![]()
1 Power and weakness of civic nationalism in Switzerland, 1848â2014
Regula Argast
Switzerland, a ânation by choiceâ
Switzerland is widely regarded as a prosperous state with a long tradition of popular sovereignty, equality before the law, federalism, and cultural pluralism. Indeed, the first Federal Constitution of 1848 guaranteed the Christian Swiss universal male suffrage, granted cantons a high degree of autonomy, ensured the political balance of forces at the parliamentary level between the linguistically, culturally, and denominationally diverse parts of the country, and established German, French, and Italian as the three official national languages.1 The liberal Founding Fathers of the federal state envisaged a nation of equal citizens. The report on the draft of a Federal Constitution of April 8, 1848, stated that: âIf we wish Switzerland to be a nation, the confederation a family of brothers, we must lay down the principle of equal rights for confederates.â2 As in the United States and France, the founding of the state went hand in hand with equal citizenship and visions of a civic nationalism.3
The civic nationalism of the liberal Swiss elites and its translation into democracy and equality before the law doubtlessly helped counteract the divisive factors in the multiethnic, multi-confessional, and politically disunited state after the defeat of the conservative Catholic cantons against the liberal Protestant cantons in the Sonderbund War of 1847. Nevertheless, the idea of the nation as a political community of equal citizens remained controversial. For one thing, cultural homogeneity rather than political equality was the rallying cry of participants in the European national movements of the nineteenth century.4 For another, the conservative Catholic and federally minded cantons saw civic nationalism as a threat to their cantonal autonomy.5 In their eyes, the Swiss nation consisted of a community that had developed organically, whose heroic forefathers had fought for fatherland and liberty.6 Unification into a nation-state and equality before the law had no place in this organic concept of the nation.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the hegemonic civic conception of the nation embraced by the liberal Founding Fathers of the state was voluntaristic in nature. At that time, the renowned Swiss constitutional lawyer Carl Hilty and the French linguist and religious scholar Ernest Renan posited the concept of the âWillensnation,â variously translated as ânation of willâ or ânation by choice.â With respect to Switzerland, where the total revision of the Federal Constitution in 1874 established popular rights, Hilty wrote in 1875 that: ânot language alone makes nationality but also history, combined with the resourceful awareness and will to unify, as all vigorous nations show.â7 In his famous 1882 Sorbonne lecture on âQuâest-ce quâune nation?â Renan, too, rejected ethno-cultural, notably linguistic criteria, not least in advocating the return, in keeping with the will of the local population, of the eastern French territories annexed in 1871 by the German Empire, the âReichsländerâ Alsace-Lorraine.8 Among other examples, he cited Switzerland: âIn the human being there is something that is above language: the will. The desire of Switzerland to be united despite its linguistic variety is a much more important fact than similarity often achieved by humiliation.â9
The idea of the Swiss ânation by choiceâ as the key to the successful building of the Swiss nation across cantonal, linguistic, and denominational divisions has survived to this day. The media, members of the Federal Council, and political parties across the political spectrum still draw on it when debating political issues and identity values. On closer inspection, this reading of civic nationalism and its role for the Swiss federal state is, however, called into question by two things: first, the fact that, since the founding of the liberal federal state in 1848, the cohesion of the culturally heterogeneous Swiss population has been ensured only in part by the practices of civic nationalism. Indeed, civic nationalism itself, in the sense of classical republicanism focusing on an arms-bearing, economically and politically independent life,10 displayed exclusive aspects. One example is the exclusion of Swiss women until 1971 from active and passive suffrage and thus from the civic nation. What is more, practices grounded in cultural conceptions of the nation hampered the integration of certain Swiss population groups into the civic nation, leading to the tardy granting of equal rights to Swiss Jews. Aram Mattioli writes of âmissed emancipation.â11
Second, foreign population groups rarely benefited from the concepts of civic nation and ânation by choice.â On the one hand, the introduction of political rights for established foreigners was never seriously discussed at the federal level. On the other hand, Swiss nationality is defined as citizenship of the federation, of a canton and a local civic community (âBĂźrgergemeindeâ). Thus the process of naturalization involves not only the federal but also the cantonal and local levels and is more restrictive than in most other countries. Since poor relief was a duty incumbent on the civic communities until well into the twentieth century, they had little interest in accepting new citizens.12 Furthermore, during the First World War, the traditional reserve of local government towards admission to citizenship was reinforced by growing ethnic nationalism and rigorous rejection of foreigners by the federal and cantonal administrations, officially termed âĂberfremdungsbekämpfungâ (variously translated as fight against foreign infiltration, excessive immigration, or inundation by foreigners).13 The buzzword âĂberfremdungâ experienced a second heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s during an economic boom, and was directed particularly against the âguest workersâ recruited by Switzerland after the Second World War from Southern Europe and Turkey. Not until the last quarter of the twentieth century did individual cantons and municipalities adopt strategies for the civic and societal integration of foreign residents.14
These considerations raise two main issues: first, the strategies political actors in multiethnic Switzerland adopted in pursuit of state and societal cohesion in the face of numerous divisive factors, and the role that civic nationalism played in this process; second, the integration of foreign residents. In about 1848 these foreign residents constituted about 3 percent of the total population, in 1900 11.6 percent and in late 2016 approximately 24.9 percent.15 What did federal, cantonal, and municipal authorities do to promote the societal and civic integration of immigrants, not least of all to place the Swiss civic nation on a broad democratic basis?
Nation-building, phases of nationalism, and âimagined communitiesâ
Three theoretical concepts determine the analytic framework. First, it uses the nation-building model developed by the German political scientist Jochen Hippler who defines nation-building as a âprocess of socio-political development, which ideal-typically [âŚ] converts initially loosely connected communities into a common society with a corresponding ânationâ-state.â16 However, the process of building a nation is not at an end with the founding of a nation-state. On the contrary, nation-building remains the point of departure and the goal of political action in societies organized as nation-states. Among the core elements of successful nation-building that Hippler identifies are: âa community-building, convincing ideology, the integration of society, and well-functioning machinery of government.â17 The distinctions drawn for analytical purposes between essentially closely interwoven elements of nation-building are also adopted here. The aim is to sharpen the analytical eye and help ensure that the role of the integrative ideology (in our case civic nationalism) is not overestimated from the outset but measured against the actual role it played in integrating society and the functioning machinery of government in Switzerland (referred to by Hippler as âstate-buildingâ).
The chapter takes its orientation secondly from the phase model of European national movements developed by the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch.18 According to this model, there are three phases in the formation of the European nations in the nineteenth century:
- Proto-nationalists look for linguistic, historical, or cultural criteria that define the nation.
- Activists promote the nationalism emerging out of the proto-nationalistsâ research.
- Nationalism becomes a mass movement.
Eric Hobsbawm further developed this model by adding two more phases to the history of European nationalism: âthe apogee of nationalismâ in the beginning and the gradual demise of nationalism at the end of the twentieth century.19 The development of nationalism in Switzerland and its importance for societal and state cohesion follows part of this broader historical pattern identified by Hroch and Hobsbawm. In order to bring this development to the fore and at the same time highlight the particularities of the Swiss case, the five stages in the history of the Swiss nation are traced.
Finally, following the constructivist definition of Benedict Anderson, the nation is understood as an âimagined political community,â20 which can be politically organized in widely differing fashions; for example, in the form of a national movement seeking to found a nation-state, as âtop-down nationalismâ within an existing state, or as legitimation for the exclusion of and discrimination against âundesirableâ population groups.21 Following Christian Geulen, nationalism accordingly means the âpractice of this imaginationâ of the national.22
This chapter is divided into five chronologically ordered sections. The first examines the role of civic nationalism in the founding of the liberal federal state in 1848 and the integration of Swiss society. This is followed by a consideration of the exclusion of Swiss women, Jews, Catholics, and the lower social classes from the Swiss civic nation, showing that in 1848...
