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Reviewed by:
  • A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891
  • Celia Applegate
A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891. By Oliver Zimmer (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003) 269 pp. $65.00

Zimmer enters into the tangled discussions of nationalism and nation-building with confidence and flair, providing both a great deal of fascinating detail about the chronically ignored national identity of the Swiss [End Page 649] and an equally large dollop of common sense about the balance that scholars should strike between theories and empirical research. Throughout his densely argued narrative of Swiss developments in national identity across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he never loses sight of broader comparisons to other national histories—German, French, British, and others. Students of nationalism will not just learn about Switzerland but will benefit from Zimmer's unusually penetrating insights—many of them modestly placed in footnotes—into the blind spots, oversights, and instances of simplemindedness present in all the competing arguments about national identity and nationalism.

Zimmer is certainly committed to interdisciplinary research: His chapters make good use of the concepts of anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and others. But he brings a bracing skepticism about any inadequately considered transfer of concepts from one discipline to empirical research in another. One example among many should suffice. In discussing the growing antagonism among Swiss writers of the eighteenth century toward French cosmopolitan culture, Zimmer rejects the notion that this antagonism is explicable simply in terms of a functional need "to erect a symbolic boundary" between "Us" and "Them," "Self" and "Other" (common terminology in widely read studies of nationalism). Zimmer points out that such a move derives from anthropological work on the maintenance of small ethnic groups, commenting pithily, "Whether this model is equally suitable for the macro-level of analysis (which I severely doubt) ... has rarely been critically reflected" (76). He argues instead that the Swiss patriots of the late eighteenth century drew on an already existing set of "core myths" in their opposition to French dominance of European culture. In other words, they had no need to invent the self simply in opposition to the other; the self had its own resources upon which to draw. For such insights alone, the book is a small gem of analysis and conceptual sophistication.

As this example indicates, Zimmer has far more to offer than criticism. His own preference in interdisciplinary work is what he calls "medium-range concepts," which are particularly "suitable for concrete historical analysis" (xv). In this spirit, he undertakes a contextual, chronological investigation of two persistent elements in Swiss national identity: first, the ways in which historical memories constituted the actual content of many debates about national identity, and, second, the interplay between "voluntaristic" and "organic" notions of nationhood in the views of the Swiss themselves. These "pivotal principles" structuring "the discourse of national identity in the long nineteenth century" appear again and again in the debates that he examines throughout his chapters, as one political conflict, crisis, or change succeeds another, each in turn affecting the content and meaning of Swiss national identity (240).

Zimmer's most important contributions are to demonstrate persuasively and thoroughly that nationalism is "a contentious ideology and practice," that "cultural contest and contestation were instrumental in [End Page 650] popularizing the modern nation itself," and that national identity amounted to "a competitive project with many participants and an unpredictable outcome" (14, 118). His book represents a model of close historical research into the political and social conflicts of a state, linked to careful linguistic analysis of participants' statements. It is a model that future scholars of nationalism would do well to emulate.

Celia Applegate
University of Rochester
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