On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Keith Hudson wrote:
> How does the size of the civil service in
> Switzerland compare with other advanced countries? With all the different
> languages, is the civil service unified and heirarchic? (It is tremendously
> so in the UK, Germany and France)
In 1995, 3.8% of the workforce worked in public administration (schools
and healthcare not included) -- I don't know how this compares to other
countries. But the structure is probably more important than the number
of employees: Although hierarchic (like all public administrations?), the
decisions are taken "as low as possible" in the hierarchy, i.e. the higher
administrators only decide what the lower admin's can't decide because it
applies to the higher unit of administration. The 3 levels are
municipality, canton and federation; the 26 cantons all have their own
local parliament and local laws. The languages are nearly proportionately
represented in the local and federal administrations.
> >In my region, the "second language" that people once learned was the
> >language of their neighboring region. Now it is English. This means
> >that neighbors won't communicate with each other in the native language
> >of one of them, but in English, which is a foreign language for both of
> >them. This will increase the "misunderstandings" and decrease the sense
> >of community among neighbors.
>
> Interesting! I can understand that this will "decrease the sense of
> community among neighbors" -- but how much of this was there anyway?
This varies among individuals, generations and regions. In the past,
the sense of community was enhanced because most citizens spent some
time of their youth in the other language regions (e.g. military
training or apprenticeship). The common history especially during
WWI+II also enhanced the sense of community. The youth, however,
seems to be increasingly "internationalised" (and is, of course,
most susceptible to the EU PR..).
> That
> is, say, between the German- and French-speaking regions. I'm sure they
> both thought of themselves as Swiss but just how much do they think of
> themselves as regional? I think that people in such a federal system don't
> think consciously about this very much.
That's right, but since the mass media have catched the EU 'bug', they try
to construct a trench especially between the German- and French-speaking
parts. The French-speaking regions seem to be more pro-EU, which is kind of
ironic because in the EU, they would suddenly lose their federal privileges,
and become the final and last province of centralist Paris...
> For example, Scottish and Welsh
> people in the UK -- when questioned -- have always thought of themselves as
> Scottish or Welsh rather than British, but the English, until recently,
> would have been puzzled by a similar question. The nationalistic political
> propaganda of the last 100 years or so, which was primarily aimed at the
> Scottish and Welsh populations actually only worked on the English. Even
> so, it hasn't worked very well because, sice the rise of Scottish and Welsh
> nationalism, and the foundation of their Parliament and Assembly
> respectively, the English have suddenly discovered that they're English --
The urge for local independence usually comes when the whole state becomes
unsuccessful. We can see this all over history -- a crass recent example
being Yugoslavia. (Oops, now we're back on the topic of the subject line!)
Greetings,
Chris
