At the European Röstigraben

Three years before the EEA vote, Jean Ziegler was one of the few intellectuals and politicians interested in the first direct election to the supranational European Parliament: "I follow the European parliamentary elections full of anger in my stomach. Europe is taking shape before my eyes, slowly, with many birth pangs, but inevitably. But Switzerland, the home of Rousseau, is not taking part. I feel like a freshly caught Negro in the slave market." On May 25, the European Parliament will be renewed. In the meantime, there is definitely a European domestic politics. With the emergence of a European public it hapert. The reporting from Brussels and Strasbourg is insufficient in all national newspapers. Pan-European media - except ARTE - and intellectual debates are missing.

In our country, the corresponding balance is hardly better. However, Doris Leuthard meant something else with her strange "French-speaking Swiss newspapers are better" vote at the Swiss Media Forum: more depth, different emphasis, "more comprehensively embedded background" than in the German-speaking Swiss gazettes. The French may have been pleased - their main concern is the dependence of their newspapers, which are owned by Ringier and Tamedia. The quality newspaper Le Temps, now entirely owned by Ringier, has become anything but better for financial reasons. But still astonishingly and gratifyingly good. As if it had adopted the media minister's media scolding, the NZZ am Sonntag (which I like better than any newspaper in French-speaking Switzerland!) immediately demonstrated a great deal of closeness to French-speaking Switzerland. On May 11, it attested that the French federal councillors were a "class of their own". From now on, Hitzfeld's assistant Michel Pont writes a column: "Pont means bridge," the author himself explained. The column "Grenzerfahrung" (borderline experience), the weekly French alibi, states: "la nati" is also the measure of all things in French-speaking Switzerland.

So much bridge-building doesn't happen every Sunday, and reporting from other parts of the country hasn't become more intense over the years. Information transfer is characterized by deficits. Cultural exchange is all too often cultivated as a compulsory exercise. And it stops at national borders, which are nowhere language borders. More Europe: internally and externally! I consider the efforts of the NZZ to build up an editorial office in Austria and possibly Germany to be most gratifying. One should not blame it too much for the fact that the idea comes from an Austrian: It is a courageous response to the journalistic and political crisis in Switzerland.

It has grown closer under pressure from abroad and the euro crisis. In the years after 1992, the takeovers of the newspapers in Geneva and Lausanne would have triggered a rhetorical civil war against the cultural colonizers. Enthusiasm for Europe has dwindled everywhere. All the more remarkable is the confession that Roger Schawinski formulates in his autobiography. It is shaped by his history as the child of bitterly poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and upholds a historical consciousness that has been lost by the majority. For Schawinski, the EU remains the "most successful peace project in history." He is as grateful to it as he is for what Switzerland has made possible for him. What contribution his various media have made and are making to this, we will ask Doris Leuthard on occasion.

Jürg Altwegg is a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Geneva.