Marc H. Lerner. A Laboratory of Liberty

Marc H. Lerner begins the conclusion to his excellent monograph with a glance at Switzerland's recent past. In the mid-1990s, the Swiss government, parliament, and public engaged in a fiery debate over a commemorative year, namely 1998. The question was, which anniversary would be celebrated? On the one hand, the modern, federal, and democratic Swiss state is usually held to have been born in 1848. The constitution of that year was the result of an accommodation between conservative and liberal cantons, which had taken up arms against each other in a twenty-seven-day civil conflict, the Sonderbund War, in November of the previous year. On the other hand, some members of parliament suggested that a different anniversary be celebrated: the bicentenary of the Helvetic Republic, created in 1798 after the country was occupied by an army invading from revolutionary France. There was a public outcry against this proposal. One letter to the press described it as “perverse.” The controversy raised such questions as the role of historical memory in modern Swiss political culture, but it also struck on one of the essential problems that beset Switzerland in Lerner's hundred-year period: how to shape a federal political order in a century when European states moved, not without considerable pain and stress, from basing their legitimacy on notions of historical precedent, custom, and theological authority to foundations grounded in such principles as popular sovereignty, the individual citizen, and human rights.

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