Ethnography of a political ritual: speeches given to new Swiss citizens by representatives of the state

Abstract

Our paper examines speeches given at citizenship ceremonies in Geneva (Switzerland) in order to understand what makes a foreigner a new member of a national and especially of a cantonal entity. Focusing on speeches by three ministers over an interval of 4 years, we analyze their conceptions of the state, the nation, and of nationality, and the kind of change – if any – this rite of passage acknowledges. We observed that the variations that appeared, ranging from an assimilationist view to a conception of citizenship mainly encompassing rights and duties, reached beyond the political positions of the magistrates who wrote and read the speeches. We aim to show that official discourse covers a broad range of conceptions of the state and of citizenship, independently of the political position of the state representative making the speech.

Keywords::

• naturalization
• nationality
• citizenship
• nation
• Switzerland
• ceremony
• speeches

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Dr Anne Lavanchy for her valuable comments on this paper. We also thank the editors as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive remarks.

Table

Notes

^1. We use the term nationality to render this meaning of citizenship, reserving the term citizenship itself for talking about citizenship in a larger sense than nationality (Gagné and Neveu 2009), referring for example to non-scalar citizenship (Isin 2007), to acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen 2008), to horizontal citizenship (Neveu 2009), or to vernacular citizenship (Clarke 2009).

^2. Switzerland has been depicted as an example of a mononational state since ‘the Swiss today share a common national identity as Swiss over and above their separate linguistic, religious and cantonal identities’ (Miller 1995, 84–85), but also as a multinational country – and for Kymlicka, even ‘the most multinational country’ (Kymlicka 1995, 18) – whereas Habermas (1991), Mason (2000), and Abizadeh (2002) see it as a perfect example of a postnational state.

^3. One presided over by Laurent Moutinot in 2008, two by Isabel Rochat in 2012, and two by Pierre Maudet in 2012. The transcription of Moutinot's speech was published in the official journal of the Republic and Canton of Geneva of the 9th of May 2008 and is available online at http://www.ge.ch/fao/2008/20080509.asp. The speeches given by these three magistrates are analyzed later.

^4. Geneva has Switzerland's highest proportion of foreigners in the population, reaching 41% in 2013. Geneva also hosts numerous international organizations (such as the United Nations, the International Labor Organization, and the World Health Organization).

^5. Unlike Geneva, other cantons do not use the term ‘cantonal nationality’. In Wallis, for example, the candidate receives the ‘right of citizenship’ in the canton (based on membership in a particular commune) and Swiss nationality.

^6. Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation, 18th of April 1999, article 37, §1.

^7. In 1993, and again in 2004, the organization of ceremonies was encouraged by ministerial circulars. Since 2010, the procedures have been managed by the municipalities.

^8. In their book Le droit d'être Suisse, the historians Studer, Arlettaz, and Argast (2013, 156–163) show that notions of filiation and assimilation were still dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. Anton Heil, the president of the Federal Commission for Foreigners, was very much alone in 1969 in proposing that candidates for naturalization should not be obliged to break with their foreign origins when becoming Swiss.

^9. See later the analysis of her speech.

^10. It supposedly sometimes happens that candidates say ‘I-swear-or-I-promise’ instead of choosing between the two responses. We never heard it, but it is one of the jokes told by the civil servants who organize the ceremonies. It could be a way of saying that they would not be against strengthening the naturalization rules, especially regarding language proficiency. Nevertheless, people seem to know the difference between the first one, which refers to the religious sphere, and the second, which has a secular connotation.

^11. Citizenship oaths differ from one canton to another. However, we did not witness any substantial differences between oaths from one canton to another.

^12. As stated in article 3 of the federal constitution, ‘The cantons are sovereign except to the extent that their sovereignty is limited by the federal constitution. They shall exercise all rights that are not vested in the Confederation.’

^13. This form of naturalization concerns the husband or wife of a Swiss citizen and the foreign children of a Swiss mother or father. See articles 27–31 of the Naturalization Act.

^14. When we spoke briefly with him at the end of the second ceremony, we observed that he acknowledged that proudly, saying that it was ‘normal’ for the speech to renew itself.

^15. We refer to Switzerland's often-mentioned direct democracy and to Geneva's nongovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations and the Red Cross.

^16. For other examples of speeches implying ‘good’ ways to express cultural differences, see Ossipow (2011) and Kromidas (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Centre d'études de la diversité culturelle et de la citoyenneté, Geneva.