord.
Significantly, the body representing the cantons – the Ständerat – is known as the Conseil
des Etats and Consiglio degli Stati in the Romance languages. The cantons have therefore
also been called Stäätchen114
("little states") or Miniaturvaterländer115
("miniature
fatherlands"). The federal state created in 1848, which was based on the American model,
took account of this evolution by achieving a ticklish balance of power between the
confederation and the cantons. This involved, amongst other things, violating the
straightforward majority-principle: any change to the constitution requires a double
majority, namely the numerical majority of the people and the majority of the states – in
other words, of the cantons. The small cantons thus carry a disproportionate weight
politically. What, in practice, acts as a form of minority protection for such cantons is also
one of the causes of the inertness of the Swiss political system.
In its first article, the federal constitution, using an interesting turn of phrase, lists the
individual "peoples [Völkerschaften] of the twenty-three sovereign cantons" (my
emphases).*
At cantonal level, the right to self-determination, in the sense of a democratic
"right to self-constitution",116
does indeed go hand in hand with individual cantonal
113 The most well-informed study on this is still that of Fritz René Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (fn. 1
above),. It does not deal with Switzerland as a separate entity, instead allowing to disappear entirely
behind its constituent elements.
114 Ibid. p. 9.
115 Lüthy, Die Schweiz als Antithese (fn. 62 above), p. 8.
* This sentence has been deleted in the revision of the Federal Constitution, voted on April 18, 1999.
The revised version now says: "the Swiss people and the cantons".
116 The use of this term was repeatedly suggested by Federal Councillor Anton Philipp von Segesser, as a
way of ensuring that the difference between the democratic and national connotation of the right to
self-determination did not become blurred: see Hunziker, Die Schweiz und das Nationalitätsprinzip
(fn. 99 above), p. 79. See also my article 'Selbstbestimmung und Sezession als Herausforderung für
42
constitutions, a collective memory, and distinct institutional forms, all of which have quite
definitely assumed some of the characteristics of a quasi-ethnic demarcation, in the sense
that a "feeling of community" exists. The demos of cantonal popular sovereignty does
therefore have at least elements of a specific ethnos117
corresponding to it – and in
German-speaking Switzerland these would include dialectal nuance. The term Völkerschaften
signifies what used to be known as "historical-cum-political individualities" in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. These too had roots going back to the Middle Ages. Of course,
there is also a difference here, given that under the Habsburgs, the sovereign always meant
the monarch. The Liberal Adolph Fischhof, whose 1869 book Österreich und die
Bürgschaften seines Bestandes proposed one of the first of many programmes seeking to
reform and rescue the Habsburg monarchy following the flare-up of the nationality
conflicts in 1848–9, had a fine nose for this differentia specifica:
"What essentially attracts the Austrian politician about Switzerland is the
fact that thanks to its self-government, national dissension and linguistic
conflicts are phenomena entirely unknown to [it]. The different nationalities
live in brotherly harmony there, because none of them claims priority for
itself or its language, because each of them independently safeguards its
material and cultural interests and looks to its national development
undistracted by its neighbours. If one were to give Switzerland institutions
that ran counter to its political nature, if one were to impose a centralist
constitution on it, it would soon become the scene of political and national
struggles which, in their bitterness and state-imperilling vehemence, would
be not one whit inferior to our own. For, in so far as it is the object of
modern representative constitutions to safeguard the right of peoples to selfdetermination,
there can hardly be any more flagrant violation of the
constitutional principle than to transplant a centralist constitution from a
nation-state into the soil of a multinational one; because in such a soil, a
centralized constitution does not enable each nation to determine its own
fate; instead, it hands over to one single nation the right to determine the
fate of all the others."118
With the exception of Sankt Gallen – "an artificial entity dreamed up in the ivory towers of
Paris"119
– those cantons that did not achieve independence until after 1803 also had their
own individual historical bases. The crucial factor, for our purposes, is that the cantons,
die internationale Staatengemeinschaft', Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 11/1994, pp.
1355–67.
117 That there is no historical demos without an ethnos is an idea examined systematically by Dan Diner:
'Gedächtnis und Institution. Über zweierlei Ethnos', in id., Kreisläufe. Nationalsozialismus und
Gedächtnis (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1995), pp. 115–21.
118 Adolph Fischof, Österreich und die Bürgschaften seines politischen Bestandes (Vienna:
Wallishauffer’sche Buchhandlung, 1869), pp. 100 ff. (my emphases). On this, see also the outstandingly
well-informed study by Robert A. Kann, Das Nationalitätenproblem der Habsburgermonarchie.
Geschichte und Ideengehalt der nationalen Bestrebungen vom Vormärz bis zur Auflösung
des Reiches im Jahre 1918, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Graz-Köln: Böhlau, 1964).
119 Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (fn. 1 above), p. 261.
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43
whilst being individual part-states and "peoples" in the sense described above, are not
ethnic-cum-linguistic entities in the sense of modern nationalities. Switzerland consists,
not of four cantons, cultural nations, or nationalities, as is still claimed even in the recent
literature,120
but of twenty-six cantons. The borders of these do not coincide with the
linguistic borders. For one thing, the linguistic areas consist of very different, contrasting
cantons. For another, there are five multilingual cantons. One author who investigated the
Swiss model in the 1930s dubbed this aspect – one that has always been very difficult to
comprehend in Germany, where there is an objective concept of nation – Unterländerung
der Volksgruppen, "geo-spersal of ethnic groups". Notwithstanding the strange
terminology, his description of the phenomenon is very apt:
"But even much-lauded Switzerland, which is greatly overrated in regard to
the legal institutions it has created to deal with nationality matters, is not a
multinational state but a federation of numerous small nations that
maintains national peace to a large extent by geo-spersing its ethnic groups
and thus largely localizing tensions between different nationalities. As a
result of cantonal division, the individual ethnic groups in Switzerland have
a peculiarly fragmented appearance, the reason being that even this paradise
of multinational harmony is not founded on nationalities, though it gives
them much more scope than they actually use for their own distinctive
existence. If we are looking for an exact definition of the situation:
Switzerland is a poly-ethnic state that displays a unique combination of
étatisme and weak national traditions; it is not a true multinational state."121
My aim here is not to give a thumbnail sketch of the diversity of the twenty-six cantons
and their peculiar political traits. What I do wish to do is to illustrate the non-congruence
of the linguistic borders or nationalities and the cantonal divisions, by reference, first, to
the motley French-speaking area, and, secondly, to the multilingual cantons.
4.2 Multifarious Romandie
You will not understand anything of French-speaking Switzerland – Romandie – if you
look at it solely through the prism of common language. Its six cantons (Vaud, Genève,
Neuchâtel, Jura, and bilingual Fribourg and Valais) are much too heterogeneous for this,
despite their common cultural-cum-linguistic orientation towards Paris – and this is one of
the reasons why talk of Romandie provokes such ambivalent feelings there.122
Romandie
has no centre, nor does it constitute a single administrative or topographical entity.
Politically speaking, a much more decisive factor than any contrast between town and
120 e.g. in Peter Alter, Nationalismus (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 21.
121 M. H. Boehm, Das eigenständige Volk (1932), as quoted by Schieder in Dann and Wehler (eds.),
Nationalismus und Nationalstaat (fn. 12 above), p. 324: n. 55 (my emphases).
122 '"Ne dites plus jamais Romandie!" Gewissensbisse bei der Bezeichnung eines Landesteils', NZZ, 2
Aug. 1996; similarly Maurice Chappaz, 'La Suisse Romande: Die Welschschweiz', Merian 1/28 (Jan.
1975), 'Die Schweiz', p. 67.
44
country or mountain and valley is the fact that three French Swiss cantons are Protestant.
Language and religion thus lie athwart one another. This fact was highlighted by the
French political scientist André Siegfried, in a perspicacious little book on Switzerland:
"By a piece of good fortune whose beneficent effects cannot be praised
enough, the linguistic borders do not coincide with the religious ones, nor
do either of them coincide with those of the cantons: both German and
French Switzerland contain Protestants and Catholics, such that there could
never even be cause for the emergence of an alliance of language and
religion centred on a particular area."123
The highly centralized Canton de Vaud, created by the Vaudois Jacobins of the République
Helvétique, remains the most French of all the cantons. Communal autonomy plays no
part here, in contrast to the situation in Valais, where it is all. Prefects are appointed by the
government. At the same time, however, Vaud is Protestant and sees itself as "the leading
force in, and heart of, Romandie…the geographical and intellectual link that binds French
Switzerland together".124
Protestantism and revolutionary traditions are also hallmarks of Neuchâtel, which, as a
Prussian-cum-Helvetic hybrid, was long considered a curiosity: though allied to the
confederates from the sixteenth century, it remained in the possession of the House of
Orléans-Longueville, passing to Prussia when the latter died out. The monarch was far
away, and the divided sovereignty presented no problem within the confederation. But this
division could no longer be reconciled with the confederation created in 1848. This led, in
1857, to the "Neuchâtel Crisis" which I have already mentioned.
Then comes the ancient and proud city-republic of Geneva. Previously territorially unconnected
to Switzerland, it now shares a four-kilometre border with it, being otherwise
completely surrounded by France. With Bern’s help, Geneva managed, from the fifteenth
century, to assert its independence from both Savoy and France. Economically and
culturally it was at least on a par with the confederate city-republics. It was from here that
Calvinism set forth and changed the world, and Geneva became a refuge for the Protestants
of France. Religious disputes in early sixteenth-century Geneva led to the latter being
named "Huguenots". Whether the name is a corruption of "eidgenots" (Eidgenossen –
confederates) or whether it derives from Besançon Hugues, the spokesman of the
confederate anti-Savoy party, is a matter of dispute.125
In 1602, Savoy tried one last time
to reconquer the city. Since the American Calvinist and democrat Woodrow Wilson
designated the city of Calvin, Rousseau, and Dunant the headquarters of the League of
Nations, Geneva has developed into the most cosmopolitan of the Swiss cantons. Just how
deeply the particularism of the Völkerschaften runs, even in French Switzerland, is
demonstrated by the fact that Geneva, once annexed by France, celebrates the Restoration
123 André Siegfried, Die Schweiz. Eine Verwirklichung der Demokratie (Zurich: S. Hirzel, 1949), pp. 115
ff.
124 Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (fn. 1 above), p. 408.
125 Ibid. p. 447.
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45
as an act of liberation, whereas in neighbouring Vaud it is the Revolution that is honoured
as such.126
French-speaking Jura (see Section 4.4.) and the bilingual cantons of Fribourg and Valais
have, for their part, remained Catholic. Notwithstanding its Francophone unity – which
dates only from the mid-nineteenth century, when French Swiss patois gave way to literary
French – French Switzerland is almost predestined, by its religious and political diversity,
to be the pioneer of particularism and cantonal sovereignty within the confederation. The
French Swiss speak of la fédération rather than of the nation. Hence, a concept of nation
prevails here which demarcates itself no less resolutely from the French nation une et
indivisible than does the German Swiss concept from the pre-political, objective German
nation. Internally centralist Vaud, for example, conducts itself externally as a bulwark of
Swiss federalism. And whilst the French Swiss cantons are unanimous in their rejection of
German Swiss efforts at homogenization, the ethnic-cum-linguistic line there is broken by
multi-layered cross-cutting coalitions of interests.
4.3 The Multilingual Cantons
The misconception that the Swiss cantons are ethnic entities has world-wide currency. It
even surfaces in the UN’s proposals for creating two cantons on Cyprus. One of the
factors that tells against it is the existence of the multilingual cantons.
Staunchly Catholic Fribourg is culturally and intellectually much more strongly oriented to
Paris than are the other French-speaking cantons. Two-thirds of its inhabitants have
French as their mother-tongue, and one third German; the language-divide runs right down
the middle of the cantonal capital. Interestingly, linguistic policy in Fribourg has tended,
at various turning-points in the city’s history, to follow political opportunity. When the
city was accepted into the old confederation, the authorities encouraged the advance of the
confederation’s official language and suppressed French. When, in the midst of a
Reformed environment, Fribourg later developed into the bastion of the CounterReformation,
the patriciate promoted re-Latinization, prefixing a stylish "de" to many a
name that had previously been Germanized. Since the constitution of 1857, which put an
end to the liberal party-dictatorship at the point of the confederate bayonets of the
Sonderbund war, the canton has been officially bilingual. The Catholic university,
founded in 1889, also regarded itself from the outset as the intellectual heart of European
Catholicism and was bilingual. And yet, for a long time Fribourg appeared a purely
French-speaking city. Fritz René Allemann observed that no other multilingual canton
"[took] less account of its minority than this same city of Fribourg which, in its patrician
past, had tried so desperately hard to emphasize its German character". One would look in
vain here, said Allemann, for that "typical Swiss tradition of having regard for minorities –
indeed, of actually granting them something of a privileged position precisely because of
their numerical disadvantage".127
Of course, there are two factors to take into consider-
126 Schwander, Schweiz (fn. 46), p. 111.
127 Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (fn. 1 above), pp. 372 and 374.
46
ation here. In addition to Fribourg’s isolated position as a French-speaking Sonderbund
canton, there was the fact that it straddled a linguistic border. For a long time, the
Francophones exploited their majority position within the canton, for fear of being drawn
into the slipstream of the Alemannic territories around them. Since then, the minority has
managed, through tough negotiations, to secure equal status for itself: in 1990, the two
official languages were set on an equal footing in the cantonal constitution, under strict
observance of the territoriality principle; and in 1991, names of streets began to be
indicated in both languages.128
Without the impetus which Bern lent to the process of state formation, there would be no
French-speaking Switzerland – as has already been observed. And yet in 1815, very little
of this remained in Bern’s possession; since the secession of the northern Jura in 1978, the
canton of Bern has had only a small Francophone minority, in the southern Jura. Its
members make up 7.8 per cent of Bern’s inhabitants (1990 figures), and, despite their
opting to remain in the old canton, they see themselves less as Bernese than as southern
Jurassiens. Whereas the three Bernese Jura-districts of Moutier, Courtelary, and La
Neuveville are French-speaking, Biel/Bienne – which has been allied to Bern since the
Middle Ages – is the bilingual Swiss city par excellence.
Wallis/Valais is also bilingual. Whereas German (24.9 per cent) is spoken in the upper
part, southern Valais is French-speaking (59.7 per cent). In the former bishopric of
Sion/Sitten, the use of Latin until the eighteenth century, the prevalence of Catholicism,
and the history of this Alp-enclosed mountain-valley, which could literally be sealed off by
the turn of a key at the Saint-Maurice gate,129
all combined to bridge the language-divide –
and still do so. Although the Germans of upper Valais prided themselves on the fact that
the bishop of Sitten had renounced his rights over them as early as 1631, and had to
acknowledge them as "freye Landslüt…ein frey demokratisches Volk" ["as free
inhabitants, as a free democratic people"],130
they themselves continued to hold sway over
southern Valais until the invasion of the French. Following the return of the Département
du Simplon annexed by Napoleon, there was heavy fighting as the population of upper
Valais attempted to reassert their former rule. Here, the dividing-line between former
subjects and erstwhile rulers more or less coincided with the linguistic divide, and this lent
the political quarrels in Valais a particular vehemence. The possibility of the canton’s
being split along the linguistic divide seemed, more than once, to be on the cards.131
Finally, however, the feeling of being one people prevailed – though it was only after 1847
that Valais became a modern state based on popular sovereignty. Despite all the
dissension, French and German were both acknowledged as official languages in the
nineteenth century. At the turn of the century, new linguistic conflicts arose, because
German-speaking Swiss from upper Valais began migrating in greater number to fertile
128 Marcel Schwander, Fondue und Röschti. Grenzgänge zwischen Deutsch- und Welschschweiz (Zurich:
Vontobel Stiftung, 1993), p. 15.
129 Heinrich Zschokke, Die klassischen Stellen der Schweiz und deren Hauptorte in Originalansichten
dargestellt (Karlsruhe-Leipzig, 1942; repr. Dortmund: Harenberg Kommunikation), p. 235.
130 Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige Schweiz (fn. 47 above), p. 145.
131 Im Hof, 'Die Viersprachigkeit der Schweiz' (fn. 68), p. 59.
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47
southern Valais. The erstwhile masters laboured under what amounted to an obsession
with their minority status, until the constitution of 1907 introduced linguistic safeguards
for the German minority. The construction of the Simplon Tunnel in 1906 and the
Lötschberg Tunnel in 1913 were seen as bringing deliverance to upper Valais, creating as
they did the conditions needed for the development of industry and tourism.
What is by far the largest canton, Graubünden – a veritable labyrinth of mountains and
high-lying valleys – is the only one with three official languages. 65.3 per cent of its
resident population have German as their mother-tongue, 17.1 per cent Raeto-Romansch,
and 11 per cent Italian (1990 figures). Another 6.1 per cent have a mother-tongue other
than one of these. The linguistic landscape is that of a sort of Switzerland-withinSwitzerland,
and the same is true of Graubünden’s history. The traditions of the Holy
Roman Empire persisted longer here than elsewhere – as witnessed by the RaetoRomansch
language. The bishopric of Chur preserved ancient continuities and maintained
a certain cohesion when Chur Raetia was partially Germanized, both upriver along the
Rhine and by the Valaisans from upper Valais. The alliance of leagues that made up
Graubünden was put to the test in the Swabian War of 1499, and shortly afterwards it
conquered Valtellina, the strategic barrier between Austria and Milan. Unlike the
confederation, Graubünden’s 49 free Gerichtsgemeinden ("jurisdictional communes")
combined the idea of federation with the democratic majority-principle. Linguistically, it
was "the only multilingual state within the old confederation in which power was not held
exclusively by Germans.…In the three Raetian leagues, the communes of all four linguistic
groups asserted their independence from the overall league even more visibly than was the
case in Valais".132
The equality of status was a product of practical circumstance: Latin
had long been the compulsory language of written documents, alongside German as the
official language of the alliance. The alliance transcended the linguistic diversity. It also
proved stronger than the religious divide, which had set the Catholic Grey League (around
Disentis) against the two mainly Reformed Raetian leagues and had drawn Graubünden
into passionate and bloody involvement in the Thirty Years War. Here too, ethnic-cumlinguistic
and religious differences were not congruent, but cut across one another. The
Reformation found supporters in all three language-groups. As one expert has commented
dryly, the linguistic situation in Graubünden "sometimes seems too complex even to the
champions of diversity".133
And the reasons for the decline of Raeto-Romansch go back an
extremely long way. When the city of Chur was Germanized during the fifteenth century,
the Raetian mountain-valley dwellers lost their focal point. Although their language were
given a boost during the seventeenth century, as a result of various translations of the
Bible, it had to contend with the opinion of a number of Graubünden enthusiasts of the
Enlightenment, who believed that Romansch stood in the way of the general improvement
of popular education.134
132 Weilenmann, Die vielsprachige Schweiz (fn. 47 above), p. 153.
133 Iso Camartin, 'Die Beziehungen zwischen den schweizerischen Sprachregionen', in : Schläpfer (ed.),
Die viersprachige Schweiz (fn. 48 above), p. 343. The author was professor of Raeto-Romansch at
the ETH in Zurich.
134 On this, see Jachen C. Arquint, 'Stationen der Standardisierung', ibid. pp. 173 ff.
48
Gemeinden (communes) and Kreise (districts) play a much more important role in
Graubünden than in the other cantons. Most importantly, each commune decides independently
in what language early schooling will be delivered. If a commune decides to
change to another language, the canton cannot interfere with this. The most frequent
change-over has been to German. Whereas in the middle of the last century, half of all the
communes still spoke mainly Romansch, today the figure is less than a quarter. The extent
of communal freedom – remarkable even for Switzerland – is therefore no cause for
idealization. Indeed, this freedom has been a factor (one of several) in the disappearance
of Raeto-Romansch. Of course, it was others that ultimately tipped the scales. For one
thing, it has economic causes: Graubünden’s mountain valleys number amongst the major
areas of emigration of the last two hundred years; and when the construction of the
Brenner and Sankt Gotthard railways drastically reduced the economic importance of
Graubünden’s mountain passes over the Alps, the area became almost totally depopulated.
Tourism provided only a partial substitute, and, what was more, in the economic boom that
came after 1945, it increased the pressure exerted by the German language. Secondly,
Raeto-Romansch is hampered by its own extreme fragmentation – in more than just the
topographical sense. In point of fact, there is no such thing as Raeto-Romansch per se.
This, the smallest of all the Swiss national languages, comprises a large number of spoken
languages and several written variants. The most important are Ladino (in the Engadin)
and Surselva (in the Vorder Rhine valley). All the written forms of Raeto-Romansch are
recognized as cantonal languages in Graubünden. This very plurality, and the lack of a
shared written language, helped ensure the dominance of German. The various RaetoRomansch
idioms are sometimes so far removed from one another – not only
geographically, but also linguistically – that their speakers are only too pleased to switch
into German, which all of them know. (German is the universal foreign language in later
schooling.)135
All attempts made so far to unify Raeto-Romansch have failed. Its promotion to the status
of a national language in 1938 was followed by the publication of the Dicziunari
Rumantsch Grischun. In addition, the confederation subsidized the various RaetoRomansch
language-books and school-books, which are published not by the canton of
Graubünden, but by the Lia Rumantscha – the umbrella organization for all RaetoRomansch
associations. Since the gradual fraying of Raeto-Romansch was undoubtedly
one of the major causes of its dramatic decline over previous decades, a new phase of
unifying standardization was initiated: in 1982, the Zurich Romance specialist Heinrich
Schmid unveiled a new language – Romansch Grischun – constructed, in collaboration
with the Lia Rumantscha, out of all the various Raeto-Romansch idioms. To begin with, it
did not get a very good reception from those concerned. The belated standardization is
certainly a ticklish enterprise, given that, realistically speaking, any attempt to preserve the
language must be prepared for "the risky undertaking of existing in a bilingual world" and
of preserving the mother tongue alongside the German language. The precarious situation
of Raeto-Romansch speakers, so the specialist Iso Camartin judges, "will not permit of any
experiments with unification that might unthinkingly put at risk their intimate colloquial
135 Florentin Lutz and Jachen C. Arquint, 'Die rätoromanische Schweiz', ibid. pp. 259 ff.
49
49
relationship with their regional language. For it is precisely this relationship which confers
the greatest immunity to any temptation to exchange the language of childhood for the
language of the working environment."136
Of the four Italian-speaking valleys of Graubünden (Val Mesolcina/Misox, Val Calanca,
Poschiavo/Puschlav, and Bregaglia/Bergell), Bergell had espoused the Reformation,
whereas in Puschlav an arrangement based on parity had been agreed upon. The Engadin
was recruited to Calvinism from bases in Bergell and Puschlav, and it soon became a
fanatical adherent (mention has already been made of the Bible translations). This in itself
shows that the Italian-speaking valleys of Graubünden, which had never been under
confederation rule as the Ticinese had been, were not mere appendages. Although
Graubünden lost Valtellina again in 1815, Italian irredentism never aroused much response
in its four Italian-speaking valleys. Under the Chur government, from which they were cut
off by the Alps, they enjoyed considerable freedom. During this century, the four valleys
came together to form the umbrella-organization Pro Grigioni Italiano, which, together
with the Lia Rumantscha, secured federal subsidies for language-promotion. Of course,
Graubünden’s smallest language-group – unlike the Raeto-Romansch group – can look
directly to a major cultural region for support.
The widespread habit of referring to Ticino as Svizzera italiana – Italian Switzerland –
leaves out of account not only Graubünden’s four valli, but also the fact that Italian is the
mother-tongue of many of the foreigners who have settled in Switzerland, and is thus
spoken all over the country. Reference has been made to the thumbs-down given to the
Cisalpine Republic; but Ticino’s integration during the nineteenth century was not always
an easy process. Tensions arose not only from the Kulturkampf – the struggle between
Church and State – but also from the impoverished Ticinese economy. The mass
depopulation of Ticino’s mountain-valleys, and the migration of its inhabitants to work as
chimney-sweeps, grooms, coachmen, masons, and chestnut-vendors, was notorious.
Despite this, irredentist calls for annexation – a recurrent phenomenon in Italy from 1859 –
fell on deaf ears. Ticinese radicals who had supported the Risorgimento as volunteer
mercenaries turned away in disappointment when the unification of Italy assumed a
monarchical hue.137
It was only after the construction of the St Gotthard Tunnel in 1882
that jobs began to be created. The tourist industry too – no insignificant factor – also got
off the ground at this time. The expansion of this, combined with the mass purchase of
holiday homes by German-speaking Swiss and by Germans, aroused fears of a loss of
cultural-cum-linguistic identity amongst the Ticinese. As early as the 1930s, the Swiss
Federal Court explicitly granted the canton the power to take measures to safeguard its
traditional language, even in cases where the language upon which restrictions are imposed
is another national language.138
136 Camartin, 'Die Beziehungen zwischen den schweizerischen Sprachregionen', ibid. pp. 345 f.
137 For an informative account of this, see Hunziker, Die Schweiz und das Nationalitätsprinzip (fn. 99
above).
138 Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), p. 223; Schieder (see fn. 12 above), pp. 328 and 320) – saw this
judgement as the key to 'a model of conservationist language-policy, which takes the principle of
50
In 1990, 9.8 per cent of the Ticinese population stated that their mother-tongue was
German. Given that, for the majority of these individuals, Ticino is a place of retirement,
linguistic integration is minimal, and the canton’s linguistic homogeneity is therefore being
eroded. This gives rise to constant complaints. Another contributory factor here, besides
tourism and mass immigration, is the fact that Italian, though a national language on an
equal footing with the others, has in practice taken a back seat. In addition, it has lacked
the kind of cultural and intellectual aura which gave French its prestige for such a long
time. Since the start of labour-based immigration in the second half of the last century,
Italian has been regarded – and continues to be regarded – as the language of the
Gastarbeiter. The expert group appointed by the Swiss government came to the conclusion
that, although not in danger of extinction, the Italian language in Ticino did merit
increased support from the confederation.
4.4 The Canton of the Jura: A Difficult Birth
The canton of the Jura, the product of a scission from Bern, is scarcely twenty years old.
Because the federal constitution guarantees the cantons territorial integrity and does not
provide any mechanism for reconfiguring Swiss territory, the secession of the Jura raised
complex constitutional problems. Only with the help of third-party mediation did it prove
possible, in an arduous process, to balance the opposing interests. Since there is a clear
analogy between this birth and many other secessionist movements, I shall deal with the
individual steps that led to the creation of a canton of Jura in greater detail than is called
for by the language question per se.
Historically, the dispute arose from the fact that, at the Vienna Congress in 1815, Frenchspeaking
Jura had been annexed to Bern as compensation for the loss of Aargau and Vaud.
Besides being entirely pre-democratic in character, this transaction could not be justified in
terms of the legitimacy principle either: the Jura had been part of the prince-bishopric of
Basel since 999 but, following the latter’s destruction in the upheavals of the revolution,
had been left without a master. It is not surprising that opposition to the alien regime soon
began to stir in the Jura; since then, tensions have erupted on a regular basis. The official
language of Bern was German, but historical and linguistic tensions were mixed with
religious ones here – and this, according to Eric Hobsbawm, is what often turns
nationalism into an explosive "cocktail".139
An autonomist tendency began to make its
presence felt as early as 1830. And in 1836, when the Große Rat (cantonal parliament) in
Bern ratified an anti-clerical concordat, the Jura fell into a state of turmoil. When a
reinvigorated Catholicism declared war on the modern age with the publication of the
Syllabus errorum in 1864 and of the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870, the Swiss liberals
responded, in the so-called Kulturkampf, by repeatedly defying "Jesuits" and
"ultramontanes", and this rekindled the Jura conflict. Bern persecuted and suppressed
dozens of priests faithful to Rome; the church law of 1874 prohibited all public processions
territorial autonomy and develops it into a form of protection for linguistic and cultural areas that is
elevated to the status of a right of settlement'.
139 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Das imperiale Zeitalter 1875–1914 (Frankfurt/M.: 1989), p. 205.
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51
and made clerics subject to election by the commune – an affront to Catholic canon law:
"During this period, the northern Jura suffered psychological wounds that took years to
heal; for the violation of religious feelings is something that persists in the memory for
generations."140
During the First World War, the Jurassiens mobilized their defensive reflex against the
threat of "Germanization", but the separatist movement soon fizzled out. The economic
depression of the 1930s hit the region particularly hard and reactivated old fears. In 1947,
the conflict flared up again, when the cantonal parliament in Bern refused a councillor
from the Jura jurisdiction over the planning department – a post to which he was entitled
on grounds of seniority – because he spoke French. This provoked bitter protests. Bern
rewrote its constitution; its first article now stated that Bern comprised "the people of the
old part of the canton and that of the Jura", and that political power rested "upon the
totality of the people in the old part of the canton and in the Jura". The Jurassiens thus first
achieved recognition as an independent people in 1950; they were even allowed their own
flag. This was a one-off phenomenon: no other canton is based on more than one people,
not even the multilingual ones.141
However, as is almost always the case in these kinds of conflicts, the term "people of the
Jura" concealed numerous pitfalls. Despite their recourse to language, the separatists
underpinned their demand for independence with historical arguments – only in this way
could they lay claim to German-speaking districts as well. Because their desire for
secession was driven by the notion that, after eight centuries of affiliation to an
autonomous prince-bishopric, it was impossible ever to become truly Bernese, Fritz René
Allemann has claimed to see in this conflict "something typically Swiss".142
But as well as
the historical and ethnic unity of the Jura, there is its historical and ethnic fragmentation:
the region falls into two parts – not just geographically. The prince-bishopric of Basel was
a comparatively loose political entity, and the southern part had followed Bern in
espousing the Reformation. Whereas this part had been incorporated into the Swiss system
of defence, the north stuck constitutionally to the empire and was repeatedly caught up in
the latter’s turmoils from the time of the Thirty Years War. It was only with the advent of
the French, who, in 1792, first declared a République rauracienne and then proceeded to
annexe this, that the Jura achieved unity (temporarily), in the form of the Département du
Mont Terrible. But the centrifugal forces of history then took effect once again, reinforced
by industrialization. Whilst the Catholic parts of the region went into economic stagnation,
Biel and the districts of Saint Imier and Moutier rose to become centres of the Swiss clockand
watchmaking industry. They attracted immigrants on a mass scale; these settled in the
southern Jura, strengthening the latter’s ties with Bern. Hence, on closer inspection, it can
140 Hans von Greyerz, Nation und Geschichte im bernischen Denken. Vom Beitrag Berns zum
schweizerischen Geschichts- und Nationalbewußtsein (Bern: Staatlicher Lehrmittelverlag, 1953), p.
240.
141 Daniel Thürer, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker. Mit einem Exkurs zur Jurafrage (Bern:
Stämpfli, 1976), pp. 209 ff.
142 Allemann, 25 mal die Schweiz (fn. 1 above), p. 479. It says a lot about the author’s political nous that
despite the title of his 1965 book, he devotes a separate chapter in it to the Jura
52
be seen that the oft-evoked peuple jurassien un et indivisible and its unité ethnique
crumbled into a Francophone Catholic north, a Francophone but Reformed south, and a
German-speaking Catholic Laufental.
Only in the north, in the three Bezirke or districts of Porrentruy, Saignelégier, and
Delémont, did the agitation of the separatist Rassemblement jurassien fall on fertile
ground. With their own flag, their annual Fête du peuple jurassien in Delémont, their
weekly newspaper Jura libre, and their militant youth-organization Les Béliers (literally
"rams", but also an allusion to the medieval battering-ram), the separatists possessed
effective vehicles for publicizing their political aspirations. In 1959, a widely supported
petition or "popular initiative" (Volksinitiative) resulted in a referendum on the separation
of the Jura. As expected, the electorate of Bern rejected the proposal by an overwhelming
majority. But no one had reckoned on the initiative also being narrowly defeated in the
Jura itself. Once again, the old opposition between north and south had proved stronger
than language: even the French-speaking south (the districts of La Neuveville, Courtelary,
and Moutier) had voted no. That said, the slogan of the Bernese anti-separatists – "Votez
non, et on n’en parlera plus!" ("Vote no, and we’ll say no more about it!") – turned out to
be a pipe-dream. In the 1960s, some of the separatist Jurassiens graduated to direct action
and bomb attacks. Roland Béguelin, one of the powerfully eloquent leaders of the
Rassemblement jurassien, sought to secure the solidarity of French-speaking Switzerland
and of the ethnie française, and, in his most extreme utterances, distanced himself from
Switzerland.
This dangerous escalation prompted a series of attempts at mediation. A reconsideration
by the Bern government, combined with proposals from a "Commission of Good Offices"
initiated by the Federal Council, eventually resulted in a plan providing not only for an
autonomy statute for the Jura but also for further referendums. In March 1970, an
"Addendum to the Constitution of the Canton of Bern on the matter of the Jura Region"
was adopted by an overwhelming majority. It acknowledged the right of the population of
the Jura to self-determination. That population was now to go to the polls to decide
"whether the whole area or individual parts thereof wished to form a new canton, join
another canton, or continue to form part of the canton of Bern".143
In order to take account
of the unequal interests, and in order to avoid the pitfall usually associated with these kinds
of referendums – that of one minority problem being replaced by another – a territorially
differentiated three-stage procedure was adopted. Petitions (Volksinitiativen) were used to
request: first, a vote on the question of the formation of a new canton; then, in districts
where the no-voters had been outnumbered, the option of a further referendum about
staying in, or breaking away from, Bern; and, finally, in case of secession, the option, in a
third round of voting, for border communes to decide whether to join the new canton or
Bern. In the case of Laufental, the option of joining another canton was also provided for.
The right to self-determination was meant, in this way, to be decided upon "in units of the
smallest possible size", via a "cascade-style series of plebiscites".144
143 Text in Thürer, Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker (fn. 141 above), pp. 241–3.
144 Ibid. p. 217.
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53
This differentiation made it possible for an independent canton to be created even where
the majority in the Jura as a whole remained loyal to Bern. At first, the Rassemblement
jurassien was reluctant to take part in the plebiscites. It demanded that the right to vote be
restricted to "autochthonous" Jurassiens – which would have been against the constitution.
It also had doubts about the propriety with which the polls would be conducted. These
were allayed when the confederation undertook to monitor the voting.145
The "cascade"
could now begin. It confirmed the north–south divide. However, in 1974 a narrow majority
of the residents of the Jura as a whole now voted for an independent canton;
predictably, agreement ranged from 74 per cent in the northern district of Freiberge to 24
per cent in southern Courtelary. In Alemannic Laufental, three-quarters of the voters said
no. Once a majority had been achieved in the Jura as a whole, the separatists began
vociferously calling for unity, but the procedure that had been opted for allowed
countervailing interests to be taken into account. The northern Jura formed itself into a
canton, and the secession was given an overwhelming seal of approval in a national
referendum conducted in 1978. Since then, the Swiss constitution has talked of "the
peoples of the twenty-three sovereign cantons".
This complicated birth did not solve all the problems, but it did ease tensions in regard to
the Jura question. The Rassemblement jurassien has continued to call for the incorporation
of the south, or at least for a half-canton to be created. In 1990, the Swiss Federal Court
declared the Unir initiative, which sought to pledge the government and parliament of the
Jura canton to do what it could to promote unification, inadmissible; despite this, the
canton has passed legislation obliging its government to work towards this goal.
Meanwhile, the majority in the southern Jura have remained resistant to these siren-songs.
This situation is unlikely to change at least "as long as the 'barricade-fighting' generation
continues to set the tone in the plebiscites. The wounds which the separatists have inflicted
on their opponents in this passionate struggle are too deep for that."146
When, in 1984–5, it became known that the Bern government had given lavish financial
support to the pro-Bernese referendum committee, this added fuel to the Jurassian fire. In
the Laufental, the scandal tipped the scales: having narrowly voted for Bern in 1983, the
district was now ordered by the Federal Court to re-stage the poll. This time, Laufental
voted to join Basel, to which it has belonged since 1994. The commune of Vellerat, the
last to vote, opted to go over from Bern to the canton of Jura. The national referendum
required for this took place in 1996.
According to one specialist with an intimate knowledge of the Jura question, its ultimate
solution was due, on the one hand, to the persistent and experienced political leadership of
the separatists, and, on the other, to the "generous readiness of the Bernese government and
people to concede the right of self-determination to the Jurassiens". As regards the overall
Swiss situation, however, he highlights a different aspect: "The fact that the Jura question
did not turn into a powder-keg in the midst of quadrilingual Switzerland is due primarily to
145 Kurt Müller, 'Kanton Jura: Differenzierte Lösung eines komplexen Problems', in: id. (ed.),
Minderheiten im Konflikt. Fakten, Erfahrungen, Lösungskonzepte (Zurich: Verlag NZZ, 1993), p.
142.
146 Ibid. p. 144.
54
French-speaking Switzerland, which, despite its sympathies for the Jurassiens, toiling
under the heavy hand of Bern, remained alert to anti-Helvetic endeavours to bring about a
united dissenting Romandie."147
5. The Laborious Revision of the "Language Clause"
5.1 Linguistic Freedom versus the Territoriality Principle
The Bundi motion of 1985, which urged the confederation to make a stand against the
demise of Raeto-Romansch, then in its death-throes, prompted the Federal Council to
appoint an expert commission. This was to undertake a detailed examination of all
problems relating to language, given that, in the view of the government, the "marked
increase in indifference towards quadrilingualism" was a threat not only to the linguistic
minorities, but to "the national identity of the country as a whole".148
In 1989 the working
group submitted a report that was tantamount to an encyclopaedia of Swiss linguistic
problems, at the same time proposing two versions of an amendment to the constitution.
This triggered a wide public debate and a series of parliamentary consultations that went
on for several years,149
leading ultimately to a change to the constitution in March 1996.
The report – Zustand und Zukunft der viersprachigen Schweiz ("Present State and Future
Prospects of Quadrilingual Switzerland") – laid the blame for the growing disquiet on the
"marked increase in indifference to quadrilingualism", the "general debasement of
multilingualism", and the increasing "competition from English". From the point of view
of Switzerland as a whole, the core problem, said the report, was the Mundartwelle – that
is to say, the "trend towards the elimination of the so-called diglossia typical of Germanspeaking
Switzerland", meaning the co-existence of dialect and standard German. The
growth of dialect, said the report, lessened the incentive for Romance-speakers to learn
German and at the same time eroded the ability of German-speaking Swiss to
communicate with speakers of other languages at home and abroad and with Germanspeakers
from other countries. The report concluded by asking trenchantly whether a shift
was under way towards a "two-and-a-half-language Switzerland". This could, it said, be
taken as referring not only to the national decline of Italian, but also to the advance of
English to the status of second language, and to the fact that the Swiss were now only halfable
to communicate in the other national languages.150
Of course, when it came to
reflecting on what was to be done, the experts got tangled up in contradictions.
147 Ibid.
148 Message to chambers (fn. 27 above), p. 2.
149 On this, see, inter alia, the supplement to the NZZ of 16 Apr. 1991 Die viersprachige Schweiz and the
Presseschau Bundesverfassung Sprachenartikel (PS 728), Bern 31 Dec. 1995.
150 Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), pp. I–XIII.
55
55
Not the least of these was that, on the one hand, the report was dominated by an alarmist
tone: national identity and political integration were under threat, it claimed; Switzerland
had "got itself into a drastic situation as far as certain linguistic aspects were concerned".151
At the same time, the report observed that the high degree of public sensitivity to the
language difficulties was "not an indication of the existential explosiveness of the
problem"; these were, it said, "relatively fortunate times, [in which] a society was able and
willing to take steps to ensure the preservation of linguistic and cultural traditions".152
A recurrent theme of the report was regret at the increasing indifference and mere
juxtaposed existence of Swiss nationals of different tongues. From this, the report concluded
that multilingualism, bilingualism, multiculturality, and mutual understanding
needed to be promoted in a more systematic fashion than before. The experts stressed that
Swiss linguistic harmony – Sprachfrieden – owed much to the territoriality principle. This
imposes a "duty of assimilation" in all public affairs on anyone who moves to a different
linguistic area.153
The setting-up of French schools in German-speaking Switzerland has
been prohibited by the Federal Court, except in Bern, where it is permitted on account of
the presence of federal employees. The justification cited is that German-speaking Swiss
might then want to set up German-speaking schools in Ticino and in French-speaking
Switzerland. On the other hand, the committee concluded that, in those very areas where a
linguistic minority tipped over into a majority, as was often the case in communes in
Graubünden, the territorial principle did not work.154
It therefore recommended that the
principle of territoriality be subjected to cautious revision and that individual linguistic
freedom and bilingualism be given a higher profile. Turning to the call for greater mutual
understanding, the report proposed that the television stations of the three linguistic regions
should broadcast country-wide. But it also cited the pitfall inherent in such an
undertaking: reception of German Swiss television in Ticino and in French-speaking
Switzerland could render the linguistic-cum-cultural integration of German-speaking Swiss
even more difficult.155
Finally, the report lamented the triumphal advance of English, and the supposedly
"gloomy" prospects for the future which it entailed: "For a traditionally multilingual
country such as Switzerland, the major issue in the future will in fact be whether the three
great cultural languages will not become isolated from each other as a result of the preeminent
position of English."156
But this view overlooks the fact that English, beloved of
151 Ibid. pp. 309 ff.
152 Ibid. p. 258. By the way, linguistic problems surfaced, albeit peripherally, in another governmentappointed
expert committee which, from 1989 to 1991, was reflecting on the future of Switzerland:
Schweiz morgen. Vier Szenarien zur schweizerischen Zukunft. Bericht der Eidgenössischen
Expertenkommission an den Bundesrat (Bern, 1991). The public reaction to these scenarios was
admittedly quite minor: over the last few years, Switzerland has been too preoccupied with its past to
give much attention to the future.
153 Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), p. 193.
154 Ibid. pp. 199 ff; also pp. 346–55.
155 Ibid. p. 115.
156 Ibid. pp. 259 ff.
56
young people in every area of the country, facilitates the kind of cross-linguistic
comprehension being called for, and can thus promote mutual understanding. Why should
the existence of Switzerland be jeopardized if the global lingua franca gradually attains to
a position which it already holds in many other multilingual countries – the position,
namely, of an "intra-national medium of communication for all" – particularly since this
would cancel out the negative effects of the much-lamented Mundartwelle?157
The report on the one hand warns that, as a result of the growth in dialect, the German
Swiss are losing their diglossia, and thus also their ability to communicate both at home
and abroad. At the same time, however, it traces this growth to the way in which the
electronic media use the cosiness of dialect as a "home advantage" against foreign channels
that broadcast in the same language. The proportion of dialect broadcast on DRS (Radio
der Deutschen und Rätoromanischen Schweiz), which stood at about one third in 1970,
increased to one half over the next ten years, and to about two-thirds by 1980;158
in the
case of German-speaking television, the figure is about one third. Conversely, however,
the number of foreign stations in Switzerland has increased over the same period, and is
currently one of the highest in Europe.159
It would seem that radio and television are
reinforcing linguistic affiliation to the detriment of national broadcasters of other
languages: "French Swiss choose television programmes broadcast from France; German
Swiss choose those broadcast from Germany. German and French Swiss are sitting back-
to-back."160
In line with this, over the last few years most newspapers have stopped
dividing their television listings into "home" and "foreign" and now arrange them by
language. Could it be that the increasing importance of television is one of the factors
driving the recent promotion of ethno-linguistic affiliation, to the detriment of other kinds?
The obverse of this development is, of course, that the dialect-speaking German Swiss is
encountering spoken standard German at closer quarters than ever before in his everyday
life. One is therefore justified in doubting the claim that the German Swiss is losing his
competence in the standard language.161
After the publication of the report, the Swiss ministry of the interior set the
Vernehmlassungsverfahren or consultation procedure in motion. This typically Swiss
legislative procedure involves gathering statements of opinion from cantons, associations,
interest-groups, experts, and all those potentially affected. This is intended to help ensure
as broad a consensus as possible – an advisable move given that, thanks to the referendum,
one can easily end up holding a plebiscite on every piece of legislation. In the present
157 This is the view expressed by Urs Dürmüller, 'Englisch in der Schweiz', in Materialienband (fn. 39
above), pp. 1–14, and in id., 'Englisch als neues Verständigungsmittel zwischen den Angehörigen
verschiedener Sprachgemeinschaften', Gesetzgebung heute (1991), 1: pp. 124–32.
158 Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), p. 111.
159 Werner A. Meier, Auswirkungen internationaler Kommunikationsstrukturen auf die schweizerische
Medienkultur unter besonderer Berücksichtigung kultureller Souveränität und nationaler Identität,
Nationales Forschungsprogramm 21 (Basel, 1991), p. 7.
160 Schwander, Schweiz (fn. 46), p. 56.
161 On this, see Walter Haas, 'Die deutschsprachige Schweiz', in: Schläpfer (ed.), Die viersprachige
Schweiz (fn. 48 above), p. 108.
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57
case, a total of 88 statements were received. Above all, the cantons stressed the fact that
jurisdiction over language lay with them. Protection of national linguistic minorities was
also their responsibility in the first instance, they said; the confederation must only
intervene on a subsidiarity basis and in conjunction with themselves. Most of the
statements wanted to see the principle of territoriality enshrined in the constitution. As the
government summed it up, it was above all the French-speaking cantons and organizations
that "insisted on a strict application of the principle of territoriality in all language areas.
Only in this way could the language borders, and thus also linguistic harmony, be
preserved."162
The main line of conflict was thus defined.
On the basis of the expert report and the statements of opinion, the Federal Council put the
following proposed reformulation of the language clause before parliament in 1991:
" 1. Freedom of language is guaranteed.
2. German, French, Italian, and Raeto-Romansch are the national
languages of Switzerland.
3. The confederation and the cantons strive to ensure the preservation
and promotion of the national languages in their areas of use. The
cantons take special measures to protect national languages under
threat in a particular area; the confederation assists them in this.
4. The confederation and the cantons promote understanding between the
language communities and proper representation of all four national
languages at the pan-Swiss level.
5. The official languages of the confederation are German, French, and
Italian. In dealings between the confederation and Raeto-Romansch
citizens or Raeto-Romansch institutions, Raeto-Romansch is also an
official language. Details are regulated by legislation."163
This was certainly not revolutionary. Ranged against the newly adopted freedom of
language was the principle of territoriality: "preservation of the national languages in their
areas of use". But it was precisely in the area of tension between the two that the
parliamentary deliberations were to get bogged down. In the Council of States, freedom of
language met with stiff opposition from the French-speaking representatives. They pointed
out that this could be claimed not only by members of the linguistic minorities, but also by
the many German Swiss residents in their parts of the country, and they therefore argued
for it to be deleted. Whereas the French-speaking members of the council insisted on the
strict application of the principle of territoriality, the members from Graubünden advocated
flexibility, in order to afford greater protection to Raeto-Romansch. The Ticinese, for their
part, considered mutual understanding across linguistic frontiers to be more important.164
162 Message to chambers (fn. 27 above), p. 24.
163 Ibid. p. 27.
164 See Verhandlungsheft 91.019: 'Bundesverfassung, Sprachenartikel, Parlamentsdienst', Bern, 10 Dec.
1995, pp. 47–64.
58
The two chambers debated the language clause in an arduous to-and-fro that lasted until
1995. On several occasions, the whole procedure was left hanging by a thread, and it was
only out of concern for the endangered Raeto-Romansch language that nothing was done
to tear this. The main difficulty lay in the fact that the original enthusiasm of the Frenchspeaking
parliamentarians for the Bundi motion had waned. They feared a weakening of
the territoriality principle and of the linguistic sovereignty of the cantons. The crunch
question for multilingual Switzerland – that of the sensitive relationship between Frenchspeaking
and German-speaking Swiss – had thus been touched upon.
As is well known, the referendum on the European Economic Area in December 1992 hit
this raw nerve particularly painfully: with a turn-out of 78.3 per cent, a figure almost
unequalled since 1945, the EEA was rejected by the narrowest of margins – 50.3 per cent
to 49.7 per cent. The difference was all of 23,295 votes. However, the indispensable
majority of the cantons gave a quite different impression: 16 cantons against, and 7 in
favour (all the French-speaking ones and the two that make up Basel). In French-speaking
Switzerland, more than 70 per cent voted for the EEA; and in German-speaking
Switzerland 56 per cent voted against. The same kind of divergence has occurred
repeatedly since then – in the November 1993 vote on facilitating naturalization for young
foreigners, for example; or in the June 1995 vote on the relaxation of restrictions on the
acquisition of landed property by foreigners. Of course, there are several dichotomies in
operation here: town and country, young and old, the educated classes and the nonuniversity-educated,
upper and lower income-levels; but the gap between French Swiss and
German Swiss is a particularly sensitive one politically. Because of a reluctance to do
anything in the debate that might worsen this gap, the parliamentarians eventually deleted
both items – freedom of language and the territoriality principle – from the language
clause. The rapporteur in the Council of States, Riccardo Jagmetti, conceded that the
resultant slimmed-down version was not much of a feat:
"In the article, we have not touched on the major issues relating to national
coexistence in a country with several languages. Our text contains neither a
guarantee of the principle of territoriality nor an assurance of linguistic
freedom, nor, in particular, any stipulation as to how these two principles
are to be combined…We could not reach agreement on the formulation. It
appears that we in Switzerland are quite capable of solving such problems
in practice, and of shaping coexistence in a positive way, but that we exhibit
some difficulty articulating what we are living. Of course, this is better than
the other way round."165
In practice, this was tantamount to an admission – notably by the French-speaking Swiss –
that the delicate balance of interests was assured with the type of administration of justice
that the Federal Court had provided up to then.166
The following final version, the product
of years of deliberation, was finally passed on 6 October 1995 – unanimously by the
Council of States and with very few votes against by the National Council:
165 Ibid. p. 85 (my emphases).
166 On this, see Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), pp. 188–249.
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59
" 1. German, French, Italian, and Raeto-Romansch are the national
languages of Switzerland.
2. The confederation and the cantons promote understanding and
exchange between the linguistic communities.
3. The confederation supports the measures taken by the cantons of
Grau-bünden and Ticino to promote the Raeto-Romansch and Italian
languages.
4. The official languages of the federation are German, French, and
Italian. In dealings with persons of Raeto-Romansch tongue, RaetoRomansch
is also an official language of the confederation. Details
are regulated by legis-lation.
This version was put to the vote on 10 March 1996 and was adopted by the "sovereign"
(the electorate) with a 76.1 per cent share of the vote. Had the mountain laboured for more
than ten years to bring forth a mouse? Yes, if one views the result from the point of view
of legislative efficiency. But this criticism is tempered by the fact that the arduous
deliberations and public debates had reminded the Swiss of the difficult prerequisites for,
and conditions governing, their linguistic harmony. In addition, the preconditions for
confederation measures to support the two small minority languages had been improved.*
A more serious objection is that, given the multicultural realities of urban life, it has long
since ceased to be enough simply to defend traditional quadrilingualism. Whilst defending
Swiss linguistic minorities, so the criticism goes, and forking out millions for them, the
authorities require foreigners to conform to their Swiss environment in a way that "takes
on board a loss of human potential in the form of the linguistic and cultural assets brought
in by immigrants". This "disproportion", it is said, is particularly striking because "more
than half of foreign residents are Italian nationals and thus have command of one of the
official languages of Switzerland".167
But things are not quite as static as this. In 1990,
Switzerland – whose prohibitive naturalization practices were nicely captured in the
wickedly funny film-comedy Die Schweizermacher – did at least introduce the option of
dual nationality, with not very many votes against. As a result of this, the person seeking
naturalization is no longer required to give up his traditional national or cultural ties.168
* The completely revised Constitution, adopted by the people's vote on April 18, 1999 sustains these
formulations; see articles 70, 4 and 8.
167 Gita Steiner-Khamsi, 'Ausländische sprachliche Minderheiten in der Schweiz', in: Materialienband
(fn. 39 above), p. 90.
168 Georg Kreis, 'Schweizer als Ausländer – Ausländer als Schweizer', NZZ, 26 Oct. 1990. Compared
with similar procedures in Germany, the amendment to the law on dual nationality went through
astonishingly smoothly. The practical background to it was the fact that, once the internal market had
been created, EU citizens were no longer willing to forgo their advantages, and so their rate of
naturalization fell drastically – despite the fact that only minimal integration problems were associated
with them.
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5.2 Confederation Help for Raeto-Romansch and Italian
No one contradicted the alarmist tenor of the expert report in so far as it related to the
endangered Raeto-Romansch language. The new article of the constitution raised the latter
to the status of a partial official language and converted the confederation’s jurisdiction
over its promotion and preservation into a duty. In doing so, it created an explicit basis for
financial assistance. This benefited Raeto-Romansch radio and television broadcasting,
which since then has almost doubled – from what was previously five hours a day and just
less than an hour a month respectively. Direct support from the confederation has also
increased. This includes not only subsidies for the Lia Rumantscha and for school
textbooks, but also monies for further-education courses for adults (particularly languagelearning
for those moving into the area), advanced language-study, and grants for
publishers and print media. The umbrella language Rumantsch Grischun also seems
gradually to be finding more favour, particularly amongst speakers of the most endangered
idioms. The efforts of the confederation to enhance the status of Raeto-Romansch would
be more effective if a common written language could be agreed on voluntarily within the
canton.169
That said, there are strong indications that all these measures can at most delay the further
decline of Switzerland’s fourth national language. The expert report talks of "actual
evidence of disintegration".170
Given that it is already certain that there will "never again
be an adult monolingual Raeto-Romansch-speaker",171
the experts pinned their hopes on an
intensive, well-targeted promotion of bilingualism amongst Graubünden Romance-
speakers.
The increase in confederation subsidies that has come about since 1996 as a result of the
new language-clause has also profited the Italian-speaking valleys of Graubünden and
Ticino. As early as 1991, the Federal Council reinstituted the plan for a university "that
would help consolidate cultural identity throughout the region and would, not least, in its
capacity as a Swiss university, confer increased prestige and functionality on the Italian
language in Switzerland".172
On previous occasions, this project, the earliest plans for
which go back to 1844, had always come to nought. In October 1996, the Università della
Svizzerra Italiana was opened in Lugano and Mendrisio.
6. Not a Model, but a Useful Object of Study
Even without recourse to the myth of the "special case", there are, as has been shown here,
a number of rational factors that can be cited to explain why – with the exception of the
First World War – Switzerland has never experienced mass linguistic discord or
unresolvable tensions between its various linguistic-cum-cultural areas. That said, the
169 NZZ, 21 Dec. 1995.
170 Zustand und Zukunft (fn. 29 above), p. 265.
171 Ibid. pp. 260 ff.
172 Message to chambers (fn. 27 above), p. 34.
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difficulties and contradictions that emerged during the revision of the constitutional
language-clause also serve as an answer to the question of Switzerland’s suitability as a
model: how can a concrete historical experience be distilled into a model that need only be
"applied", roughly correctly, to quite different constellations, if that experience, though
managing somehow to function in practice, cannot even be set out in simple terms by
Swiss legislators? To this extent, the answer to the question posed in my title – namely,
whether Switzerland can serve as a model – must be "No". Abstracting general guide-lines
from the specific conditions in which the political system originally emerged is not
possible – or is only possible at the cost of being left with a lesson that is, precisely,
abstract.
That said, it is possible to use Switzerland as a basis for studying a collection of concrete
experiences that may be helpful as regards the management and de-escalation of
nationality conflicts of a potentially violent kind – provided these experiences are treated
cautiously, with common sense and an appreciation of contextual differences. I shall here
summarize once again the major elements of this kind of "practical application".
1. The foundations of the Swiss state were laid long before the emergence of today’s
conflicts over nationality and language. The notion of global confederate patriotism was
invoked from the late Middle Ages onwards, and in fully fledged fashion from the
eighteenth century. Both Machiavelli and Voltaire were aware of the intimate relationship
between patriotism and republicanism: "A republican is always more attached to his
fatherland than a subject is to his, for the simple reason that one is more fond of one’s own
property than of one’s master’s.".173
The combination of individual freedom, a new shared
sense of patriotism, and an attitude of veneration to the Alps that was typical of
Enlightenment Helveticism prompted the Italian historian Federico Chabod – as I have
already said – to ascribe the emergence of the modern idea of the nation entirely to
eighteenth-century Switzerland. Whatever the truth of this, there is no doubt that Swiss
history symbolizes the possibility, in principle, of bridging linguistic and ethnic differences
within a political "nation by will".
2. One of the inherent conditions for this is a renunciation of the desire to unify distinctive
individual historical sovereignties, identifications, and traditions. Formulas such as
"L’unité par la diversité" or "E pluribus unum" may sound clichéd, but it was the
inordinate amount of care and attention paid to cantonal differences, traditions, and
institutions that formed the basis on which the edifice as a whole was able to cohere via
associative, voluntary links. A story put about by Karl W. Deutsch relates how villagedwellers
in the border regions of eastern Europe, on being asked to state their nationality,
are supposed to have replied uncomprehendingly: "We’re from here." It is almost as if this
backwoods attitude had been deliberately cultivated in Switzerland. Nothing that can be
done at commune or canton level has been centralized – in the EU this basic federalist idea
is nowadays known as subsidiarity.
3. Most of the cantons have developed their unique political character in the course of a
lengthy historical evolution. In this process, each particular citizenry – the demos of the
173 As quoted in Kohn, Der schweizerische Nationalgedanke (fn. 31 above), p. 301.
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old republics and especially of modern-day popular sovereignty – created a memory of its
particularity and a collective affinity. What the Swiss constitution describes as a "people"
undoubtedly displays features of an ethnos, without this being based on any linguisticcum-ethnic
commonality. These two are not absolute opposites. For one thing, for a long
period of history, affiliation was a precondition for participation in the old republics. For
another, up to now there are still no universalist democracies that are not rooted in
particular states. None the less, the precedence given to self-determination, in the sense of
the democratic "right to self-constitution", over its narrower ethno-national acceptation, is
still of interest.
4. The comparatively high degree of democratic participation is related to the great
diversity of small-scale sovereign actors. It was, and is, not least the French-speaking
Swiss and Ticinese – in other words, the linguistic minorities – that have exploited, and
continue to exploit, this advantage over the centralist nation-states that share their
language. In Switzerland they were also, and still are, pioneers of federal independence,
opposing confederate tendencies to unification. That is why, in 1998, Switzerland, unlike
Germany, celebrated not only the anniversary of the bourgeois revolution and federal
constitution of 1848, but also – albeit reluctantly (as always) on account of the French
occupation – the events of 1798, when egalitarian democracy triumphed over the old
oligarchies, when the subject territories were liberated, and when equality of rights for a
plurality of national languages was established.
5. The idea of confederation, and the long period of self-assertion by small and very small
self-governing republican polities on, as it were, the Alpine periphery of the European
territorial dominions, led to the emergence of a specific political culture. In addition to
sovereignty, this comprises a long tradition of contractualism: after a number of bloody
wars, the Swiss were forced to learn to put their trust in compromise and voluntary
subjection to common arbitration-procedures. The very emergence of this kind of
democratic culture was blocked in neighbouring Austro-Hungary, and the delay in the
latter’s democratization was partly responsible for the nationality conflicts running out of
control once the crown ceased to be able to keep them in check. Of greater impact from
today’s perspective is the fact that Communism once attempted to solve the nationality
question by, as it were, territorializing it and subjecting it to a unique kind of formal
federalization: since all subpolitical entities were overlaid by the hypercentralist unity
party, experience of the practices and rules of democratic self-government and conflict
resolution was totally lacking. The old, complex relationship between democratization and
nationalism that has repeatedly surfaced since the French revolution once again makes
itself felt here. Of course, democracy does not of itself solve all nationality conflicts; but
there is no doubt that, without the option of democratic procedures, such conflicts become
more acute.
6. Another element of the political culture of Switzerland is the comparatively long
experience the Swiss have of plural affiliations or identities. What the German Swiss
experience as problematic on account of their difficult relationship with Germany since the
late nineteenth century appears simpler for the French- and Italian-speaking Swiss – the
combination of a clear cultural affiliation with the self-evident political affiliation that
comes with being a Swiss citizen. In addition, multilingualism and the fact of having
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several national languages of equal status makes every Swiss aware from childhood of the
unusual and thought-provoking fact that there are people who, though strangers, are also
part of one’s own world. This can awaken interest in what is other, what is strange.
7. In the nationalist age, it was possible to enlist the old foundation-stories about
particularist differences to combat the rapidly increasing power of ethno-nationalism. It
was only at this point that, in addition to other compensatory strategies of integration
(neutrality, republican freedoms, the mythologization of the Alps), multilingualism was
ideologized as the core feature of the distinct, politically construed Swiss nation and was
endowed with a sacred status as Switzerland’s own unique mission. The positive side of
this self-stylization was that, to the strongly federalist trend – which gave the minorities
more weight than they were entitled to numerically – there was now added an active
political determination to work against homogenization. Tendencies in this direction result
not only from state-led ideologies of unification; they are also at least partly natural
concomitants of the industrialization and social mobilization of the modern age. The
principle of territoriality can counter them, but it is no panacea. The Swiss experience
teaches us that this principle must be handled in a flexible way: the more endangered a
language is, the less appropriate the principle is. The decline of Raeto-Romansch in any
case shows that, even with the best will in the world, socio-technocratic linguistic policy
has its limits.
8. The sovereignty of the cantons has counteracted linguistic tendencies to
homogenization, just as, conversely, multilingualism has bolstered the cantons against
modern-day efforts at centralization. Political integration and consensus in Switzerland
rest on a complicated system of so-called cross-cutting cleavages or "multiple forcefields".
Linguistic, religious, cantonal, cultural, and economic differences and contrasts
criss-cross one another, with the result that, instead of there being straightforward "battlefronts",
there is a multi-layered interpenetration of majorities and minorities. These kinds
of constellations provide a favourable context for any attempt to temper ethno-centrism
through decentralization and federalization.174
Where every group can potentially be in a
minority, no one thinks of reducing democracy to the majority principle. In fact, it is more
likely that, conversely, democratic culture will be taken to imply respect for minorities.
9. If I have laid stress on concrete historical and political constellations in trying to make
Switzerland comprehensible, this has certainly not been with the object of proving that to
federalize or "cantonalize" ethnic conflicts is impossible where other circumstances and
preconditions prevail. The example of Switzerland does show what sort of time-scales are
needed for processes of democratization and democratic federalization to be successful;
and knowledge of this fact can be a salutary antidote to all-too-brashly optimistic sociotechnocratic
approaches which believe that acute nationality conflicts can be laid to rest by
"conflict management" based on a handful of simple recipes. Lasting settlement takes
time.
174 On this, see also the Basel charter on federalist conflict-settlement: Der Friede beginnt im eigenen
Haus – Der Weltfriede beginnt mit dem innern Frieden der Staaten, an account of which is given in
NZZ, 6 Oct. 1995.
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10. Switzerland has benefited from the fact that three of its languages are European world
and cultural languages. It was because of this that, for a long time, the idea of learning the
other respective languages held a certain attraction. Besides this, French-speaking
Switzerland never felt itself culturally in a minority or inferior; on the contrary, in its own
view and in the perception of the German-speaking majority, it had the status of a model in
many areas of everyday life: culture, cuisine, table-manners, etiquette, fashion, style,
elegance, intellectual style – in short savoir vivre. This state of affairs made regard for the
language of a minority much easier. Since English has become the global lingua franca
and US influence on science and culture has made itself felt all over the world, this has
abated. Instead of learning French or German as their first foreign language, most young
people would rather opt straight away for English. Could this not in fact facilitate
understanding between the different languages? At all events, the doom-and-gloom view
of civilization, which says that what nationalism did not manage to achieve in the
nineteenth century – namely, the disintegration of Switzerland into its constituent
linguistic-cum-cultural parts – could well be accomplished by the current indifference to
other language-groups, is not a compelling one.
11. Fear of the centrifugal force of the different languages has always been present in
Switzerland. What has held them together was the certainty that they had more of a voice
and were in safer hands in Switzerland than in Germany, France, or Italy. External
pressure and neutrality acted as added integratory forces: for a long time, demarcation from
the outside reinforced internal integration. But this has ceased to function nowadays. In
fact, the habit of standing aloof, which has hardened into a real isolationist syndrome,
seems to be having the opposite effect: now that neutrality has been undermined and the
myth of the special case has crumbled, the rejection of European integration – which, in
the case of the German Swiss, has a lot to do with fears about identity – has met at the very
least with incomprehension in French-speaking Switzerland. This issue, as was
dramatically demonstrated by the plebiscite on the European Economic Area, rekindles old
antagonisms. One of these is the division between French-speaking and German-speaking
Switzerland. It is mainly the latter that has squandered the opportunity to link into the
European changes. Perhaps the minorities will again be the ones to give it a helping hand.
Despite all this, the idea – not infrequently to be found haunting the German media – that
Switzerland may start to crumble away at the edges of its linguistic borders appears to me
to have little basis in reality. By analogy with a famous dictum of Tito’s, according to
which he governed a country that had two alphabets, three languages, four religions, and
five nationalities, and that these lived in six republics, were surrounded by seven nations,
and had to make do with eight national minorities, one might say: Switzerland is a small
state consisting of a fragile political nation that is made up of four languages, two
religions, and twenty-six partially sovereign cantons, and is, moreover, surrounded by
mighty and not always innocuous big powers and nation-states. For all that, it has not
fallen apart.