Foreword

The late Stein Rokkan once called Switzerland a microcosm of Europe because of its cultural, linguistic, religious and regional diversity. Rokkan recommended that anyone wishing to study the dynamics of European politics should immerse themselves in the study of Switzerland. Today this advice seems even more justified. With the continuing process of European integration, it becomes increasingly clear how difficult it is to bring together different cultures into a single political system. With the fall of the iron curtain, cultural identities have gained greater importance, certainly in Central and Eastern Europe, but to a certain extent also in Western Europe.

Under these conditions, this present study by Wolf Linder is a welcome contribution to the discussion of European politics. He enlightens us about the lessons to be drawn from the Swiss experience. These lessons are far from naively optimistic. Linder is too critical of his own country to simply offer its history and institutions as a blueprint for Europe. Linder's approach is institutionally oriented, which fits in nicely with the trend in political science towards a 'new institutionalism'. For Linder, however, there is nothing new in this emphasis on institutions. Before becoming a political scientist he received a thorough legal training. This background has made him doubly aware of the importance of institutions in the political process.

Linder stresses three institutional features in the political system of Switzerland: power-sharing, federalism and direct democracy. From this perspective, Switzerland is the exact opposite of the classical Westminster model. In the United Kingdom power is concentrated in the majority party in the House of Commons. In contrast Switzerland has developed a system of dispersed power. The cantons and the local communities enjoy much autonomy; at all levels the major political parties participate in the executive; and the citizens themselves are, in many important issues, the ultimate decision-makers. This dispersion of power is the Swiss way of handling the problem of cultural diversity.

As Linder points out, the dispersion of power also has a negative side, namely a certain immobility in the system. With accelerated development now in so many fields, this immobility is increasingly felt in the daily life of Swiss politics. The most prominent example relates to relations with the European Community. Switzerland has great difficulty in deciding what exactly this relationship should be. Thus it is lagging behind in the construction of a new Europe, instead of letting Europe profit from its multicultural experience.

Linder's analysis is a very differentiated one. On the one hand he recognises that federalism, the referendum and power-sharing are very important tools for the practice of democracy in an increasingly multicultural world. On the other hand he tries to sharpen these tools in such a way that the danger of immobility can be reduced. In this way much can be learned from Linder's study about the future of European politics. The lesson is certainly not: do it like the Swiss, and everything will be fine. Rather: study the history and the institutions of Switzerland, adopt what seems to work and avoid the many pitfalls.

The major part of this study was written when Wolf Linder, during sabbatical leave, stayed at our house in Chapel Hill. Thus my wife Ruth and I had the intellectual pleasure of following day by day the emergence of his analysis.

JURG STEINER
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Bern