Abstract
When debating asylum, Swiss parliamentarians often refer to Switzerland’s long tradition of granting asylum to refugees. Swiss asylum benefited several thousand French Huguenots who fled to Geneva, the birthplace of their Calvinist faith, after the St. Bartholomew Massacre in 1572. Another 20,000 Huguenots came to Switzerland following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and while initially hospitable the Swiss confederation, which had a largely poor, rural, and religiously divided population of only 1.5 million, soon showed “compassion fatigue,” a term commonly used to describe today’s attitude toward asylum.1
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Notes
For more on the Huguenots fleeing to Switzerland, see Markus Kung, Die Bernische Asyl- und Fluchtlingspolitik am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Geneva: Droz, 1993).
Britain played a critical role in protecting Switzerland from its neighbors throughout much of the nineteenth century. For more on British-Swiss relations during this period, seeAnn G. Imlah, Britain and Switzerland 1845–1860: A Study of Anglo-Swiss Relations during Some Critical Years for Swiss Neutrality (Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1966). For more on refugees in Switzerland in the nineteenth century, see Jean-Charles Biaudet, “Der Modernen Schweiz Entgegen,” in Handbuch Der Schweizer Geschichte: Band 2 (Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus, 1977); Herbert Reiter, Politisches Asyl im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Deutschen Politischen Fluchtlinge des Vormarz und der Revolution von 1848/49 in Europa und den USA (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992); Irene Collins, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Historical Association, 1957); Gottfried Guggenbuhl, Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft: Zweiter Band (Erlenbach-Ziirich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1948).
Hans Kohn, Nationalism and Liberty: The Swiss Example (NY: Macmillan, 1956).
Joachim Remak, A V ery C ivil W ar: T he S wiss S onderbund W ar of 1847 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
Cited by Gordon A. Craig, The Triumph of Liberalism: Zurich in the Golden Age, 1830–1869 (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 84.
Cited in Herbert Reiter, Politisches Asyl im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Deutschen Politischen Fluchtlinge des Vormarz und der Revolution von 1848/49 in Europa und den USA (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992), p. 230.
Werner Rings, Schweiz ins Krieg (Zurich: Ex Libris, 1974), p. 326.
For more on Swiss asylum legislation, see Walter Kahn, “The Legal Condition of Refugees in Switzerland,” Journal of Refugee Studies 7, 1 (1994), pp. 82–95.
Walter Kalin, “The Legal Condition of Refugees in Switzerland,”Journal of Refugee Studies 7, 1 (1994), pp. 83–4.
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© 2000 Niklaus Steiner
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Steiner, N. (2000). Switzerland: The 1979, 1986, and 1994 Parliamentary Asylum Debates. In: Arguing about Asylum. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299422_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299422_2
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