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Switzerland: challenging the big
theories of nationalism
n
MARC HELBLING
n
AND NENAD STOJANOVIC
´
nn
n
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fu
¨r Sozialforschung, Germany
nn
Zentrum fu
¨r Demokratie Aarau, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Traditional accounts of nationalism
In the major theories on European nationalism, Switzerland is typically
portrayed as an outlier – a country that does not fit the common categorisa-
tions of nations and thus sometimes ends up being ignored – or, alternately, as
a prominent example that the advocates of different theories invoke for their
own (sometimes divergent) ends. The difficulties of classifying the Swiss case
often seem to arise around the subject of its four language regions, and
around questions over the extent to which these language regions constitute
nations. There is dissent over whether a nation in which different languages
are spoken is even possible.
For those who champion subjectivist approaches, Switzerland stands as a
nation despite its multilingualism. Hans Kohn (1956) considers Switzerland a
case of civic nationalism, where minorities are not excluded and liberal and
democratic ideas serve as integrating forces. For Ernest Renan (1947), a
common language might facilitate the formation of nations, but it does not
guarantee the success of such a project. Indeed, Renan holds that it is the will
to live together that is most crucial.
For those who defend objectivist approaches to nationalism, however,
multilingualism challenges Switzerland’s status as a nation. Some consider a
common language to be a sign of a homogeneous culture, and thus place
Switzerland in the category of multinational states (Acton 1948; Renner
1964).
For Ernest Gellner (1983), a common language, a standardised education
and, more generally, a homogeneous culture are crucial for the functioning of
Nations and Nationalism 17 (4), 2011, 712–717.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00516.x
rASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011
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The question of whether Switzerland is a nation-state or a multinational state was discussed at
an international conference we organised at the Centre for Democracy Studies in Aarau,
Switzerland, in May 2010. Some of the conference contributions are presented in this special
section. This project has been made possible through the generous financial support of the Swiss
National Science Foundation, the Centre for Comparative and International Studies in Zurich
and the Centre for Democracy Studies in Aarau. We would also like to thank Lisa Scha
¨del for her
assistance.
EN
AS
JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION
FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY
AND NATIONALISM
NATIONS AND
NATIONALISM
industrialised societies. To what extent Switzerland contradicts his theory is
not completely clear, though: he barely discusses this case in his work.
Similarly, Karl Deutsch (1966) treats the Swiss case only marginally in his
œuvre, most likely because it would contradict his argument that nationalist
movements are linked to the emergence of a space of communication and
standardised cultural codes.
Recent debates about Switzerland
Since the early 1990s, there has been a pronounced increase in the number of
studies on nations and nationalism. Here, again, Switzerland has been
invoked as a key case in works by advocates of different and often opposing
views. Those who defend the liberal conception of a (single) nation-state are
very keen on citing Switzerland (Canovan 1996; Miller 1995; Schnapper
2004). David Miller (1995: 94–5), for instance, suggests that ‘the Swiss today
share a common national identity as Swiss over and above their separate
linguistic, religious, and cantonal identities’.
On the other side of the table, one finds prominent advocates for multi-
national states; these thinkers do not hesitate to claim Switzerland for this
category (Kellas 1998: 3; Pinder 2007; Requejo 1999: 283, note 31). For Will
Kymlicka, Switzerland is ‘the most multinational country’ (Kymlicka 1995:
18); meanwhile, McGarry and O’Leary assert that it is the first ‘multinational
federation’ (McGarry and O’Leary 2007: 181).
Finally, Switzerland is also a prominent topic in the recent literature on
postnationalism (Abizadeh 2002; Habermas 1991; Mason 2000). Authors work-
ing in this field often use the Swiss case to prove that a state does not need citizens
who share a single national identity in order to become a stable and functioning
democracy of free and equal citizens. For Ju
¨rgen Habermas (1991: 15–16),
Switzerland thus represents an exemplary case of ‘constitutional patriotism’.
Given the confusion and ambiguity surrounding the Swiss case, it is perhaps
no coincidence that some authors prefer simply to ignore it. For example,
Walker Connor – an advocate of the multinational state – proposes that one
‘pass over Switzerland as a rule-proving exception attributable to the peculia-
rities of its size, location, topography, and specific historical circumstances’
(Connor 1994: 12). Jeff Spinner-Halev (2008: 625, note 10), a postnationalist,
has deliberately and tacitly decided to disregard Switzerland by simply erasing
any reference to this country when quoting Kymlicka (2007: 18).
Inside Switzerland, new studies were undertaken partly in the context of
the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of the first core of the Swiss
confederacy (in 1991) and of the 150th anniversary of the modern Swiss
federation (in 1998) (Altermatt et al. 1998; Kreis 1993; Marchal and Mattioli
1992). These largely historical works investigated the origins and the devel-
opment of Swiss nationalism, and consider the extent to which Switzerland
constitutes an exceptional case.
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Switzerland 713
The contributions in Guy Marchal and Aram Mattioli (1992) come to the
conclusion that Switzerland does not constitute a special case, but is instead a
regular imagined nation that has been shaped by the emergence of nation-states
in Europe. Urs Altermatt et al. (1998: 11, 13) claim, in particular, that in
Switzerland – as in other European countries – some segments of the
population developed a national consciousness well before the nineteenth
century, but that the main impulse for nation-building came from the founding
fathers of the 1848 federal constitution, whose explicit goal was to consolidate
the Swiss national unity and national sentiment through policy centralisation.
Oliver Zimmer (2003) shows how the symbolic representation of the Swiss
nation was the result of ongoing political struggles between the nation-state and
the civil society. He argues that there were indeed different opinions on how to
define the Swiss nation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All of
them, however, accepted the idea of a nation as a central point of reference.
There is disagreement, to a certain extent, over the interpretation of historic
developments. Some historians (see Guzzi-Heeb 1998: 132) claim that the
creation of a common Swiss national identity can be traced back to the Helvetic
Republic (1798–1803), or even earlier (see Zimmer 2003: 55–65). Others,
however, believe that the Helvetic Republic also triggered the process of creation
and/or consolidation of the cantonal (proto-national) identities (Kreis 1993).
After the historical debates of the 1990s, the 2000s saw political scientists
reacting to the treatment of the Swiss example in the contemporary international
academic literature on nationhood. Nenad Stojanovic (2000), Francois Grin
(2002) and Paolo Dardanelli (2008) have contested the ideas advanced by
multinationalist authors like Kymlicka (1995), Miche
`le Seymour (1999) and
Donald Ipperciel (2007) (all working in Canada, interestingly), who suggest that
Switzerland is a multinational country. For Dardanelli and Stojanovic (2011:
372), the Swiss experience ‘supports neither the multinational nor the postna-
tional theses’, but rather the idea ‘that several linguistic communities can coexist
within a single nation based on a degree of shared political culture while
preserving and developing their cultural distinctiveness in other spheres’.
Nevertheless, Dardanelli and Stojanovic argue that some portions of the
population do possess a ‘quasi-ethnic’ understanding of the Swiss nation-
hood. This becomes particularly evident, as they point out, in the naturalisa-
tion laws and practices at the level of municipalities, where political struggles
‘turn around the questions of how to define the Swiss nation’ (Helbling 2008:
173). While a very liberal conception of nationhood prevails in some
municipalities, in others an ethnic understanding of citizenship has emerged.
This further emphasises that there is no real consensus on the nature of Swiss
nationhood – even among political actors within Switzerland.
New directions to the study of Switzerland and nationalism
The sheer malleability of the Swiss example reveals the degree to which
experts have had difficulty identifying the ‘true’ nature of nationhood in this
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714 Marc Helbling and Nenad Stojanovic
´
multilingual country. This lack of consensus not only challenges the big
theories of nationalism: it induces researchers to think more thoroughly about
what nationalism and nations are, and to consider more carefully the role that
the Swiss example can and shall play in these theories. Because of this, the aim
of this special section is not only to find an answer to the question of whether
Switzerland is a nation-state or a multinational state. More generally, by
challenging dominant conceptions of what a nation is, the Swiss case helps us
to exceed the limitations imposed by existing definitions, and to open new
directions for studying nations.
This notion appears, among others, in Andreas Wimmer’s opening con-
tribution: He shows how the reach of networks of political alliances and
power structures has made the formation of nationalist movements across
language regions possible. In the light of his approach the Swiss puzzle
disappears, and more general processes and mechanisms at work in the rise of
nationalism and the nation-state come to the fore.
In a similar vein, Antoine Chollet analyses the Swiss case to come to some
more general conclusions about nations and nationalism. The fact that
Switzerland cannot accurately be described as either a nation or a non-nation
reveals, to his mind, some basic characteristics of all nations: their artificiality
and the tremendous efforts undertaken to hide this.
By highlighting how Swiss nationalism has been both voluntaristic and
organic in nature, Zimmer challenges yet another common categorisation. He
argues that organic perceptions in a seemingly diverse country have been
made possible through the communal embeddedness of the national(ist)
imagination. Because citizenship has been granted mainly at the local level,
the municipalities have provided the institutional and cognitive frame through
which nationhood has been imagined and defined.
How difficult it is to distinguish mono- and multinationality becomes clear
in Karin Reinhardt’s contribution, which presents a critique of Kymlicka’s
theory of multiculturalism. Using a content analysis of the state and sub-state
constitutions of Kymlicka’s paradigmatic cases - Switzerland and Germany –
she demonstrates how such a distinction is difficult to maintain, and how it
must thus be approached anew, theoretically as well as empirically.
In contrast to these first four contributions, Ipperciel sees some traces of
multinationalism in Switzerland. Proposing a normative definition of nation-
hood, he characterises a nation as a political entity having the largest possible
group of individuals inhabiting a space of public discussion within a state.
Such spaces for public discussion are predicated upon the existence of a
common public language used by its citizens. On the basis of these assump-
tions, cantons may be considered small nations – although certain pressures
on the boundaries of cantonal public spaces tend to expand these cantonal
boundaries to encompass the whole of their related linguistic regions.
In his concluding contribution, Eric Kaufmann summarises where these
five contributions concur and disagree and discusses how they provide
new perspectives on the nature of nations and nationalism. Discussing
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Switzerland 715
explanations of the ‘Swiss success story’, he concludes that the Swiss case
prompts us to question commonly held typologies, concepts and policy
solutions.
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