THIS IS A SPECIAL ISSUE OF OUR JOURNAL AND IT IS THE outcome of a conference held at the Centre Européen de la Culture in Geneva. The Centre was founded in 1947 by Denis de Rougemont, the great Swiss writer, philosopher and European federalist, and directed by him until his death in 1985. Now it has been revived under the presidency of Professor Jacques Freymond, the best-known Swiss political scientist in the world of academia, and himself the author of many classic works on international politics. We want once more to thank the Centre, its present physically and intellectually indefatigable President and its expert staff.

CAN THE SWISS CONFEDERATION BE IMITATED? THAT DEPENDS, says the historian, on what you mean by imitation. Switzerland has certainly served as a model for others, sometimes a model distinctly not to be imitated. When the American Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to write a new constitution and ‘to form a more perfect Union’, they had Switzerland in mind. Alexander Hamilton, a chief actor in that enterprise, devoted part of an issue of The Federalist Papers, written the following year as a defence of what the framers had drafted, to a close analysis of the Swiss Confederation. Switzerland did not impress him:

He recognised that they were held together ‘by their joint interest’ but saw the confederacy as a poor guarantor of internal and external coherence. ‘Whatever efficacy the union may have had in ordinary cases, it appears that the moment a cause of difference sprang up capable of trying its strength it failed.’

AS THE GREAT HISTORIAN LOUIS HARTZ TAUGHT US IN HIS remarkable study The Liberal Tradition in America, anyone wishing to focus on the special character of a regime would do well to begin by taking the measure of what is absent rather than what is present. Like America, Switzerland has long been regarded as an exception to many of the conventional rules of historical and democratic development — Sonderfall Schweiz is how the Swiss portray and perhaps boast a little about their national exceptionalism. Switzerland possesses a unique form of democratic government the hallmarks of which are participatory democracy, neutrality and radical federalism (decentrahsm or localism, what the Swiss sometimes call Kantönligeist). These hallmarks give to it a character which stands in stark contrast to traditional Anglo-American democracy. The student of comparative politics will observe at once that a great many of Switzerland's leading political features seem to have no analogue in either the English common law or the American Constitution. Swiss democracy is English democracy minus most of English democracy's salient features: which is to say, it is scarcely English democracy at all.

The powerful idea of natural rights as the armour of the individual against illegitimate authority (originally against the illegitimacy of absolute monarchy, later against the hyper-legitimacy of majoritarian tyranny) is largely missing, for example. Missing too is the tradition of an independent judiciary devoted to the protection of wholly private rights against an alien, power-mongering state. When Alexis de Tocqueville, whose liberal premises suited America so well, went looking in the Alps for something like the English liberties, he went astray. Not finding English liberties, he quite misunderstood Switzerland's regime.

IT IS NOT SO EASY TO DETECT THE SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE Helvetian model in the Switzerland of today. They should rather be sought in what has made Switzerland what it is in seven centuries of the association of different communities, often disunited, fiercely determined to maintain their own sovereignty and independence. Switzerland was born from the conviction that only a system of collective security would in the long term assure to each community the liberty to which all aspired. It was a double liberty: that which was threatened by external aggression, and that which had to be preserved against interference from those which one was committed to succour. For, in binding themselves, from the second half of the thirteenth century, by successive treaties of alliance, the first confederated cantons in no way surrendered their own liberties.

The system of collective security thus set up in the thirteenth century was the cornerstone on which Switzerland was built, its spinal column. The engagements formed in the pact of 1291 were set out in a few lines, and are still valid seven centuries later. They have certainly enabled the Confederation to stand up to external danger almost until the end of the Ancien Régime in 1798. It is these secular experiences in matters of collective security which have inspired and, after many changes, fashioned modern Swiss security policy.

‘FEDERALISM’, CLAIMED THE SWISS PHILOSOPHER, DENIS DE Rougemont, ‘rests upon the love of complexity, by contrast with the brutal simplicity which characterises the totalitarian spirit’. It would be hard to deny that complexity is the most striking feature of federal government in Switzerland. To comprehend it fully, one would have to analyse the history, politics and atmosphere of each of the twenty-six cantons, for each is a political system in itself; and there is no such animal as a ‘typical’ canton. Political scientists have studied one or two cantons in some depth, and there are also impressionistic accounts of cantonal life, but there is no really satisfactory comparative analysis of the cantons as a whole. Further, many Swiss cantons are ‘closed' societies, difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and not easily accessible to the academic inquirer. The political scientist needs to acquire the skills of the anthropologist in addition to those of the analyst of political institutions if he is to make headway. It is difficult, therefore, to give anything more than a very general impression of the principles lying behind federal government in Switzerland, an impression which is bound to be, to some degree at least, misleading. For of no country more than Switzerland is it more correct to say that the truth lies in the minute particulars and not in generalities.

The complexity of Swiss federalism is a consequence of the fact that the Swiss have embraced more completely than any other democracy that essential principle, the leitmotiv, of federalism — the sharing of power. Switzerland is indeed an extreme example of federalism, just as it is an extreme example of the application of the principles of democracy and of neutrality in foreign affairs.

WHEN SWISS CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS SPECIAL ISSUE LIMIT themselves to the presentation of a picture of modern Switzerland and leave it to the public to decide whether they want to learn something from the Swiss experience, two problems remain unsolved. First, in Switzerland we have neglected to some extent the analysis of the structures and the processes of the political system. We know more about the history of our political institutions than we do about their actual functioning. Normative theory is better developed than empirical research. This leads to the second problem: as many questions concerning the mechanics of the system are not answered in a sufficiently clear way, interpretations of the Confederatia Helvetica differ considerably between various analysts.

THROUGHOUT THE TWO-DAY DEBATE OF OUR SYMPOSIUM we did our best to answer a challenging and I would say tricky question: can the Confederado Helvetica be imitated? I do not think that the Swiss who were present considered their country as a model at all. They tried to establish and to maintain a certain distance from the object of their study and to refrain from the reference — too often used — to a so-called special Swiss case. They were no apologists but honest witnesses.

Personally, I would make an evaluation of my country from a slightly different angle. My enquiry, therefore, would be focused on the functioning of the Swiss democratic system, on our capacity to face the challenge of our times and to maintain a national cohesion which is indispensable to our existence as a nation. Is this small country still viable? Is it not condemned to be swallowed by one of those continental empires which, in the decades following 1945, were supposed to structure the international system in one, two, three, four or five sub-systems?

It appears that the outlook in this fin de siècle is a little different: small countries are still alive; they have proliferated. There are today more than 160 states on the planet and there are more to come. Everywhere there appears a frantic search for a cultural identity on which to base a nation.

JUST AS THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 WAS PRECEDED BY A ‘campaign of banquets’, so, a hundred years later, the European revolution was announced by a ‘campaign of congresses’ spread over the years 1947–49. These congresses expressed the state of mind, and stimulated the major trends, of a heterogeneous and many-sided movement — a movement curiously inefficient in its tactics, and direct in its strategy, but to which the Council of Europe owes its existence, and because of which the Community of the Six has been able to take shape and to win the acceptance of public opinion, and hence of the parliaments and governments responsible to public opinion in those days.

Historians may argue that the congresses achieved nothing — and indeed we do not normally expect congresses to achieve much. Members of the same profession meet together to sit through tedious sessions and enjoy themselves all the better afterwards. But in those days, a strange driving passion, unknown to this generation, inspired the militants of Europeanism, and induced them to prefer the nightly labours of commissions and operas. It is the sense of this driving passion which must be communicated, if we are to convey the psychological and historical reality of the campaign of congresses, and pay due tribute to the influence it exerted. Their action should not be considered as that of a general seizing a military position, a law-giver imposing a legal structure, or even a medicine effecting a cure. Rather should it be regarded as a concerted concentration of psychic and psychological factors which prepare the ground and enable the organism to resorb certain poisons, overcome certain inhibitions and liberate new energies. It is such profound metamorphoses which really deserve the name of revolution.