In Search of Natural Identity: Alpine Landscape and the Reconstruction of the Swiss Nation

Abstract

Elias Canetti, in a brief passage of his Crowds and Power (first published in German in 1960), argued that neither language, nor territory or history are at the heart of what today we would call national identity. What nations can not do without, however, and what has contributed most to turning different individuals into conscious members of a particular nation, is a national "crowd symbol." Canetti then went on to show that most European nations possessed one such symbol around which a popular feeling of national belonging could be generated and sustained. In the case of England, he maintained, it was the sea that took this function; while for the Germans it was the forest. In France, on the other hand, it was the Revolution that came to play this very role. And in Switzerland-the case Canetti probably knew best from his own experienceit was the mountains (see Canetti 1960:191-203). While it would be difficult for me to judge the accuracy of Canetti's comments on national mass symbolism in the English, German, and French cases, I broadly agree with his statement about the important role of Alpine symbolism in Swiss national identity. But why the mountains? Here his admittedly thumbnail explorations need some qualifying. First, there was nothing inevitable about the Alps becoming Switzerland's most salient national symbolan impression that one could easily get from reading Canetti's text. On the contrary, it was under particular circumstances and as a result of context-bound ideological activities that the Alps evolved into a national mass symbol of the Swiss.

The Swiss: A Political Nation?

“…Finally, the Alps, and especially the alpine community, have been related to common Swiss values such as diligence, humility and order (Berthoud 2001). Mountains were alleged to have a “purifying effect on human beings” (Zimmer 1998, 654f.). In contrast to the political interpretation of the landscape, values are not projected onto but rather derived from the Alps; schoolbooks, for example, were often used to transmit ‘Alpine’ values (Helbling 1994).…”

Construits identitaires et imaginaires de la territorialité : variations autour de la figure du « montagnard »

“…Mais les termes de cette fonction normative et descriptive ont pu varier en fonction des contextes politiques. Appliquée à des populations dont la mythologie nationale célèbre les vertus, par exemple en Suisse (Walter, 2004 ;Zimmer, 1998), en Écosse (Trevor-Roper, 1983) et, à partir de 1918, en Autriche, la catégorie des « montagnards » a souvent désigné des modèles à suivre et encouragé des interventions publiques destinées à en louer les traits culturels et les modes de production. Appliquée à des populations dont on jugeait les caractères étrangers au modèle social de référence ou les comportements inadaptés à une modernité que l'on cherche à promouvoir en Occident, elle motive une critique sociale et une remise en cause des modes d'existence de ces montagnards.…”

Nationalism, Exclusion and Violence: A Territorial Approach

“…As Joan-Lluís Marfany so forcefully puts it: This does not mean to say, however, that at a given moment in time all nations have been related to territories in the same, circular way. Eric Kaufmann and Oliver Zimmer (Kaufmann 1998;Kaufmann and Zimmer 1998;Zimmer 1998) have made an analytical distinction between the direction of the relationship between nation and territory. On the one hand, is the process of the 'nationalisation of nature', whereby 'popular historical myths, memories and supposed national virtues are projected onto a significant landscape' with the result that 'a nation's distinctiveness is seen to be reflected in a particular landscape' (Kaufmann and Zimmer 1998:486).…”