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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Pray tell why do the Chinese indulge in eradication of culture in Xinjiang if diversity is so awesome?

Homogeneous in the modern use of the word.

> Homogeneous in the modern use

What does it mean if it includes heterogenous populations from linguistic, historic, religious and even cultural backgrounds?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

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.

>source

Arguably common knowledge but if you must. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

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.

As the joke goes the HRE was none of the 3.

As for a source on the history of the confederation: https://youtu.be/OpA_ET9bYGY

…why is a lawyer my old firm used a Swiss historian!

Which one is the lawyer?

I think they mean racial/ethnic.

> they mean racial/ethnic

"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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_people#Cultural_history_...

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.

I think that it's pretty obvious that the user that you're responding to is using the term 'homogenous' as a euphemism for "white"

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'm not - not everything is about race. That's a pretty basic lesson that World War 2 taught us, that you should have learned.

What did you mean when you said homogenous, given the reality of Switzerland, its history, its civil structure, its languages, and its culture?

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

Apologies - I've no idea what you're trying to say.

> 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.

I get hard working and low crime, but why does homogeneity make a country rich?

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

I’d point out two things:

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.

I quite agree. It's a diversity of peoples who have developed an umbrella identity that dates back a long time. And it's been very successful!

They have a successful federal structure; much more so than more recent confederacies referred to by others in this thread (Belgium, Canada).

Can you list the statistics that demonstrate the exceptionally diverse population?

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.

OK, you probably have a point. As they say, once you've seen the La Tène cultural package....

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.

Can you say the quiet part out loud, please? I'm having trouble hearing what "something else" is meant to convey.

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...

It's a dog whistle for "if a country's racial identity remained pure everything would've been fine".

It's nothing to do with race. You need to gain the mindset that not everything is about race.

If it’s nothing to do with race, then why is a country with four official languages being called “homogeneous”?

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.

Switzerland, homogeneous? Is this some kind of joke?

> only spends 16% of GDP on public welfare

It's easy to not have to spend much money on public welfare when there is a constant stream of foreign money floating in.

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.

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