Attitide to the European Union: the risk of disrupting the Swiss society

Introduction. The processes that are going on now in Europe make a research of the social, cultural and political peculiarities of the Swiss electorate a timely issue due to their ambiguous attitude to the perspective of Switzerland joining the European Union.  

Materials and methods. The research is based on the theoretical and empirical analysis of Swiss ap­propriate sources and literature by using the meth­ods of historical, system and behavioral approach, that allowed us to define a causal relationship and differential signs of German-speaking Swiss com­munity as a particular ethnic group, to display most important factors that make the greatest influence on this group in terms of their attitude to EU.  

The results of the research. The Swiss elector­ate is deeply committed to the Swiss political insti­tutions. The principles of neutrality, federalism and direct democracy are supported by all population of Switzerland irrelatively of their ethno-linguistic di­versity. That is why many Swiss Eurosceptic argue that the membership in the EU is incompatible with political traditions of the Swiss Confederation. The repudiation of the EU membership is mostly peculiar to a great number of the German-speaking Swiss due to their political and cultural habits. On the contrary French-speaking Swiss mostly stay for joining the EU. We presuppose that a sufficiently high level of repudiation of the EU membership by the German-speaking Swiss can be explained by two main rea­sons: on the one hand, all Swiss belong to the state that has no general cultural (ethnical) attributes that make them more vulnerable to the institutional am­bitions of the EU, on the other hand, being German-speaking Swiss they belong to the ethno-linguistic and territorial unit which has no institutional sup­port and vivid cultural articulation. Being squeezed from both sides by the political and linguistic factors the German-speaking Swiss electorate possess a la­tent feeling of vulnerability and a nation-exclusive type of identity, which is the reason of their Euro­scepticism.  

Discussions and conclusion: the European Union wants to clarify the outlines of its relations with Switzerland. But the more resolute its politi­cal line becomes in this respect the more definitely the German-speaking Swiss electorate will perceive that this policy is a danger to their identity and the stronger their willingness to stay outside the EU will become. If we take into account that the German-speaking Swiss population is three times as big as the francophone Swiss population, Switzerland will apparently remain outside the EU in the foreseeable future.

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