New world disorder ? “Absolute Power corrupts absolutely” !

This turned out to be an utterly fascinating book, and it explained quite a bit about Swiss behavior and culture. While I of course can’t vouch for everything in the book, I’ve tested a lot of it by observation and questioning the natives, and it seems consistent with reality.
Switzerland turns out to have a number of unique characteristics that aren’t obvious to the outsider. For example, the government consists of an extraordinarily complex nested set of committees with a rotating presidency. The author makes the case that virtually all Swiss institutions, including government at all levels, the church and major corporations, are strongly influenced by an 800-year tradition of committee organization. In spite of having the most stable government in Europe (which my Swiss co-workers do not dispute), Switzerland has one of the most malleable constitutions in the world (which my co-workers do dispute).
I’m personally fascinated by language issues, so I read ahead to that chapter before finishing the lengthy chapter on politics. Again, Switzerland is unique in its treatment of dialects, which have very different social implications and practices in the French, German, Italian, and Romansh areas. According to the author, the urban Swiss Germans gave serious consideration to aligning themselves with ‘greater Germany’ in the 19th century. This obviously did not take place, and one of the unique results is that the local versions of Schwyzer Tüütsch (choose your spelling depending upon the valley you’re in) are universally spoken without significant class variations. In other words, this chapter explains why the Italian Swiss are more likely to be comfortable in standard Italian, and the French Swiss are more comfortable in standard French, than the Swiss Germans are speaking standard German. As any outsider who speaks German is painfully aware, the Swiss Germans read and write standard German (Hochdeutsch), but generally prefer not to speak it.
Swiss seem more willing to discuss politics than religion, but the chapter on religion was enlightening. After all, Switzerland was at the heart of the reformation, with Zwingli in Züri and Calvin in Geneva. Again, the Swiss are unique among European countries in their treatment of religion and the extraordinary compromises they have made to allow the peaceful co-existence of roman catholicism and protestantism.
The Swiss military is, unsurprisingly at this point, another unique institution. Virtually the entire male population is expected to belong to the reserves for most of their working years, and they keep their weapons and ammunition in their homes. It was only recently that 52 year olds were no longer required to serve a short annual duty. I’ve found that the military intrudes regularly when you are working with the Swiss, so besides being interesting, the chapter on the Army is helpful in becoming more aware of some of the workplace dynamics.
How can a country with 4 different official languages have and maintain a common culture? What do the different regions have in common? Quite a bit, actually. Anyone who deals with the Swiss on a regular basis or spends over a week here would find this book a helpful start on building an understanding of Swiss institutions and culture. This would also be an excellent book for students doing cultural area studies of Europe or Switzerland. It is a good read, and anyone interested in contemporary Europe would enjoy it and find it educational.

I work in the US for a Swiss company. Switzerland is unique in Europe and it’s hard to figure out why. This book does a very good job of explaining the origins and dynamics of modern Switzerland. I should add that this is not a travel book, rather an examination of Swiss politics, history and culture. For a another, more irreverent, condensed but also insightful book on the Swiss, read the “The Xenophobe’s Guide to Switzerland”

This work, first published more than a quarter-century ago and twice revised, most recently in 1996, succeeds because the national Swiss characteristics which it explores are essentially timeless and unchanging. While tracing the begrudging and belated enfranchisement of women and the gradual integration of Roman Catholic and Jewish minorities who once were isolated, the author conveys the underlying tensions beneath a remarkably successful experiment in coexistence. As one who lived and worked in Switzerland for more than eight years, and whose own memoir, Living Among The Swiss, was published in January 1999, I can attest that Mr. Steinberg’s generalizations ring true to my own experience and observations, and that they are supported by a myriad of political and sociological details that one would normally expect to learn only from a highly educated native. The prose, though scholarly, is highly readable, and evidences deep thought and mature reflection.

Even if you had no prior curiousity about Switzerland, this book would pique your interest. The author’s stated aim is to create a multidisciplinary narrative, in the tradition of the Enlightenment (Johnson, Gibbon), explaining…well…”Why Switzerland?” – i.e. how did Switzerland arise, persist, and come to be so aggressively ecclectic?

And the author has some work to do. Not unlike the ‘bacterial flagellum,’ Switzerland’s spectacularly improbable emergence from the fabric of history could be invoked by creationists to support a ‘design inference.’ It is, to paraphrase Michael Behe, as though a 747 spontaneously assembled itself and took flight.

Of course, Steinberg’s answer to “Why Switzerland?” is much more interesting than “God did it.” It cannot be summarized, but involves grain prices, the halberd, high-altitude athletic training, cottage industry, credit and interest and William Tell. At the very least, it has something to teach us about federalism, decentralization, peaceful coexistence and martial virtue.

For me the most fascinating part of this was to see how resistance to the Hapsburgs and then Napolean created a culture of decentralized disorganization – the opposite of Absolutist/Enlightenment France. The Swiss come across like the Duke Boys of central Europe (“Someday the mountain might get’em but the law never will…”). But this culture of rebellion also stands in contrast to Germany’s stark tradition of blood and soil reactionism. Napolean’s influence on Germany sowed the seeds of the World Wars. In Switzerland it acted as a sort of positive selection pressure, perturbing Alpine society and provoking its organization into Alpine civilization.

This is a very dense book, with more obscure names and places than a Russian novel. Some independent reference material (i.e. map, Wikipedia) is useful to figure out just which Johann is which, and to distiguish the various mountain passes from one and other (passes being the primary geographical feature and navigational reference point for most of the nation’s history). But a reader’s close attention to this book will be very well repaid.