The journey to Bern was a fiasco. At least for the ten members of the National Council and Council of States from Aargau who travelled to the first session of the Federal Parliament. They set off on 5 November 1848 to arrive on the eve of the constituent assembly. Unfortunately, they missed the first change of coach. At the second, the postman was missing, so a young man had to take over the carriage and drive it into a field at night. They finally arrived in Bern at four o’clock in the morning, and were far from the last. Kasimir Pfyffer from Lucerne fell asleep in his carriage, was left in a coach house and was forgotten until the next day.
These anecdotes illustrate the difficulties faced by the founders of the fledgling federal state. The delays had no political consequences, of course, but they were nonetheless characteristic of the bumpy road to Swiss federalism. The authors René Lüchinger, Peter Schürmann and Gerhard Schwarz recall these turbulent times in their book ‘Struggle for Freedom – Liberalism in Switzerland’. Their book spans the period from the Ancien Régime to recent history with the EEA fiasco and the Swissair grounding, which put an end to the dominance of the powerful Liberal Party.
To this day, liberalism has not recovered and seems weaker than ever: in this country, the very movements that benefit most from freedom are threatening it with repressive political correctness and blackmail. At the same time, authoritarian tendencies are on the rise around the world.
The authors tell the story of Swiss liberalism through the eyes of the people. They recall, for example, the Prussian-born Heinrich Zschokke and his campaign newspaper Der Schweizerbote: ‘You have civil freedom when you can do like everyone else what the laws allow,’ he wrote, fearlessly fighting against reactionary Catholicism and urban patricians. Much like his contemporary Ignaz Troxler, described in the book as an ‘angry citizen’. He argued for a centralised state because ‘a federation of 22 serenades is absurd’. The antagonism between federalism and centralism still pervades the political debate today. Liberalism, with its various strands leaning towards both sides, is at the centre of this debate.
The development of a federal state with a bourgeois character suffered constant setbacks. The courage to become a nation of will was lacking, at least in the first half of the 19th century, as the authors explain with reference to the historian André Holenstein: “Switzerland is a nation of the will – of foreign countries. One could also say that it was a nation of will without or against will”. So foreign powers forced it together: Napoleon with the Act of Mediation, the Congress of Vienna with the Restoration, the British Lord Palmerston with an intervention after the Sonderbund War to keep the country together.
Criticism of the Conflict Over Direction
The book concludes with an essay by Gerhard Schwarz, former economics editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, on liberalism in the 21st century. He argues for a responsible approach to freedom: “It is true that liberals, unlike adherents of other world views, constantly question themselves and also have self-doubts. This chapter includes Schwarz’s criticism of the current controversy: ‘The liberals wanted to distance themselves too much from the national conservatives and have therefore joined the left’s march from a society of self-responsibility to a society of entitlement. To sum up: ‘Performance should count again instead of being demonised.”
This article appeared in Die Weltwoche on 30 January and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Die Weltwoche.
