Gdbook7-Swissconfederation.Pdf
11_Swiss.fm Page 320 Wednesday, February 17, 2010 12:39 PM 11_Swiss.fm Page 321 Wednesday, February 17, 2010 12:39 PM Swiss Confederation thomas fleiner and maya hertig Like the United States, the Swiss federation was created from the bottom up, based on a covenant (foedus) uniting formerly independent states. However, while the framers of the United States Constitution chose feder- alism mainly to strengthen local democracy and limit government powers with a view to protecting individual liberty, Swiss federalism was designed primarily to accommodate communal diversity and to provide for peaceful management of deeply rooted conflicts among adherents of different reli- gious, cultural, and political traditions. Federalism implies the existence of at least two orders of government and some autonomy of the constituent units. Given that the constituent units (called cantons) in Switzerland are themselves internally diverse and fragmented, they, too, had to develop strategies of conflict management based on substantial powers of their municipalities. Thus, the Swiss federal polity is composed of three orders of government. introductory overview With a surface area of 41,290 square kilometres and a population of 7.3 mil- lion, Switzerland is a small European country whose neighbours are France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Lichtenstein. It is composed of twenty-six cantons1 varying greatly in size, population, history, language, and culture. There are four national languages – German (spoken by 64 percent of the population), French (20 percent), Italian (6.5 percent), and Romansh (0.5 percent) – and two major religions (42 percent Roman Catholics and 33 percent Protestants), not to mention the tiny minority of Jewish and Old Catholic inhabitants.
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