Oliver Zimmer. A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761-1891. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xviii + 269 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-81919-0.
Reviewed by Riccarda Torriani (Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs)
Published on H-German (August, 2004)
Switzerland does not get a great deal of attention among historians outside the confines of Swiss academia, and beyond the debates on Switzerland's most recent past, very few works of substantial research have found their way into the wider historical community. Certainly, it is almost de rigeur for historians studying the nation and the dynamics of national identity to refer in passing to the Swiss case and point out that it presents us with the antithesis to most theories of nation formation and the emergence of national identity. Nonetheless, no monograph published in English has so far focused exclusively on the dynamics of nation formation and national discourse in Switzerland. In A Contested Nation, Oliver Zimmer, lecturer at Durham University, sets out to fill this gap by offering an analysis of Switzerland's nation-building process in the long nineteenth century that is informed by a range of theoretical approaches to the nation developed in the past decades. The result is a very illuminating assessment not only of Swiss nationalism, but also of theoretical questions arising from the recent literature on nation formation. Zimmer's thorough reading across the theoretical canon makes A Contested Nation a highly relevant text not just for scholars interested in Switzerland, but for anybody working within the broader domains of nation formation.
A Contested Nation is structured largely chronologically, although where necessary chronology is abandoned for a more thematic approach. The introduction consists of an outline of the different theories on the formation of national identity. Very helpful is Zimmer's incorporation of the arguments set out by Skinner on the limits imposed on political actors by prevailing sets of morality.
The first part covers the closing decades of the eighteenth century to the 1850s, including the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 and the writing of the first Swiss constitution in 1848. The first chapter of this section discusses Swiss patriotic discourse up to the establishment of the Helvetic Republic in 1798. In particular, it traces the trajectory of the Helvetic Society, according to Zimmer one of the most important protagonists of the idea of a Swiss nation in this period, from "cosmopolitan patriotism to historicist nationalism" (p. xvi). The next chapter analyzes the impact of the Napoleonic invasion in 1798 and the subsequent establishment of the Helvetic Republic on nationalist and patriotic discourse. Essentially, Zimmer argues that the old tensions between conservatives and supporters of a strong federalist state persisted, but that with the imposition of a modern Swiss state, the framework had changed (p. 81).
The contested nature of the Swiss project is also the focus of the next chapter, in which the author treats the decades around the Sonderbundskrieg in 1847, a civil war between the Protestant, more urbanized majority cantons on the one side, and the smaller, Catholic and more rural cantons on the other. Unlike many other historians, Zimmer argues that the key polarity was not between an affirmation of the modern federal state and its denial in favor of traditional communalism, but arose rather from competing definitions of the "Swiss nation." On one side were ranged the advocates of a nation based on civic exceptionalism, voluntarism, and essentially the much-used and abused concept of Switzerland as a political Willensnation, a "willed nation." Opposed were the conservative (and mainly Catholic) champions of the Swiss nation as an organically-grown community based on the cantons as the highest form of political organization.
As the title of the second part, "The Birth of the Modern Mass Nation," indicates, the remaining two chapters move on to the end of the nineteenth century and the debates around inclusion that dominated Swiss political discourse at the time. The first of the two chapters shows the importance of the national mass festivals staged in Switzerland from the 1850s onwards in the consolidation process after the creation of the Swiss Bundesstaat (effectively the first Swiss state) in 1848. The Swiss nation was still contested, and it was still the Catholic and rural cantons that were most opposed. However, Zimmer shows that instead of excluding themselves and boycotting all national manifestations, they chose to bring their understanding of an organic and community-based Swiss nation into the national discourse. The result was that by 1891, the year of the six-hundred-year anniversary of Oath on the Ruetli, Swiss national identity had taken a variety of different, but not exclusive meanings by which most of the protagonist groups of the long nineteenth century could identify themselves with their present state.
The last chapter, dedicated to memory and the "production" of a sense of history, is the weakest part of an otherwise outstandingly argued monograph. Zimmer's discussion of nineteenth-century debates within Swiss academia is interesting in itself, but the link with the arguments put forth in the earlier chapters appears tenuous.
A few points merit special attention. Zimmer delimits his study by the years 1761 and 1891, two dates that do not seem the most obvious starting and ending points. Nonetheless, as the story develops, this periodization becomes more and more convincing. Too often, major political thresholds (which in this case would be 1798 or 1848) are taken as initial or terminal points of historical research, so that continuities are missed. Starting his study in 1761 with the foundation of the first patriotic society, and ending in 1891 with the six-hundred-year celebration, Zimmer manages to paint a picture of Swiss national affirmation that takes this longue duree aspect into account and thus enlarges our historical understanding of Switzerland's nineteenth century. Secondly, the author's careful distinction between the different factions within Swiss society contesting the idea of the nation is very useful, and a point that is too often ignored. For instance, Zimmer is undoubtedly right in pointing out that the different ideas of Swiss nationhood cannot be exclusively accounted for by the Protestant versus Catholic divide, as has so often been asserted. Yet the fact remains that the confessional dichotomy is essential to the story Zimmer tells. For instance, the short civil war and the writing of the Constitution in 1848 cannot be understood if religious divides are left out, nor can the ensuing period of consolidation that effectively cemented the success of the new Swiss state. Ultimately, even if the divisions and subsequent arrangement between democrats and conservatives or between the rural and the urban populations played their role, the real king-makers of the new state were the Catholic-conservatives. Defeated in 1847, the Catholic-conservative cantons gradually decided to engage in the national discourse, and slowly integrated into the nation by introducing their views into, and thus altering, the collective discourse. Without the co-operation of the Catholic-conservatives, the Swiss federal state would have faced an uncertain future. Zimmer thus leaves the reader with the suspicion that maybe, and in spite of all the other cleavages discussed in his book, it was the religious divide that really counted after all. This leads to the one question Zimmer leaves unanswered: why was it that in the second half of the nineteenth century the Catholic minority embarked on a course of integration rather than turning away from the project of a Swiss federal state entirely? Why did Catholics accept the "nation" as a frame of reference despite its perceived fundamental contradictions to their beliefs and social organization?
Zimmer set out to show that "the formation and reconstruction of Swiss national identity ... was a competitive project rather than a top-down process of cultural diffusion" (p. 15), and in this, he has certainly succeeded. His illuminating and carefully argued book makes a significant contribution to the study of nation formation and finally introduces Switzerland to the set of themes that have dominated the history of the European nineteenth century more generally.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.
Citation:
Riccarda Torriani. Review of Zimmer, Oliver, A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761-1891.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9700
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.