And again and again a copperplate of the Rütli oath

Even empty phrases occasionally provide insights. For example, in the case of Federal Councilor Alain Berset. As a Social Democrat, he is a member of a party that constantly and rightly emphasizes and laments the social differences in Switzerland and the world and tries to reduce them. Berset said last week in the National Council that the current and heated debate about Swiss historical images was dividing the country "unnecessarily". Interposed question: Are there necessary divisions that the country has to endure? The striking differences in income and wealth, for example? Unquestionably acceptable, since they are important for the success of the big banks and for their shareholders at home and abroad? And what about the increasingly difficult access for foreigners to citizenship - and thus to political rights? One question remains: What kind of democrats are these who deprive other residents and taxpayers - sometimes for decades - of political participation? Is this a society with limited democracy, a GmbD?

No, such questions were not Berset's intention. He was guided by the bourgeois and boring national tradition of talking down contradictions. Anyone who asks questions and makes demands outside of this unwritten agreement remains an outsider. This happened to the Social Democrats until they accepted national defense and stopped talking about the class struggle that the bourgeoisie continued to wage.

Where rifts open up, calls for harmonization no longer help. Specifically, in Switzerland - as in other European countries - a culture war has been steaming for years, driven by traditionalist/fundamentalist Christians, pro-lifers and nationalist economic liberals. Battlegrounds are topics like families (exclusively for heteros?), registered partnerships, abortion, drugs and national identity in a Christian-Jewish Occident (with or without Muslims?). Or in other words: Many social liberalizations of past decades are to be stopped or reversed. (If you want to read how intolerant, narrow-minded and joyless Swiss society was in the 1950s to 1970s, read for an hour in the late journalist Max Schmid's book. Democracy from Case to Case. Zurich 1976.)

This national-conservative alliance has a starting advantage. It cultivates images of history that were still a bourgeois consensus until the mid-1980s, summarized in the formula "Switzerland as a special case," which could also be used to justify political isolation (no membership in international organizations such as the UN or the EU). The rest was and is folklore: no battle celebration without men in Landsknecht uniforms, no OLMA guest canton without halberd bearers.

These Swiss myths dominate even in places where one would not expect it. Historian Thomas Maissen, once NZZ editor, then history professor in Heidelberg, now director of the German Historical Institute in Paris, mentions an illuminating example: almost all of his interviews on Swiss historical images were illustrated in the print media by the editors either with "some copperplate engraving of the federal oath" or with a photograph from World War II. They would thus "reduce Swiss history to two phases of heroic resistance against foreign villains," on the one hand the Habsburg bailiffs, on the other the "Nazi henchmen. This is the construct that Blocher & Mörgeli & Köppel are trying to spread in these weeks. They respond to criticism with insinuations, like Christoph Blocher: Maissen is belittling Switzerland because he wants to lead it into the EU. Conclusion: Controversy is necessary. Even media professionals, whether in editorial offices, PR bureaus or advertising agencies, cannot avoid turning more to the enlightened and urban Switzerland. And to the liberal traditions that were able to develop in Switzerland against the resistance of patricians, clergy and mountain farmers.

Hans Stutz is a journalist in Lucerne. He is also a member of the Cantonal Council and the Green Party.