Armed neutrality since the 1500s still guards twenty-six cantons
Switzerland, a landlocked confederation of 26 cantons at Europe’s crossroads, divides among Alps, Plateau, and Jura, with Bern as federal city. Four language regions—German, French, Italian, Romansh—share a state whose 1291 Federal Charter is treated as founding paper and which has avoided international war since 1815.
Hominids left traces here about 150,000 years ago, and the oldest farming village, at Gächlingen, dates to around 5300 BC. The La Tène culture, named for a site on Lake Neuchâtel, flourished from about 450 BC, and its Helvetii held the Plateau. Urged on by the aristocrat Orgetorix, they set off west in 58 BC, only for Julius Caesar to crush them at Bibracte and send them home. Roman towns such as Aventicum and Augusta Raurica prospered in the first two centuries AD until Alamanni raids after about 260 turned the region into a battered frontier.
Burgundians brought French to the west while Alemanni settled the Plateau and later the Alpine valleys. Clovis defeated the Alemanni at Tolbiac in 504, and after the Treaty of Verdun in 843 the land was split until the Holy Roman Empire reunited it around 1000. Magyar raiders razed Basel in 917 and St. Gallen nine years later, so Zurich and other towns were walled. Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden gained imperial immediacy to guard the passes, and in 1291 those three rural communes sealed the charter now treated as the nation's birth certificate.
Westphalia confirmed independence from the Empire in 1648. The confederacy was one of only two republics, with San Marino, to outlast Napoleon, though France imposed the centralised Helvetic Republic from 1798 until 1803. The present federal state dates from the 1848 constitution.
Swiss identity is often called a Willensnation, a nation held together by will rather than shared language or faith. The codes CH and CHF come from the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica, after the Helvetii, who also lent their name to a 1960 typeface. About 9 million people live here, mostly on the Plateau, in a country that birthed the Red Cross, hosts the WHO, WTO and FIFA, and has the highest nominal wealth per adult.
Source: Switzerland
