Geography
Switzerland is landlocked, with France to the west, Germany to the north, Austria and Liechtenstein to the east, and Italy to the south. The total area is 15,940 square miles. More than 70 percent of the country is mountainous; the Swiss Alps dominate central and southern Switzerland, and the Jura Mountains, the northwest. Important ranges within the Swiss Alps include the Pennine Alps forming the southwestern border with Italy, the Bernese Alps in the southeast, and the Rhaetian Alps forming the Italian-Swiss border into the east. Dufourspitze (15,203 feet), Austria’s highest peak, is located in the Pennine Alps. The Jura Mountains are forested and mostly rounded; cleared areas are used for pastureland. Mittelland, a plateau, lies in central Switzerland between Lake Geneva in the southwest and the Lake of Constance in the northeast. Principal rivers include the Rhine, Rhone, and Ticino.
INCEPTION AS A NATION
Tribes of Celts and Germanics, as well as the ROMANS, all once inhabited the territory that would become Switzerland. In the ninth century C. E. the territory was divided into Swabia and Transjurane Burgundy. In 1033 the two regions were united under the Holy Roman Empire. Tribes in Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Uri united to defeat the encroaching Hapsburg Empire in the late 13th century. Switzerland conquered Aargau, Thurgau, and Ticino, which became subject territories until 1798.
Switzerland defeated Burgundy in 1476-77, leading to an independent Switzerland, recognized by Emperor Maximilian I in 1499. By 1513 Switzerland consisted of 13 cantons.
Switzerland and France formed an alliance of perpetual neutrality after Switzerland’s defeat in 1515 during the Italian Wars. Because of religious differences among loosely knit cantons a united Switzerland was not conceived until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The Treaty of Paris in 1815, ending the Napoleonic Wars, established perpetual neutrality for Switzerland. In 1979 Jura became the 23rd canton of the Swiss Confederation.
Swiss: nationality time line (continued)
1954 Sculptor Jean Tinguely has his first one-man show in Paris.
1959 Switzerland becomes member of European Free Trade Association. 1967 Claude Nobs founds Montreux Jazz Festival.
1999 Switzerland elects its first woman president, Ruth Dreifuss.
2002 Switzerland joins United Nations (UN).
This photo shows a scenic view of the Swiss Alps. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-83235])
CULTURAL IDENTITY
The geographical location of Switzerland practically in the center of Europe combined with its mountainous terrain to create the unique character of the Swiss nation, a combination of contrasting traits, ethnic tolerance, and ethnic pride. It resembles other countries in Europe in having been a crossroads of culture from earliest times. But unlike them, it has benefited from its isolating mountains, which have protected the mountain Swiss from foreign domination to a great extent. Although the fertile plain between the Alps and the Jura and the mountain passes were the focus of conquest by the Romans, the Carolingians, and the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland experienced nothing like the kind of repeated mass movements through eastern Europe of vast tribal confederacies that resulted in centuries of turmoil, instability, and complex intermingling of peoples. The different peoples who made up the Swiss multiple ethnicity—the Celts, such as the Helvetii; the Romans; and the Germanic Burgundii and Alamanni—occupied their territories with much less friction. After the end of Roman authority in 400 c. e. the Alamanni slowly trickled down from the north into the less hospitable thick forests of the central and northeastern parts of Helvetia to build new villages and agricultural settlements, generally doing so without displacing previous inhabitants and halting their advances at points where the land was already populated by Burgundii. Meanwhile on the south side of the mountains and in the closed Alpine valleys of Rhaetia Lombards and Rhaeto-Romanic peoples (see Ladins; Friulians) retained close cultural links with their former Roman overlords, the latter adapting Vulgar Latin into their own unique language. The Burgundii in the west largely adopted the Gallo-Roman culture of their territory After this point each group, especially the common people in the countryside, developed a distinct culture.
When around 1220 the road over the great St. Gotthard Pass was opened for traffic, the regions adjacent to it assumed enormous importance because of the trade network that quickly developed. When accordingly the Austrian house of Hapsburg extended its control over much of Switzerland, the proud independent people farming the remote high valleys of uri and Schwyz and their neighbors in forested unterwalden remained self-reliant and more or less free. The Swiss soon engaged in rebellion against Hapsburg authority of a kind that would not be seen elsewhere in the empire for centuries. The legendary founding of the Swiss Confederation on the Rutli meadow on August 1, 1291, by representatives of Schwyz, Unter-walden, and uri, based on an earlier agreement of unknown date declaring that an attack on any one of the partners was an attack on all, was an event that crystallized Swiss cultural identity, the basis of which was freedom from outside interference.
The name the members of the confederation gave themselves after 1291—Eidgenossen— means approximately “comrades bound by oath into a cooperative.” It has a special significance even today. Switzerland still calls itself the
Swiss stand by a boat on the shore of Lake Brienz in Switzerland in the late 19th century. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-108890])
Eidgenossenschaft, and the word Eidgenosse is listed in dictionaries as a synonym for Swiss. Swiss neutrality and its laws of political asylum that have made the country a magnet for many creative persons during times of unrest or war in the rest of Europe should be understood on the basis of the values that permeated the formation of the confederation. Among these is the importance placed on maintaining the distinctive French, Italian, German, and Rhaeto-Romanic cultures. In a real sense the four parts of the country represent a definite resistance to leveling or homogenizing influences, political or cultural. At the same time Switzerland, using its status as a neutral country, has important institutions that function internationally, such as the Red Cross, the banking system, and a number of respected newspapers. The mission of Helvetia mediatrix (Switzerland the mediator) is revealed not only in the foreign assistance programs oriented toward self-help that are carried out in several small and developing nations but also in the unusually high number of literary translators within the country.
Further Reading
David Birmingham. Switzerland: A Village History (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).
Edgar Bonjour. A Short History of Switzerland (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985).
Janet Eve Hilowitz, ed. Switzerland in Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1990).
Wolf Linder. Swiss Democracy: Possible Solutions to Conflict in Multicultural Societies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997).
James Murray Luck. A History of Switzerland, the First 100,000 Years: Before the Beginnings to the Days of the Present (Brussels: Sposs, 2001).
Jonathan Steinberg. Why Switzerland? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
World History
