• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1512 0

at integration into a greater Europe, and refused entry into the United Nations in a 1967 national referendum. At the end of 1992, following an unnerving Danish “no” to the Maastricht Treaty, the Swiss also voted no on membership in the European Free Trade Association (as a preamble to membership in the Common Market). Their negative vote followed cultural fault lines with the French Swiss voting overwhelmingly for Europe and the German Swiss overwhelmingly against.13 It had been hard enough for the German Swiss to surrender their precious semisovereignty to a new federal government back in 1848 when the “modern” constitution eroded certain crucial cantonal privileges. In 1992 it was not so much Switzerland, whose elites—the federal government, the major parties both conservative and liberal, as well as corporate, banking, and even many union leaders—fully supported Europe, but rather the cantons and communes that led the obstinate resistance. The elites spent millions trying to prod the citizenry out of its democratic parochialism, warning them that a “no” vote could put the Swiss multinationals out of business (or at least out of Switzerland) and turn Switzerland into “the Nepal of Europe.”14

Europhile observers, that is to say the greater part of the European press, were utterly befuddled, muttering darkly about Switzerland’s “reflexive traditionalism” and its self-defeating “neo-isolationism,” and predicting that unless it permitted itself to be awoken by Europe’s economic “electroshock” it was doomed to become a “third-world country.”15 Yet the Swiss have one of the highest standards of living in the world (higher than the United States), are committed free traders, and have been participants in the building of the financial ectoskeleton of McWorld. They are not stupid. What was at stake for Switzerland’s reluctant “Europeans” was not a reactionary Jihad against modernity. Rather, the German Swiss in particular, but also the Italian Swiss who in the canton of Ticino voted nearly 62 percent no, were struggling against Europe in the name of cultural autonomy and regional democracy—two frequently disjunctive values that for unique historical reasons have intersected in Switzerland. Indeed, in Europe’s oldest and most decentralized democracy, not just the cantons but the communes enjoy prerogatives few other constitutions in the world afford to people locally. Gemeindefreiheit (communal liberty) and kantönligeist (the local spirit of the canton) apparently remain values worth fighting for, even at the cost of the rewards of economic integration. But the tradition to which the Swiss cling is local democracy, and their loyalty may in part be due to the powerful impression left by Euro-technocrats and McWorld marketeers that democracy is simply not part of the global game they are playing.

In Switzerland, then, the struggle against McWorld is to a degree a self-conscious struggle on behalf of a parochial culture that happens to be generically associated with self-government and regional liberty. Perhaps alone among the partisans of Jihad, the Swiss are struggling to preserve a traditional culture against modernity in the name of democracy. Where elsewhere isolationists fight against both markets and democracy as twin products of a homogenizing modernity they fear, in the Alps they oppose homogeneity because it imperils democracy. Since it came to Switzerland long before the Enlightenment, even the Enlightenment’s most savage critics can count democracy as their ally rather than their enemy.

The refusal of the Swiss to buy into the McWorld for which their economic success has prepared them was again underscored in February 1994 when, in still another display of referendum obstinacy, they voted to ban all heavy cargo truck traffic through the Alps, ruling that by the year 2004 cargo must be carried exclusively by rail. In doing so, they turned the clock back nearly a century to the time when the citizens of the canton of Graubünden legislated a ban on all automobile traffic from that canton’s extensive and still virgin territory