Varied Peoples, Beliefs : The Swiss: United by Diversity

The cleverness of Switzerland always impressed Dr. Samuel Johnson, the English literary giant of the 18th Century. He marveled how “it is brought to pass” that in a little country of so many different peoples and religions “there should be no civil commotions.” It is an achievement still worth pondering.

Switzerland has a population divided almost exactly between Catholics and Protestants, but it does not suffer from the slightest hint of a Northern Ireland syndrome.

The Swiss speak four different languages--German, French, Italian and Romansch--but their government, unlike Belgium’s, is not paralyzed to despair by conflict over who speaks which language where.

Enjoys Labor Peace

Although highly industrialized, Switzerland has enjoyed a half-century of labor peace, largely due to a series of arbitration agreements between unions and industry beginning in 1937. Switzerland had only three strikes in 1985, one in 1986, none at all last year. Also, almost anyone looking for work found it. The unemployment rate was less than 1% in 1987.

For almost a half-century, the Swiss have voted in more or less the same numbers for the same political parties. The four main parties long ago worked out a formula for splitting up the seven seats on the ruling Federal Council without rancor. Most Swiss can’t remember more than two or three of the names of the seven councilors.

National politics are so harmonious that they are dull. The last serious political controversy--over whether women should sit on the council--was settled in October, 1984, when the Federal Assembly, the national legislature, voted to accept the nomination of Elisabeth Kopp, then mayor of Zurich, to the council. Kopp, who is now justice and police minister, will eventually become head of state under the system in which the presidency rotates among the councilors.

Women Do Vote

It irks some Swiss that many foreigners still hold wrongly to the image of a nation that denies women the vote. In fact, women have had the right to vote in federal elections since 1971. The controversy does linger on a local level, however, in the little populated German Protestant half-cantons of Appenzell-Ausser Rhoden and Appenzell-Inner Rhoden, where male deputies of the canton (state) legislatures cling stubbornly to tradition and refuse to allow women to vote in cantonal elections.

Outsiders seem to identify Swiss nationalism not by language or race but by deportment. The Swiss strike many foreigners as the most orderly people on earth.

“You know how, in France, when there is a television debate,” said Joe Salm, a German-born manager of a Lucerne tourist agency, “everyone gets angry and talks at once, and you don’t understand a word they say. That doesn’t happen in Switzerland. Here one man begins and speaks slowly and goes on and on, and no one interrupts him but waits until he reaches the end. Then the next speaker begins and takes it from there.”

Well-traveled Latin Americans like to regale each other with tales of the legendary strictness of Geneva. At a recent party in Paris, a Peruvian set off raucous laughter with a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a policeman stopping him for driving over a flower on a park road in Geneva. Latins can think of no place more different from their homeland.

There is an irony in this. Within Switzerland itself, many Swiss-Germans tend to look on the Swiss-French as a people of little discipline and on French-speaking Geneva as a city too full of foreigners to have a distinctively Swiss flavor. Yet, to an outsider, Geneva, a city whose character was set by the Protestant leader John Calvin in the 16th Century, could hardly seem more Swiss.

The same is true of Italian Switzerland. “Everyone who comes from Italy tells us how orderly Italian Switzerland seems,” Jorg Kistler, an official of the federal Ministry of Justice, said in a recent interview in Bern. “To us, it’s the most disorderly part of Switzerland.”

Yet a visitor to Lugano, the main city of the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, quickly realizes that the Swiss-Italians are different from Italians. At crosswalks, for example, a pedestrian must watch out for visiting Italian drivers who honk their way through no matter who is in the way; only the Swiss-Italian drivers stop.

There are what seem like fissures behind the facade of orderliness. Many Swiss would rather learn English than the language of other Swiss. Some people of Geneva feel that the rest of Switzerland cheats them. A growing number of Swiss fret over the large percentage of foreigners who now live and work among them. Many Swiss feel uncomfortable about what foreigners think of a banking system that has allowed corrupt Third World dictators to hide millions, even billions. Other Swiss are worried about what will happen to Switzerland when the rest of Western Europe unites in a true common market in 1993. But, in fact, none of these problems disrupt the order of Switzerland.

The 6.5 million Swiss live in a small country of great wealth and exquisite beauty divided into 26 cantons in and around the magnificent Alps of Europe. Many of its medieval towns nestle by rivers and lakes that lap beneath great craggy and snow-topped mountains.

Although Roman Catholics now slightly outnumber Protestants throughout Switzerland, the two best-known cities of Switzerland, Zurich and Geneva, are Protestant in attitude and mood. Outsiders tend to look on the people of Zurich and Geneva, and therefore the Swiss in general, as hard-working, frugal, clean, orderly, rich and unshowy.

In an odd way, the unity of Switzerland probably depends on its diversity. German is the most important language--65% of the Swiss speak German while only 18% speak French, 10% Italian and 7% Romansch and foreign languages. Yet the German speakers do not make up a powerful monolithic force; they are divided into Catholics and Protestants, townspeople and farmers, rich and poor, leftists and conservatives. Many analysts believe that the religious differences, which provoked wars centuries ago, are as important as the language differences.

Economic differences cut across language lines.

“We are unlike Belgium, where one language community is richer than the other,” said Erich Heini, a former foreign correspondent now directing public relations for a large industrial organization in Zurich. “Here, in Switzerland, we have a rich city like Geneva in the French cantons and a rich city like Zurich in the German cantons, and there are poor areas on both sides.”

Historical differences also count. The French-speaking canton of Vaud, for example, usually hands out the severest sentences in criminal cases in Switzerland.

“But that’s not because it is Protestant,” said Kistler of the ministry of justice. “The sentences come out of a tradition of nobility in medieval Vaud in which lords exercised great power.”

Another, even more important protection against dominance is decentralization. In a Europe where powerful governments often reach out from capitals to dominate everyday life everywhere, Switzerland is a confederation of democratic cantons that came together of their own free will over centuries and still retain far more power than even an American state. The Swiss, no matter what their language, religion or history, run their own affairs.

With so much decentralization and diversity, the Swiss have a hard time defining or even explaining their national identity. An outsider cannot always tell whether the Swiss feel Swiss.

“Culturally,” said Heini, “the Swiss-French have always looked to Paris, the Swiss-German to Berlin and the Swiss-Italian to Milan, Florence and Rome.”

Yet in World War II, Switzerland, a neutral state, suddenly found the poles of its three main cultures in threatening, unfriendly hands.

“The Swiss-Germans felt betrayed in their culture by the Nazis,” said Robert Vieux, a former Swiss diplomat, over a recent lunch in Geneva. “The Swiss-Italians detested the Fascists of Italy. The Swiss-French saw France crash before them.”

Many Swiss date their country’s feeling of national identity to World War II. The war also solidified Swiss faith in the Swiss army as a force for national unity and for national protection.

Despite their traditional neutrality, the Swiss have long regarded their men as skilled in the craft of warfare. For centuries, Swiss mercenaries were employed by foreign kings, even on both sides of the same war. During World War II, the Swiss army mobilized itself to defend Switzerland, pledging to battle for every inch of the Alpine fastness.

“Many Swiss feel strongly,” said Kistler, “that it was the army that ensured that what happened to other countries like Holland and Belgium and even France did not happen to them.”

The army of 650,000 has a kind of mythical status now. The legacy of World War II is a strong citizen army with soldiers leaving their private lives to serve several weeks every year for 30 years. On top of this, the defense-minded Swiss have developed an elaborate program of civil defense, with fallout shelters dug deep into mountains. Most Swiss look on the army now as a great unifier. For many Swiss, annual military service may be the only time that they ever spend in a canton that speaks a different language from their own.

A demonstration of Swiss national identity came in 1986 when voters in a referendum overwhelmingly defeated a proposal that Switzerland join the United Nations. Persuaded by the argument that membership would weaken Switzerland’s traditional neutrality, every canton voted against the proposal.

The German-speaking Protestant canton of Zurich defeated it by 71%; the French-speaking Protestant canton of Geneva by 70%. The German-speaking Protestant canton of Bern defeated it by 77%; the German-speaking Catholic canton of Lucerne by 80%. The French-speaking Protestant canton of Vaud defeated it by 75%; the French-speaking Catholic canton of Fribourg by 77%. In short, most Swiss, whether French or German, Catholic or Protestant, voted alike.

Some analysts see future threats to Swiss national identity because of language. Although French-speaking youngsters study German in school and German-speaking youngsters study French in school, they usually fail to win full command of the other language. Bilingualism is not widespread in Switzerland.

The problem is compounded because most Swiss-Germans speak a dialect known as “Swiss-German” that differs greatly from the written German that is taught in school. It has, in fact, become more and more fashionable for Swiss-Germans to take pride in their dialect. Swiss-French, even if they do well in their German studies, have a difficult time understanding a Swiss-German.

“When you hear a Swiss-German speak his dialect,” said Vieux, a bilingual Swiss-French, “it makes a Texan sound like he is speaking Oxford English.”

“Our greatest danger,” said Vieux, “is Indianization.”

By this, Vieux explained, he meant that Switzerland might end up like India where people speak to each other in English, a foreign language, because they do not understand each other’s native language.

In another related problem, some Geneva residents, insisting that French speakers, especially those in Geneva, do not get their fair share of jobs in the Swiss government, have started a separatist movement. They want Geneva to break from Switzerland and become a tiny country on its own, like Liechtenstein. The movement has very little support, but it may reflect a festering resentment.

Vieux thinks the separatists confuse the problem.

“The problem is that no one in Geneva wants to go to Bern,” he said. “There is a shortage of French speakers in Bern. This causes resentment. But, when you ask some young person who complains to go work in Bern, he says no. They like Geneva. And if they want to study, they would rather study in the United States than study German in Bern.”

As a political force, the separatists do not impress Vieux very much, but he still does not like their challenge to Swiss identity.

“Their movement is the joke of the century,” he said, but added, “It is not very funny.”