General Information

Switzerland's state structure and specific forms of political life differ widely from those of other European states, and these differences are comprehensible only when the historical roots of this state in the center of Europe are taken into account.

In the 13th century, the Gotthard Pass in the heart of the Alps became negotiable and rapidly developed into an economically important north-south crossing point. As a result, the valleys of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden at the north foot of the Gotthard massif suddenly became a focal point of European power politics, and this led their inhabitants to found the core of what was to become Switzerland with a pact of mutual assistance. Today, August 1 is still celebrated as a national holiday in commemoration of this alliance of 1291. In fact, the allies did not intend to found a state but merely to retain their traditional autonomy and the rights of the free peasants within the Holy Roman Empire. From that time, throughout Swiss history the modern Swiss state has found its expression in the autonomy of the communities and the federal principle.

The medieval Confederation might never have survived if it had not managed to ally the rural areas with the cities such as Lucerne, Zurich, and Berne, which were also struggling for autonomy. It was an alliance of complete equality for larger and smaller political entities, a principle that is still evident today in that any changes in the Federal Confederation must be approved or rejected by a majority of the cantons by a people's plebiscite.

In the 15th and early 16th centuries the independent members of the Confederation - which had by now grown to thirteen - went through a serious crisis with their subject regions and adjacent areas. Their aggressive expansionist involvement in European power politics was brought to an abrupt end by internal quarrels among the cities and the lands and by the heavy defeat suffered at the Battle of Marignano in Northern Italy (1515). Since then Switzerland has pursued a reserved foreign policy; at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 it committed itself to the status of armed neutrality, which remains guaranteed under international law to the present day.

Although the division of faith caused by the Reformation in the 16th century also led to war in the Confederation, it did not bring about its dissolution, and in the end the readiness to compromise - one of the essential elements of Swiss politics - was actually promoted by the confessional division. After the Confederates had more or less succeeded in keeping out of the Thirty Years' War, the complete independence and sovereignty of the Confederate's League was formally recognized at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

At the beginning of the 19th century, with the support of the French revolutionary army, the bourgeois-revolutionary Swiss proclaimed the Helvetic Republic, a centralized national state. This brought about the disappearance of the old feudal and separate state structures, although it was not long before Napoleon restored Switzerland's federal organization. Subsequent Swiss history led not to a unitary state but to a nation by will in which small communities of varying size, economic strength, and cultural traditions (language, religion, etc.) live voluntarily and in mutual respect within the same federal state.

In 1848, after a short civil war over religious issues, the Confederates decided to replace the previous loose confederation of states with a soundly structured federal state, and the Swiss Federal Constitution was drawn up. The Constitution reserved some limited powers for the federal authorities but gave all the rest to the cantons. Although in the course of time further responsibilities were allotted to the central authorities and a number of popular rights were guaranteed federally, the distribution of power among approximately 3,000 independent communes, 26 sovereign cantons and the central Confederation with its seat in Bern has remained unaltered up to the present day.