Swiss Confederation

The Swiss Confederation is a landlocked federal republic in central Europe, bordered by the German states of Baden and Württemberg to the north, Austria-Hungary and Liechtenstein to the east, the Socialist Kingdom of Italy to the south, and the French Empire to the west. Bern is the seat of federal government. The population is approximately nine million.

Switzerland is the most decentralised state in Europe and among the most decentralised in the world. Twenty-six cantons hold the residue of sovereignty and delegate upward; the federal government exercises only what the Constitution grants it; and every significant federal decision may be put to the whole electorate by petition. There is no head of state. Executive power belongs collectively to a Federal Council of seven, whose members are equals, and whose presidency rotates annually as a matter of chairmanship rather than office.

It has four national languages and no national language, is permanently and armedly neutral, and has stayed out of every war since 1815. Its neutrality is not pacifism: it maintains a militia army on universal male conscription and has fortified its mountains for a century and a half against invasions that never came.

Its relationship with the rest of Europe is characteristically its own. Switzerland belongs to the European Concert, and belongs on terms no other member holds: it took the customs area and the single market and declined the political competences, the Court’s jurisdiction over its domestic law and the federalising machinery. The instrument was approved by referendum in 2027 by a margin of under three points, after full membership had been rejected outright in a preceding vote.

Etymology

Switzerland takes its name from the canton of Schwyz, one of the three forest communities of the original confederation, whose name spread to the whole because Schwyz was prominent in the fourteenth-century wars against the Habsburgs. The country is therefore named after roughly a fiftieth of itself, and the other cantons have never entirely stopped mentioning this.

The Latin form, Confoederatio Helvetica, is the state’s answer to having four languages and no way of choosing among them. A country called Schweiz in German, Suisse in French, Svizzera in Italian and Svizra in Romansh cannot put its own name on a coin without slighting three of its own peoples, so it uses a dead language nobody speaks and everybody accepts. The abbreviation CH on vehicles and in the internet domain descends from it.

The people are the Swiss; in German usage the country is die Schweiz and the state is die Eidgenossenschaft, the oath-fellowship, from the founding oath rather than from any territory.

History

The Confederation

Swiss tradition dates the Confederation to 1291, when the communities of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden swore a mutual defence pact against the Habsburgs. The document exists. The oath sworn on the Rütli meadow above the Lake of Lucerne is a later literary elaboration and is treated in Switzerland as national myth rather than as history, which does not stop the meadow being visited.

The Confederation grew across three centuries by accretion, absorbing cities, valleys and subject territories into a loose league whose members had little in common but a shared interest in not being governed from outside. Its soldiers were the most sought-after mercenaries in Europe and its principal export for two hundred years, a trade that ended in the nineteenth century and survives only in the Papal Guard.

The Reformation split it and nearly destroyed it, producing a patchwork of Protestant and Catholic cantons that fought four civil wars over two centuries and then settled into a suspicious coexistence. Neutrality emerged from this as much as from any principle: a confederation whose members would fight each other over religion could not possibly agree on a foreign war, so it took no side in anyone’s, and by the seventeenth century the habit had become a doctrine.

Napoleon abolished the Confederation, replaced it with a centralised Helvetic Republic that the Swiss detested, and restored the cantons when it failed. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 recognised Swiss permanent neutrality and guaranteed the country’s borders, which have not changed since.

The federal state

The last civil war was fought in 1847. Seven Catholic cantons formed a separate league, the Sonderbund, against a liberal Protestant majority intent on a stronger central state; the federal army defeated them in twenty-six days, with fewer than a hundred dead on both sides, under a general who ordered his troops to spare property, treat prisoners well and end the thing quickly.

The Federal Constitution of 1848 followed, and it is the foundation of the modern state. It created a federal government with defined and limited powers, a bicameral legislature modelled partly on the American one, a collegial executive of seven, and a customs union that turned twenty-five separate economies into one. The defeated Catholic cantons kept their institutions, their schools and their religion, and were brought into federal government rather than excluded from it, which is generally held to be why 1847 was the last time.

The Constitution was wholly revised in 1874, which introduced the legislative referendum, and again in 1999, which restated it in modern language without altering its architecture.

The Great Wars

Switzerland was neutral in both Great Wars and fought in neither.

Its position in the Second Great War was unlike that of the other neutrals and unlike its own position in any other history. It sat between a fascist France to the west and an Allied Germany, an Allied Italy and an Allied Austria-Hungary on every other side. It was therefore not encircled by one belligerent but wedged between both, and that geography gave it a function no other state could perform.

Switzerland was the channel through which the belligerents spoke when they had to. It was where the protecting powers did the work of protecting powers: prisoner lists exchanged, camp inspections arranged, the mechanics of the laws of war conducted between states that were killing each other. The escape lines out of occupied territory ran north to the sea and east into Switzerland, and the organisers used the second route knowing exactly what it meant, because a person interned in Switzerland was alive. Thousands spent years there.

It also sheltered refugees and turned refugees away, and the proportion between the two is a matter of Swiss historical argument conducted honestly and at length. Its banks and its industry did business with both sides. That is the durable charge against Swiss neutrality in this war as in the other, it is substantially true, and the Swiss commissions that examined it published findings which did not spare their own country. Switzerland’s own official position is that the record stands as the commissions found it.

After 1945

The postwar decades were prosperous, quiet and internationally awkward. Switzerland declined to join the reconstructed League of Nations as a member for half a century, on the ground that collective security and permanent neutrality could not be reconciled, while simultaneously hosting the League’s headquarters and a large part of its system at Geneva. It joined in 1986, by referendum, after the argument had been had four times.

It was not a member of the alliance system that formed after 1949, is not one now, and has never sought to be.

Government and politics

Switzerland’s institutions are unusual enough that they resist comparison, and Swiss people are used to explaining them.

The Federal Council

Executive power is held by the Federal Council, seven members elected individually by the Federal Assembly for four-year terms. They are equals. Each heads a department; decisions are taken collectively; and once taken, every councillor defends the decision in public whether or not they supported it, a convention called collegiality that is observed with remarkable consistency.

There is no head of state and no head of government. The President of the Confederation is one of the seven, chairs the meetings, performs ceremonial duties for a calendar year, and returns to being an ordinary councillor at the end of it. The office rotates by seniority, cannot be held twice in succession, and carries no additional power whatever. The incumbent for 2028 is Nadine Stucki.

Foreign visitors reliably fail to identify who is in charge of Switzerland, and the correct answer is that nobody is.

The Council’s composition follows an arithmetical convention, not a law, by which the seats are distributed among the largest parties in rough proportion to their strength, and among the linguistic regions. Governments are therefore permanent coalitions of parties that oppose each other at elections, there is no opposition in the parliamentary sense, and a change of election result alters the Council slowly or not at all.

Direct democracy

The distinguishing feature of Swiss government is that the electorate is a branch of it.

Any federal law may be challenged by referendum if fifty thousand signatures are gathered within a hundred days, and the law then stands or falls by popular vote. Constitutional amendments and major treaties require a mandatory referendum and must carry both a majority of voters and a majority of cantons. And any hundred thousand citizens may propose a constitutional amendment by popular initiative, which must be put to a vote whether or not the government or parliament wants it.

Votes are held four times a year, on several questions at once. Turnout is modest, usually between forty and fifty per cent, and Swiss commentary treats this as the natural consequence of voting constantly rather than as a crisis.

The system makes Swiss politics slow, consensual and hard to move. It also means that no government can carry a measure the country will not accept, and that anything the political class agrees on can be stopped by anybody who can find fifty thousand people who disagree. Both the strengths and the costs are visible in the country’s European policy.

The cantons

The twenty-six cantons are the constituent states and hold the residue of power: everything the Constitution does not assign to the Confederation belongs to them. They run schools, hospitals, police, and much of taxation, and they differ from one another substantially in law, language, religion and temper.

Each has its own constitution, parliament and government, and two still hold their legislative assembly as an open-air gathering of all citizens in a public square, which is the oldest surviving form of democracy in Europe and is conducted with the seriousness of anything else in Swiss public life.

The cantons are represented equally in the Council of States, two members each and one for the six historic half-cantons, regardless of population. Zurich, with a million and a half people, has the same weight as Appenzell Innerrhoden, with sixteen thousand.

Neutrality and defence

Swiss neutrality is permanent, armed and self-imposed. Its recognition in 1815 was an international act; its content is a Swiss decision, and Switzerland has interpreted it consistently to permit humanitarian action, protecting-power mandates and economic relations with everybody, and to forbid military alliance, foreign basing and the transit of belligerent forces.

The armed forces are a militia. Service is compulsory for men, voluntary for women, and consists of an initial training period followed by annual refresher service into middle age. For most of the twentieth century soldiers kept their rifles at home, a practice reduced but not abolished. The army can be mobilised very quickly, is not designed to project force anywhere, and exists to make the country expensive to invade.

The Alpine fortifications built for that purpose, the tunnels prepared for demolition, the bunkers under ordinary buildings and the shelter space for the entire population are the physical residue of a doctrine that assumed invasion was a matter of time. None of it has been used. Swiss opinion on whether the expenditure was justified divides along lines that have not moved in fifty years.

A popular initiative to abolish the army was put to a vote in the 1980s and was rejected, by a smaller margin than anybody had expected, and the result is still cited by both sides.

The European Concert

Switzerland belongs to the European Concert and does not belong to it in the way any other member does.

The Concert was founded at Straßburg in 2027 to lower the great-power tensions stirring as the long cold war faded, and it binds most of the continent into a customs union, a single market, a phased free movement of persons and a set of political competences policed by a court that may bind a member to a rule it voted against. That last feature is the one Switzerland could not accept, and the reasons are constitutional rather than sentimental. A state whose electorate can strike down any federal law by petition cannot promise that its law will conform to anybody else’s, because it cannot bind its own voters. Swiss negotiators put this to the Concert as a fact rather than a demand.

The country voted twice. Full membership was rejected outright, by a wide margin and by every canton but four. A negotiated instrument was then put to a second vote and carried by under three points, with the cantonal majority secured narrowly: Switzerland takes the customs area and the single market, participates in the technical and regulatory machinery, contributes to the Concert budget, and stands outside the political competences, outside the Court’s jurisdiction over Swiss domestic law, and outside the federalising provisions altogether. Free movement applies on a bilateral basis with its own safeguard clauses.

The arrangement is resented by several other members, who describe it accurately as selection among the parts of the union that suit, and who observe that Switzerland enjoys the market while declining the obligations that make the market possible. The Swiss answer is that they were offered membership, said no, and negotiated something they could actually ratify, and that a Concert unable to accommodate a state with genuinely popular sovereignty would be telling the rest of the continent something about itself.

The question is not settled. Every enlargement of Concert competence reopens it, each reopening requires a Swiss vote, and nobody in Bern or Straßburg expects the present balance to survive indefinitely.

Economy

Switzerland is a small, rich, open economy with almost no natural resources, and its wealth is a construction rather than an endowment.

Banking and financial services, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, precision engineering and machine tools, watchmaking, insurance and reinsurance, and a commodity trading sector centred on Geneva and Zug account for most of what the country sells. Its firms are disproportionately world leaders in narrow fields, and its manufacturing survives high wages by operating where price is not the deciding factor.

Banking secrecy, for most of the twentieth century the industry’s foundation and the country’s most persistent international difficulty, has been substantially dismantled since the 2010s under sustained external pressure, and Swiss banks now exchange information with foreign tax authorities as a matter of routine. The sector adapted, remained large, and lost an argument it had been making since the 1930s.

The Swiss franc is a reserve and refuge currency and is chronically overvalued, because every international crisis sends money into it and drives up the exchange rate against the interests of Swiss exporters. Managing this is the central and unending problem of Swiss monetary policy. The franc is also the currency of Liechtenstein, which shares a customs area with Switzerland under long-standing treaty.

Income per head is very high by any measure, and the country sits at the top of the ordinary international rankings of wealth, competitiveness and quality of life. It does not out-earn the wealthiest states of the European order, several of which sit above it, and Swiss opinion has never been much troubled by the comparison.

Demographics and society

The population is approximately nine million, of whom roughly a quarter are foreign nationals, one of the highest proportions in Europe. Naturalisation is famously difficult and is decided partly at communal level, in some places by a vote of the existing residents, which has produced episodes that Swiss courts have had to correct.

Switzerland is intensely urbanised in the plateau between the Alps and the Jura, where nearly all the population and almost all the economy sit, and very thinly settled in the mountains.

Languages

There are four national languages and no national language.

German is spoken by roughly two thirds, in the form of Swiss German, a group of Alemannic dialects that are the ordinary spoken language at every level of society and are not mutually intelligible with standard German. Written German is standard, spoken German is not, and the gap between them is wider in Switzerland than anywhere else in the German-speaking world. French is spoken by about a fifth in the west, Italian by under a tenth in Ticino and the southern valleys, and Romansh, a Rhaeto-Romance language, by a few tens of thousands in Graubünden.

German, French and Italian are official at federal level. Romansh is official in dealings with Romansh speakers, a formula devised to give a language of forty thousand people constitutional standing without requiring every federal document to appear in it.

The linguistic frontier runs through the country without following the cantonal boundaries, and three cantons are officially bilingual and one trilingual. The division is real, is discussed constantly, and has never in the modern period threatened the state, which the Swiss attribute to the fact that religion, language and canton cut across one another rather than reinforcing.

Religion and society

Roughly a third of Swiss are Catholic, a fifth Protestant, and a growing plurality of no religion. The confessional division that produced four civil wars is now of chiefly historical interest, and the cantonal arrangements it left behind survive in school calendars and public holidays.

Switzerland’s most serious modern failing in its own account of itself is the position of women. Women did not receive the federal vote until 1971, later than any other country in Europe, because extending it required a referendum of the existing all-male electorate, which refused in 1959 and agreed only twelve years afterwards. The last canton to admit women to cantonal affairs did so in 1990, by order of the Federal Supreme Court, having declined to do so by any other means. This is taught in Swiss schools without mitigation, and the standard Swiss observation about it is the uncomfortable one: that the same direct democracy which makes the country hard to govern badly also made it impossible to reform quickly, and that half the population paid for that.

The other long-running blemish is the treatment of children removed from poor, unmarried or itinerant families and placed as indentured farm labour, a practice that continued into the 1970s and for which the Confederation apologised and paid reparations in the 2010s.

Culture and daily life

Switzerland is four cultures that share a state and a set of habits.

Those habits are punctuality, privacy, quiet, order, an unusual attachment to rules and an equal willingness to vote them down, thoroughness, and a strong preference for the local over the national. Swiss people identify with their commune first, their canton second and the Confederation third, and are comfortable saying so.

The country’s cultural production is regional and its international profile is smaller than its wealth: it exports architecture, design, typography and a certain kind of precision rather than mass culture. Its writers work in four languages and are generally claimed by the neighbouring literature.

The mountains are the national landscape and the national industry, having been converted from an obstacle into an asset by the invention of tourism in the nineteenth century. Skiing, hiking and the Alpine clubs are mass activities rather than elite ones. Shooting clubs are ordinary, following from the militia system. Sunday is quiet by custom and, in many places, by regulation.

Symbols

The flag is a white cross on a red square field. It is one of only two square national flags in the world, and the square is the point: Switzerland is not a maritime power and the rectangular proportions of the world’s flags follow naval convention. The Swiss ensign, flown by Swiss-registered vessels, is rectangular for exactly that reason, which the Swiss consider a reasonable compromise and slightly funny.

The coat of arms is the same device on a shield. There is no crest, no supporter and no motto in ordinary use, though Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno appears in the dome of the Federal Palace and is not official.

The Red Cross emblem is the Swiss flag with its colours reversed, adopted in 1863 in honour of the country where the movement was founded, and the resemblance is not coincidental.

The anthem is the Swiss Psalm, adopted provisionally in 1961 and definitively in 1981 after two decades of argument, and there is a recurring and so far unsuccessful campaign to replace its words on the ground that few Swiss can sing more than the first line.

National day is 1 August, marking the pact of 1291, and became a federal holiday only in 1994, by popular initiative.

Trivia

See also

• The European Concert, which Switzerland joined on terms no other member holds
• The League of Nations, whose headquarters is at Geneva and which Switzerland declined to join until 1986
• The Second Great War, through which Switzerland was wedged between both sides rather than encircled by one
• France, the fascist power to the west during that war and the French Empire since
• The German Empire, whose southern states of Baden and Württemberg share the northern frontier
• The Socialist Kingdom of Italy, to the south

Switzerland · Federal Republic · Europe · Neutrality · Foreign Nations