Federal project from 1655

All attempts to centralize the old confederation in Switzerland , to make the contractual relations of the old and the associated places more uniform, to set up a court of arbitration and to resolve differences of opinion about the interpretation of the old confederations failed. Such attempts were made in 1554/55, 1655 and 1776.

The federal project of 1655 was a proposal to combine the old leagues into a single federal instrument, i.e. a document. Since the author of this text, Mayor Johann Heinrich Waser of Zurich, closely followed the wording of the old letters and hardly changed the content of them, he and the evangelical towns could hope for approval from the Catholic towns. The Catholic localities, however, refused such a new version of the old leagues, which had not been confirmed by the oath since the Reformation. The reason for this rejection was probably the fact that the new version would have opened up the possibility for all places to enter into special alliances with each other and with foreign powers, and thus also made possible a special evangelical covenant as a counterweight to the golden covenant of Catholic places.

literature

• Hans Nabholz: Federalism and centralism in the federal constitution before 1798. Politisches Jahrbuch 30, 1916. S. 208

• Norbert Domeisen: Swiss constitutional history, philosophy of history and ideology. Bern 1978. p. 68 ff.