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1. Pilgrimage Most visitors to Schwyz ride down from Zürich on the train. The approach is pleasant, as is practically all of Switzerland. For Switzerland, however, it is an ordinary beauty - a picture postcard on the rack, but not the one of the four or five you would buy. The small-town buildings are tired, a bit faded; not the crisp whites and criss-crossing browns that you expect, and usually find. There are no spectacular castles or mountain passes, or if there are, they have eluded me on more than one trip as grey mist slumps around the train. About halfway through the one-hour trip it hits you that just because a place is historic doesn't mean it's going to be inspiring. Maybe it is better to keep expectations low. But to anyone making a pilgrimage to the Schwyz archives, there's also a sense of anticipation. Each stop brings you closer to a piece of history. The geography reinforces this, the train winding along a river surrounded by mountains. One cannot see far horizontally; the view is mainly upward. So you never know; on rounding the next curve, you might arrive at your stop. When we do arrive at the Schwyz station, though, the scene, despite the gloomy weather, is anything but Death in Venice. The first thing to catch my eye is a medium-sized news stand. Medium-sized for O'Hare airport or Penn Station, that is: For a small rural town, this one, like many in the country, is huge. (An article in the paper several days later boasted, accurately by my experience, that the Swiss consume more newspapers per capita than the people of any other country - twice the European average.) My thoughts are broken by the hiss of bus brakes. Like taxi cabs at La Guardia airport, they have rushed up to meet the train. There is added hurry; the drivers seem to know (and it concerns them) that they are about ninety seconds late. Swiss punctuality may be a stereotype, but it is an accurate one. Climbing onto the bus are five or six others: A pair of teenagers; a woman of about forty-five years, her hair dyed an extreme brassy red- orange color of the type normally seen only on teenagers in America, but which is surprisingly popular among older women in Switzerland; and a man with muddy boots and blue jeans and a red plaid shirt. The man is talking with his son in a dialect that's hard to make out, but he uses the German word for "fertilizer." The bus pulls back, bumping and hissing me into the real, tangible world. A short ride, mostly uphill, brings me to my destination: The Schwyz information center, near the post office. Actually, the information center has closed. Luckily, a travel agency next to where the old center was helps me out with directions to the archives. The young woman there, who is fluent in English and Japanese, has obviously given these directions before, and has a map of the town to point out the simple turns one needs to make. But there is no fanfare about it - no official transfer of duties, and, one senses, no great hue or cry in the town or among the occasional tourists about the loss of the center. With characteristic low-key efficiency, the travel agency appears to have stepped in, seamlessly, for the old center. The archives are closed until 2 p.m. anyway, and something urges me to soak in a little bit of the town. It is more inspiring than either the train ride or the literature about Schwyz have led me to believe. A tour book describes a somewhat dingy village "cowering under the peaks of the Mythen." In fact, the buildings - though none is more than a few stories tall - seem to tower above the mountains. This is only an illusion resulting from the structure of the town, but it feels no less real. Though the streets are newly paved, they are narrow, some dating to Medieval times. This makes it difficult to stand back and get a perspective accurately contrasting the buildings with the mountain's far greater height. Whatever the cause of this effect, an unpretentious nobility whispers from the old white homes and inns, the granite town hall at the end of the street, and even the old wooden storehouse and stone tower that both predate the Bundesbrief itself. And far from cowering, they seem - partly due to the layout of the streets, partly due to a natural romanticization - to gently rival the mountain and the sky. There is a quiet greatness. August 1, 1291 - that is the date that brings me to a small mountain town in central Switzerland. The year isn't as famous as 1776. And the document that was signed - now called the Bundesbrief, or what might be translated as a "letter/ contract/ charter of allegiance/confederation/bond" - isn't as well known as the Magna Carta. On that date, though, human freedom made an important advance. It is the oldest written record of a confederation that gradually became Switzerland. It led directly to extended charters of freedom for the tiny states near here, for a period of two decades and, ultimately, to an historic military victory that confirmed their freedom in 1315: the battle of Morgarten. What happened, in the words of one historian, not only explains the birth of Switzerland, it "is the birth of Switzerland." As well, like America's own declaration of independence, this is a story of more or less "people's diplomacy," in this case between the rugged communities of the central Alps. There is probably no exact historical enactment of the signing of a social contract. As Rousseau suggested, the "social contract" is more an abstraction from events than an event itself. But the Swiss Bundesbrief has some of its characteristics. It comes close. Does any of this matter? That is to say, Why study Switzerland? One obvious reason is Switzerland's material and, one might say, cultural or social greatness. It is perhaps the richest country in the world in terms of per capita income, which is about $40,000 per year. The Swiss economy is one of those - Taiwan, Japan - that seem blessed by a poverty of physical resources. The country mines neither precious metals nor fossil fuels, and is even, despite its dairy industry, significantly dependent on imports of certain foods. Yet by thrift and invention, the Swiss people have made pioneering advances in manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, and other industries. When the country's jobless rate nosed above 1 percent late in the twentieth century, Swiss politicians, straight-faced, talked about the nation's "employment crisis." Culturally, the Swiss have managed to accommodate language, religious, and ethnic diversity with unusual harmony. The country has three official languages in wide use and a variety of ethnic groups. Switzerland has been a nation of immigrants and refugees in Europe for centuries, and continues today: close to 20 percent of the resident population is foreign. Yet crime and social tension are low, cohesion high. Even prosperous countries with a degree of Switzerland's language "divisions," as they are called in other countries, seem nagged by the complexity: Canada and Belgium, to name just two. Poor countries in these conditions are simply overwhelmed. Yet the Swiss navigate between French, German, and Italian in their market places, their civic institutions, and in everyday life, with an easy grace. Many university presidents and mayors in the United States, and heads of state in Asia or Central and Eastern Europe, have cause to envy and perhaps emulate Switzerland. An interesting statistic is that when asked an open-ended question as to what makes them proud about their country, more than 60 percent of Swiss give as their first answer something having to do with their political system. In many countries, rich and poor, neither politics nor the system is so esteemed. These very achievements, however, have generated a certain bias in recent thought about Switzerland. The country is regarded as somewhat narrow and calculating by some, merely fortunate by others; at best, as a kind of bucolic land of women with puffy white sleeves and yodeling - a lovely cheese and chocolate store, but no more. The notion is that Switzerland has enjoyed centuries of what one American writer called "uninterrupted peace and prosperity." These notions of Switzerland, however, are a myth. What is worse - for myths can do great good - they are a debilitating myth. They make it hard to think seriously about Switzerland - and therefore, hard to take advantage of the lessons it may have to offer. In fact, parts of Switzerland were occupied by French troops for a generation (1792-1813). The Swiss fought a civil war at about the time America and Europe fought theirs (1847), and were surrounded and land- locked by Nazi Germany (1940-1944). The country suffered bitter religious divisions for centuries, and in recent years (1970s) had to combat - albeit successfully - a "secession" movement that featured domestic terrorism, in what is now the independent canton of Jura. Despite the liberal attitudes of the Swiss, women were not empowered to vote until 1971. And some Roman Catholic orders were outlawed until very recently. In short, Switzerland has not been immune to the plagues of history, and if it is healthier now, it is because its people seem to have found cures for at least some of the more fatal diseases. Therefore, in an age when many countries have not yet been able to surmount some of these difficulties, there is much to be learned from the Swiss. One might say there is a certain urgency. It is doubtful whether the solutions of a country like Switzerland can be directly transplanted to Bosnia, Poland, Vietnam, Korea, or South Africa. It is also doubtful, however, that these countries will be able to solve their religious and ethnic divisions, natural partitions, or the tensions of federalism without applying measures based upon certain general principles. As the Swiss have worked on many of these successfully, it is only by a perverse insularity, or a stubborn ignorance, that one would want to ignore the Swiss experience. Europeans, meanwhile, are now engaged in a great process of economic integration. They are learning that this implies a degree of political and even spiritual integration as well - quite a task given the state of the polyglot that is Europe. What nation has more to teach on these matters than Switzerland? In the narrow sense, Swiss education and cultural systems have achieved a remarkable degree of integration of three great European cultures. In a broader sense, as the Swiss parliamentarian Andreas Gross has observed, it may just be that to deal with the politics of European Union as a kind of unpleasant afterthought may be a backward approach. It is possible, if the Swiss are any guide, that Europe can gain much by considering such matters as a truly federal assembly, and a right of approval of laws by referendum, first rather than last. Indeed the Swiss, in a sense, have already accomplished on a small scale what Europe hopes to do on a larger scale. The measurements are different, but not necessarily the operating forces. Thus there may be lessons for Europe in the experience of what might be called the first European nation. Some Swiss wonder whether they should join the European Union. But there is another question: Should Europe, in some ways, join Switzerland? For America (yes, even for America), it is possible to learn as well. This is especially true given the concerns about the state of our politics, our institutions, and our mores. In recent years, one hears words such as "responsibility" and "citizenship" more and more often - surely a healthy sign. But the mere fact that these are raised in the manner of a plea, or as a proposed counter-culture, suggests how far out of practice we have fallen. Switzerland, since the time of Machiavelli, has been characterized by a tenacious and somewhat mystical patriotism and civic dynamism. In Switzerland, even today, one feels somewhat transplanted into the American democracy observed by Alexis de Tocqueville: a regime characterized by bustling activity, a "constant generation" of community activities, private initiatives, and civic improvements and associations. In his classic, Modern Democracies, James Bryce outlines some of the reasons why students of history and politics should take a special interest in Switzerland.(1) One justification, of course, is its longevity. "It contains communities in which popular government dates farther back than anywhere else in the world." There are practical reasons as well. The Swiss reliance on, and affection for, local government has generated "a greater variety of institutions based on democratic principles than any other country, greater even than the Federations of America and Australia can show." Most important, however, is the extent to which Switzerland has placed a unique degree of faith in the people. Through its use of initiative and referendum at the national level, its citizen-based legislature, and similar devices, the Swiss have established a very different kind of democracy than is seen anywhere else. As Bryce writes: Among the modern democracies, Switzerland has the highest claim to be studied.... Switzerland has pushed democratic doctrines farther, and worked them out more consistently, than any other European state. In short, it is an important laboratory not just for a collection of ideas, plural, but for an idea, singular, that unifies these innovations: the most populist (in the objective sense of the term) democracy in the world. Switzerland answers the potential question of the political scientist or citizen: What happens if we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers? The much earlier experiences with this far- reaching democracy, as in the city-states of Greece, took place without the benefit of the advances in communication that make it possible to have popular government without having government by physical assembly. Switzerland has taken democracy down a path not taken by others. Does this path, like the "road less traveled by," to paraphrase Robert Frost,(2) differ only sentimentally from the other? Or is the Swiss path meaningfully different, perhaps even advantageous? The great dynasties of Europe and Asia, in other words, have much experience. But the Swiss have much experience with democracy. America is great in space; a majestic continent of vast powers. But Switzerland is great in time; a bold experiment sweeping back almost a millennium. To understand democracy in Switzerland, then, we must survey not merely the country's topographical features, or even its present institutions, but its origins. We must travel not merely to Schwyz, but to 1291 and earlier - to the Bundesbrief, and the still more ancient heritage of democratic practices implied by history and the language of the Bundesbrief and the earlier Freibriefe themselves. The roots of democracy in Switzerland are deep indeed. Notes 1. James Bryce, Modern Democracies, MacMillan Company, 1921, Volume I of II. 2. From Collected Works of Robert Frost, New York, Viking, 1977. 2. 1291 "Switzerland is a product of both creation, in its constitution of 1848, and evolution, in hundreds of years of people in sovereign states, learning to get along. You must understand both elements to understand Switzerland today." - Edgar Brunner If you look at a relief map - which is almost essential to understand Switzerland - you can see the logic of Switzerland's development in a series of quasi-independent villages, towns, and cities. If you were to place a group of marbles at the center of the map, among some of the highest peaks of the Alps, they would eventually meander to the long, Norway-shaped plain of the northwest, and the lakes of Como and Maggiore to the southeast. But the route the marbles would travel would bounce down around the Lake of Luzern, and of course the Saint Bernard and Gotthard Passes routes. This imaginary route of the marbles more or less defines the outer border of the three original cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, as well as those that soon became part of the Swiss confederation: Luzern, Zürich, Bern, Zug, Appenzell, and the lands of what was later Aargau. The main grooves, some six or seven, are chopped up into dozens of smaller rivulets. They form semi-isolated units suitable for similarly independent human communities. A town planner setting up Switzerland from scratch today would probably follow this design, toward which the country was evolving naturally from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. To extend on our analogy above, if you were to sprinkle small ball bearings on our relief map, they would bump and nudge their way down to settle into these nooks and crannies very much where the actual towns are today. Even the "great plain" of Switzerland, stretching from Geneva in the southwest across Lausanne, Bern, Basel, and Zürich up to the Bodensee in the northeast, is diced into a hundred or more natural towns - of which there are more than 3,000 in Switzerland today, for an average population per unit of only some 2,000 people, and a median of perhaps 1,500 or less. These relatively low-lying areas have the climate to support high- altitude farming, and the river transport to export its products. By the late thirteenth century, they had even developed some reputation for producing quality woven textiles and other products that could benefit from their access to large and wealthy markets all around the region, including France, Germany, Italy, and Austria. As the calendar pushed on toward the year 1300, outside forces began to attack the independence of these communities. This happened for several reasons. First, the nations around Switzerland - the kingdoms of Lombardy, Burgundy, and Savoy; the emerging empires of France, Germany, and Austria - were expanding. By tradition, most of the cantons that formed the original Swiss confederation, located in what is now central-northern and eastern Switzerland, were possessions or protectorates of Austria or of the Hapsburg family, which later ruled Austria, but originated in the present-day Swiss canton of Aargau. The Habsburgs, however, were never popular in their own place of origin, and grew less popular as some of the Habsburg nobles became more arrogant over the years 1200 to 1350. The Swiss, for their part, complained of high tax rates and arbitrary judgments from the local courts run by Habsburg nobles. With Austrian and Habsburg influence waning, and popular affiliation with Austria weak at best, France, Burgundy, Germany, and the lords of Lombardy looked to fill the void. Switzerland, situated in the middle of these competing states, became a battleground as the borders of these emerging empires crept toward one another. A second factor, stronger in the centuries that followed but present even in 1291, was the mild rebuke to top-down rule posed by the very existence of Swiss communities with their mixed democratic practices and traditions. We cannot document the exact shape of the politics of those local villages, which in any case varied widely, because most of what we know about them either comes from less reliable oral history or must be inferred from the small number of documents. But it is generally accepted that even in the thirteenth century, the Swiss - particularly in such fiercely independent cantons as Uri and Schwyz - made use of local, popular assemblies to decide many broader and nearly all local questions of policy. These certainly were more democratic than any of the nearby empires. Naturally, not everyone "voted," but in some communities, landowners and even burgers probably did. The Swiss, even in the midst of the Middle Ages, also offered something of a demographic haven. Uri, one of the three original cantons, had its origins, as historian J. Murray Luck has written, as "a kind of Siberia" to which mountain farmers, too rough for the tribes of Germany and Alsace, were banished. If there were few or no formal individual rights, there was an ethos of independence and political equality, and the right to speak your piece. "From even these early times," as former Senator Franz Muheim impressed on me during long discussions of Switzerland's animating principles, "there has been a code of, 'I mind my own business, you mind yours.' It is easiest to understand if you start by trying to assume that someone wanted to go against this principle, such as the Habsburgs. Then you look at a map, and you see all these valleys, lakes, rivers, and steep hills and mountains, breaking the country up into a tapestry of thousands of natural villages. If you wanted to impose your will even on your neighbor, how would you do it? It would take a large army just to conquer a few such communities. How would you then take over dozens or hundreds of them?" This haven naturally had an impact on the surrounding aristocracies. It put ideas into the heads of peasants and laborers bound to service in the more feudal communities around Switzerland. In Uri and Schwyz, the grant of rights had been made directly from the emperor to the people at large, making the Swiss example especially dangerous for the neighboring aristocracies. Finally, as is common when we find human competition and conflict, there were economic elements. Sometime shortly before or after the year 1200, the freemen of canton Uri opened a small bridge across the river Reuss. The bridge wobbled several hundred feet above the torrent during low periods, precariously close to it when the river rose, and connected two sides of a deep gulch not far from the Gotthard Pass. It was called Teufelsbrucke, or devil's bridge. Some attributed this to a large bulge of rock above that appeared suspended by occult forces. Others note the bridge itself stood somewhat athwart nature and normalcy. Man seemed to issue to the rocks, like Satan to God, his own defiant non serviam. Crossing was no exercise for the meek. Even riding over today's modern, concrete bridge, not far from the original, in a four-door sedan, the winds are enough to bounce your car around a little, and the occult shadows thrown off by the high and jutting cliffs menace. The combination of height, galloping waters, howling air currents, and sharp rocks stabbing out from tall cliffs all around creates a feeling of great precariousness. Nevertheless, the bridge became a transportation jugular, and a catalyst for a rapid increase in economic exchange for all the surrounding countries. Before, there had been no economical way to transport cattle and other products from the dairy farms of Uri and its neighbors to the wealthy regions surrounding Milan to the south. Now these products could make it through, and more developed products from north and south could be exchanged more efficiently, spurring trade between Germany, Italy, and France. No one kept elaborate output or trade statistics in those days, but we can infer the impact of the Teufelsbrucke from related measures. For example, as Swiss historian Werner Meyer has noted in his fine history {1291: L'Histoire), there was one major chateau in the central Swiss region in the year 1000: Rotzberg in Nidwald. This grew to four by the year 1100, and stood at five at the turn of the century in 1200, roughly the completion of the bridge. By the year 1250, however, this number tripled, to sixteen, with nine of the eleven new structures in Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden. These figures suggest a rapid expansion of economic activity during the period. The population of many existing towns in Uri, Schwyz, Luzern, Unterwalden, and the region around Zürich more than doubled between 1200 and 1300 - a time of relatively slow rises in life expectancy, and many conflicts in Switzerland. This was much faster than the surrounding towns, many of which saw flat population growth. As one direct measure of the economic impact of the bridge, in 1359, Uri paid approximately 100,000 francs for lands in its district held by the Fraumunster cloister of Zürich. This was only a fraction of Uri's collection of tolls from the bridge, since the canton made similar purchases from the Habsburgs, individual lords, and other abbeys during the same decade. On May 26,1231, Emperor Friedrich II sent a Freibrief, or freedom charter, to "the people of the Uri valley," recognizing and formalizing in law the independence from the Habsburgs that they had gradually won in fact. It is worth noting that this letter was addressed to "the people," not a particular official, institution, or lord. The Swiss cantons asserted, and the emperor recognized, not merely a set of terms for a set of nobles and their king to agree on privileges, but of rights enjoyed in common by the inhabitants of the Uri valley. Friedrich was succeeded by several emperors of lesser note and by an "interregnum" (1256-1273) between emperors. In 1273, the nobles selected no populist to head the empire, but one of their own in spirit: Rudolf I. Rudolf was a Habsburg, the first in a long line to serve as emperor for much of the next 500 years. Rudolf was interested in recovering his family's holdings and influence in Switzerland, now all but crumbled, as a long-term guarantee of Habsburg rule. In this, he may have been shrewd, but his methods made enemies both in the Waldstatte and the empire at large. He attempted to raise taxes and to exploit many feudal obligations. For example, he called upon his subjects to send troops for sham or at best uncertain battles, then negotiated with them to waive his rights in return for cash payment. Rudolf appointed family members and foreigners as judges and other officials to the Swiss cantons. The simple Swiss villagers resented these bureaucrats not only as economic dead weight, but as arrogant overlords. Several of the Habsburgs apparently used their position to seduce or compel women in their districts to convey sexual favors and join them in what the Bundesbrief itself alludes to as "unnatural" perversions.(2) By the end of his life, the excesses of Rudolf and his family had alienated most of Switzerland. Close to the end he tried to recoup popular support by offering to reconfirm the essence of the freedoms of the Waldstatte in a slightly repackaged form. Rudolf promised to appoint judges only from among the Swiss. But this was only a promise not to assert his right to appoint other judges, not a limitation of his own power per se. And his description of who would be covered by these rights was ambiguous - clearly including the nobility, not so clearly the general population. Gone was the clear-cut universis hominibus of Friedrich, to be replaced by an elitist and unprincipled game of divide and conquer. Rudolf's death on July 15, 1291, was preceded by two years of obviously declining health. Even so, the Swiss rebels moved with surprising speed, considering the state of communications in those days - suggesting that such moves had been orchestrated in anticipation of his death. Within two weeks - August 1, 1291 - they had sealed a pact for "everlasting cooperation," the Bundesbrief. We have no recorded debates or newspaper accounts of the actual event. In this sense, almost anything said about the drafting and approval of the Bundesbrief is speculative. But there is intelligent speculation based on evidence. From this, without making too many leaps, we can ascribe a number of features to the event. The text of the agreement refers to a renewal of the "ancient" cooperation between the cantons, suggesting that no dramatic departures were needed and the requirement for popular oversight was light. On the other hand, this was a dramatic time, and the declaration of a perpetual alliance at a time of possible war. The very fact that something was being put on paper suggests a heightened solemnity. The Bundesbrief describes itself as a pact between "the people of Uri, the community of Schwyz, and representatives of the people of Underwalden." Read literally, this sounds like a meeting, probably in Schwyz, at which the "communitas" (community) of Schwyz was largely in attendance, a large popular assembly of Uri, and a group from Unterwalden more in the character of a chosen assembly or group of representatives. We need not read it so literally, of course, but we have no strong reason to prefer a different interpretation, especially given the broader context. Whatever combination of leaders and common farmers joined together, they met, in all likelihood, in some village along the Lake of Luzern or of one of the rivers nearby. Such a choice would have made for a central location, and would have made broader participation possible by allowing for use of the rivers, lakes, and nearby roads that were much of the transportation network. The author Schiller, among others, placed the events on the banks of Rütli, certainly one possible location. Another is the town of Schwyz itself, where the Bundesbrief is now kept. The composite scene that emerges is not necessarily far from the legendary paintings, tapestries, and operatic versions - an indication that either the artists did their historical homework, or that the Muse that moved them did so in emulation of the fact. The men stood out along one of the gentle hills that have formed a backdrop to so many popular deliberative assemblies over the last 1,000 years and, looking forward as well as back, sealed a solemn "and perpetual" oath. Even in this setting, at Rütli or nearby, Switzerland seems almost designed to be a democracy. The slopes make for a natural stadium or amphitheater, allowing a large number of citizens to participate in a discussion and then vote. That there was some kind of democratic assent is implied not merely by the political system of the villages in the cantons, but by the document itself. The Bundesbrief notes, for example, that there was near unanimity, but not total unanimity, of the participants - suggesting some sort of measurement or discussion or both. It refers several times to the document as an "oath," renewing, solidifying, and perfecting an "ancient alliance." This suggests, particularly in the Middle Ages when oaths were taken seriously, an actual oath of some sort. Yet the Bundesbrief is also self-consciously a document, referring to the statutes and promises "above," and those "now written." Hence it was not merely a pro-forma repetition of whatever old oath of alliance may have existed. Here again, Schiller and the artists may be saluted for either happily or artfully conforming their representations to the likely facts. And Tschudi, Gagliardi, and other historians sometimes taken to task for their credulity may turn out to have greater skeptical acumen - refusing to judge a thing wrong just because it is deemed true by the oral tradition - than some revisionists who are merely contrarian. Aspects of the Bundesbrief's content are worth noting. The document contains no "signatures," unlike the Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta. In this sense, it is highly populist, almost corporatist. At the bottom are the community seals of Uri and Unterwalden, and on the left, a mark where the corporate seal of Schwyz once was. In some ways, this anonymous character is appropriately Swiss, the product of a politics of consensus by a group of equal citizens. The new agreement did not set up a mechanism of government; it did not proclaim itself a new republic or even promise one. In this sense, the Bundesbrief is indeed a limited document. It is, however, a social contract as well, albeit a focused one. And because the participating communities were already significantly democratic in form and practice and assumption, it set up a very important experiment, and proclaimed the legitimacy of doctrines implicitly contrary to monarchy and feudalism. For the most part, the empire was much too absorbed in wider and more immediate problems to deal with the Swiss. It took nearly a year for the bitterly divided electors of the Holy Roman Empire to select a successor to Rudolf, whose own holdings had to be divided among his sons. Adolf of Nassau (1292-1298) was killed in battle trying to keep his empire stitched together. Albrecht I (1298-1308), the son of Rudolf I, tried to create trouble by encouraging the Habsburg nobles in Austria and Aargau to reassert their ancient rights, but the lords, as noted above, were expelled rudely. Not until Friedrich the Beautiful (1314-1326) was the empire sufficiently stable for the Habsburgs to mount a serious effort to overturn the upstart confederation. The Swiss founders, by luck or shrewd design, took advantage of this confusion to consolidate their own internal relations and to add allies. The powerful surrounding cities of Bern, Zürich, and Luzern were natural allies, and longed to free themselves from the Habsburg influence. But they would be more inclined to take part in an alliance that seemed solid than to gamble their prosperity on a mere chance coalition of farming communes. The Bundesbrief served not only an internal function, but an external one, projecting a picture of solidarity to potential friends and enemies. This was a touchy game to play: Too brazen a rebuke of the nobles might have focused the counter-revolution in Switzerland. Instead, the royals fell out among themselves - the German princes versus France versus Burgundy; Saxony against Austria for influence in Bern, Fribourg, and Aargau; and others. If this account does not overcredit, then the founders of the Rütli emerge as not only effective nation-builders, but shrewd strategists. The Bundesbrief, in combination with economic boom and a citizen's army of growing effectiveness, helped shelter the Swiss from foreign intervention for a generation - roughly from 1291 until the Battle of Morgarten in 1315. Morgarten added the seal of military history to the Bundesbrief. Some 15,000 Habsburg troops from Austria - noble, well-armed, mounted, and skilled - marched toward the central cantons. Through a clever series of road-blocks, the outnumbered Swiss farmers and village craftsmen drew the attackers into a narrow passage between the Aegerisee and Mount Morgarten. With perhaps only 100 troops, and certainly no more than 250, the farmers fell upon the Austrians in the narrow pass, suffering little disadvantage from numbers under the cramped quarters, and surpassing the Habsburg contingent with their courage and resourcefulness. Many Austrians were slaughtered in the "bloody rocks" just west of what is now a nearby town; the Swiss rolled boulders, logs, and (in some accounts) wild animals onto them. Other Austrians were driven into the water and reportedly drowned. About 2,000 Austrian and twelve Swiss troops died. "Morgarten," as one military historian put it, "shocked the world," much as the success of the American Revolution over the British Empire. The Swiss had proven, in their first great test, that a popular, citizen army could hold its own against elite forces from one of the great European powers. Indeed, "Switzerland," though not yet existing, was an attractive political economy and an attractive idea even early in the fourteenth century. Before and after Morgarten, the Swiss managed to form important agreements with Glarus, Arth, Milan, and Luzern. Even the ill-fated first alliance with Zürich, which ended when besieging Habsburg troops crushed the town in 1292, rebounded in favor of the Swiss. After the sacking, the resentment of the people of Zürich for the Habsburg dominance was, like the Bundesbrief, "in perpetuity." It was only a matter of time - and a few more victories like Morgarten - before the forest cantons convinced Zürich, Bern, and other great cities of the region decided that this was a confederation worth joining. Morgarten was the material manifestation of a long policy of intelligent statecraft by the central Swiss, a combination of internal political justice and equality with prudent external alliances. Notes 1. The diffusion of wealth and breakdown of feudal privileges seen in Uri and in Switzerland generally went against the trend of the times. Danish peasants and private farmers, for example, owned more than half of the land in the year 1250; by 1650, this figure had declined to just more than 10 percent. For most of Europe, the transition enjoyed by Switzerland came only in the 16th Century, and in some cases, later still. 2. See for example Jurg Stussi-Lauterburg, and R.Gysler-Schoni, Helvetias Tochter, Huber, Zürich, 1999 3. Willensnation Victory at Morgarten established the upstart confederation as a viable emerging confederation. It also set off the dynamic of growth by attraction - the voluntary association of neighboring principalities, cities, and individuals - that makes Switzerland a nation created by acts of the free will. The Swiss call this concept, and the political entity based on it, Willensnation, and use the term with pride. It is a nation of people who have come to Switzerland (even today, nearly 20 percent are foreigners) or whose ancestors did, or whose ancestors belonged to towns or small principalities that freely joined the confederation. The common point is some attraction to the idea of Switzerland with its freedom and cultural diversity under a banner of strong national ideals. In this way, as in many others, Switzerland bears some resemblance to the United States. The term Willensnation is apt in a second sense - one used by few or no Swiss today, and certainly not intended at the start, but nevertheless appropriate. For Switzerland was also "willed" in the sense that the country's independence, neutrality, prosperity, and special political and social culture resulted in part from a long series of deliberate policies. Switzerland's position and its geography sometimes aided these developments, sometimes frustrated them. They were not, however, sheer accidents of climate and other facts of nature, contrary to much commentary from Sully to Montesquieu to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and down to the present. These tendencies, once established, reinforced one another. As Switzerland became known as a haven for the industrious, the freedom- loving, the independent, it tended to attract more such people. Many emigrated to escape ruinous taxes, or the feudal duties that acted like taxes. As this turbulent frontier attracted such pioneers, the traits of independence and fortitude were reinforced, and so on. All these dynamics, however, required a point of crystallization, some core, at the start - much as the "Norwegian section" or "little Vietnam" of Chicago, after reaching some critical mass, became a self- generating phenomenon. Without this core, we might have seen simply a long history of bloody rebellions along the borders of the three great empires - France and Burgundy; the German-Austrian Hapsburg Reich; and Italy and (to some extent) Lombard and the Papacy to the South. Instead, the confederation of independence-minded states at the crossroads of Europe became an example and a magnet. Suddenly, and ever since, the idea of liberty had enough soil for something living to grow on. If we examine Switzerland's history from 1291 up through the twentieth century, its political economy and culture can be seen as represented in Figure 3.1. The figure is not exactly a map, though it roughly positions the main actors geographically. It is more of an historical flow chart that represents a number of Switzerland's roles in Europe and, indeed, the West. For 800 years, Switzerland has served as a natural crossroads for the exchange of goods between Germany, France, and Italy. By the early eighteenth century, more than 10,000 persons passed over the Devil's Bridge annually - often accompanied, of course, by more than one cart or horse of products per traveler. There were other ways to travel between France, Germany, and Italy, of course, but - especially for transporting livestock or large caravans of goods - the most efficient way was to cut through the Alps, especially as this became more and more efficient with improvements to the bridge and the surrounding roads and towns. To attract a growing volume of traffic, even this strategically situated crossroads had to be adept, or at least competent, at many tasks. Merchants needed a safe road to travel on, with inns and churches and other essentials of life along the way. They would prefer traveling through areas where the legal system was fair, prompt, and relatively simple to deal with. Money - preferably a single, reliable currency; certainly a multitude of them if not one - was essential. When Plato sets about establishing the ideal state in his Republic, he starts with the need for a market for exchange and for a market to carry out that exchange - money is needed. Naturally it would be helpful to find people along the way who could converse in your native tongue, particularly in the larger cities where contracts and exchanges might have to be worked out. Switzerland has benefited from the earliest times in that it had a strong incentive to develop this kind of efficient, stable political economy. All nations have an interest in this, of course, but for the people that inhabit what is now Switzerland, the potential gains were even larger - and the potential for division and violence, arguably, greater too. Much was riding on the successful maintenance of this position, both for the original cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, and for the surrounding cities - Zürich, Baden, Luzern, Bern - that prospered in part thanks to the success of the confederation. The geographical additions to the confederation began almost immediately. Zürich joined in a separate alliance weeks after the Bundesbrief. It proved ill-fated when the Hapsburg Austrians destroyed much of the city in revenge two years later, and was tested again throughout the fourteenth century, but eventually proved solid. Luzern, likewise, sometimes leaned Hapsburg, sometimes toward the Alpine Bund. These two rich cities had the largest stake of any in a free, prosperous transit across the Alps. In a sense, the early Swiss were in a competition with the Hapsburgs - with the support of the merchant cities likely to swing toward the group they thought could provide the most effective economic and political regime. Who could run the trans-Alpine marketplace best? Inexorably, both Luzern and Zürich took advantage of every opportunity to side with the confederation, and generally tacked back toward the Hapsburgs only under duress. There were divisions within their own populations as well, of course, but these were evidently few. Note, for example, how eagerly the Zürich elite sided with the unproved alliance within ten weeks of the sealing of the Bundesbrief in 1291. By 1393, the original confederation of three cantons had grown to eight: Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden were joined by Luzern, Zürich, Glarus, Zug, and Bern as confederates. This central core was working cooperatively with communities on the next periphery to solidify the new de facto state still further. Bern reached out toward the now- French-speaking cities of Fribourg and Lausanne, Uri and Luzern looked south toward what is now the Italian portion of Switzerland, and Zürich and Schwyz aimed at popular diplomacy with the independence- minded farmers and merchants of Aargau to the West and St. Gallen to the East to provide a buffer zone from the Hapsburgs - and, of course, potential ground for the federation's own growth. This process is represented in Figure 3.2. Note that Switzerland was not yet a "country" as such, and would not be for many years. Some would place the date as late as 1648 and the treaty of Westphalia - or even 1848 and the constitution following Switzerland's final major religious war. On the other hand, attributes of sovereignty were forming out of this Willens-confederation as early as 1291, as we have observed. This makes assigning an exact date both difficult and, in a sense, arbitrary and unnecessary. The white core in the center represents the three original cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden (Obwalden and Niwalden) roughly as they were in 1291. The four gray regions that seem to move out from that core represent the 52), and the cities of Zürich (1351) and Bern (1353). Some of the territories not marked as part of the confederation were already, in the mid-1300s, "subject territories" of Bern, Zürich, or of the confederation. For example, Fribourg (associated with the confederation in 1481). The broadest dark line around the outside is the border of modern-day Switzerland with France, Germany, Italy, Liecthenstein, and Austria. An illustrative addition to the confederation during this period was Zug, a city (and now canton) on a still lake south of Zürich. The Hapsburgs strove to retain control there as they did in Bern and Zürich - anything to avoid being completely cut out of the picture in a region evolving as a crossroads. Parts of the town sympathized with the earlier confederation, and probably fought as individuals at Morgarten. Some of the ruling aristocracy were Hapsburg and pro- Hapsburg; others not. After securing the support of Zürich and Luzern in 1351, the central cantons moved against Zug in June 1352. It fell in a matter of weeks. From a Hapsburg point of view, one might say that the Swiss on federation seized the town by mere physical force. This, though, is only part of the story. There was in fact a vigorous faction within the city that supported incorporation within the confederation. Families within the township of Zug and in the surrounding countryside organized themselves and were fighting for the confederation within the city. Few details of the battle remain and there were apparently few casualties, all suggestive of a short battle in which the conqueror was welcomed as a liberator. It was at the end of the century, however, that the real cement was applied to the confederation. In that year, Emperor Friedrich III died, succeeded by his son Maximilian I. To a treasury already strained by rivalry with the French, Maximilian added an untimely taste for luxury and even display. He established a tax, the Pfennig tax of one penny, throughout the kingdom. Maximilian also strove to centralize the judicial system, introducing an Imperial Chamber of Justice and allowing appeals of purely local cases. Here were two matters, taxes and centralized justice, on which nearly all Swiss, peasant and landowner, worker and merchant, could agree. After winning an alliance that brought money but no troops from France, the Swiss confronted the Austrians, the Kaiser's initial proxy, in a series of campaigns running from the Jura in the Northwest through Basel and Baden in central Switzerland and Graubünden and St. Gallen in the East. The decisive battle took place on July 22, 1499, near the Solothurn fortress of Dornach. The Austrian troops assumed the Swiss were far away and were bathing lazily in the Birs to escape the heat. The Swiss fell on the Austrians and killed many of their 16,000 men, including the Austrian commander. The Kaiser relented and agreed to a peace treaty at Basel on September 22, 1499. Within two years, Basel itself joined the confederation, which grew to thirteen cantons with its entry in 1501. Basel illustrates the attraction of the confederation's free democratic model in a highly positive way. Even the city's ruling class had reason to admire the tenacious fighting spirit that the mountain democracy of the forest cantons seemed to breed. Swiss troops had heroically defended the city in 1444 in what might be called the Pyrrhic defeat of St. Jakob's. Marching with the intention of absorbing Basel and nearby areas into France, the French troops slaughtered their opponents. But they were chastened by the courage with which some 1,500 Swiss held off 40,000 trained and well-armed troops, inflicted great casualties, and fought to the death. The French decided there were better places to expand than this region where they would be resisted with such ferocity. The people of Basel realized they had been rescued by this act of self- sacrifice, and relations between the city and the confederation grew closer in the coming decades. The cities joining the federation took the lesson of Willensnation to heart, adapting some of the principles of democracy at work in the rural cantons to their own use. Bern, one of the most aristocratic entrants into the confederation, adopted democratic political reforms after resentment of the city's ruling elite resulted in riots in 1470. Zürich's ruling families ceded increasing powers to an elected council and acquiesced in the rise of the guilds, whose power transformed the city. These reforms did not put the more elitist cities on a democratic par with the rural Landsgemeinde, or community meetings, but they were a significant step. Thus, even Switzerland's conquests represent persuasion and example as much as sheer muscle. It was at popular diplomacy that the Swiss excelled. Such cities as Bern, Fribourg, and others followed the pattern of Zürich in many ways. They could surely have resisted the mountain men of the Alps, had it not been for the fact that many of their people sympathized more with, and longed for the freedom of, the Waldstätte. They evidently felt an alliance with these rugged folk was more reliable than those based on the caprice of the dukes and princes and clergy that dominated the rest of Europe. "The Swiss are not easy to win as allies," as the Duke of Milan said during one of Switzerland's less creditable hours as the Duke and France engaged in a bidding war for the use of Swiss mercenaries. "But they are highly sought because, as allies, they are extremely valuable." Machiavelli, who observed the Swiss in battle and traveled extensively in Switzerland, regarded the Swiss as perhaps the toughest fighters in Europe, comparing them - the highest compliment possible from Machiavelli - to the soldiers of the Roman Republic. This reputation as fierce fighters stayed with the Swiss down through the centuries, leading to comparisons to the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s and the Afghanistan rebels of the 1980s. Like the Romans, Machiavelli observed, the Swiss fought well in part because they had something to fight for. Their free lives and republican virtues not only gave them better weapons and better leaders to fight with, but animated great individual courage among this "army of citizens." By the time Machiavelli saw the Swiss defeated by French forces at the battle of Marignano (1515), Switzerland's growth by absorption of territory was almost at an end. Thirteen of the present twenty-three cantons belonged to the confederation, stretching from the Bernese territories in the west across Basel, Zürich, and down through the forest cantons and into Appenzell and Glarus in the East. The full inclusion of many of the French-speaking cantons in the West in a multilingual Switzerland was not complete until the nineteenth century. But already there was great affinity and extensive trade, monetary, and other links with Geneva and Lausanne, as well as with some of the towns of what is now the Italian-speaking Ticino in the South. This affinity became formal defense treaties with Lausanne in 1525 and Geneva in 1526. The Duke of Savoy made a final attempt to assert his rights over Geneva and was crushed by a confederate force composed largely of troops from Bern and Solothurn. It would be wrong, however, to think that Switzerland ceased to be a political magnet after 1500. From the sixteenth century onward, Switzerland didn't absorb bordering cities and territories at the same rate, and it began to follow a policy of neutrality in foreign affairs that has survived to the present. It did, though, continue to attract large numbers of people. Some were religious, political, or ethnic refugees. Others were risk takers, entrepreneurs. Still others were the rebellious and the contrary who didn't like the taxes, the feudal dues, or the social elitism of European society. Almost all took part willingly in the culture of freedom, tolerance, and democracy. In short, before about the year 1530, Willensnation moved borders. Afterward, to a large extent, it moved people. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, setting forth a great exodus of Huguenots and other Protestants from France. In the coming years, an estimated 120,000 poured into the Swiss confederation. Many of these resettled into Germany, America, and other countries, but many chose to remain. In percentage terms, those figures compare with the great Irish migration to the United States. A deliberate policy to control the population growth played a role in how the immigrants were assimilated (or not) into Swiss society. In the 1670s and 1680s, Bern, Luzern, Solothurn, and Geneva established fees before one could become a burgher. Smaller towns followed suit and the fees generally grew throughout the century until they were prohibitively high. The result was that skilled laborers, who valued their ability to export readily into the French market, had the wherewithal to remain in Switzerland: approximately 3,000 in Geneva, 1,500 in Lausanne and Bern, and a significant number in the smaller towns of Vaud and Fribourg. Of these, a disproportionate number consisted of highly skilled artisans, employers, and financial elites. "Much of Swiss industry (watches and textiles, to name just two) owes its origins, not to economic causes, but to religious oppression in neighboring countries," writes J. Murray Luck in his History of Switzerland. "The refugees from France and Italy brought with them invaluable skills and know-how." Data from Geneva and Zürich for the year 1700 indicate the population of both cities consisted of 28 percent or more of immigrants. If we add in the number of persons who came from other parts of the federation - such as Italian-speaking and German-speaking Protestants from the forest cantons and the Ticino - the proportion of refugees and immigrants would surely have approached or exceeded 40 percent. In 1864, the confederation concluded a treaty with France that provided for the establishment of Jews in Switzerland. The treaty obliged the Swiss to allow French Jews to settle freely in Swiss territory. This was followed by a popular vote, in 1866, that codified the right of Jews to settle anywhere they wanted in the country. If it seems a grudging measure by today's standards, it came some eighty years before similar protections were provided in the rest of Europe. Coming at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise again in Europe, as the industrial age advanced and paranoia about "Jewish capitalists" resurfaced, this was an important gesture by the newly reconstituted nation. In Geneva (about 6 percent) and Lausanne (close to 10 percent) , the percentage of Jews in the population was higher. A number of Jews, of course, emigrated to Switzerland only to relocate in a few years to such destinations as Poland and the United States. Those who remained made disproportionate contributions to scientific, financial, and other core economic activities, and helped generate the kind of critical mass in intellectual brilliance that would attract other leading researchers and entrepreneurs, making Switzerland the greatest contributor to increased productivity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Switzerland has won more than five times the Nobel Prizes for science of any other nation on a per capita basis.) If generous, then, the policy was also wise. Jewish immigrants from France and (later) Germany formed the basis of a great expansion of the Swiss banking, construction, and manufacturing industries. The contribution from immigrants was by no means limited to Jews. Arab traders and financiers fled from Spain and helped make Basel a center of science and trading in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and their descendants remain today. Protestant refugees from France, fleeing to the Western cantons, and later Catholic refugees from Holland, England, and Scotland flocked to the central cantons - Switzerland, at times, was a magnet for both confessions. It was the willingness to accept people power of many different races, faiths, and ideologies that helped Switzerland thrive. Diversity, it turns out, is competitive. For example, two engineers who left France in the 1860s played a key role in the construction of a railroad through the St. Gotthard pass, completed in 1882. The initiative, financed privately by the leadership of investment magnate Alfred Escher, spawned a number of spin-off innovations in engineering by immigrants in Geneva, Lausanne, and Bern. This intelligent but much-disputed decision by government and industry (debated from the late 1840s onward) acted somewhat like the U.S. space industry or the Internet, catapulting Swiss firms to the lead in a number of technological fields. The direct impact resembled that of the Teufelsbrücke: the new trans-Gotthard route reduced transit time from a period of several days to less than ten hours. The list of Swiss immigrants (Jewish and non-Jewish) from the mid- nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries reads like an international Who's-Who of overachievers, job generators, and breakthrough scientists. In 1858, Henri Nestlé left Germany to work in the pharmacy of another Swiss immigrant; during his apprenticeship he first began to toy with improved infant food formulas that were not only to form the basis of one of the world's largest conglomerates, but would save countless lives. He was spurred on by the work of two American brothers, Charles and Henry Page, who in 1866 had founded a condensed milk factory in the small Swiss town of Cham. The development illustrates the important "critical mass" feature seen in places such as America's Silicon Valley, where the presence of so many bright minds, finance capital, and new ideas becomes a synergistic, self- generating boom. In the same period, Brown Boveri of Baden was founded by a Scottish engineer and a German financier. Today, Asea-Brown-Boveri, or ABB, employs several hundred thousand workers in Switzerland and around the world. French immigrants had already brought the manufacture of muslin to Zürich in the 1690s; in the early nineteenth century the textile industry attracted more immigrants as Escher Wyss and other spinning establishments, not allowed to import equipment, brought spinning experts from Britain and the United States to develop their own. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Switzerland proved an attractive haven for such diverse intellectuals as Victor Hugo, Madame de Stael, Gibbon, and Albert Einstein. In flipping through five or six centuries in as many pages, we run the risk of missing some important intervening developments, rather like a time-lapse photographer snapping a shot only once a generation. For the purpose of understanding Switzerland, however, it is enough to describe the dynamic that was at work over those many years - and to provide some examples and anecdotes that illustrate the basic historical movement. One danger is that we make the development of democracy in Switzerland seem easier than it really was. There were, after all, jealous and powerful princes who would have loved to seize control of the chokepoint in the Alps. For all the advantages geography gave to the Swiss in defending their mountain redoubt, geography also placed most of the country's arable land and natural living space in a valley wide open to French and German attack, and naturally drawn toward those lands by many habits of language and culture. Swiss toleration for religious differences seems simple looking back, but then, so does most history when we can look back on it. For four centuries, the Swiss were as divided between competing religious ideas as the rest of Europe, and, indeed, gave birth to two of the more searching critics of Catholicism, Zwingli and Calvin, the West has seen. Before we begin to survey the operation of Swiss institutions in the present and recent past, it is important to examine some of the difficulties they had to overcome to arrive at their present state. 4. Geodeterminism "Switzerland," avers Alfred Defago, "was made for federalism and democracy." Defago is the Swiss ambassador to the United States and the former head of one of Switzerland's broadcasting services, a sophisticated communicator and politician. He leans back in a slim, comfortable chair - ostentation, no; functionality, yes; he is Swiss - and continues. "I doubt our institutions could simply be copied and replicated elsewhere with the same results. We are a small democracy with certain geographic features, cultural pluralism, and political consensus-building. Others would not enjoy these traditions and this landscape." This is vintage Swiss: Keep it small. It works for us, but we make no large claims. But before my opportunity to object - "Mr. Ambassador, without copying the Swiss system wholesale, surely other countries can adapt your institutions, and profit from your experience" - Defago seems to recollect himself. He is speaking to an American - and one interested in the historical overlaps and parallels of "the Sister Republics," as the United States and Switzerland have been called.(1) Defago rocks forward. "Then again, I guess what we did is more or less copy the U.S. constitution." He is right: The Swiss constitution of 1848 was largely based on the U.S. constitution of 1789. (The U.S. constitution in turn drew on the Swiss experience, while avoiding some of the perceived pitfalls by setting up a more coherent central government than the Swiss enjoyed at that time.) "Then, Mr. Ambassador, perhaps the system can be exported - provided it is copied from the U.S. and not Switzerland." Defago relaxes into the smile of both an intellectual patriot, who appreciates his own country being understood, and a satisfied politician, who likes to see a problem solved with a turn of phrase. The Swiss have benefited of a number of accidents of nature that make them seem, at times, a kind of geographically chosen people. Mountains and ridges offer a defensive redoubt. The Alpine passes make it a natural transportation node, and therefore, a cultural and economic one as well. It would be wrong to infer, however, that Switzerland has enjoyed an "uninterrupted... peace and happiness," as a Baltimore Gazette correspondent gushed in 1788. This is a common mistake, repeated by visitors in each of the last seven centuries. "The entyre people," as an English merchant put it during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), "seem blessed" with a "felicity ordained from the mountains themselves." This geodeterminism is seductive because it has some truth. Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, is one so aware of the role the land must have played in human activities as in Switzerland. And Switzerland, while by no means always affluent, has traditionally enjoyed a balanced development in which extremes of rich and poor are rare. These facts are abetted by the Swiss, with their self-minimizing temperament: They would rather point to nature or fate as explanations for the country's achievements, than their own skill or that of their ancestors. The result can be to sell short what has been achieved by statesmanship, leading us to overestimate the forces of nature, and underestimate the potential for human action. The constitution of 1848 is one example. Its basic arrangements survive today, a tribute to the political acumen of the framers, who had to deal with religious, social, and economic conflicts against a backdrop of foreign meddling in Swiss affairs and a general European revolution. It was not, however, written by rivers or mountains, but by men. If we think in terms of geographic predestination, then we may miss valuable lessons. The view of Switzerland as a merely fortunate accident of geography, a sort of historical boutique, is simply inaccurate. One obvious barrier for Switzerland is geography itself - something that cuts in different directions. To whatever extent the Swiss landscape tends to impose a certain natural federalism, it also frustrates Swiss nationhood. Imagine trying to unite these different communities of aggressively independent fanners and merchants, especially when ties of religion, language, and power were often tempting them to turn outside. For purposes of review, we can group these entropic forces into several broad categories: economic factors, using the term broadly to cover matters of domestic policy and politics; military-strategic elements; and religious divisions, including those between Christian sects since the Reformation, but also those within the Catholic Church both before and after it. If we look at some defining moments of Swiss development, we nearly always find one of these factors present - usually two or three. It then becomes clear that Switzerland came about because human ingenuity was able, at critical times, to surmount large difficulties Economics are at the heart of Swiss political development, and not always a positive factor. The potential for passage through the Gotthard and other passes was only economically relevant with the effort of the people of Uri to build the Devil's Bridge. Even this act of community entrepreneurship, however, was only necessary, not sufficient, for significant commercial traffic. Someone would have to supply money, security, lodging, and other services critical to a marketplace and a highway. And provision of these, while in the interest of Uri and indeed all the cantons, was rendered difficult by the very federalism, independence, and do-it-my-way spirit of the Swiss. As the historian Arthur Mojonnier noted, even after the Napoleonic occupation ended in 1815, the route to and through the Devil's Bridge was a tangled thicket of regulations, special charges, and other expensive complexities.(2) Linen manufacturers of St. Gallen often sent their wares all the way through Strassburg to reach the Western parts of Switzerland, rather than across their own country. Foreign companies in the 1820s and 1830s sometimes bypassed the country entirely, at a cost of many added days, rather than pass through a number of its competing twenty-two cantons. A piece of cloth, cheese, or other item passing through the Gotthard was liable to some 400 taxes on the transport of goods. The Ticino alone, one Swiss canton, managed to apply thirteen taxes and tolls. At each stop, merchants had to take their goods, unload them, and allow customs bureaucrats to weigh them. The cantons grew vexed at one another, each one wishing its neighbors would leave the revenue collection to it and stop clogging the road with competing taxes; trade and tax wars were set off as each one tried to dream up new charges. Taxes weren't the only problem. "Money," as one historian put it, "was a mess." Before 1848 each canton, many cities, and even some ecclesiastical lords had the right to issue currency. There were more than fifty such authorities in Switzerland, producing an estimated 700 different pieces of gold, silver, and other types of coinage. The only saving grace for the Swiss was that their own little currencies were of such limited use that most cantons by statute, and the entire country as a matter of practice, tended to accept the French franc and écu as legal tender. From time to time, the currencies of Bavaria and Württemberg were also accepted. Still, acceptance of the franc, along with associated free trade and other privileges extended to France, created other problems, making the Swiss economy more vulnerable to the swings in value of the French economy and monetary authorities. Money and taxes were only two of the most visible downsides of radical federalism. Legal codes were distinct from canton to canton and even town to town. Some descriptions make the cantons sound like an accumulation of speed traps and rigged courts. Cloth was measured according to more than five dozen units of length; liquid volume stated in some eighty-one different measures. There were, of course, four languages, and many different subdialects of the most common, German. France's invasion of Switzerland in 1798 suggests weaknesses in the Swiss position of a military and strategic nature. Perhaps just as impressive, the French occupied the country until 1815. These facts illustrate the fact that not all geography works in favor of Swiss independence. The French made substantial preparations, illustrating some of Switzerland's vulnerabilities as a multicultural hub. For months prior to the invasion, the Directorate flooded Western Switzerland with pamphlets, newspapers, and speaker-agitators, urging its comrades to take arms against the aristocrats, particularly in the frankly oligarchic cities of Lausanne, Bern, and Fribourg. These arguments played to an already strong and fast-growing community of expatriate dissidents and Swiss fellow travelers - a subsidized Fifth Column - present since the run-up to the 1789 revolution. "The Swiss loved these fugitives," a French nobleman living in England remarked as the juggernaut pointed East. "Now they will be reunited." The campaign began on an inauspicious note when several regiments from the city of Geneva, assigned by the Swiss Diet or cantonal congress to aid in the defense of Bern, declined to take an oath of allegiance to the confederation. There were few or no outward demonstrations against l'ancien regime de Suisse, but many of the people were lukewarm in their support. French troops marched down off the heights West of Switzerland and into Vaud, proclaiming liberation. History books barely even speak of the battles in this war. Some Swiss troops tried to make a stand and were out-maneuvered; many dissolved as units and returned home; a small number, perhaps two or three percent, joined the French. The canton of Vaud fell without a shot being fired, and on January 28, the French occupied the important city of Lausanne without resistance. In late February, French forces occupied most of Fribourg and the canton of Bern; General Schauenburg entered Solothurn on March 5. On March 14, after being issued an ultimatum by Brune without a fight, the Great Council of Bern abdicated. Zürich and Basel did not fight, and though proud Schwyz and later Nidwalden made a stand, it was not a memorable one. On March 28, Lecarlier, commander-in-chief of the occupation forces, could inform the French government that he had assumed "the full powers of government over the whole of Helvetia." By May, he was generally in control. Where were the country's unassailable mountains, not to mention the fighting spirit of its militia, as the French strolled across Switzerland? One answer is that while most of the country in terms of square miles consists of mountains and is highly defensible, the bulk of the population and economic output are located in the crescent-shaped valley that runs across the Northwest, from Geneva across to Zürich. One need only seize control of perhaps 20 percent of Swiss territory to have control of most of its population and economy. Another answer can be found in the cultural affinity between Switzerland and France. This is particularly evident in the French- speaking region in the West, but extends East by tradition and psychology. For hundreds of years Swiss mercenaries, largely from the poorer German-speaking cantons in the center and East, earned a small fortune from the kings of France by offering their services on the country's behalf. That the communities could be tempted into this sort of arrangement is another illustration of Switzerland's sometimes precarious position; the country is always vulnerable not only to the cultural pull of the great nations around it, but to economic and military manipulation. Switzerland was also somewhat divided by political and economic class. In fits and starts but for centuries, the cities of Bern, Zürich, and Geneva had undertaken gradual political reforms to enfranchise the burghers and the guildmen. In the early and middle eighteenth century, however, this progress in voting rights, due process, and other democratic reforms had been halted and, in many cases, reversed. When Russian and Austrian troops marched in from the East and South, they were treated as forces of freedom. There was, however, a substantial minority, the disenfranchised and the radical, who welcomed the French invasion. And the majority, while certainly patriotic, was lukewarm. Switzerland was not sharply divided, but it was not unified to the extent required for tiny countries to resist large-scale invasions. The Swiss lacked the fighting spirit they showed when the mountain men resisted the Austrians in the fourteenth century and booted them across the Rhine in the fifteenth century; the people did not fear and loathe the French leadership as they would Bismarck in 1870 and Hitler in 1935. The Diet barely began military preparations even though it had debated defense improvements at almost every session from 1793 on. Geographically, Switzerland was and is divided and small. Three distinct language and economic zones are separated by mountains as if they were a television dinner tray. "The natural conditions," as James Bryce writes, "might seem most unfavorable to the creation of a State or even of a nation. The Swiss people 1/4 dwell on different sides of a gigantic mountain mass, 1/4 separated from one another by craggy heights and widespread snow-fields. Given the easy crossing at many points of the Rhein, no natural boundary marks them off from the Germans to the north and east, from the French to the west, and from the Italians to the south." By virtue of its historic tolerance, and its relatively recent social consensus, Switzerland is often wrongly perceived as having missed the religious quarrels of the rest of Europe. "The cantons of Switzerland, " as the Reverend John Witherspoon wrote during the American Constitutional Convention, "have never broken among themselves, though there are some of them Protestants, and some of the Papists, by public establishment." In fact, Switzerland has suffered its share of religious divisions. From the intra-Catholic disputes of the Middle Ages through the strife of the Reformation, Switzerland sometimes escaped the fury of the times - it came nearly unscathed through the Thirty Years War - but more often did not. Figure 4.1 lists just some of the large-scale religious conflicts experienced by Switzerland. Table 4.1 Swiss Religious Wars 1525 Repression of the Anabaptists Religious leader Huldrych Zwingli declares the Anabaptists, who favor "full acceptance" of the Sermon on the Mount, are "heretics," and the city of Zürich begins a repression. Anabaptists are expelled, drowned, hung, and burned. 1531 Battle of Kappel Catholic cantons, with outside backing from Austria, defeat a force of Protestant forces from Zürich. In this battle the Swiss religious leader Zwingli - a pacifist - fought for the Zürich forces and was killed along with 500 compatriots. (October 11, 1531). 1586-89 Civil War Plans; Savoy hits Geneva Central cantons form an alliance with Spain. Catholic Savoy attempts to take over Protestant (Calvin) Geneva. (Catholic cantons opposed.) "Civil war was probably averted," the Catholic historian Hillaire Belloc argues, "only by the defeat of the Spanish Armada" in 1588. 1618-1649 Wars over Graubünden Reformed Synod of Bergün condemns local pacts with Spain, Austria, aimed at preserving Catholic predominance. Prominent Catholics are driven from their homes; some killed. In July 1620, Catholic bands retaliate, murdering 500 persons. Spain, Austria, France, and Venice intervene, with major engagements in 1621, 1622, 1624, 1633, 1635, and 1637. A "permanent peace" was signed in 1649. 1633-1634 Swedish intrusions Zürich (according to Catholic cantons) allows Swedish troops, on their way to battle the forces of the Kaiser, safe passage through Thurgau. Catholic cantons demand resistance. Reformed cantons make plans for a war, the Catholic cantons allege, at Zürich in January 1634. The Swiss Diet (May 21, 1634) approves a plan for internal peace and neutrality vis-à-vis Sweden. This statecraft, according to Gagliardi, "saved the country," and leads to conclusion of the Defensionale of Wyl (1647). 1655-1656 First Villmergen War Schwyz confiscates properties by citizens converting to Protestant faith, beheads others, and demands return of subjects who fled to Zürich. Zürich (aided by Bern) mobilizes 25,000-man army against 6,000 Catholics, but the confrontation dissolves. Erupting again, the two forces meet at Villmergen on January 24, 1656. The forces of the mountain Cantons crush the Bernese forces (backed by Zürich), and craft an agreement confirming cantonal sovereignty for confessional matters (Baden, March 7). 1667-1681 French Comté Louis grabs the French Comté without strong resistance. Switzerland's newly federalized war council tries to organize a response, but too late. The cantons renew the Defensionale in 1668 and briefly win the return of the region to Spain. But France re-enters in 1674. As the War Council contemplates retaliation (1675-76), Schwyz, then other cantons, withdraw (1679) from the Defensionale. 1701-1735 Expulsion of the Anabaptists Bern, Zürich, and other cities engage in large-scale expulsion of Anabaptists. Some Anabaptists are compensated, but others suffer property confiscation and harassment. Bern hires Ritter & Company to assist the effort, paying a fee for every Taüfer Ritter could dispatch to America or Canada; there was a bonus for paupers. 1712 Baden and the Freiämter Zürich and Bern combine against five of the central cantons to fight over administrative control of Baden and the so-called Freiämter. "The Swiss lack only one thing," the Swiss historian Abraham Ruchat comments. 'They are not united ... and the cause of their division is religion." 1732-1768 Geneva: Burning Rousseau Geneva, Swiss historian Johannes von Müller commented, was "nearly always" troubled in this period. Peasant demands focused on economics but had a sectarian edge given the Calvinism of the ruling aristocracy. In 1738 the city gave in to many of their demands. The ruling class attempted a reversal in 1760, and held a celebrated burning of the books of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in front of the Geneva Council House. The burghers again revolted, and though Bern and Zürich sent aid to their fellow Protestant elites, the oligarchs retreated in 1768. 1798-1815 French Occupation Only partly religious, but there were confessional and clerical issues at stake. These strengthen after Napoleon declares the Protectorate Constitution in 1803. (See text.) 1802 Federalist Revolution Due to the treaty system of Lunéville and Amiens, French troops had to evacuate Switzerland in 1802. Immediately afterward a federalist popular revolt swept away the centralist government left by the French and installed a government at Schwyz. Napoleon Bonaparte sent his troops a second time and had them stay until 1804 to stabilize his clever adaptation of the newly federalist Swiss system, the so-called Mediation of 1803. 1847 Sonderbund War (Swiss Civil War) Civil war between Catholic cantons, which formed their own "defense league" against alleged intrusions against cantonal rights to allow Jesuit instruction in the schools, and Protestant cantons opposed to what they term de facto secession. (See text.) --- A recurring theme of these conflicts is the presence of, indeed manipulation by, foreign interests. Switzerland's geopolitical position at once excites the interest of these powerful states, and, at the same time, exerts a certain cultural pull on the people toward them. This is not to say that Switzerland was overcome by these difficulties; this would be geodeterminism merely redirected. The Swiss were able to conquer their challenges, for the most part. The point is, they did, in fact, have to conquer them. The Defensionale of 1647 - which helped cement Switzerland's independence and growing prosperity from 1600 to 1800 - was written and concluded not by rivers but by men, and approved by a referendum- like popular assembly in the Landsgemeinde cantons. Likewise the declaration of neutrality in Baden on May 3, 1764, despite its flaws, was a helpful instrument and guide to the future in helping the Swiss avoid some of the entanglements of European affairs. But it was a man- made instrument. All of these factors - economic, political, and religious fissures, abetted by foreign meddling - came together in 1847 in Switzerland's civil war, the Sonderbund War. The war was rooted not only in Swiss internal factors, but in the effort of European statesmen to build stability after the ravages of the Revolution and Napoleon. European maneuvering to control, influence, or simply divvy up Switzerland began as early as the first grand coalition. In 1813, as the troops of Austria and Russia swept across Switzerland, all the powers had ideas about the proper shape of a new regime. Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia disliked Swiss liberal tendencies, but was concerned about French influence of any sort. Even with Napoleon gone, maps, institutions, and sympathies had been rewritten in the generation since 1789, and he feared a strong France. Tsar Alexander I of Russia felt neither great sympathy nor enmity toward the Swiss, but as a practical matter, favored a buffer state against the French dominated by him and his fellow royalists. Britain felt a certain natural sympathy for the Swiss as a democratic republic and a victim of continental meddling. Robert Peel was serving as Ambassador to Bern for Palmerston's government and developed a deep respect for the Swiss. The British also viewed a strong Switzerland - armed and neutral - as a bulwark against aggression in any of several directions. More than most of the other diplomats, Peel and Palmerston understood that Switzerland's high ideals and democratic institutions were helpful, if not essential, to the country's ability to play this role. Animating and shaping the approach of the great powers for the first half of the nineteenth century, however, was Metternich of Austria. Though seen as a dispassionate diplomat of the chessboard school, Metternich was anything but cool and analytical regarding the Swiss. His memoirs, private correspondence, and accounts of his conversations with the British suggest a contempt bordering on fury. He loathed the way this "Germanic people" showed historic sympathy to the French. He disdained the "former strength" of Swiss arms in the divided nation and was vexed that the Swiss were not more grateful for their liberation from Napoleon by the Austrians. Perhaps, too, like a suitor somewhat scorned, Metternich knew that Switzerland's ancient mistrust of the Hapsburg Empire to the East had never really disappeared. Above all, though, and simply put, Metternich seethed at the Swiss democracy. He loathed its toleration of intellectuals and dissidents - loathed it, and feared it. He blamed Switzerland, in part, for harboring some of the revolutionists that had brought chaos to Europe for thirty years. He seems to have been determined, even passionate, to bring this mysterious and uppity renegade - "perhaps the greatest threat to peace in Europe" - to heel. Insisting that others abstain from involvement in Austria's internal affairs, Metternich meddled liberally in Swiss domestic politics. In 1830, the Swiss made efforts to revise their constitution in a manner that would have strengthened the central government but, naturally, reduced somewhat the autonomy of the original Waldsätte. Metternich growled that respect for Swiss neutrality was dependent upon the constitutional state of affairs as of 1815, strongly suggesting armed intervention. He encouraged the Catholic cantons of Innerschweiz to toy with the usual special leagues in 1830 and again in 1845. When the Swiss declined a French demand that they extradite Prince Louis Napoleon, Austria and Russia encouraged the French to mobilize 25,000 troops. The Swiss prepared for battle. War was avoided only when Louis Napoleon voluntarily left Switzerland in 1838. By 1845, developments within Switzerland had the country on a path to civil war. In the canton of Aargau, newly molded after the French occupation and precariously balanced between Protestant and Catholic, Reformed forces gained the upper hand and began demanding taxation, regulation, and expulsion of the monasteries. Nearby, Luzern and other cantons wanted to accept the offer of the Jesuits to provide teaching in the schools, based on both sectarian grounds and economic: the Jesuits cost far less to maintain than regular public school teachers. Under the constitution and the practices of many years, both efforts were probably within the legal competence of the cantons in question, but they were resented by opponents. Both sides began to get jumpy. In 1844 and again in 1845, radicals from the Reformed cantons formed a small private militia and attempted an assault on Luzern. The threat was marginal but the fears and suspicion aroused were not. As fears mounted, the cantonal governments began to take preemptive action, while the relatively weak federal government was paralyzed, in effect divided within. The Protestant cantons formed an economic league that had no formal religious purposes but had strong anti- Catholic overtones. Uri, Schwyz, Luzern, and other central Catholic cantons formed a mutual defense league, the Sonderbund. The Bund aimed narrowly at protecting their distinctive religious preferences. More broadly, the agreement was viewed as a secessionist arrangement by the other cantons that violated the spirit of the confederation. In effect, the Sonderbund was a Catholic version of the Protestant alliances already aligned against it. Elements of the old rural peasants versus urban elites were involved, along with economic issues (such as taxes) and regional disputes (very roughly, Austria and France with the Catholics, versus Britain and Germany with the Protestants). While all this was going on, the political and economic power of Switzerland was gradually shifting back to the cities, thanks largely to the appearance of steam engines and other advances. Center-left coalitions favoring a stronger federal union won elections in both Zürich and Bern. Politicians in the Diet realized there would soon be enough votes to pass a measure discussed in 1846 and early 1847, mandating the dissolution of the Sonderbund. The vote took place in July 1847, with Swiss military leaders on both sides already making plans for armed conflict. The confederation chose Henri Dufour to head its army and, on November 4, passed a resolution instructing him to bring the rebel cantons into compliance by force of arms. The war itself, viewed in retrospect, was anticlimactic. The cities were larger, better armed, and better prepared. The forest cantons wanted their independence, but the invaders were not foreign enemies; in this war, they were marching not against French or Austrian troops, but against other Swiss. The federal forces under Dufour won a pair of relatively minor skirmishes and a truce was called before the end of the year. The business lasted twenty-six days and produced 435 wounded and 128 killed in battle. If estimates of participation by different immigrant groups are accurate, there were probably more Swiss killed in the American Civil War than in their own. Dufour won the appreciation of the rebellious cantons, and the respect of his own side, by insisting that there be no reprisals, lootings, or other such acts. "The men we are fighting," Dufour reminded his troops, "are Swiss." The war did not end without a final spasm of interventionism. Twice in December the continental powers - France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia - wrote to the Diet expressing their concern and threatening to intervene. Metternich reasserted Austria's view that the peace of 1815 gave them the right to do so. The Swiss politely informed the powers, to the bemusement of Peel and the British, that they would need no assistance putting their affairs in order as the civil war had been ended. In less than a year, Metternich himself was ousted in a civil coup and became a refugee, as the revolutions of 1848 swept Europe. The Swiss, meanwhile, had drafted a new constitution, strengthening the federal government but wisely conciliating the defeated forest cantons. Swiss today are mildly proud of their civil war. For although it followed upon and was sparked by abuses and errors, it also removed those abuses. In fact, the Swiss civil war of 1847 was the catalyst for the new constitution, a constitution that finally reconciled the Swiss love of cantonal and community autonomy with a coherent (but limited) central government. The basic framework survives today, a tribute to those who were able to construct it under the press of domestic religious quarrels, economic and cultural debates, and the interference of foreign states. It is fruitless to debate whether men govern forces, or forces govern men. Obviously, the two act and react upon one another; history in some sense is merely this reciprocal action. Geography did not write the Bundesbrief or unite the forest cantons with Zürich and Bern; it never wrote a single constitution. Yet it played a role in the development of Switzerland. Perhaps the highest tribute one can give to statesmen is to say that they conformed their actions intelligently to these factors - accepting the material they are given, but shaping it too. If the design works, we may learn from it. Notes 1. The phrase was probably coined by Johann Rodolph Valltravers, councilor of Bienne, in a letter to Benjamin Franklin dated 14 April 1778. An excellent book on this subject is published by the Library of Congress: See James H. Hutson, The Sister Republics: Switzerland and the United States from 1776 to the Present. 2. In E. T. Rimli (ed.), Histoire de la Confédération, Stauffacher, 1967. 5. Constitution Albert Blaustein, the great scholar of world constitutions, once devised a simple and intriguing method for assessing them at a glance. According to Blaustein's rule of thumb, the shorter a constitution, the better it probably is. Corrupted polities tend to cram such documents full of sham "rights," complex rules, and pompous pronouncements. The constitutions of such countries, like the tombs of the self-important Egyptian kings, often run to 50,000 words. By contrast, the constitutions of the United States, Germany, and other successful republics tend to be shorter and more limited. Powers are distributed and denied. Popular liberties are stated or implied, and then followed. Naturally there are caveats and exceptions, but this is a very fast way to form a general impression of a country's fundamental law and government. The Swiss constitution of the late twentieth century didn't perform terribly on this "Blaustein test," but at some 15,000 words, or about sixty-five pages of normal-sized type, it didn't achieve the economy we normally attribute to the Swiss.(1) Unlike a recent Asian constitution, it contains no elaborate listing of the rights of tenants in high-rise buildings. Nor, as distinct from the constitution of Cuba, are the people guaranteed progressive and inspired leadership; and the civil liberties of left-handed persons, generously shielded in Nigeria, are not pledged protection. The Swiss constitution in place until January 2000, however, did "encourage the growing of table-fruit," and provide for a tax of "1.9 percent on radio and television activities of a noncommercial character." It also compelled the civil authorities to "make sure that every deceased person can have a decent burial," and, importantly, established "the total tax rate for beer" at "the level of 31 December 1970." The picture suggested of a highly encumbered document, though, is misleading. The constitution's core sections, such as those outlining the powers of and limits on the different branches and providing for election to the various federal offices, occupied little more than 10 percent of the document. This portion of the old Swiss constitution, in about forty brief articles, comprised perhaps 2,000 words and was comparable in brevity and clarity to the American Constitution - on which it is partly modeled. The articles referenced above, on everything from the prohibition of absinthe to federal authority to regulate "the slaughter at abbatoirs and other methods of killing animals," came under the headings "general provisions" and "transitional provisions." These made up some ninety or one-hundred longer articles and took up more than 85 percent of the document. Such provisions were enacted not as part of the basic governing structure when the constitution was written in 1848 and revised (but with many key provisions left unchanged) in 1874 and 1999. Rather, they became part of Switzerland's fundamental law by public referendum over the last 125 years. Under a quirk in the system, citizens are allowed to "initiate" a constitutional change by collecting 100,000 signatures, leading to a vote of the people by referendum. (To take effect, the referendum must achieve a double majority of the popular vote as a whole, and within the individual twenty-three cantons.) By contrast, the right to pass on regular laws is limited to challenging certain laws already passed by parliament in a referendum - mere laws can only be initiated by the parliament, but can be challenged with as few as 50,000 signatures. The Swiss also enjoy a right to petition, and to have their petition answered by officials. The result is that matters of policy that would normally be mere statutes are often the object to constitutional amendment. It is sometimes easier to change the constitution by this manner, despite the large majorities required, than it would be to persuade a bare majority of legislators to enact the same change. That this is the case - and probably would be in many other democracies - may itself be instructive about the state of our politics. The length of the constitution, and its forays into seeming arcana, is also an indication of the extent to which the Swiss people have been able to shape the fundamental law of their own land. The accretion, while troublesome (the Swiss have discussed making initiative possible for federal laws, and likely will in the coming years) is also suggestive of the openness of the system to the action of citizens as individuals and groups. The working of the initiative and referendum process is of sufficient importance to merit its own examination later in the book. It must, however, be discussed in considering the working of the whole as well, given its importance to the whole operating spirit of the regime and its institutions. Naturally, the amendment process is only one of many important revisions in the constitution. It was not even a major controversy when the basic ideology of the current constitution took shape in 1848, following the civil war; initiative and referendum at the national level came about late in the nineteenth century, during and following the rewriting of the constitution in 1874. As if to improve their performance under the Blaustein Test, or perhaps simply out of a desire to consolidate and perfect, the country drafted a revision of its constitution in the late 1990s, which took effect early in the year 2000. The new constitution, in the assessment of its framers and advocates, made no significant changes over the old. Certainly, on a structural level, this appeared to be so. The new constitution, at about forty-five pages of single-spaced type, achieved the same ends as the older, longer version. It retained some of the penchant for unusually specific provisions seen often in the old, such as a passage providing the Confederation may "encourage the variety and quality of cinematographic works offered" (article 71) or a clause "on avoiding abusive notices of termination" (article 109). For the most part, however, these provisions were moved into a final section of "transitory provisions" that will drop off the basic document as soon as they are enacted in the form of laws per se (Title 6, Chapter 2 - article 191). "These provisions," as former President Dr. Kurt Furgler noted in an interview, "are more properly matters of regular legislation. The Swiss had always recognized this, and, being Swiss, have a desire to revise their fundamental law so as to put things in their proper place." More controversial was a statement of "Social Goals" contained in article 41. Among the notable provisions, "every person shall benefit from necessary health care." As well, "every person looking for housing shall find... appropriate housing at reasonable conditions." On the other hand, "every person capable of working shall sustain himself or herself through working under fair and adequate conditions. " Although this section of the constitution makes clear that this listing of goals implies no "direct subjective right" to receive them from the state, the wary Swiss, particularly in some of the central cantons, wondered whether the elaboration of social goals, albeit brief, might lead to subtle changes in their political fabric. Indeed, the debate over the new constitution, in the words of Bernhard Ehrenzeller, "focused largely not on any of the positive provisions, but on the document's preamble and purpose sections." Ehrenzeller, a professor at the University of St. Gallen and adviser to former President Raoul Kohler, was part of a team of scholars that worked with Kohler to craft the new constitution and win support for it. One offending section of the preamble called for "solidarity and openness towards the world." This might seem an unobjectionable phrase, particularly since it follows a commitment to "liberty, democracy, [and] independence." To some Swiss, however, it seemed an erosion of Switzerland's tradition of neutrality, and its reticence toward involvement in international organizations that might compromise neutrality. Did the new phrase imply Switzerland's eventual entry into the United Nations, or even the European Union? "We certainly didn't intend to insert such a meaning," Ehrenzeller said, "and I don't think it's the right reading of the constitution. But, it became a controversy." Regardless of this original intent of the founders, a lively opposition formed in the weeks leading up to the vote on the new constitution. Swiss in nine cantons voted against the new design. Nevertheless, in April of 1999, the Swiss voted by a 59-41 percent margin to approve the work of the new framers. The most striking aspect of the Swiss design, of course, is its use of direct democracy. Almost equally different, however, compared to other constitutions of the world, is the new constitution's federalism - the extent to which rights and prerogatives are delegated to the cantons and communities. Indeed, to the Swiss, such matters are not merely "delegated," but "reserved," having been retained by the local units of government all along. Federalism was central to the framers during the constitutional sessions of 1848. The issue was how to create a stronger federal core without driving the independent-minded cantons to another civil war. Their first remedy was to follow the American Constitution, with its blend of states' rights and new federal powers. The opening paragraphs mention each of the "sovereign cantons." These are sovereign wherever there is no explicit federal power to make laws. Yet the constitution also speaks in the name of "the people" of each of the cantons. It proclaims citizens of one canton citizens of Switzerland - and declares that citizens of Switzerland have those rights in any of the cantons. This incorporative language was retained and strengthened over the years. The federal constitution also contains limits on what the cantons may do even within their own constitutions. For instance, confederation's guarantee of cantonal constitutions is conditioned on the assumption that "they have been accepted by the people and can be amended whenever the majority of citizens so demand." The confederation wisely did not place a large number of such limits on the cantons, but this one is significant and, indeed, unusually sweeping among Western democracies. The United States, for example, proclaims the federal Constitution the supreme law of the land. It does not, however, specify that state constitutions must be amendable - still less, that they must be amendable by the people. Many U.S. states, particularly in the South and the East, have no such provision, and indeed, some have no referendum or initiative process altogether. That this is one of the more stringent impositions on the cantons reveals something of the Swiss faith in popular government. Like the U.S. Constitution's Tenth Amendment, the Swiss constitution reserves all powers not specifically delegated to the confederation for its states or cantons. The Swiss have followed this tenet more strictly than the Americans. The cantons remain the largest unit of government to this day, whether measured by revenues or employees. The Swiss cantons enjoy rights not common among the local levels of government in many Western countries. They can establish religious institutions and support them with tax money, and provide religious teaching in the public schools. There is freedom of choice for the individual worshipper, protected by the constitution. There is, however, no "wall of separation" between church and state of the kind so often spoken of in other Western democracies. The remedy for a Roman Catholic living in Bern, or a Protestant or Jew living in Schwyz, is to attend his local independent church, or move to another canton. In practice, since all the major faiths are now recognized, and the school instruction and religious content is not aggressive, this is not a major issue. It is, however, a measure of the power of the cantons that they still enjoy such autonomy. The cantons also maintain control of roads and bridges, except for a few federal roads. And, unusually, each canton establishes its own system of criminal and civil court procedure. Court decisions and police actions taken in one canton are binding upon another. The cantonal courts enjoy significant discretion and exhibit a wide variety of methods. Most powers reserved to the cantons were, in fact, merely reserved - not "given" to them in the federal constitution, because they had been enjoyed all along. As long as these were not, in fact, reserved to the federal government, they remain the province of the sovereign cantons. Among these are many nonenumerated powers over the police, public works, and education and the schools. It is difficult for many modern Americans and Europeans to grasp the idea of dual sovereignty inherent in this. Although we have traditions and rhetoric of federalism, the practice of federalism was significantly eroded over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United States, as well, the use of "states' rights" arguments by the Southern states before the Civil War, and again in the 1950s and 1960s, to oppose some civil rights measures, has somewhat discredited the very idea of federalism. This is not to say that state government has disappeared in the United States; still less so in Germany. Few take seriously, however, the idea that these units of government are truly sovereign. In Switzerland, this concept is still held and felt strongly, particularly by Swiss over the age of fifty. The constitution gives the federal government oversight of the army. "The army is the province of federal legislation." The cantons may continue to administer elements of their own armed forces, but they do so "under the supervision" of the confederation. No canton may maintain a standing army of more than 300 persons - nor may the confederation itself. The army is another of those Swiss institutions that requires a separate examination. We cannot understand the working of the constitution, or the balance of its design, without at least referencing it here, for it is the most national and perhaps the most nationalizing institution the Swiss have devised. In a very general way, the operations of Swiss federalism may be summarized as follows: The framers, in 1848 and 1874, did not provide the federal government with a large number of powers. (These have been added to over the years, however, through the referendum process.) The federal government at the center has only a few powers in number - but of those, several are highly compelling and strategic. Among these are its power to decide disputes between the cantons, its power over the currency, the unitary power over the military and over decisions of war and peace, and the sole power to negotiate treaties and nearly undivided power to approve or reject them. Many more powers, in number, were retained by the cantons, and are today. Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated this when he advised his colleagues in the French Parliament what to watch for in the unfolding constitutional debates. The Swiss federal government, Tocqueville argued, did not need to provide most or all of the goods, services, and functions of government in order to be effective. But it needed to provide some of them. In particular, it needed to provide some of them itself, in a direct intercourse with the people - instead of always acting through, and therefore somewhat at the discretion of, the cantons. The Swiss federal constitution set up several such arrangements in 1848, to which more have been added. The creation of the Swiss franc, and abolition of cantonal currencies, was certainly one. Money is a "bottom line" in so many economic and even social transactions, and sound money provides a real service to the people and the economy. The frequent elections set up by the federal constitution and its requirement of amendability for the cantonal constitutions provides another unifying source, a sociological one. The need to prevent a too-powerful federal government was also met through indirect means. The Swiss, like the Americans, divided the powers of the federal government between branches and then, for good measure, divided the branches somewhat within themselves. Thus the executive branch in effect has not one president, but seven council members, each of whom serves a term of one year as president in rotation. Legislation must pass both houses of parliament to become law, but it needs no further signature from the executive. This check, the "veto," was thought to be unnecessary: it is carried out by the people through initiative and referendum. Similarly, while judges are certainly respected in Switzerland - perhaps more so than in the United States and Britain - they are not appointed for life. The judiciary's independence is guaranteed, first by the good faith of the legislature, and second - this factor must always be kept in mind - by the ability of the people to overturn capricious or vindictive legislation directed at the judiciary, were such legislation to pass. Here again we see a distinctive element in the Swiss system. No less than other democracies, the Swiss have checks and balances. A larger share of them, however, tend to involve popular checks - restraints imposed by the people on political elites, rather than by one group of elites on another. The difference in spirit can be seen if we compare various provisions in the Swiss constitution with those of other democracies, as in Table 5.1 on the next page. The Swiss regard their constitution somewhat differently than the people in other Western democracies. Some of these differences appear to be advantageous, others not so. On the one hand, in political and even everyday discussions, it is treated with a little less reverence than in the United States. If the constitution is a holy oracle or fixed tablet in the United States, France, or Germany, in Switzerland it is more of a home medical guide. The Swiss are more used to taking the thing off the shelf and using it - possibly doing damage, sometimes doing good, and in any case, having it out for use. It is treated less like an icon, and more like a tool. Table 5.1 Constitutions at a Glance: Provisions for Selected Countries Switzerland, Germany, France, Mexico, U.S. Federalism Federal is largest government unit($) – no, yes, yes, yes, yes Citizenship voted at local level – yes, no, no, no, no Legislature Proportional representation – yes, yes, yes, no, no Two chambers – yes, yes, yes, yes, yes Term limits – no, no, no, yes, no Executive Direct election – no, yes, yes, yes, yes Veto power – no, yes, yes, yes, yes Single executive – no, yes, yes, yes, yes Judiciary Executive appoints – no, yes, yes, yes, yes Life appointment – no, yes, yes, yes, yes Popular Access Initiative@ – yes, no, no, no, no@ Referendum@ – yes, yes%, yes%, no, no@ Have government answer a petition – yes, yes, no, no, no Primary system* – no, no, no, no&, yes Source: "Constitutions at a Glance," research memorandum, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, 1999. Copyright © AdTI, all rights reserved. Notes: # - U.S. termed a direct election system for practical purposes since (1) electors have little discretion, (2) results of unit-rule at state level seldom vary from national popular vote, and (3) executive is not normally chosen by members of the legislature. @ - at the federal level. % - infrequent and not mandatory for certain laws. * - not a constitutional provision unless indicated. & - Some parties in Mexico, including ruling party (PRI), plan primary system for its elections in 2000. --- On the other hand, there is a certain friendly familiarity that results from such experience. This is particularly so given the somewhat greater ease of changing the constitution in Switzerland and, more importantly, the fact that the way one changes it involves the common people to a greater extent, both at the front end and the back. In the United States, since the passage of the initial ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution has been altered some one dozen times over two centuries and only once since World War II. The typical Swiss voter of age fifty has seen about twenty to twenty-five constitutional changes in his lifetime, and as an adult has voted on an average of more than one per year. Perhaps he even volunteered time to help support the passage of one or the defeat of another. In any case, if he is a typical Swiss, he was reading regular newspaper articles about the merits of this change or that change. In this process, implicitly, he was engaged in a kind of rolling review of his country's fundamental law. This process makes the constitution alive and the people its owners, in a more tangible way than in nearly any other country. To say this is not to comment on the wisdom or lack of wisdom of the measures themselves. It is an observation about the process and its impact upon the sociology, if you will, of the Swiss constitution as against others. The Swiss constitution, for all its flaws, is less an object for handling only by an opaque priesthood of attorneys and officials, and somewhat more of a living document and a family member. If familiarity breeds a certain rough contempt, the overall impact appears to be a healthy, balanced respect and a greater sense of pride and participation. Note 1. During the work on this book, Switzerland passed a new constitution, consolidating the language of the old into a more terse document, but kept the same structure. We can expect this new document to be subject to some of the same accretions and alternations through the process of initiative and referendum. Hence, references to length and complexity refer to the constitution in place for most of the twentieth century, though observations about substantive provisions apply equally to the new constitution that came into force in 1999. The fact that Switzerland's whole framework of government can be so smoothly altered every few years, and even consolidated into a whole new draft, is evidence of the kind of flexibility and populism that are the Swiss constitution's defining characteristics. The fact that many of its provisions, popularly enacted, were for a time not "written" through this process does not substantially alter the character of the document.