ABSTRACT
As a small country located at the crossroads of Northern and Southern Europe, Switzerland is widely known for its neutrality and peaceful attitudes, its ethnic and linguistic diversity – German, French, Italian, and Reto-Romansch1 are all national languages – and a decentralized government that makes most laws at the canton (or state) level.2 But the nice picture of being a country privileged by Kantian ‘eternal peace’ is as correct as the supposition to be called the inventor of the Bavarian Black Forest time-piece. There is a good reason why control and integration policies figure large in a federalist country that was challenged since its birth – in the aftermath of the successful liberal Revolution of 1848 – by centrifugal forces on the religious, regional, political, social, and ideological levels. Certain foreign scholars, puzzled by Switzerland’s apparent enduring stability (and overlooking the history of violent and disruptive conflicts from the civil war of 1847 until the social unrest of the 1930s), detected the source of this solidity in the clever management of a multicultural country through its federal institutions (Schnapper 1997). Others see Switzerland as a ‘paradigmatic case of political integration’ as a result of the subsidiary structure of the Swiss state which supports both the strong municipal autonomy and the comparatively high participation rate of the constituency in the polity (Deutsch 1976). Other authors see the source of the country’s stability in the successful creation of a strong national identity, which helped overcome the social distrust that arose during rapid industrialization, and which was based on the country’s small size, and the idea that Switzerland was under permanent threat of strong neighbouring countries (‘Überfremdung’) (Kohler 1994; Tanner 1998).
