Local Global Switzerland.

When we were in Sarajevo, a politician said he wanted Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH ) to be like Switzerland. I thought that was ambitious. In our global Capitalist system, Switzerland is where world leaders solve a “problem” like Bosnia. But he was not referring to international politics. He wanted BiH to adopt the Swiss Canton (state) system, so that Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks could live autonomously, but linked as a confederacy.

Switzerland, like BiH, is composed of diverse ethnic groups. German, French, Italian, and Romansh-speaking people live in four different sections of the country, divided further into twenty-six autonomous Cantons, which legislate issues from water management to education and healthcare. 

Each Canton has their own holidays, reflecting local culture. The only national holiday is on August 1, the day we arrived for our one-month stay in the Canton of Baselland. Fireworks lit up every corner of the sky to celebrate the day in 1291, when the three Cantons signed an agreement to form a Confederacy to fight off foreign invasions, giving birth to the current political system. From its origin story, communities allied against common enemies. 

William Tell is part of the Swiss National Independence Day myth. He’s the one who proved his marksmanship by splitting an apple on his son’s head with an arrow.  When I was a kid, my Dad used to play the William Tell Overture and tell us the story. We would try to balance apples on our heads.

Come to think of it, William Tell has a lot in common with Bosnia’s Gavrilo Princip. Both slew  Austrian Dukes, 600 years apart, one with an arrow, the other a gun, birthing nations. There are differences. Princip was real, and today, he is a partisan figure, while Tell is fictional and universally embraced.  

My father is central to my other early perceptions of Switzerland. He loved the Heidi story, especially Heidi’s declaration to sickly Clara, who escaped the ills of Frankfurt for the Swiss Alps: I knew the mountains would make you well!

 When The Sound of Music came out, we went to see it three times. I remember Dad standing up in the back of the theater, crying when they crossed the Alps to freedom. Like the Trappe family, his German-Jewish family sought refuge in Switzerland.

They did not find it.

My great-grandparents tried to cross the border and were turned back. When the Nazi’s seized Jewish assets, my grandfather transferred funds to Switzerland, but when he needed the money to get out of Germany, the Swiss bank would not allow him to withdraw it.  For one of those reasons, in 2005, we received checks for $800 from the Swiss government—the amount they deemed they owed by my deceased father, divided by four kids. The year before, Switzerland formally pardoned Swiss citizens who had been punished for illegally assisting Jewish refugees. (We visited the Memorial to these righteous ones and the people they assisted, created in 2011-15 in Reihen, Switzerland, on the German border. Its doors are open and unstaffed. We sat in the library by ourselves for several hours, reading and researching. )

The reparations check came while I was working on an immigrant rights fundraiser in Minneapolis to support workers who experienced workplace raids at meatpacking plants in southern Minnesota.  (ICE precursor). The money helped us put on a successful event.

Other preconceived notions of Switzerland came from a childhood friend whose parents emigrated from Basel. From her, I conjured up images of a place where everything was better: water, air, healthcare, and baked goods.  A couple of years ago, she moved back to her parents’ homeland. We connected, and she and her partner took us to her favorite place, a mountain paradise, with 360-degree views of the famous Alpine peaks. The long train and funicular rides up the mountain were perfect for catching up with my BFF. Our bodies are older, but we are the same people we were as teenagers. Only lifelong friends know that. 

Baselland 

We spent most of our month in the urban foothills of Baselland, where French, German, and Swiss borders intertwine. The entire region is one economic entity. Most working-class people and immigrants live just outside of Switzerland, giving visitors to Baselland the false impression of equitable economic prosperity. 

One of the first things I noticed was the plethora of grocery stores. We walked everywhere and did not see a food desert. Our neighborhood had some boarded-up and abandoned buildings, but no payday loan centers or all-night liquor stores. There are people without homes in Basel, but the number is minuscule compared to a US city like Minneapolis.

It is legal to drink alcohol outside in public spaces in Baselland. Maybe that is part of why you don’t see broken bottles or empty beer cans littering places where people like to drink. You will not be ostracized or arrested for drinking and then carrying the containers to a receptacle. Maybe there is less excessive drinking.  In Latvia, which has the highest alcoholism in Europe by some accounts, we saw people sneaking drinks at the bus stop, then ditching the evidence.  We did see people in Basel doing intravenous drugs in a back alley on our way to the train station. They were wasting away, not recreating. Addiction is everywhere. 

The first time we saw a community garden, each with its own hut, I thought it might be a low-income neighborhood. But the huts were not for living. They are for storing garden implements and having a picnic in your garden.  Housing is mostly apartments, so these gardens were people’s yards. We had one nearby that was big enough for a nice walk. Signs warned us of consequences for picking what was not ours. I laughed, thinking the vegetable gardens were more heavily surveilled than homes. There are no mosquitoes in Switzerland, and people leave windows open, wide enough for someone to climb in. I guess it makes sense– food is so expensive. I was surprised that we were the only ones picking concord grapes from a public park. In the grocery store, you trade a limb for a purple bunch of die Trauben.

We had a Baselland Card that allowed us free transport on Baselland public transit as long as we stayed within the Canton borders.

The trams are clean, comfortable, and only busy at rush hour. We also walked everywhere, happy to be where sidewalks are wide and cars stop when you approach a yellow crosswalk, even at rush hour.

 

Our neighborhood had woods nearby with a human-made creek that was part of the water filtration system. Despite its unnatural contours, it reminded me of beloved Minehaha Creek in Minneapolis. 

 

Switzerland and the world 

As a young adult, before I learned about my family’s experience, I was exposed to the myth of Swiss neutrality, which complemented my childhood perception that the world would be better if we were all like Switzerland. It is not completely a myth. United Nations meetings and global peace negotiations happen in Geneva. The Red Cross was founded there. As I write, there is talk of moving the UN Convention from New York to Geneva due to President Trump denying visas to the Palestinian delegation. The world is a better place because Geneva exists. But neutrality involves more than creating space for international meetings. In a global capitalist economy, neutrality is impossible. Nations decide what side they are on, not just by their foreign diplomacy, their financial relationships. and their refugee policies.

The Swiss were the innovators of informal empire. Never hampered by the costs of colonialism, they were always available to profit. These are the origins of wealth in this prosperous country, where the cost of living is the most effective gate to immigration. 

Yet the myth persists. As recently as 2017, a Swiss politician visited the Door of No Return in Benin and said she was glad to be from a country that was not involved in the slave trade. In truth, the foundation of Swiss wealth was built on the backs of enslaved people. The founder of Credit Suisse, Alfred Escher, owned a coffee plantation in Cuba. Swiss banks owned predominant shares in a British slaveship company. Switzerland was actually the last European country to end its ties to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Switzerland owes reparations to both West Africa and Cuba. Switzerland leads in pharmaceutical manufacturing. It could provide Africa and Cuba with the medicines they want. Switzerland could fund Cuba’s global medical relief projects. 

Historian Bernhard Schär noted that Switzerland has been central to all of Europe’s colonial projects, from the Atlantic slave trade to religious and academic exploitation. We discovered this when researching museum possibilities in Zurich. The global city is filled with the looted treasures of Native America, Asia, and Africa.  A statue of Alfred Escher greeted us at the Zurich train station.

A few weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, BLM protestors in Zurich demanded that the Escher statue come down. A committee was set up to consider it. The statue has not been removed—yet. Pushed by the global Black Lives Matter movement, the National Museum in Zurich curated an exhibit on Switzerland’s connection to colonialism and slavery, which opened in September 2024. Unfortunately, it was no longer there when we visited. I was impressed, however, by the Museum’s commitment to a narrative that was not all positive, and brought its historical chronology up to the present. They boast about it in their brochure, so I imagine this is a new commitment.

What are the major 21st-century issues facing Switzerland, according to the Museum? Climate change, immigration, and an aging population. Bernhard Schär noted that Swiss anti-immigrant sentiment and policies toward Global South countries are not only immoral but also disingenuous. The Swiss have been interacting with the world for centuries. 

They had a fantastic exhibit on the building of a hydroelectric dam that included personal testimony of those whose communities were destroyed, the relatives of those who died in workplace “accidents,” the environmentalists who still oppose the project, the planners and funders who supported it and the Italian immigrants who actually built the dam, only to be sent home when the work was completed. 

We were able to join activists in their weekly protest in downtown Basel against Swiss complicity in the genocide in Gaza. We met in the Aushchenplatz, a central transportation square, during rush hour, and stopped traffic. This week, the focus was on Palestinian journalists murdered by the Israeli forces. The organizers handed out posters with pictures of murdered journalists for us to carry. We marched to the newspaper building to demand that Swiss journalists speak up, and to USB bank to demand an end to Swiss investments in genocide.

A few days later, walking in the Birsfelden neighborhood, we found a cemetery.  I was impressed by the individuality of the stone decorations and the live flower garden. The lack of military memorials and veterans’ stones. stood out. Though Swiss soldiers have been fighting European wars as mercenaries for centuries, the Swiss government has been officially neutral and pacifist since 1815. There is no need to encourage future soldiers with honorifics to the dead. The municipal cemetery tells ethnic and religious stories: with Catholic, Protestant, and secular markers,  three recent graves for Muslims, and one Jewish.  

Looking closer at the Jewish gravestone covered with pebbles, I noticed the famous name.  Engraved on the stone is a quote from his daughter, Anne. I posted about this on Facebook. One person objected to spending time and online space on the most famous child victim of the Nazi Holocaust when Israeli Zionists are currently committing genocide against Palestinian children. After all, Otto Frank was a Zionist.

For me, it is all the more important now for us to act and remember.  Those of us fighting fascism and genocide must be leaders in antiracism, resisting every fall into racializing victims or perpetrators.

The dead don’t speak. It is up to us to make the connections that liberate.