Switzerland's history: a confederation that stopped expanding and made a system out of it

How three valleys became a confederation

On 1 August 1291, Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden bound themselves together to keep the peace on the death of Emperor Rudolf I of Habsburg. That agreement is the nucleus of the Old Swiss Confederacy and the date the modern state takes as its founding, which is a later reading of a document that was doing something smaller at the time.

Growth followed. By 1353 the three valleys had been joined by Glarus and Zug and by the city-states of Lucerne, Zürich and Bern, forming an eight-member federation that held for most of the fifteenth century. The economics underneath it were specific: the Holy Roman Empire had built roads and bridges linking industrial northern Italy to the Rhine, the peasants and bankers along that route grew rich on the traffic, and they used the money to buy Italian armour and stop paying the Empire's road tolls.

Then the wars. The Swiss defeated the Habsburgs at Sempach in 1386 and gained autonomy inside the Empire. Zürich was expelled from the Confederation between 1440 and 1450 over a territorial quarrel. The Burgundian Wars of 1474 to 1477 against Charles the Bold made the Confederation both powerful and famous, and the fame was military: Swiss mercenary infantry became the most sought-after professional soldiers in Europe, serving foreign crowns, above all the kings of France, from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance. In 1499 the Swiss beat the Swabian League and won exemption from the Imperial reforms of 1495 and immunity from most Imperial courts. In 1506 Pope Julius II engaged the Swiss Guard, which still serves the papacy.

Why the expansion stopped

The reputation for invincibility broke in one day. At Marignano in 1515 the Confederation was defeated, and the expansion that had run for two centuries ended there.

What the country did with that defeat afterwards is the interesting part, and it is worth stating carefully because the popular version is wrong.

Switzerland did not become neutral in 1516. Modern historians dispute the dating, and the evidence is unusually clean: before 1895, no historian traced neutrality to the Battle of Marignano at all. The backdating appears in the 1890s, and it appears immediately after several major powers threatened in 1889 to rescind the neutrality they had granted. A country whose legal protection was suddenly conditional acquired, within a few years, a four-century-old tradition of it.

The legal fact is later and much narrower. Neutrality was established by the Treaty of Paris in 1815, and Switzerland has not fought a foreign war since. The tradition of armed neutrality goes back to the Reformation in practice; the guarantee is nineteenth century.

What the Reformation split

The Reformation reached Switzerland in 1523, led by Huldrych Zwingli, priest at the Grossmünster in Zürich since 1518. Zürich turned Protestant and Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen followed. Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Nidwalden, Zug, Fribourg and Solothurn stayed Catholic. Glarus and Appenzell split internally.

The result was two religious wars in 1529 and 1531, each canton generally outlawing the other confession, and eventually two separate diets: the Protestant one meeting at Aarau, the Catholic one at Lucerne, with the formal full diet still convening at Baden. The Confederation survived all of it, which is the fact the rest of the country's history rests on. A federation that can hold a confessional split without dissolving has already learned the thing it will need in 1848 and again in 1914.

During the Thirty Years' War Switzerland was, in a contemporary phrase, an oasis of peace in a wrecked Europe, and the reason was commercial rather than moral: every major power depended on Swiss mercenaries and none would let a rival take the country. At the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 Switzerland attained legal independence from the Holy Roman Empire.

The internal record is less serene. A peasant war in 1653 followed a currency devaluation, and the authorities won it but conceded tax reforms, which in the longer run prevented the absolutist consolidation that happened at other European courts. Confessional tension erupted again in 1656 and 1712.

How Napoleon ended the old order

The French First Republic invaded in 1798 and replaced the Confederation with the Helvetic Republic, a client state. The 1798 constitution and the 1803 Act of Mediation both promised that France would protect Swiss independence and neutrality, and neither promise was kept.

What came out the other side was different from what went in. The Congress of Vienna agreed in May 1815 that Switzerland should be neutral, with Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain and Sweden all party to it, and ratification waited until Napoleon's final defeat. Neutrality was therefore not something Switzerland declared. It was something eight powers granted, for their own reasons, to a state sitting on the alpine passes between them.

What a civil war produced

The federal state is younger than the neutrality and it was made by a war.

Seven Catholic cantons formed a separate alliance, the Sonderbund. The radical, liberal and Protestant majority in the Tagsatzung held that this violated the Federal Treaty of 1814, whose sixth article expressly forbade separate alliances, and voted on 21 October 1847 to dissolve it. The war that followed was short, and its casualties were low enough that the losing cantons kept their institutions and their religion. A federal state built on a civil war that nobody was crushed in starts from an unusual place.

The settlement was a federal constitution in 1848, extensively revised in 1874, which gave the federal level responsibility for defence, trade and legal matters and left everything else to the cantons. That division is still the shape of Swiss government: 26 cantons with permanent constitutional status and a degree of independence unusual among the subnational units of any state.

The 1848 settlement also fixed how the country would decide things, and that machinery outlasted everything it was built for. Competences the constitution did not hand to Bern stayed with the cantons by default rather than by grant, so the federal level has spent its entire existence acquiring powers one referendum at a time. It is the reason Swiss reform is slow and the reason Swiss reform, once made, is rarely undone.

Industrialisation followed in the cities, textiles above all. In Basel in 1888, women were 44% of wage earners, nearly half of them in the textile mills and most of the rest in domestic service. The share of women in the workforce was higher between 1890 and 1910 than it would be again in the late 1960s and 1970s, and Swiss universities of the period are notable for the number of women taking medical degrees. None of that translated into political rights for another eighty years.

What the wars cost

The major powers respected Swiss neutrality through the First World War.

The Second is the harder record and Switzerland has spent decades examining it in public. Germany considered invading and did not. Under General Henri Guisan the army prepared for mass mobilisation and built the Réduit, a network of stocked positions high in the Alps. Independence held through a combination of military deterrence, economic concession and the timing of larger events elsewhere.

The concessions are what bought the deterrence time to work. Switzerland relied on trade for half its food and effectively all its fuel, and controlled the trans-alpine rail tunnels between Germany and Italy. Its principal wartime exports were precision machine tools, watches, jewel bearings for bombsights, electricity and dairy produce. The Swiss franc was the only major freely convertible currency left in the world, and both sides sold gold to the Swiss National Bank: the German Reichsbank sold 1.3 billion francs of gold to Swiss banks between 1940 and 1945, hundreds of millions of it looted from the central banks of occupied countries, and 581,000 francs of gold taken from Holocaust victims in eastern Europe was sold to Swiss banks. Total German-Swiss trade contributed about 0.5% to the German war effort.

On refugees the record is equally exact and equally uncomfortable. Switzerland interned 300,000 people over the course of the war, 104,000 of them foreign troops interned under the Hague Conventions. Of the civilians, 60,000 were escaping Nazi persecution and between 26,000 and 27,000 of those were Jews. Between 10,000 and 25,000 civilian refugees were refused entry. The country's own Jewish population at the outbreak of war was between 18,000 and 28,000, in a total population of about four million.

Controversy among historians about the country's relations with Nazi Germany became significant in the 1960s and has not stopped since. The Federal Assembly eventually commissioned an independent expert body to examine the period, and its work is why the figures above are as precise as they are: this is a country that investigated itself and published the result.

What the mercenaries actually built

The Confederation's export for three centuries was soldiers, and the consequences ran deeper than the battlefields they were hired for.

Swiss infantry served foreign crowns from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period, most persistently the kings of France, and their proven capability made them the sought-after troops of the Renaissance. That trade did three things at once. It brought money into cantons with very little arable land. It gave every major European power a direct interest in Switzerland remaining independent, which is precisely why nobody annexed it during the Thirty Years' War. And it made a country whose young men fought in other people's armies while the country itself fought nobody, which is a stranger arrangement than the modern word neutrality suggests.

The traditional order in which the cantons are still listed reflects the era, and the papal Swiss Guard engaged in 1506 is the last working piece of it.

Who was still waiting for a vote

The last piece of the modern Swiss state arrived within living memory.

Swiss women gained the vote in national elections in 1971. Some cantons had granted it from 1959; an equal rights amendment was ratified in 1981; and full nationwide voting rights for women in every election were not established by the courts until 1990. Switzerland was the last Western republic to enfranchise women, with Liechtenstein following in 1984.

The explanation is structural rather than incidental, and it is the cost side of everything above. A political system that decides by referendum, and that reserves most competences to cantons, is a system in which an existing electorate must vote to share its own franchise, canton by canton. The same machinery that absorbed a confessional split without breaking, and that kept the country out of two world wars, took until 1990 to finish enfranchising half its population.

The international position closed on a similar rhythm. Switzerland joined the League of Nations in 1920 and took until 2002 to join the United Nations, more than half a century after it was founded, and it did so by a vote of the people rather than a decision of the government.