Communal Democracy and Liberal Democracy: An Outside Friend's Look at the Swiss Political Tradition

This article offers a brief overview of the history of Swisscommunal liberty. The author traces the development of key conceptsand practices, especially the use of covenant, that were employedto strengthen and expand the federation. The author then explainshow the cultural background of the peoples that settled Switzerlandcontributed to the formation of the polity. In a comparativeanalysis between liberal democracy and communal democracy, theauthor notes that the struggle to synthesize the conflict betweenthe theories and practices of these two forms of democracy hasbeen at the heart of Swiss politics for the last 200 years.