page_title: Swiss people
section_title: Cultural history and national identity
hierarchical_section_title: Swiss people / Cultural history and national identity
caption_attribution_description: Die Landsgemeinde, Gemälde von Albert Welti (1862-1912), 1910/12, fünf Felder, je 273 x 144 cm, Guache auf Papier auf Leinwand, Kunsthaus Zürich, Eigentum der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft. Das Original befindet sich im Ständeratssaal in Bern.
context_page_description: The Swiss are the citizens of Switzerland or people of Swiss ancestry.
  The number of Swiss nationals has grown from 1.7 million in 1815 to 7 million in 2016. More than 1.5 million Swiss citizens hold multiple citizenship.
  About 11% of citizens live abroad.
  About 60% of those living abroad reside in the European Union.
  The largest groups of Swiss descendants and nationals outside Europe are found in the United States and Canada.
  Although the modern state of Switzerland originated in 1848, the period of romantic nationalism, it is not a nation-state, and the Swiss are not usually considered to form a single ethnic group, but a confederacy or Willensnation, a term coined in conscious contrast to "nation" in the conventionally linguistic or ethnic sense of the term.
  The demonym Swiss and the name of Switzerland, ultimately derive from the toponym Schwyz, have been in widespread use to refer to the Old Swiss Confederacy since the 16th century.
context_section_description: The Swiss populace historically derives from an amalgamation of Gallic or Gallo-Roman, Alamannic and Rhaetic stock. Their cultural history is dominated by the Alps, and the alpine environment is often cited as an important factor in the formation of the Swiss national character. For example, the "Swiss illness", the condition of Swiss mercenaries pining for their mountainous native home, became prototypical of the medical condition of nostalgia ("homesickness") described in the 17th century.
  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, and is often cited as a model for new efforts at creating unification, as in the European Union's frequent invocation of the Swiss Confederate model.
  Because the various populations of Switzerland share language, ethnicity, and religion not with each other but with the major European powers between whom Switzerland during the modern history of Europe found itself  positioned, a policy of domestic plurality in conjunction with international neutrality became a matter of self-preservation.
  Consequently, the Swiss elites during the period of the formation of nation states throughout Europe did not attempt to impose a national language or a nationalism based on ethnicity, instead  pushing for the creation of a civic nation grounded in democratic ideology, common political institutions, and shared political ritual. Political allegiance and patriotism was directed towards the cantons, not the federal level, where a spirit of rivalry and competition rather than unity prevailed. C. G. Jung advanced the view that this system of social order was one of a "chronic state of mitigated civil war" which put Switzerland ahead of the world in a civilizatory process of "introverting" warlike aggression.
  A similar view is attributed to Gottfried Keller, who is cited to the effect that the Swiss Confederacy could not exist without the endemic rivalry between cantons.
  From the 19th century there were conscious attempts to foster a federal "Pan-Swiss" national identity that would replace or alleviate the cantonal patriotisms. Among the traditions enlisted to this end were federal sharpshooting competitions or tirs,  because they were one of the few recognized symbols of pan-Swiss identity prior to the creation of the 1815 Confederation and because they traditionally involved men from all levels of society, including the peasants, who in Romantic nationalism had become ideologically synonymous with liberty and nationhood. An additional symbol of federal national identity at the federal level was introduced with the Swiss national holiday in 1889.   The bonfires associated with the national holiday have become so customary since then that they have displaced the Funken traditions of greater antiquity.
  Identification with the national symbolism relating to the Old Swiss Confederacy was especially difficult for the cantons which had been joined to the Helvetic Republic in 1798 without any prior membership in the Swiss Confederacy, and which were given the status of Swiss cantons only after the end of the Napoleonic era. 
  These specifically include Grisons, Valais, Ticino, Vaud and Geneva. 
  St. Gallen is a special case in a different sense, being a conglomerate of various historical regions created in 1803; in this case, patriotism may attach itself even to sub-cantonal entities, such as the Toggenburg. Similarly, due to the historical imperialism of the canton of Berne, there is c
caption: Landsgemeinde by Wilhelm Balmer and Albert Welti (1907–1914); an idealized National Romantic depiction of Swiss population and society.[10]
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