You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).
Nobody in Switzerland is worried about the population growing due to birthrate. This referendum is about stopping immigration (even though in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth).
> Wasn't Switzerland already a rich country by then?
In 1940, Switzerland’s GDP/capita was 2.9x [EDIT: the world average]; it peaked at 4.4x in 2000 and is now 3.8x [1]. (It increases linearly, long term, from the mid 20s until 2000.)
Relative to Western Europe, Switzerland was 1.6x in 1950, about the same as today.
In 1910 the foreign-born population was 14.7% and the drop around WWII was caused by other factors.
Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants. Arguably the wealth of today is the product of managing to avoid the worst of WWII and profiting from Switzerland's "neutrality" but that's an entire conversation by itself.
Well they were neutral, its just most folks, even otherwise smart ones, don't like true neutral behavior if it doesn't actually favor their side, hence such 'smart' snarky remarks I can see all the time, by people feeling they know history. Swiss accepted everybody, hundreds of thousands of refugees too, some parts even when it became obvious they will all face starvation since they were completely encircled by axis. Private banks accepted everybody's money, just like every global bank did before and after the war.
They secretly helped allies - check Campione d'Italia story for example. Thats very far from neutral behavior. And so on. But most people don't want to know facts, they want simple black & white stories.
It continues till today - they are officially neutral but look at their moves ie against russia during Ukraine war. Completely aligned with west (well apart from US which has top brass collaborating with their sworn mortal enemy). Look how their army looks like - 100% compatibility with NATO, 0% with russia or anybody else. They picked their side, they just don't boast around it, actions speak more than 1000 words.
> Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants.
This. In particular the chemical/pharmaceutical industry (which is still a major Swiss industry today) got bootstrapped in great part by French and German chemists moving to Switzerland where they could make chemicals that was patented elsewhere but not in Switzerland due to looser industrial property laws at the time.
It saw a fair bit of immigration before the war to get there. The war itself obviously helped enrich them by not being in it and also practically zeroed immigration. Immigration continued after the war.
There’s other factors, obviously, like early industrialisation.
>in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth
Such a claim would need terms to be defined, even before justification. Switzerland's mercenary attitude to immigration is well known, yes. I would argue that endogenous factors (history and culture) are far more important in explaining Switzerland's success. Neither natural resources nor immigration are determinative of a country's wealth. See: Japan, which historically has had neither.
Historically, Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states: immigration is strictly contingent on labor needs, and citizenship is almost completely out of reach.
> Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states
I need to say: Have you watched any YouTube videos about the way that low-skill migrants live and work in Gulf Arab states? It is horrifying. I will not downvote your comment if you reply in good faith. My point: Italian migrants who worked on big Swiss infra projects may not qualify for citizenship, but they did not have their passports confiscated by employers, nor lived in housing anywhere near the appalling conditions of Gulf Arab states.
If the referendum passes and the population crosses the threshold, Switzerland may need to remove itself from e.g. the Schengen area. All the remediations mentioned in the referendum are about suspending immigration.
All the butthurt people are going to come in here with screeds trying to upend a basic economic tenet that a growing population translates to economic growth if you can employ that growing population gainfully
> Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people.
That's a very dumb theory. People cannot just be exchanged: you cannot take say, 60 million people out of Bangladesh, put them in Japan, and expect Japan to stay the same. Just as you cannot take 60 million Japanese, put them in Bangladesh, and expect Bangladesh to stay the name.
That's a fact. But I could give a shitload of historical examples too... Here's one: when white and black people arrived in the americas, there was still cannibalism taking place in both northern and southern america. The americas had neither white nor black people. Today there's no cannibalism anymore and there are not many kids sacrifices happening in the US to please Inca/Maya gods anymore either.
A slightly more reasonable theory is that if you import people through immigration at a reasonable rate, you can assimilate those people. For example for a long time in Europe female genital mutilation wasn't a thing anymore. Now sadly due to mass migration, ask any ob-gyn doctor in western Europe what he sees and what kind of act he has to do: like re-stitching hymens to pretend the women-to-be-married are virgins (because, yes, there are patriarchal cultures where men are going to inspect a woman's hymen to make sure she's a virgin).
People just live in a fantasy land in their heads: there are 300 million women alive, today, who've been genitally mutilated (that's a very sizeable percentage of all the women out there). What's actually ongoing is weirder and shittier than most people realize.
I say good for Switzerland to curb immigration a bit.
People may be not dissimilar but cultures certainly are.
The first time I was in Switzerland was 1985, and even then, I would not call it "homogenous." The people at the time spoke French, German, Italian, and Romanisch. Switzerland is an excellent example of the "harmonious" rather than "homogenous": it manages to integrate people from four linguistic groups into a well-ordered society.
China has 8-10 major dialects that are not mutually intelligible, but many would say that China is pretty homogenous. 90% of the population is classified as "Han Chinese," even though the subgroups are quite visibly different from each other.
While it's terribly fascinating for linguists it's generally understood that the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture.
> the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture
Switzerland speaks languages from the Italic and Germanic clades of PIE [1]. That makes them about as dissimilar as Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages are from each of them.
Helvetia is a confederacy specifically because Switzerland has never been particularly homogenous. Homogeneity explains, in part, Nordic and Japanese success, though less and less the former in the modern era. It does not explain Switzerland’s.
Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires. The Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment. Arguably it was the Swiss greater class homogeneity that explains their success.
> Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires
Swiss territory has been part of, variously, the Roman Empire, various Germanic kingdoms, the Carolingian Empire, the HRE and Napoleonic France. Swiss independence was really only enshrined at the Congress of Vienna, I believe at the courtesy of Metternich. Of Austria-Hungary.
> Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment
Source?
> the Swiss greater class homogeneity
Yes, Switzerland was universally poor and started becoming wealthy with less inequality than other nations in the 1920s. (Note that in the 1910s like 15% of Switzerland was foreign born.)
The homogeneity pitch just doesn’t work for Switzerland.
Thank you. If the source is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, the Founders were operating on bad information. Napoleon wasn't the "first successful foreign invasion" of the Confederation, unless we're being cute about how the HRE was organised.
"In early modern Switzerland, the Swiss Confederacy was a pact between independent states within the Holy Roman Empire. The populations of the states of Central Switzerland considered themselves ethnically or even racially separate: Martin Zeiller in Topographia Germaniae (1642) reports a racial division even within the canton of Unterwalden, the population of Obwalden being identified as 'Romans', and that of Nidwalden as 'Cimbri' (viz. Germanic), while the people of Schwyz were identified as of Swedish ancestry, and the people of Uri were identified as 'Huns or Goths.'
Modern Switzerland is atypical in its successful political integration of a multiethnic and multilingual populace" [1].
I know plenty of Swiss-for-generations Swiss whose complexions would not have passed as white a hundred years ago.
Switzerland does not have a homogenous population, and to a reasonable person who has travelled in Switzerland I think this is an insane thing to be defending. A significant proportion of the population (certainly for Europe) do not even share a common first language. Significant proportions sit on different sides of the reformation which is again a big deal for Europe. etc
Homogeneous isn't likely the correct word. Shared cultural norms and "harmonious" is often more accurately what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous".
> what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous"
The Nordic countries were historically ethnically homogenous. Switzerland has been a multi-ethnic place since like the Helvetii were being picked on by Caesar.
Then they should say white. I'm prepared to give a lot of leeway when conversing with non-native speakers but as somebody who has grown up within a culture that understands that the concept of cultural homogeneity cannot refer to native speakers of non-mutually-comprehensible languages or historically antithetical religious positions, if they choose to use the word in novel ways that's their problem not mine!
I don't know what the exact word is - I wouldn't quite say "culture", as there are clearly different cultural backgrounds at work, but just as with Canada mixing French and Anglo traditions, there is a generally homogenous Western European metaculture at work, premised on the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, the rule of law (and equality of opportunity under the law), freedom of religion, the importance of education and hard work, private property, and personal responsibility.
Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change
> it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world
For most people in developing countries, Swiss banks are places where politicians and rich people stash ill-gotten wealth (corruption, crime, etc), because they know the banks will never let the legal system get back the money.
Because it favors social cohesion and social trust, which are strongly correlated with economic success. Americans are reflexively thinking of race, but that's entirely incidental and basically irrelevant.
But Switzerland emphatically does not have a homogenous population. It has an exceptionally diverse population, linguistically, religiously and culturally. And yet as you say it has an exceptional record when it comes to cohesion and social trust. Living the dream!
The social cohesion of Switzerland is mainly within the linguistic communities. Many Francophone Swiss hardly speak a word of German (just as their Belgian counterparts don't speak Dutch). And a large proportion of Switzerland's "diverse" immigrants are in fact from just across the country's borders (particularly Germans). "Diversity" is not what explains Switzerland's wealth.
Absolutely agree, and of course I would never argue that "diversity" explains Switzerland's wealth. It occupied a pretty unique and interesting place during the Reformation, and maybe there is something there. But the idea that either diversity or homogeneity can explain economic performance is obviously not bourne out by any serious examples. I was thinking about Belgium (and also thinking about Harry Lime) whilst typing away--it seems a bit of a counterexample to Switzerland where the same linguistic and cultural diversity within a country can lead to very different outcomes and senses. Nobody would ever write "Il n'y a pas de Suisse" as Destrée wrote "Il n'y a pas de Belges"--long history vs short history and as always the Reformation upheavals explain it perhaps
1) While Switzerland combines several ethnicities and cultures, the fusion dates back almost a millennium. The Old Swiss Confederacy arose in the 14th century, before Italian, French, and Romansh were even recognized as separate languages.
2) The Swiss federal structure goes to great lengths to give autonomy to the distinct groups.
So it’s not accurate to say that Switzerland is “homogenous” in the same way Denmark is homogenous. But it’s not like Switzerland’s Italian-speaking population grew from nearly 0% to the current 8% over a period of a few decades. There is a common umbrella identity encompassing these groups that dates back a long time.
Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This is an extraordinary level of diversity for a European country, and as other commentators have noted it isn't like there's a lingua franca: a large proportion of Swiss do not speak the languages used by other groups fluently--for example, 85-87% of Swiss don't speak French at all!
This should be quite straightforward evidence regardless of your cultural assumptions, but many people may not be aware of the impact and cultural importance of the Reformation in Europe, which in general meant that nations ended up with a state religion that was either Catholic or Protestant. Switzerland was pretty exceptional and in the 16th Century (which is the important period here) the population was split pretty much 50/50. This religious diversity is pretty important to its history as well as to wider European history.
I wouldn't call that extraordinary diversity - these are all Western European. I note you've added a new caveat "for a European country" as a get out of jail free card, but this "diversity" is extremely long-standing and, still, exists within Western Europe, the cradle of a hilariously disproportionate percentage of all of the social, civic, scientific, and technological advances the world has ever seen.
Interesting statistics and I for one will back up your analysis. But the Alpine woolly mammoth in the room is that, in 21st-century Europe, "cultural and religious diversity" does not, for most people, imply a heterogeneity of Germanophones and Francophones, or Protestants and Catholics. It means something else.
Sorry if cultural history and facts are a bit dull. I don't really want to argue about *something else* though; let's leave that to the *something else*ists.
It's not that the facts you presented are dull. It's that given the massive extra-European population influxes since WWII, the "cultural diversity" of any given West-European country (including Switzerland) is now far broader than the linguistic and religious distinctions you keep mentioning. You surely know this.
It's not even true, 40% of the population has an immigrant background. And as for low crime, yes, blue collar crime. Please don't ask about white collar crime, we don't talk about that here...
Why do people say China is “homogenous” when people speaking Cantonese can’t understand people speaking Mandarin? It’s because those groups of people have been part of a common polity off and on since the Qin dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.
Similarly, Switzerland has been a thing, in various forms, since French and Italian were considered different dialects of vulgar Latin. The groups that speak the four different languages nonetheless share 800+ years of common political and social history.
I’m pretty sure people say China is homogeneous because 90+% of the population is a single ethnicity, and approximately 100% is “Asian” for some meaning of that word.
What you’re describing is national unity or identity or something like that, not homogeneity.
Kind of a funny example, since Japan got crushed by the poster boy country for diversity, and this nonsense about homogeneity played no small part in their arrogance in thinking they could win.
I wonder why this got downvoted. Are we not supposed to mention the war? Does it make people uncomfortable to be reminded of how their rhetoric mirrors that of fascists?
That doesn't make much sense. Do you think foreign money is directly paid to people who would otherwise be welfare recipients? Is there anything foreign money can't do, would you say?
When foreign money flows into the economy, it generates jobs, and because there is so much of it, these jobs can be well paid. And when you got a population that has a low unemployment rate and high wages, you consequently need to spend less money on social welfare.
Probably the same as Britain, which didn't suffer any economic damage from leaving the EU. Look at current trade ratios, GDP and other core stats vs neighbouring France. No difference.
The EU single market is apparently not as important as it's cracked up to be. The EU has sanctioned Switzerland before and it didn't matter. And the Swiss economy is very strong.
One of those is an island, the other is a landlocked country that would quite literally starve to death if the EU decided to stop facilitating its access to international markets.
Switzerland exists purely at the mercy of the EU, it lacks the military capabilities to fight its way out to the sea and force an alternate reality.
The day Switzerland is able to conquer the north of Italy is the day they get to meaningfully negotiate with the EU.
Uh, that escalated fast! I really hope you're not European with threats like that.
EU tried all this bullshit with the UK too. Threatening to cut off electricity supplies and so on. The mask really fell, but in the end they didn't do it, they didn't even respect their own supposed red lines like cooperation on academic research. They meekly invited the UK back into their academic collaboration a few years later despite claiming at the time that it was a "privilege" tied to everything else by the laws of physics. So the idea an organization that weak is going to try and genocide an entire country over FoM is ridiculous.
At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.
What threats? I was simply pointing out the undeniable fact that Switzerland is utterly dependent on the benevolence of the EU.
The EU has unlimited ability to punish Switzerland with extreme precision and at a low cost, Switzerland has no meaningful ability to go tit-for-tat even at a very low level.
> At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.
Yes, you’ve succeeded at explaining why it makes a difference that Britain is an island. At the very extreme end, the EU would actually have to go to war with them instead of just issuing a NOTAM and sending a few cop cars to monitor border crossings.
Also, FWIW, at no point during Brexit has Switzerland been a better partner for the EU than the UK has.
The EU would have to rely on German, Austrian, French and Italian cops/soldiers to actually enforce any sort of physical blockade against Switzerland.
I am not certain if all the respective governments would simply obey such an instruction if they didn't have any beef with the Swiss themselves.
Which now means that the EU has to block not just Switzerland, but (say) Austria, which means compliance from four other countries (CZ, SK, SI, HU), which is even less probable etc. etc.
Ultimately, the EU is really good at processing papers, but doesn't have the power necessary to initiate physical punishments of this sort unless the relevant member states agree.
> The EU would have to rely on German, Austrian, French and Italian cops/soldiers to actually enforce any sort of physical blockade against Switzerland
Without these treaties, there absolutely will be permanently manned border checkpoints.
None of these countries love Switzerland enough to be willing to end the EU over it.
Manned border checkpoints are inevitable in that case, it would be an external border.
But of course a blockade isn’t a realistic option, the Swiss would fold immediately if they thought things were headed in that direction. You could never get to that point.
The point is that the EU can crush Switzerland with the stroke of a pen, they couldn’t crush the UK without going to war. Switzerland could never even consider a kinetic response, so its room to manoeuvre agains its vastly bigger neighbour is limited to begging for mercy.
It’s also important to remember that nobody in the EU likes the Swiss, they are notorious troublemakers who are tolerated at best and despised at worst.
only there are several studies like this:
"These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%"
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34459
If you read them carefully, you'll find no such studies are using a valid methodology. It's not a hard question to answer either, just compare like with like.
I guess? I mean, I'm sure there's a non-zero number of companies that relocated HQ on paper as that's easy to do, but it doesn't show up in GDP or trade stats. There aren't any problems with imports/exports either. Actually trade ratios between EU/rest-of-world have continued on their long term trend, you wouldn't know anything had happened if you look at the zoomed out view.
There was transient disruption around the time of exit, which might be where those stories you remember came from? Maybe someone found a photo of an empty shelf and blamed leaving the EU instead of COVID for some reason. But forms and stamps aren't very effective weapons and people quickly adapted to the new systems.
Brexit is one of those topics that resulted in a firehose of propaganda by the pro-EU global establishment because what it represented terrified them. It undermined deeply held visions of the future in which all of humanity was destined to be united under one world government. So you can easily find a long string of false or nonsensical claims about it if you look. For example, there are a bunch of academic papers claiming economic impact from Brexit. But if you look carefully, they show a loss of growth vs fictional countries that don't exist, or they assume the EU would have experienced sudden dramatic growth out of nowhere and stuff like that. It's all just sophisticated forms of lying.
You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).