Switzerland: Less Polarized, More Fragmented

Switzerland’s political landscape after the elections: less polarized but more fragmented. Photo: twicepix/flickr

Last Sunday’s elections unexpectedly bucked the trend of growing polarization in the Swiss political landscape. All major established parties lost support, while two new center parties – the Liberal Greens and the Conservative Democrats – were the big winners.

But, to many, the biggest surprise was the weak showing of the Swiss People’s Party, the SVP. For two decades, the proportion of the electorate voting for the anti-immigration, anti-European party had steadily increased. With a number of controversial popular initiatives and xenophobic campaigns (most famously the ‘black sheep‘ campaign, which the UN denounced as racist), the party mobilized voters and more than doubled its percentage between 1991 and 2007.

The Adventures of Switzerland’s Most Famous Stone

Never mind it’s a duplicate. Photo: Patrick Frauchiger/flickr

Fans of yodeling, dancing and schwingen got their money’s worth last Sunday at Switzerland’s biggest celebration of traditional culture, the Unspunnen festival. If the sight of men wrestling in lederhosen isn’t exciting enough for you, the festival showcases another pearl of entertainment: stone throwing. No less than 83kg of massive granite has to be shifted by each competitor, the further the better.

The first Unspunnen festival was held in 1805. Napoleon had just invaded Switzerland, and the event – and the ‘Unspunnen Stone’ with it – became a symbol of Swiss unity. But it was not until 1984 that the stone rose to international fame, when it was abducted by a group of Bélier activists – part of quiet Switzerland’s very own separatist movement.

Revival of the “Red Booklet”

Civil Defense was published in Switzerland in 1969 (left, courtesy of Histamut/Wikimedia Commons) and re-published in Japan for the third time in 2003 (right, courtesy of Amazon.co.jp)

The question intrigued me. When abroad, I am used to being asked whether it was true that all Swiss men had a military rifle at home.  But, before a Japanese friend asked me about it the other day, I had never heard about a book called Civil Defense, which in the 1960s was apparently handed out to every household by the Swiss government. What was she talking about? And why on earth is a dated Swiss book, unknown to me, popular among the Japanese?

The volume was known in Switzerland as the “red booklet“, which is a double irony: the ‘booklet’ is 320 pages long and full of anti-communist ideology. Zivilverteidigung (Civil Defense) was published in 1969 and 2.6 million copies were distributed to Swiss households for free. It served two purposes: 1) as a guide for the Swiss population about how to behave during, and prepare for, national disasters, including nuclear war; and 2) to instill a spirit of patriotism and resistance towards everything foreign and dangerous (at that time, mainly communism).

The red booklet included lyrics of patriotic songs and, most interestingly, two versions of a story in which Switzerland is threatened by revolutionary forces supported by an outside power. In the first version, written on the right-hand pages of the book, the Swiss people resist and save their country; in the second version, written (of course) on the left-hand pages, the revolution succeeds and Switzerland collapses.

Just a year after its publication in Switzerland, in 1970, Civil Defense was translated into Japanese, and that’s not all: Minkan Bōei (民間防衛), as it’s known in Japanese, was re-published in 1995 and again in 2003. With 150,000 copies sold in all, it isn’t quite a best-seller. Nevertheless, the red booklet remains popular in Japan.

Not so in Switzerland, where it was already out of fashion at the time of its original publication:

Top Security Threats: All Transnational

Boundary stone at the Swiss border: deters neither mafiosi, nor human traffickers nor cyber criminals. Photo: Thomas Bresson/flickr

Money laundering by mafiosi, human trafficking and cyber crime: these are the top three security threats identified by the Swiss federal police in their 2010 annual report (German).

What is striking about this list is that each menace is transnational in nature. What does this mean?

For one: as this assessment by the Swiss authorities indicates, police work is no longer the strictly domestic affair it once was. As a result,  international cooperation has become a first-order concern for national law-enforcement organizations.  And this can be very difficult in practice. Take, for example, the fight against the mafia in Italy and Switzerland —  two countries which,  though neighbors, have different legal regimes and requirements for due process.

It is clear that more efforts are needed to  properly track  criminal activity across borders. In this day and age, the police’s concerns cannot remain theirs alone. Everyone dealing with or talking about security should take heed of this annual report and perhaps even adjust their own priorities.

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Switzerland – Failing to Deal with Too-Big-To-Fail?

A lot of numbers to keep track of - stock market news at a UBS branch in Zurich. Courtesy of belpo/flickr.
A lot of numbers to keep track of – stock market news at a UBS branch in Zurich. Courtesy of belpo/flickr.

World-renowned for its delicious chocolate, accurate watches and safe bank accounts, Switzerland considers itself an island of political and economic stability at the heart of Europe. As a measure of success, the Swiss economy survived the 2008-09 financial crisis experiencing fewer devastating consequences than other industrial countries. Switzerland was not completely immune however, as the government had to come to the rescue of the financial industry in the fall of 2008.

Fearful of the potential fallout if banking giant UBS declared bankruptcy, the Swiss government deemed it necessary to bail it out in October 2008. The rescue package included a $6 billion convertible bond issued by the government and the establishment of a fund, supported by the Swiss National Bank, into which UBS transferred toxic assets once worth around $60 billion. In view of an annual GDP of roughly $550 billion the Swiss public entered a huge financial risk by saving UBS.

Since then, the Swiss economy seems to be back on track with slow but positive GDP growth. As immigration and energy issues dominate the media in anticipation of upcoming national elections, many seem to have forgotten about the complex and unresolved risks regarding the financial sector: Banks like Credit Suisse and UBS could still push the economy on the verge of collapse: They remain ‘too-big-to-fail” and profit therefore from an implicit state guarantee.