The landlocked, multilingual confederation in the mountainous heart of Europe played a central role in the development of European propaganda as a locus of the Reformation and a major center of early printing. As a neutral country Switzerland has provided a refuge to propagandists from other states, from John Knox (c. 1514-1572) to Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924). The city of Geneva has been home for the League of Nations (1919— 1946), the International Red Cross (from 1864), and other international organizations, including the World Health Organization. The projection of the Swiss national image has been closely tied to its role as an international peacemaker.
Partly because of its mountainous location, medieval Switzerland developed with a tradition of independence and special privilege not seen elsewhere in Europe. In 1291 three cantons (regions) Uri, Unterwalden, and Schwyz, combined to form the Everlasting League of the Three Forest Cantons to defend themselves against Habsburg Austria. Lucerne joined in 1332. These events are memorialized in the legendary campaign of resistance led by the archer William Tell, retold by eighteenth-century historian Johannes von Muller (1755-1809) in his History of Switzerland (1786). Tell became a potent symbol of national awakening in Switzerland and beyond during the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century. He was celebrated as a symbol of freedom in a play of 1804 by the German poet and dramatist Schiller (1759—1805) and as an allegory of Italian nationalism in the opera of 1829 by the Italian composer Rossini (1792—1868).
From 1291 Swiss power grew through successive military campaigns, more cantons joined the league each generation, and in 1499 the Emperor Maximilian (1459-1519) formally recognized the virtual independence of the league. But the growing power of Switzerland was cut short in the sixteenth century, first by defeat at the hands of the French in 1515 but most significantly by the Reformation. Two leading figures of the Reformation worked in Switzerland: the Swiss-born Hulderich Zwingli (1484-1531) in Zurich and Frenchman John Calvin (1509— 1564), who was based in Geneva from 1536. The Reformation split the country as the Four Forest Cantons fought to defend their Catholicism. But both sides agreed with the need for neutrality. The Swiss profited from this neutrality in the Thirty Years War (1618—1648) and received international recognition of their independence under the Treaty of Westphalia, which brought that conflict to an end.
Swiss neutrality was recognized internationally in the Peace of Paris (1815) at the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, during which the French had imposed on Switzerland the Helvetic Republic (1798-1803). Nineteenth-century Swiss politics was characterized by the clash between the centralizing Radicals and the Catholic cantons, which wished to retain regional power. The struggle involved much sectarian propaganda, and key players on the Catholic side included the Jesuits. In the 1840s the Catholic cantons combined into the Sonderbund (Separate League). This was crushed in the largely bloodless civil war of 1847, and in 1848 Switzerland agreed to a new federal constitution and a ban on the Jesuits operating within the country.
In the twentieth century the Swiss conducted propaganda campaigns during the two world wars to assert their neutrality. During World War II Switzerland became a major theater of the propaganda war as Britain and Germany vied for the sympathy of the Swiss public, but neither side achieved much success. Allied anti-Nazi propaganda seeped across the Swiss border into Germany in the form of mail, news, and rumors.
In the postwar period issues in Swiss politics included the struggle for language rights by the French speakers of the Jura region. In the 1990s the far-right Peoples’ Party made gains in Switzerland. The party, led by Christoph Blocher (1940— ), traded on anti-immigrant feeling and resentment of the international disapproval of the Swiss role as bankers to Nazi Germany, the scale of which had been revealed during that decade. It won nearly 25 percent of the votes in the election of October 1999, becoming the nation’s second most powerful grouping. Switzerland has a record of frequent referenda on key issues, all of which have produced lively political campaigns. In 2002 Switzerland voted to join the United Nations.
