A European role model for Canada

"A European role model for Canada"
A multilingual federation of autonomous provinces that don’t entirely trust each other. It’s called Switzerland—and it works
The Report
by Colby Cosh
March 3, 2003

There has long been a quiet cult of Switzerland among liberty-minded economists and political philosophers. For thrice the lifespan of the American republic, the Swiss have remained free, prosperous and independent—despite the necessity to reconcile three equipoised ethnic groups (Italians, French and Germans) and conduct public business in four languages (those of the aforementioned peoples, plus Romansch). Switzerland has survived civil wars, religious hostility, Napoleonic conquest and the ambitions of other neighbouring states. It is governed like no other country—but although it seems to be governed well, Switzerland sometimes seems like an afterthought, a hole in the map, in the imagination even of Europeans.

It is perhaps excusable that prideful Germans, French and English overlook Switzerland. But Canada has less excuse. Our two countries appear together on the short, and ever shorter, list of relatively harmonious multilingual federations. (Last month, Yugoslavia renamed itself “Serbia and Montenegro” and disappeared from history, to be remembered mostly as a genocidal failure.) Switzerland is the richest and oldest of these countries, despite a complete lack of conventional “natural resources.” Yet we never think of it. For proof, one need only see how often Canada is referred to as the world’s “most decentralized federation” by Canadians. (See the accompanying textbox for a sampling.)

It is difficult to account for the persistence of this canard. “Canada is certainly one of the more decentralized federations,” says Ronald Watts, a Queen’s University professor emeritus and leading expert on comparative federalism. “Which one you believe to be the most decentralized will depend on what measure you use. I would argue that Canada comes second—behind Switzerland.” How come commentators rarely add the “behind Switzerland” part? “Perhaps,” the professor says dryly, “they just don’t know about it.”

Switzerland’s federal government is so hands-off that “La Suisse n’existe pas”—“Switzerland does not exist”—is a famous maxim in that country. (It was inscribed on the Swiss pavilion at the 1992 World’s Fair.) The Federal Council, as the cabinet is called, numbers just seven ministers: they run departments of foreign affairs, home affairs, justice and police, defence, finance, economic affairs and a miscellany of transport, communications, and energy. The Swiss presidency is a purely honorary office that rotates among the Councillors, each serving a year at a time. Only a true trivia savant could name any past Swiss president, and the name of the current office-holder (Pascal Couchepin) escapes otherwise well-informed Swiss citizens.

This is not to really say that the federal government of Switzerland n’existe pas. It has acquired new responsibilities, by constitutional amendment, more than a hundred times since 1874. Like our federal government, it has the power to make laws regarding nuclear energy, broadcasting, the environment and other matters in which the 26 cantons—sovereign in history and law—have been willing to cede power. Under the constitution, federal law is supreme where it conflicts with cantonal law, but the residual powers—those not specifically assigned in the constitution—belong to the cantons.

The fluidity of the Swiss Constitution may seem unusual, but the document is no bald statement of individual rights; it contains specific detail about tax rates, railroads, animal welfare and everything else imaginable. Constitutional amendments can be introduced, at any time, by means of an initiative signed by 100,000 Swiss citizens. Amendments must be ratified in referendum by a “double majority”—a majority of the overall vote and a majority of the vote in a majority of the cantons.

The idea of Switzerland as a voluntary association of sovereign cantons is a bedrock of Swiss politics. This idea of the Willesnation, of a nation-by-choice, is given force in the Constitution: “The Confederation shall leave the cantons as large a space of action as possible and shall take their particularities into account.” Similarly, the cantons respect the rights of cities, towns and valley communes to conduct purely local affairs as they wish. In this subsidiarist model, when one applies for Swiss citizenship, one does not apply to the federal government, or even to one’s canton of residence. Citizenship is granted by the local community, either by a council vote or, in some places, by popular ballot. Cantons, not the federal government, issue temporary work permits to new arrivals. Income is reported to, and income tax paid to, a local official, who collects on behalf of the canton—which only then forwards the federal government its share. Welfare benefits are determined and provided at the local level. Education policy is set by cantons and applied by local officials. This radical decentralization is one thing setting Switzerland’s political structure apart from others; the other chief distinction is its commitment to direct, as opposed to representative, democracy. Switzerland could be said to have blundered into the habit of voting on everything, since the country is otherwise ungovernable. In the federal structure and throughout the cantons, any legislative act may be sent to referendum by means of a petition carrying a certain number of signatures. Citizens’ initiative is pervasive too, though the bar is usually somewhat higher; draft a law, convince some of your fellow citizens of its wisdom, win the resulting referendum and it goes right into the books.

In the federal instance, Swiss citizens have 100 days, after the publication of a new law or even a treaty, to gather 50,000 signatures and force a yes/no national referendum. A campaign to amend the Constitution can be initiated anytime, and organizers are given 18 months to collect the necessary 100,000 signatures. If the text of the amendment is ratified by double majority, it cannot be altered by Parliament, the federal government or the courts. (The government can put a “counter-proposal,” usually some more moderate version of the original initiative, on the ballot; but this tactic is regarded with suspicion and has had certain limits placed upon it.) The traditional English-style right of petition by individuals or small groups plays an important role in Switzerland too; authorities are constitutionally required to take note of such petitions, and by custom they are always answered. Similar rules are observed at the cantonal level, with variations: in the canton of Zurich, for example, a citizen initiative can proceed with one signature, if it receives a certain degree of support in the cantonal legislature.

For the Swiss citizen, this all means constant voting and discussion of individual political issues. Partisan politics, as we understand them, are unknown there. The four major Swiss parties have retained more or less the same vote share since the Second World War; with direct democracy holding Parliament in check, and a rotating presidency, there is little at stake to arouse conventional partisan passion. The seven Federal Council seats have been distributed among these parties exactly the same way (2-2-2-1) since the war.

Gregory Fossedal, chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution in New Hampshire, has just published a comprehensive book (a major source for this article), Direct Democracy in Switzerland. “The typical Swiss voter of age fifty,” Mr. Fossedal writes, “has seen about 20 to 25 constitutional changes in his lifetime, and as an adult has voted on an average of more than one per year...If he is a typical Swiss, he was reading regular newspaper articles about the merits of this change or that change. In the process, implicitly, he was engaged in a kind of rolling review of his country’s fundamental law. This process makes the Constitution alive, and the people its owners, in a more tangible way than in any other country.”

The Swiss parliament is bicameral, with a House of Representatives and a Senate. The 200 representatives are elected under proportional representation by the whole country, in one-man-one-vote fashion. The 46 Swiss senators are chosen according to what Canadians might call the “Triple-E” system: every canton sends two, except for six smaller “half-cantons” which get one apiece. The smallest half-canton, equal in dignity to its huge fellows, is Appenzell Innerrhoden (population 14,900), notorious for not extending the cantonal vote to women until 1990. The Inner Appenzellers still elect their cantonal government by a show of hands in the Appenzell town square on the last Sunday of each April.

There is a curious non-abstract quality to the Swiss state; it is equivalent, in Swiss minds, to Swiss society itself. One newspaper editor told Mr. Fossedal, “We have to like the parliament...because our parliament is us.” Switzerland’s largely anonymous federal legislators sit for three weeks four times a year, conducting business in casual clothes. Most keep their regular jobs during their tenure. There are no term limits, but legislators tend to leave Parliament for private life after about ten years. There are no legal campaign-spending limits, yet heavy spending in Swiss political campaigns is unknown. Like many ugly tendencies of other democracies, it is simply not done there.

The Swiss judiciary is not the strong third branch of government familiar to the U.S. or Canada. There is no Swiss court authorized to nullify federal laws, although the Swiss are having a typically thorough discussion about introducing one. Cantonal laws are voided only with overwhelming reluctance. The 54-member Swiss federal court, writes Mr. Fossedal, “is about deciding cases,” not framing grand principles; its large size makes its members as anonymous as the parliamentary deputies. Federal judges are nominated by the legislature and must be re-elected every six years; more than one-fifth are non-lawyers. Civil and criminal procedures for cantonal and community courts are set—in accordance with subsidiarity—by the cantons.

Is any of this really relevant? Surely Switzerland is a triviality, easily dismissed with Orson Welles’ wisecrack from The Third Man: “Five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” The Swiss, for their part, consider democracy and peace more precious than monuments or foreign conquests. (Switzerland did have a civil war, in 1847, but as Mr. Fossedal points out, the U.S. Civil War probably claimed more expatriate Swiss lives than Switzerland’s own squabble did.) The Swiss are the butts of other jokes, as Andreas Bucher, international affairs editor of the Swiss magazine Facts, observes: their neighbours lampoon their slow speech, compulsive tidiness and stinginess. “Let me add,” he says, “that those ugly [cuckoo] clocks are made in Bavaria; no Swiss watchmaker would touch these things with a ten-foot pole.”

The Swiss can afford to join in the laughter. Their per-capita gross domestic product in 2001 was US$30,881; that leaves the Swiss, in a bad year, more productive than ourselves (US$28,948) and not far behind the United States (US$35,450). Their public debt amounts to about one-half of a year’s gross domestic product; ours is a full year’s. The Swiss unemployment rate is hovering around 3%, and it is deemed a grave crisis when it gets as high as 4%. Needless to say, Canada cannot compete with that, nor with Switzerland’s currency, still one of the most trusted stores of value in the financial world.

The investment of Swiss companies abroad—valued at US$177 billion in 1998—is the world’s ninth largest, behind the Netherlands and France, and ahead of Italy and Canada. This is remarkable, indeed, for a country with a population of slightly more than seven million. Swiss banks such as USB and Credit Suisse are legendary, as is the country’s pivotal role in the insurance and reinsurance industries. It is home to ABB, Europe’s largest electrical engineering firm. Nestle is known wherever human beings eat; Rolex, Swatch and a half-dozen others wherever time is kept. When you see “Schindler” stamped on an elevator or escalator, you are trusting yourself to the Swiss-based Schindler Group. Swiss drug companies Novartis and Hoffmann-La Roche are 800-pound gorillas of global pharmaceuticals. Syngenta is the world’s leading producer of fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. And one could mention ten times as many companies—chemical suppliers, engineering firms, hoteliers, store chains—which are less globalized, but familiar to Europeans.

A look at Swiss Nobel prizewinners instantly dispels the argument that the Swiss have done well for themselves but contributed little to humanity. The first Nobel Peace Prize (1901) went to Henri Dunant, Swiss founder of the International Red Cross. The tiny nation has produced a staggering seven medicine laureates, six Nobel chemists and four physics prizewinners. The latter group includes Albert Einstein, who was raised and educated in Switzerland and who returned to his German birthplace only at the age of 29. Time has not slackened the pace of Swiss scientific achievement: half of the 2002 chemistry prize went to Kurt Wuthrich, the developer of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology.

Perhaps these accomplishments are unrelated to the unique Swiss way of doing politics. But few Swiss could be convinced of this. Without its distinctive popular traditions of government, there would be no Switzerland; none but a committed army of citizens, bound by a libertarian tradition, could have reasoned with Napoleon, stood off Hitler or held off Hapsburg Austria and Bourbon France for centuries. Swiss wealth is undeniably connected to Swiss policy, and low Swiss tax rates are a product of the popular veto on legislation. The Swiss education system is an acknowledged triumph of decentralization. All these things have attracted great minds to the country at least since Switzerland got its (rather late) start on industrialization and modernization in the 1800s.

Because Swiss culture has been shaped by the development of its institutions, and supports them, no one can hope to export the Swiss model wholesale, warns Ronald Watts. “But we can learn a lot from Switzerland,” he adds. “In many ways, it is of unique interest.” We tend to accept or reject cues from the monocultural U.S., but our own challenge, he says, is more complex—and may be more like Switzerland’s. The “one big lesson,” he thinks, is that a strong country does not require a strong federal government. “Giving different cultural and linguistic groups a heavy measure of autonomy reduces conflict,” he says. “Within our system, increased provincial autonomy...is the natural way to take the pain out of federal politics.” No one can doubt Swiss pride in their “non-existent” country; that makes the Swiss Confederation an insurmountable challenge to Pierre Trudeau’s equation of strong federal government with “national unity.”

It also, Prof. Watts suggests, indicts our ongoing failure to rehabilitate the real bicameral Parliament we used to possess. “We have an almost useless Senate,” he says, “when it could easily be, and should be, a body designed to present regional viewpoints. Where we live with majoritarian rule, the Swiss emphasize power-sharing and consensual concessions to minority interests.” Serious bicameralism and direct democracy make for slow political decision-making, but Mr. Fossedal points out a number of occasions when this lassitude may have helped the Swiss. In the early 20th century, voters stubbornly refused to let the country’s central bank have more flexibility in monetary policy; not coincidentally, the Great Depression in Switzerland “was a blip of unemployment that never topped 5%.” Similarly, after the Second World War, continued voter mulishness about the central bank forced the government to survive by encouraging productivity instead of inflating the currency; the positive effects lasted decades.

As a rule, the Swiss are slow to adopt new programs, but quick to reform them. It took low-unemployment Switzerland until the 1980s to introduce significant welfare beyond a “widows-and-orphans” minimum. When payouts exploded in the 1990s under pressure from foreign “guest workers,” the cantons raced each other to reform, imposing residency requirements and lifetime welfare limits much sooner than Canadian provinces and the U.S. did.

For Mr. Fossedal, the great Swiss teaching is direct democracy—citizen referendums and the right of citizen initiative. These things empower the individual voter, and let him know his power; they give him a stake in political life. If the Swiss have the most intelligent news media in Europe—and many would argue they do—it is because the irrelevancy of party politics, and the importance of referendums, have encouraged serious reporting on policy rather than treating politics as a spectator sport.

“I was speaking with a member of the Venezuelan political opposition recently,” says Mr. Fossedal. What Mr. Fossedal told him was that Latin American countries need to stop going through presidents like they were underwear. “Picking a new head of state is just drawing from the same deck of cards,” he says. “If I had the choice of letting the electorate vote on policy, or letting the electorate vote on the president, I’d choose the former every time. It’s more surgical, more effective, more responsive.”