“FORTUNATE events have put me at the head of the French government, but I would consider myself incapable of governing the Swiss,” Napoleon Bonaparte told a Swiss delegation in 1802. “The more I think about your country, the more convinced I become that the disparity between its constituent parts makes it impossible to impose a common pattern on it: everything points to federalism.”
Napoleon came and went, but the Swiss disparities remained. They culminated in a religious quarrel that led to a civil war in 1847. Fortunately this turned out to be short and not very bloody. The new constitution drafted in 1848 (loosely modelled on the American one), which became the foundation of modern Switzerland, enshrined the principles of a federal system and direct democracy, and was itself ratified by referendum. …