Introduction

A small country located at the crossroads of Northern and Southern Europe, Switzerland is renowned for its neutrality and peaceful attitudes, its ethnic and linguistic diversity and a decentralised government that makes most laws at the canton level. Yet there is good reason for control and integration policies to figure large. This federalist country has been challenged since its birth – in the aftermath of the successful liberal Revolution of 1848 – by centrifugal forces at the religious, regional, political, social and ideological levels. Certain foreign scholars, puzzled by Switzerland's apparent enduring stability (and overlooking a history of violent and disruptive conflicts from the civil war of 1847 until the social unrest of the 1930s), identify the source of this solidarity in the clever management of a multicultural country through its federal institutions (Schnapper 1997). Some see Switzerland as a ‘paradigmatic case of political integration’, the result of the state's subsidiary structure that supports both strong municipal autonomy and a comparatively high participation rate of the (male) constituency in the polity (Deutsch 1976). Others see the source of the country's stability in the successful creation of a strong national identity, which helped overcome the social distrust that arose during rapid industrialisation and was based on the country's small size and the idea that Switzerland was under permanent threat of powerful neighbouring countries, i.e. Überfremdung (Kohler 1994; Tanner 1998).

The fear of being demographically and culturally overrun by foreigners notwithstanding, Switzerland had one of the highest immigration rates on the continent during the twentieth century. According to the 2000 census, 22.4 per cent of the 7.4 million people comprising the total population are foreign born, and 20.5 percent, or nearly 1.5 million, are foreigners (defined here as persons with a foreign nationality). In relative terms, the number is twice as high as foreigners counted in the United States and considerably higher than those in Canada, two classic countries of immigration. In contrast to its internal pluralistic character, however, Switzerland does not consider itself as a country of immigration; it denied existence of an immigrant policy at the federal level before the 1990s (Mahnig & Wimmer 2003).