Swiss National Identity and Its Answer to the Far-Right’s Fear Mongering
A view of the main square of the town of Gruyères, Switzerland, the namesake of the famous Swiss cheese. Photo courtesy of Matthieu Valentin.
“Western civilization is losing its power, its performance, its authority, its capacity to act.” This was the dire warning Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gave in a 2022 speech to a group of his supporters in Romania. In the address, he defended his extreme anti-immigrant views with inflammatory rhetoric about the need to avoid becoming “peoples of a mixed-race” and stop what he alleges is the dramatic decline of the West.
Orban’s comments are not particularly egregious in the world of far-right European politics. While campaigning ahead of the June 2024 European Parliament elections, French politician Marion Maréchal from the anti-immigrant National Rally party said, “We are here to carry the voice of the resistance and reconquering in France and Europe from Islamization.” Germany’s second-strongest party, the Alternative for Germany, promotes an openly anti-Islam platform and has ties to the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident (Pegida) protest movement. In Switzerland, where I grew up, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) has become infamous for its anti-immigrant posters that draw heavily on racial imagery to present migrants as dangerous and unwelcome.
Far-right parties are increasingly powerful across Europe, making gains in recent national elections in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as this year’s European Parliament elections (though not to the extent that some had predicted). Maréchal’s National Rally was stalled in the summer’s French elections by a broad coalition of center and left-wing parties, but still controls a record-high 143 seats in the French National Assembly, up from only six in 2017. These parties have relied on racist and especially Islamophobic rhetoric to increase their support, emphasizing, in particular, the notion that non-European migrants cannot adopt European national identities because they would pose a “threat” to such national communities. European countries’ approaches to migrants tend to focus heavily on integration as defined by ethnic, racial, or historical benchmarks. However, as a recently naturalized Swiss citizen, I believe Switzerland provides a “European” model of a multicultural yet integration-friendly national identity that is a potent rebuttal to far-right ideas of a doomed European national identity.
Switzerland is unique in Europe for its fusion of four national linguistic and cultural groups in an area covering less than a hundredth of a percent of the Earth’s surface. A strong sense of Swiss national pride exists despite the Swiss people lacking the traditional markers of a European nation-state, such as a common language and religion. Indeed, this diversity has presented a challenge in the past, as the Swiss population has not always been so unified; after 1291, the iconic founding date of the Swiss Confederation, Switzerland’s territory was rocked by numerous armed skirmishes and civil wars until the establishment of the modern federal state in 1848.
As those who underwent the long and complicated Swiss naturalization process—as I did— can attest, today’s Switzerland is clearly defined by a strong sense of national pride and tradition. This includes stereotypical symbols of Switzerland like the Alps, punctuality, and, of course, a love of cheese and chocolate. More seriously, much of Swiss national identity is shaped by what scholars refer to as “constitutional patriotism,” the phenomenon of shared political values creating a national consciousness that might otherwise be based on ethnic markers. For Swiss people, political values, like the direct democracy we practice, are a defining element of nationhood. There are also crucial shared cultural aspects of Swiss national identity, many of which stem from the nation’s diversity: values like linguistic pluralism and respecting cultural differences tend to rank highly on surveys of Swiss people’s priorities.
Despite what the SVP might have one believe, these elements of Swiss national identity can and have been adopted by many migrants. Around one-quarter of the Swiss population are noncitizens and another 15 percent are citizens with a migrant background. While Switzerland does not have a huge number of migrants from non-European countries, whom the far-right identifies as the largest threat to European ways of life, many migrants in Switzerland are Muslim Kosovar Albanians, and the proportion of Muslims in Switzerland has increased rapidly in recent years. Such a high population of “foreigners” and non-Christians would suggest, at least according to the far-right’s logic, that Swiss identity is under assault from external sources. However, the statistics contradict this bigoted notion: 90% of the permanent resident population in Switzerland identifies with Swiss values and culture, with foreign nationals reporting the same levels of attachment to Swiss identity as citizens. Migrants’ adoption of the defining values of Swiss nationhood is thus largely a success story.
The looseness of Swiss national identity is a big part of the reason integration into Swiss value systems is readily possible for migrants. The centering of political and cultural traits above racial and ethnic identity means that Swiss people of all different backgrounds are able to––at least in theory––identify with the nation without restrictions based on upbringing, skin color, or religion. This is not to deny the presence of racist or nationalistic sentiment in Switzerland—the right-wing, populist SVP remains the largest single party in the Swiss parliament, and many migrants from Muslim-majority countries like Kosovo have been subject to scrutiny and racist rhetoric. Yet, these cases do not support the far-right idea that “Western civilization” is under attack. Rather, they show quite the opposite: a small xenophobic slice of Swiss society cannot cope with the overall success of migrants adopting Swiss values of tolerance and diversity. Surely, such bigotry towards migrants is highly problematic, but it should not be taken as evidence that it is the migrants who are struggling to integrate or disrespectful of Swiss national identity as the far right might argue.
Each year, tens of thousands of migrants acquire Swiss citizenship and promise to uphold Swiss values and traditions for the rest of their lives. This year, I was one of them. I was not born to Swiss parents, but Switzerland is my home, as it is for many hailing from around the world who have come to love the little country of lakes, multilingualism, mountains, and chocolate. The love that many naturalized citizens have for Switzerland is an antidote to the fear-inducing rhetoric that the far-right seeks to push, and it is particularly important to remember in an era of increasing division. The presence of those who adopt Switzerland as their home is not going to spell the country’s doom. It is going to strengthen the reach of its values and traditions, preserving them for many generations to come.
This model does not just apply to Switzerland. As I have outlined, there are several aspects of Switzerland’s history and demographics that make it unique and help enable the formation of a national identity more readily accepting of migrants. The very fact that Switzerland lacks the characteristic elements of a European nation-state goes to show that such elements are not required for a country to develop a cohesive national identity. Other countries throughout Europe could also adopt the less ethnically focused yet still culturally cohesive national identity that Switzerland has cultivated. With rising diversity across the continent, it seems likely that they will have to. Switzerland’s neighbors also have common values, common foods, and common traditions that can be emphasized in the formation of more migration-friendly national identities. Ultimately, unlike what Orban warned, European countries do not have to abandon their national identities in the face of increased migration. They just might have to reframe them.
Sabine Ebanks (CC ’27) is a staff writer at CPR majoring in political science and history. She can be reached at sje2124@columbia.edu.