Why Switzerland?
by Jonathan Steinberg
The story of William Tell is not false, even if there never was a man of that name and he never shot an apple off his son's head. (Why Switzerland?, p. 28)
William Tell's defiance of the Hapsburg oppressor is a notorious fiction, but the infallible archer, the apple and the cap are too pivotal to Swiss identity to give up. (David Lowenthal, source cited at end of notes)
I came to this book a couple of months after directing an amateur production of Peter Shaffer's comedy Lettice & Lovage, a play that plays on the notion that "fantasy rushes in where fact leaves a vacuum." And I felt, as most Americans should, a fairly high vacuum of fact regarding Switzerland. Who are those people, how did they get that way, can they really govern a modern country by referendum, why don't they join Europe?
Jonathan Steinberg, a Cambridge don, wrote the first edition of this book in 1976 and revised it heavily for the 1996 second edition. His sources include family members, newspapers, interviews with government figures at all levels, and a time of residence in the country, and his knowledge goes pretty deep. While the book doesn't finally answer all my questions, it sheds good light on some of them.
The Swiss come in several flavors, French stock in the west and northwest, Italians in the south-central part of the country, Alemanic Germans in the middle, descendants of the Raetians (I used to see it spelled Rhaetians) in some eastern valleys, and others salted through the whole. They don't fit into any ethnic category. The people today live more or less where their ancestors lived in the 1200s; migration has not been a big part of their history since that time.
We've come to think of Switzerland as a place of isolated valleys where the people on the hither side of the mountain don't speak the same language as the people on the yonder side. The center of the country, though, is a big rich basin with lots of rivers and roads running through it, many of them leading to the passes that go from northern to southern Europe. Control of the passes both put the Swiss in touch with the rest of the world and allowed them to prosper from tolls and haulage even before their Alps became tourist spots. It's perhaps true that a person in Appenzell or Graubünden once might have seen fewer outsiders than a Parisian or a Viennese, and it's important that traditions from the low-traffic centuries have helped shape the country as it exists today, but this has never been an island nation. The Swiss have always been aware of their neighbors, keenly aware of them.
Steinberg says Switzerland came into being partly as a defensive compact. In the summer of 1291, the "forest cantons" of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden swore to defend themselves and one another against Hapsburg tyranny. The "Rütli oath" (Rütlischwur) still forms the confederation's talisman, and another German word for oath, Eid, defines every Swiss as an Eidgenosse or "oath-comrade." . . . Or perhaps they didn't and it was a gradual process of accretion rather than the neat resolution that's recorded, no matter, there is a key point here: The Swiss, in Steinberg's account, regard "Swissness" as involving not just ancestry or nativity but adherence or compliance to a way of doing things and living with one's neighbors.
A handbook called "How To Be an American" would have to be printed on loose leaves, because all our methods and most of our ideas are subject to change as new people become Americans. The Swiss book might be thicker, but it could go longer without revision. If the new people don't fit in, they can just remain Austrians or what have you. While the Swiss may be no more conservative than you or I, they've gone to great pains to make their republic conservative in its operation. It isn't quite true that they make all decisions by voting, but "the Sovereign" (Der Souverän, the electorate) reserves the right to give thumbs up or down on many questions even after the government has come to a resolution. Swiss laws don't change quickly; the country will enter the European Union (EU) on the day when the Sovereign agrees to give up its power to make (or decline to make) rules about labor relations, currency, residency and a host of other matters. After all, the Rütlischwur binds the cantons and the people to reject the authority of judges who don't come from "our valleys."
Steinberg's book is not imposing, less than 300 pages long, but it contains a broad, carefully integrated collection of information about a country that's never quite revealed itself to us Americans. The book packs a surprising thesis too: Switzerland, made up of people who lack unity in almost every respect (ethnicity, language, religion, politics), has held together by carefully dividing power and seeking compromise in everything that's less important than "Swissness"; as the EU evolves into a multicultural, polyglot, secular, and politically fragmented superstate, it is bound to move away from its centralized model and emulate the Swiss style of confederation. The book is worth reading if only for this insight.
Thanks to Fran, serving as dramaturg on Lettice & Lovage, for bringing to my attention the essay quoted above: David Lowenthal, "Fabricating Heritage," History & Memory, Vol. 10, No. 1; http://iupjournals.org/history/ham10-1.html
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Why Switzerland?