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Imitation of Switzerland: Historical Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Jonathan Steinberg
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CAN THE SWISS CONFEDERATION BE IMITATED? THAT DEPENDS, says the historian, on what you mean by imitation. Switzerland has certainly served as a model for others, sometimes a model distinctly not to be imitated. When the American Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to write a new constitution and ‘to form a more perfect Union’, they had Switzerland in mind. Alexander Hamilton, a chief actor in that enterprise, devoted part of an issue of The Federalist Papers, written the following year as a defence of what the framers had drafted, to a close analysis of the Swiss Confederation. Switzerland did not impress him:

The connection among the Swiss cantons scarcely amounts to a confederacy, though it is sometimes cited as an instance of the stability of such institutions. They have no common treasury; no common troops even in war; no common coin; no common judicatory; nor any other common part of sovereignty …

He recognised that they were held together ‘by their joint interest’ but saw the confederacy as a poor guarantor of internal and external coherence. ‘Whatever efficacy the union may have had in ordinary cases, it appears that the moment a cause of difference sprang up capable of trying its strength it failed.’

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Winter 1988 , pp. 13 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1988

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References

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