Switzerland Should Not Exist (last essay before a short summer break)
Years ago, while studying in Zurich, I wrote a paper about William Tell.
At the time, I argued that Tell was one of the key figures holding Switzerland together. Here was a country divided by language, religion, culture, and geography, yet somehow united by a shared story. Tell, I wrote, provided a common symbol around which Swiss identity could form.
Looking back, I am no longer convinced.
In fact, I suspect I had the relationship backwards.
Not because myths are unimportant. Nations need stories. Shared narratives matter. They help people imagine themselves as part of a larger whole.
But I had mistaken the story for the foundation.
The older I get, the more I suspect that William Tell explains far less about Switzerland than most Swiss people would like to believe.
Because Switzerland should not exist.
At least not according to the logic that shaped most of modern Europe.
If you had described Switzerland to a nineteenth-century nationalist, he would probably have dismissed the idea as absurd. Four languages. Two major religions. Entirely different cultural worlds. Mountain farmers in Uri. Bankers in Geneva. Merchants in Basel. Italian-speaking valleys in the south. French-speaking cities in the west. German-speaking regions in the centre and east.
No common language. No common ancestry. No common ethnicity. No common culture in the traditional sense.
By the standards of European nationalism, such a country should never have worked.
And yet it does.
It has endured for centuries.
The usual explanation is William Tell.
The more interesting explanation begins with the Gotthard Pass.
Switzerland likes to tell its history as a story of freedom. Brave mountain farmers resisting foreign rule. Courageous Confederates defending their independence. A small people refusing to submit to larger powers.
It is a good story.
Perhaps too good.
The problem with good stories is that they often crowd out more complicated realities.
Let us assume for a moment that William Tell really existed. Let us assume he really shot the apple from his son's head. Let us assume he really killed Gessler.
What exactly would that have changed about the geography of Europe?
Nothing.
The Gotthard would still have been there. The Alps would still have been there. Trade routes would still have crossed them. The Habsburgs would still have wanted influence over the region. France would still have had strategic interests there. Milan would still have had reasons to care.
The real story of Switzerland does not begin with a hero.
It begins with a map.
That may sound unromantic, but history is often unromantic.
The Gotthard was one of the most important north-south corridors in Europe. Whoever controlled it controlled trade, customs revenues, the movement of goods and, ultimately, political influence. The region mattered long before anyone spoke of a Swiss nation.
Not because unusually freedom-loving people happened to live there.
Because geography made it important.
Many Swiss people prefer not to think about this. We would rather talk about freedom than transit routes. Heroes rather than trade networks. William Tell rather than mule caravans, merchants, and toll stations.
History, however, has little interest in national sentiment.
It is interested in power.
And power follows geography far more often than we like to admit.
That raises an uncomfortable question.
Would Switzerland even have come into existence if Europe's most important Alpine crossing had run through Bavaria rather than the Gotthard?
Would we still speak of the indomitable Swiss Confederates?
Or would Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden be little more than footnotes in some forgotten chapter of European history?
The question sounds disrespectful.
It is not.
It merely reminds us that nations rarely emerge from legends.
They emerge from opportunities.
Geography created the opportunity.
The Confederates seized it.
Both things are true.
The same pattern appears in the story of Swiss neutrality.
Many Swiss speak of neutrality as though it were a moral achievement that Europe accepted out of admiration. The reality was considerably more practical.
After the Napoleonic Wars, the great powers needed stability. They needed buffer zones. They needed territories that would not fall completely under the control of any rival state.
Switzerland was perfectly suited to that role.
When the Congress of Vienna guaranteed Swiss neutrality in 1815, it did not do so out of affection for Switzerland. It was not a tribute to William Tell. It was not an act of admiration for the Swiss Confederation.
It was a geopolitical calculation.
A neutral Alpine state served the interests of the major powers.
Neutrality was not initially a gift granted to Switzerland.
Switzerland was a useful instrument within a larger European order.
That may sound almost insulting.
It is only insulting if one believes history is primarily a story about virtue.
Geopolitics asks a different question.
Not who was right.
But who benefited.
And surprisingly often, that question produces the more convincing answer.
Yet even the geopolitical explanation is incomplete.
It explains why Switzerland mattered.
It does not explain why Switzerland worked.
That distinction is crucial.
The Gotthard explains the stage.
It does not explain the play.
Europe has always contained strategically important regions. Most of them never became Switzerland. Most of them never managed to hold together for centuries despite deep linguistic, cultural, and religious divisions.
This is where both patriots and cynics tend to go wrong.
Patriots believe Switzerland emerged purely from a love of freedom.
Cynics believe it is nothing more than a product of geography.
Both are telling only half the story.
Geography provided the stage. History supplied the script. Human beings still had to perform it.
Perhaps Switzerland is interesting precisely because it is not a natural nation.
It is not France.
It is not Poland.
It is not Hungary.
It was not built on a common language or a common ancestry. It rests on something far more fragile and, in some ways, far more impressive.
Institutions.
Compromise.
Federalism.
A willingness to live together despite profound differences.
The real Swiss achievement may not be that William Tell hit an apple.
It may be that people speaking different languages, practising different religions, pursuing different interests, and carrying different identities managed to build a political framework that has functioned for centuries.
That is less romantic.
But it is probably more remarkable.
Political maturity may consist of holding two ideas in your head at the same time.
Yes, Switzerland owes much of its existence to geography. Without the Alps and the Gotthard, it probably would never have emerged.
But another fact is equally true.
Without its political culture, it would never have survived.
Switzerland is neither a miracle of freedom nor an accident of geography.
It is the product of both.
And perhaps that is what makes some people uncomfortable.
It means Switzerland is neither entirely its own creation nor entirely the creation of history.
Like most successful countries, it is the result of luck, geography, interests, accidents, opportunities, and human wisdom interacting over long stretches of time.
That story lacks the simplicity of William Tell.
But it may be the more interesting one.
And perhaps the more truthful one.
