SwitzerlandEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Switzerland: Alpine village An Alpine greenwich village near Saint Moritz in the amphetamine Engadin valley, Graubünden guangzhou, Switzerland .© thomas.andri/Fotolia
A landlocked state of towering mountains, deep Alpine lakes, grassy valleys dotted with neat farms and small villages, and thriving cities that blend the honest-to-god and the newly, Switzerland is the nexus of the divers physical and cultural geography of western Europe, renowned for both its natural beauty and its way of life sentence. Aspects of both have become bywords for the country, whose identical name conjures images of the glacier-carved Alps beloved of writers, artists, photographers, and outdoor sports enthusiasts from around the world .
Britannica Quiz
Which Country Is Larger By Population ? quiz
This quiz will show you two countries. Identify the one with the larger population. This quiz is based on Britannica ’ s list of the global ’ sulfur populations, so review that before you start .
For many outsiders, Switzerland besides evokes a comfortable if rather sedate and unexciting society, an persona that is now dated. Switzerland remains affluent and neat, but its mountain-walled valleys are far more probably to echo the music of a local anesthetic rock band than a yodel or an alphorn. Most swiss exist in towns and cities, not in the idyllic rural landscapes that captivated the world through Johanna Spyri ’ south Heidi ( 1880–81 ), the nation ’ south best-known literary influence. Switzerland ’ sulfur cities have emerged as international centres of industry and commerce connected to the larger world, a very different tenor from Switzerland ’ second isolated, more inward-looking past. As a consequence of its signally durable stability and carefully guarded neutrality, Switzerland— Geneva, in particular—has been selected as headquarters for a wide array of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, including many associated with the United Nations ( UN ) —an organization the Swiss resisted joining until the early twenty-first hundred. Switzerland ’ s rugged topography and multicultural milieu have tended to emphasize difference. People living in close proximity may speak markedly distinct, sometimes closely mutually unintelligible dialects of their foremost lyric, if not a different lyric all in all. german, french, italian, and Romansh all enjoy national condition, and English is spoken widely. invisible lines separate historically Protestant from historically Roman Catholic districts, while the tall mountains of the St. Gotthard Pass disjoined northerly from southerly Europe and their divers sensibilities and habits. Yet, Switzerland has forged forte from all these differences, creating a passive club in which individual rights are carefully balanced against community and national interests.
Switzerland was formed in 1291 by an confederation of cantons against the Habsburg dynasty—the Confoederatio Helvetica ( or Swiss Confederation ), from which the abbreviation CH for Switzerland derives—though only in 1848, when a new constitution was adopted, was the present nation formed. Prior to 1848, home conflict was quite common, but Switzerland has enjoyed proportional domestic tranquillity since the mid-19th hundred, and its administration has remained basically the same : it is a union of more than 3,000 communes, or municipalities, situated in 26 cantons, 6 of which are traditionally referred to as demicantons ( one-half cantons ) but function as fully cantons. ordinary citizens are able to participate at every tied of politics and regularly exercise their will in referendum and initiatives, through which Swiss citizens immediately make numerous policy decisions at the national and subnational level. Two effects of this popular engagement are apparent : swiss taxes are preferably low by european standards, because voters are able to review and approve a broad image of expenditures, and political decision making tends to be boring, because contending individual claims and opinions must be allowed to be expressed at every step. That eminent flush of citizen participation prompted the celebrated 20th-century swiss dramatist and satirist Friedrich Dürrenmatt to allegorize Switzerland as a prison in which each Swiss citizen was at the same time prisoner and guard. even so, the swiss blend of federalism and direct democracy is unique in the world and is considered cardinal to the area ’ sulfur political and economic achiever. And Switzerland is indeed a major economic world power, thanks to its retentive custom of fiscal services and high-quality, specify manufactures of items such as preciseness timepieces, optics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, ampere well as of specialization foodstuffs such as Emmentaler tall mallow and milk cocoa. Switzerland is regularly judged to have among the world ’ second highest standards of living. Bern is a placid city whose name derives from the digest pits the canton ’ sulfur medieval rulers established there as a heraldic symbol ; the digest pits are now region of the city ’ s popular menagerie. A city carry along a big lake where the mountains meet the plains, Zürich is by far the area ’ second largest and most cosmopolitan city, its famed Bahnhofstrasse rivaling shop districts found in other leading cities in the world. Basel and Lucerne are major german-speaking cities, Geneva and Lausanne the centres of the state ’ south french-speaking cantons, and Bellinzona and Lugano the principal cities in the Italian-speaking Ticino .
Zürich Zürich, Switzerland .© Digital Vision/Getty Images
Basel The Rhine River at Basel, Switzerland .Norbert Aepli Switzerland has long been a model multiethnic, multilingual company, a target in which diverse peoples can live in sociable harmony and unite in coarse interest. The swiss justifiably take big pride in this, and the distributor point was encapsulated in the early twenty-first hundred by Ruth Dreifuss, who in 1999 became the area ’ s first womanhood and first jewish president ( a mail that rotates annually ) :
I may be a native loudspeaker of french, but my parents primitively came from German-speaking Switzerland and I myself worked in an italian-speaking area for a while and enjoy travelling to all parts of the country…. I live in a vicinity in which over 100 different nationalities live together in peace and harmony…. I greatly appreciate this diversity .
