Since 1989: Is Switzerland Finally Becoming Normal?
After 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Cold War ended. Switzerland suddenly had a problem. For decades, the country sat comfortably between East and West. Neutral. Special. The Sonderfall. Now there was nobody to be neutral between. The whole foundation of “we are different and that is fine” started cracking.
Chapter 9 of the book. Honestly, it reads like a political thriller.
The army nobody needed
First shock: in late 1989, over a third of Swiss voters said yes to abolishing the army. They lost the vote, but still. One third. For a country that built its identity around militia defense, that stung. Even worse, after Germany reunified, Switzerland realized its army of 650,000 was nominally the biggest in Europe. A pacific neutral country with the largest army on the continent. Kind of awkward.
Reforms came. Army 95 cut the force to 370,000. Civilian service became an option. Traditionalists hated every change though.
The EEA disaster of 1992
The big one. The EU was expanding. EFTA countries were negotiating the European Economic Area. Switzerland joined the talks. The government even applied for full EU membership in May 1992.
Then came December 6, 1992. The EEA vote. Turnout was massive, 78.3%. The result: 50.3% against, 49.7% for. Only seven cantons voted yes, mostly French-speaking ones. The French-speaking Swiss were furious. They felt the German-speaking majority trampled their interests. Some put up mock customs barriers along the language border.
The man who led the “no” campaign was Christoph Blocher. Head of the Zurich wing of the SVP. He argued that joining would threaten prosperity, independence, and everything Swiss. He mobilized people who normally never voted. He won.
Depression and dormant accounts
The timing was brutal. Between 1991 and 1997, Switzerland went through its first real economic depression since 1945. GDP contracted 2%. About 200,000 jobs disappeared. Unemployment hit 5.5%, which sounds low but for Switzerland was a twenty-fold increase. Wealth concentrated at the top. One in six Swiss was classified as working poor.
Then came the Holocaust banking scandal. In 1995, survivors and lawyers used US courts to go after Swiss banks that held dormant accounts of Holocaust victims. Senator d’Amato got involved. Accusations widened: gold from concentration camps, refused Jewish refugees, economic help to the Nazis.
The banks paid $1.3 billion in compensation. The government apologized. The Bergier Commission investigated and published reports. Yes, Switzerland had been restrictive with refugees. Yes, anti-Semitism played a role. Yes, neutrality was biased toward Germany. Many extreme claims were exaggerated too though.
For the SVP and its voters, this was an outrage. They saw it as foreigners turning Swiss heroes into villains. Deepened the divide.
The SVP machine
Blocher built something Switzerland had never seen. A well-funded, media-savvy, aggressive populist party. The SVP went from a modest farmer party to the biggest force in Swiss politics. In 1999, it made a breakthrough with fifteen new seats. By 2003, it was winning 26% of the vote. By 2007, 29%.
The party blamed immigration, the EU, the political elite, and the post-1968 left for everything. Launched initiative after initiative. Ban minarets. Expel foreign criminals. Tighten asylum rules. The style was loud, sometimes ugly, always effective.
In 2003, Blocher forced his way into the Federal Council, replacing a sitting minister for the first time since 1874. Did not calm down once in office. He criticized his own government publicly, pushed his agenda, broke conventions of collegial responsibility.
Four years later, the other parties struck back. They ejected Blocher and replaced him with a moderate SVP woman, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf. The SVP was outraged. They expelled her. She and other moderates formed a new party, the BDP. Swiss politics was more polarized than ever.
Banking secrecy under siege
The 2008 financial crisis hit Switzerland hard through UBS. The bank had gone all-in on American-style risk-taking and sub-prime mortgages. Wrote down billions. The government had to bail it out. UBS recorded the biggest corporate loss in Swiss history: 20 billion francs.
Then the US came after banking secrecy. A UBS whistleblower gave names. The OECD pressured. France got a leaked list of 3,000 citizens with hidden Swiss accounts. Germany bought similar data. Step by step, banking secrecy crumbled. Another pillar of the Sonderfall, gone.
Still special, still conflicted
By 2011, the SVP suffered its first losses in twenty years. The center held, barely. Consensus politics survived, kind of. The old certainties were gone though. The Sonderfall was damaged but not dead. The country remained stuck between two futures: outward-looking cooperation or inward-looking nationalism.
The authors make a good point. Switzerland became more like its European neighbors. Populist right vs. progressive left. Urban vs. rural. Winners of globalization vs. losers. Same pattern you see across the continent. In that sense, Switzerland did become more “normal.” Its unique institutions, direct democracy, federalism, neutrality, still made every debate play out differently though.
That is where the book leaves us. A country with real politics, real conflicts, and a very uncertain path forward. Not the chocolate-box postcard. Not the boring banking hub. A real place with real problems. Which, if you think about it, is what it always was.
This is part of my retelling series covering A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, published by Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0.