The Swiss Example
SHUSTER, GEORGE N.
The Swiss Example Nationalism and Liberty. By Hans Kohn. Macmillan. 133 pp. $3.25. To some authors, among them the once famous Count Keyserling, the Swiss seemed a perverse and miserly people who...
...I doubt whether any are present in Switzerland to an extent which would suggest comparison with Europe...
...At any rate, Mazzini is now revealed as an uncommonly bad prophet...
...At about the same time, a relatively unknown Swiss professor of history, Jacob Burckhardt, was predicting that his beloved Germans would see the day when all would be robots in uniform, inarching to tunes called by Reviewed by George N. Shuster President, Hunter College a fanatical dictator...
...His book is short and crisp, resembling an elongated lecture, but it contains more valid information than American readers of history can easily find elsewhere...
...He can ferret out with great skill the notable moments in the progress of the race and make them not only come to life but serve to stimulate thought about the not too manifest destiny of the present...
...One of the virtues of Professor Kohn's book is that he introduces Americans to authors about whom, with the exception of Pestalozzi, they are almost completely ignorant...
...Let us begin with the third...
...At any rate, a distinguished historian, ranging far and freely across the terrain of modern nationalism, leaves us once more greatly in his debt...
...Protagonists of these fought many a lusty battle between Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative...
...I personally believe that all serious thinkers about European unity will hold in their mind's eye the examples of the United States and of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...Had Marshal Weygand and his colleagues extended the Maginot Line across the Argonne, Hitler might well have struck across the Swiss Jura, turning the flank of the Gotthard fortress...
...Men like Jeremias Gotthelf and Gottfried Keller ought to be part and parcel of the universal literary patrimony, but for some strange reason they have not been...
...Others have considered them masters of the political arts, with the love of freedom in their blood, who knew how to keep out of war and sundry other forms of mischief...
...It may be that the professor failed in the last part of his prophecy only by reason of French cooperation...
...To some authors, among them the once famous Count Keyserling, the Swiss seemed a perverse and miserly people who made milk chocolate and milked tourists...
...Switzerland is an amalgam of various linguistic, religious and racial cultures...
...Mazzini, who believed firmly that the future of liberal institutions would be insured by nations most enamored of nationhood, pinned his hopes on Italy, Germany and Poland...
...This seems to me extremely doubtful...
...Then the Nazis would have deposited their moneys in Dutch banks and there would have been a different story to tell...
...More important is his contention that Switzerland is a model according to which a United Europe could be constructed...
...Hans Kohn brings his vast knowledge of trends and ideas to bear not on the Swiss "problem," but on the question of how the people of the cantons managed to be ardently patriotic without succumbing to the various forms of megalomania which during the past two centuries have beset nationalistic Europe...
...They all profit by the teaching and example of notable writers...
...The devotees of French, Switzerdutch, German and Romansch live side by side in, on the whole, remarkable affability...
...Professor Kohn touches on the doctrine of Swiss neutrality, now become a fateful issue in Europe, but it lies outside the scope of his inquiry and so what he says is quite innocuous...
...The mountain cantons have in the past been afraid of Zurich, but they know now that the city could be starved out very easily should it (as seems wholly unlikely) acquire any grandiose ideas...
...France, Germany, Italy, Spain are factors possessing totally different dimensions...
...The real reasons why Europe is difficult to unify are threefold —manifest differences in cultural heritage, inequality of economic achievement, and fear...
...Mazzini thought that the Swiss were dullards unaware of the rhythm of history, and Burckhardt seems to have fancied that his country was just a little dot on the map which would surely be inundated...
...The second, conceived of as bereft of its Hapsburg-inspired faults, may well be the final model, as Couden-hove-Kalergi thought would be the case...
...But after 1848 the country settled down to enjoy the benefits of a democratic constitution based on Anglo-Saxon models...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 5
