Question about the Swiss Nation

In the 1800's nationalism rose up everywhere in Europe (ie Basque, Catalan, Czech, Slavic, Italian, German, etc.) Why did the Swiss nation held together and never end up collapsing? What would Austria do in order for it to hold together as a nation. Its amazing that Switzerland is a melting pot and was never affected by nationalism. Switzerland has the secret of keeping countries together.
 
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Like has been said, the Sonderbund War took place in that time frame, but it was relatively bloodless. The Swiss had a common history, a tradition of democracy, and we're originally envisioned as a multicultural nation (Tricutural, maybe would be more accurate). So they had an environment that wasn't cohesive to nationalism, as far as I am aware...
 
One important thing to remember is that national identity is not linked to a language. It is perfectly possible, even in the 19th century, to share a national identity while speaking different languages or have seperate identities, while sharing a language.
 
In the 1800's nationalism rose up everywhere in Europe (ie Basque, Catalan, Czech, Slavic, Italian, German, etc.) Why did the Swiss nation held together and never end up collapsing? What would Austria do in order for it to hold together as a nation. Its amazing that Switzerland is a melting pot and was never affected by nationalism. Switzerland has the secret of keeping countries together.

The only real explanation I can think of is that it's due to Switzerland being so decentralised. If most of the decisions that actually affect your life are taken in your local community, the identity of the people making up the central government is going to seem of less importance.
 
What the above two posts say.

Switzerland did have a messy 19th century- being taken over by the French and then having an aborted internal war to form the modern country we know.

I guess one thing against ethnic nationalism in Switzerland is that traditionally Switzerland was a land of (mostly German speaking. Geneva a weird exception that wasn't part of Switzerland until the 19th century) self-governing cantons.
When a foreign power swooped in to rewrite the map it was Napoleon. Sure, the French speakers were happy enough about liberation for a while....but then after Napoleon they received self-rule, which is even better than Parisian rule.
Consider when the French took over Savoy, even there you had a lot of opposition to the take over and many people saying they'd rather join Switzerland.
The Napoleonic spread of Parisian culture across the entire country was not as powerful as is commonly believed.

The Germans...well they'd ruled themselves since forever. Why would they suddenly throw in their lot with the Prussians? They weren't involved with Germany.
 
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