Why Switzerland?

Revised and completely updated edition of Jonathan Steinberg's classic account of Switzerland's unique political and economic system. Why Switzerland? examines the complicated voting system that allows citizens to add, strike out, or vote more than once for candidates, with extremely complicated systems of proportional representation; a collective and consensual executive leadership in both state and church; and the creation of the Swiss idea of citizenship, with tolerance of differences of language and religion, and a perfectionist bureaucracy which regulates the well-ordered society. This third edition tries to test the flexibility of the Swiss way of politics in the globalized world, social media, the huge expansion of money in world circulation and the vast tsunamis of capital which threaten to swamp it. Can the complex machinery that has maintained Swiss institutions for centuries survive globalization, neo-liberalism and mass migration from poor countries to rich ones?

• Examines how and why Switzerland works, offering an explanation of how history has yielded such a peculiar and special society
• A completely revised and updated new edition which includes new material on Italian Switzerland and its contribution to Swiss cohesiveness, as well as the challenges posed by globalization and Swiss relations with the EU
• Presents an alternative history of Europe, looking at how the old Europe pre-1789 survived into the twenty-first century, and what it shows about the long-term forces and factors that operated differently in the Swiss Confederation