Direct democracy in the canton of Lucerne
The direct democracy in the canton of Lucerne formed in the 19th century with the expansion of people's rights to state and municipal level and the concretization of popular sovereignty . Lucerne was the first canton in which an actual veto debate was held as part of the Lucerne Constitution of 1841 . This debate, which took place in the press, in parliament and in public, was groundbreaking for the further development of direct democracy in the other cantons and at the federal level. Nowhere else in the Swiss Confederation did a cantonal population have so much power.
Resistance tradition for a just rule
The city republic of Lucerne had its sovereign rights over its subject area, which largely corresponded to today's cantonal borders, in the 14th / 15th centuries. Acquired in the 18th century and expanded to the state sovereignty. It ruled - hardly restricted in its sovereignty by the confederation with the Confederation - over its subject territory. As a Catholic suburb and the seat of the papal nuncio , Catholicism was the state religion. The Jesuits and Ursulines were responsible for the upbringing as well as aristocratic academies in France and Italy.
The predominance of the city-state of Lucerne over the countryside was considerable and, as in the other city-states of the Confederation, periodically led to revolts between the urban rulers and parts of the countryside. As early as the last decade of the 14th century, Lucerne had to explain to the people of Entlebuch who was in charge of the country. In 1434 the people of Entlebuch had to take punishment again. In 1513 the landscape rose in the Onion War . In the Swiss Peasants' War of 1653, the largest of all Lucerne rebellion movements began in Entlebuch.
The offices invoked their traditional rights and the freedoms of the rural parish cantons and defended themselves against new requirements imposed by the authorities. The religious foundation of the old law established the idea that the concrete old law was identical with an ideal justice. Peasants could invoke the positive old law to fight for “just rule”, to limit claims of the rule or to exert pressure on the rule to implement changes.
The 1841 Constitution
Community freedom and democracy from below
The constitution of 1841 followed on from a conflict-ridden, continuous process that had created small autonomous areas in the form of cooperative communities (resident, local citizens or corporation communities) since the late Middle Ages. At this political level, the electorate received increased basic political training from 1841, which went hand in hand with the expansion of the elementary school and was based on the assembly tradition since the Helvetic Republic. The municipalities were added to the constitution as the fifth power to emphasize their importance for the democratization of the canton. They should - as with the "old community freedom " - perform their tasks as independently and responsibly as possible in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity :
A good community organization is one of the most important branches of the state institution. In a democratic free state, the communities are the most excellent bearers of all popular life. The greatest possible freedom must therefore prevail here, and the state should only interfere negatively in its internal affairs, ie it should not want to govern the communities itself, but should only seek to prevent the general welfare from being harmed.
Mayor, community councilors and all community officials should now be elected by the community itself.
The veto debate
After 1830 the press became an important factor in the political debate in Switzerland. The freedom of the press - which already existed during the Helvetic era - was reintroduced at the legal level in Lucerne in 1829 and incorporated into the 1831 constitution. In the 1830s, the liberal Confederate (1831), the conservative Waldstätter Bote (1831, from 1833 in Schwyz), the conservative Luzerner Zeitung , the early socialist Lueg is Land (1839), the first liberal-radical, from 1840 conservative -democratic Swiss Federal Newspaper (1838).
The rural democrat Josef Leu , who came into opposition to the ruling liberal system and was forced out of the Grand Council in 1832, built his extra-parliamentary network on the prayer clubs of his mentor Niklaus Wolf von Rippertschwand . He was also supported by the newly formed Catholic Association, the Luzerner Zeitung and, from 1840, by the Swiss Federal Newspaper. In February 1840, the rural movement collected 11,793 signatures for the Horn petition, which demanded a total revision of the constitution and brought in specific demands (veto right, expansion of popular rights, concretization of popular sovereignty, free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion, Jesuit appointment), which had already been introduced in the Lueg is Land , the Luzerner Zeitung and the Schweizerische Bundeszeitung have been proposed for months.
For the liberals, in particular, the call for the Jesuits to be called to the Catholic education of young people was a red rag. In doing so, the rural democrats provided them with a fighting argument on which they built their counter-campaign. With the help of the Schutzverein founded by them in 1831 , they collected signatures, but only received around 4,000. In May 1840, Casimir Pfyffer made the liberal demands (no veto and no referendum ) at the meeting of the Society for Patriotic Culture (formerly Agricultural-Economic Society ) in Sempach , representative constitution, state education, no Jesuit appointment, no theocracy and ochlocracy ) for the upcoming constitutional revision.
The rural democrats founded a central committee linked to the prayer clubs and the Catholic club, which the urban conservatives joined. The gathering of rural democrats and liberals around Jakob Robert Steiger on November 5, 1840 in Ruswil and their Ruswil Memorial formed the climax of the extra-parliamentary revision struggle and the dispute about more direct democracy.
With the motions of Josef Leu in the Grand Council of November 20, 1839, in which he insisted on cantonal sovereignty according to the old federal alliance tradition and the protection of the Catholic religion, the debate on the constitutional revision was also initiated in parliament. The Grand Council rejected Leu's motions and initially prevented a lengthy revision debate.
The young press system and the extra-parliamentary activities of the liberals and rural democrats created the necessary publicity and ensured that the topics of religion, democracy and the constitution were widely discussed in the population and thus created the prerequisite for the Lucerne people on January 31, 1841 clearly agreed to the request for a constitutional amendment. On March 31, eight days after its establishment, the Commission of Seventeen was able to submit a draft constitution to the Constitutional Council.
The Constitutional Fathers
For theoretical reflection and the practical implementation of direct democracy in Switzerland, political defectors were often decisive.
In Lucerne, during the regeneration crisis (1830–1841), Konstantin Siegwart-Müller switched from radicals to rural democrats, Bernhard Meyer from liberals to moderate, while Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler served as a bridge and until 1841 had a close relationship with Siegwart possessed. During the constitutional debate, these three intellectuals provided the central impetus for advancing the democracy debate. Troxler and Siegwart made decisive contributions to the veto debate and the referendum and introduced socio- ethical aspects. Troxler carried the ideas, objectives and idealistic enthusiasm of Helveticism into the 19th century and thus became a theoretician of Catholic democracy without sharing its ecclesiastical direction. For all three as well as for the rural Lucerne democrats, modern natural law and Christian social ethics with their ideal of equality were central. On this basis, the basic set of liberal freedoms of the 1831 constitution was adopted in that of 1841.
The aspect of personal freedom has been reinforced. Bernhard Meyer, the editor of the conservative Commission of Seventeen, which prepared the draft constitution for the Constitutional Council, justified this as follows: "This freedom is one of the most precious goods and it lies essentially in the purpose of the state".
Expansion of democratic rights in terms of voting and election rights
The central element of the new constitution, popular sovereignty, was specified in the first article of the constitution with the sentence that the canton of Lucerne is a democratic free state . The Free State was no longer a democratic, representative one , but a direct democratic one, in which the will of the people , true public opinion, represents the highest law, which only bows before God, religion and justice.
The previous restrictions on voting and election rights and the political prerogatives of the city of Lucerne have been removed. From 1841 all civil servants had to regularly stand for popular elections, all government elections, including the elections to the Grand Council, should be direct. As with the previous constitution, only Catholic men were entitled to vote and vote. In order to achieve true popular sovereignty, various popular rights were enshrined in the constitution:
The popular initiative for annual total or partial revisions by revision communities within the framework of the community assemblies was introduced. When the absolute majority of all voters in all the auditing communities held in the canton had voted in favor of a revision, a constitutional council with 100 members had to be elected by the people. Every citizen was allowed to submit his wishes and views to him. For the adoption of the constitutional draft of the Constitutional Council, an absolute majority of the citizens voting was required. The introduction of an absolute majority - without any quorum - was a national novelty.
With the compulsory constitutional referendum, the voters could decide on constitutional and federal treaty amendments by the Grand Council (legislature). The Commission of Seventeen pointed out that the expansion of people's rights would not lead to more unrest among the population, as the liberals claimed, but that more direct democracy would lead to more public peace and order.
The canton of Lucerne was the third canton to introduce a legal veto and the first to hold an actual veto debate in the press, parliament and the public. St. Gallen introduced the veto in 1831 as a compromise solution by the Constitutional Council and the early theoretician of direct democracy, Franz Anton Good . Baselland wanted to use the veto in 1832 - during the turmoil of separation - to separate itself from the more backward Canton of Baselstadt. With the instrument of the veto to the veto communities, the Lucerne voters were given a say in legislation, alliances, contracts, etc. and thus became the highest legislative authority in terms of popular sovereignty.
Liberalism, Catholic Conservatism, and Direct Democracy
The liberal idea of the state, which dates back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, had a lasting impact on democratic development. For the Swiss state, the liberals achieved equal rights for the cantons, individual rights of freedom, popular sovereignty in the sense of the constitutional power of the people, the principle of representation and legal equality, and they did development work for the humanitarian primary school.
For the conservative-democratic Lucerne-born Philipp Anton von Segesser , liberalism was a theoretical view that would contradict the old democratic national spirit and seek its support outside the people, initially in the aristocratic-absolute state power, then in Helvetian-French rule.
After 1830, the Grand Council in Lucerne was ruled by a "capacity regiment" of a few liberals who vehemently opposed the demands for more direct democracy and warned against "mob rule". As a result of the increasing liberal aristocratization, popular sovereignty turned into a mere farce, deteriorated the relationship between people and government, especially with the regeneration, and gave rise to growing rural opposition.
The mostly Catholic-conservative rural democrats of Lucerne managed to win a majority in the Constitutional Council through education and mobilization of the population ( Horn petition February 1840, Ruswiler Memorial 1840) and, in the new constitution of 1841, they were able to gain people's rights on an unprecedented scale for Switzerland integrate. This anchored direct democracy in broad sections of the rural population and laid a decisive foundation for the modern Swiss Confederation.
The Catholic conservatives saw their religion endangered by the utilitarian principle favored by liberal theory , which ultimately removes its ethical basis. Direct democracy enabled them to participate in the exercise of state authority as “sovereign power” and to act politically at any time, for example to protect their religious freedom. For the historian Pirmin Meier , in the conservative understanding, direct democracy is a regulator, which does not prevent progress, but slows it down until it can finally be understood with the heart. This legacy of the losers from 1848 is a feature of political life in Switzerland to this day.
The practice of veto (1841–1869)
The learning processes with the new direct democratic instrument of the Volksvetos fell from 1841 to 1847 at a time of strong political and confessional polarization in Switzerland. The tests under extreme conditions showed that it was not the veto that sparked unrest in the population, but on the contrary contributed to the fact that the possibility of an orderly and structured expression of opinion of a violent argument could be prevented to a certain extent, despite the four veto movements during this time never succeeded in rejecting the contested laws (tightening of the press law, Jesuit appointment). Even the veto against the resolution of the Grand Council of October 24, 1844 on the appointment of seven Jesuits to Lucerne, which resulted in a violent conflict with the two free troops of 1844 and 1845, did not materialize. Even the liberals now recognized the value and effect of the veto as an outlet.
Even in the years 1848–1863, the Lucerne democracy did not develop into the ochlocracy feared by the liberals. Although the political environment was highly charged up to the Sonderbund War , the citizens never misused their new means of power against the government and the constitution. The liberals, who had been in power again since 1848, pushed through partial revisions of the constitution in the Grand Council, but retained the right of veto because they now saw it as a preventive measure against unrest and overthrow.
In 1862 the liberals ( partialists ) in the Grand Council called for a total revision of the constitution by the council, in which a referendum should be introduced instead of the veto, which should also apply to tax decrees and government bonds. The rural democrats ( totalists ) and a liberal minority council started a popular initiative for the election of a constitutional council by the people. In doing so, they joined a supra-cantonal direct democratic movement that increasingly questioned the liberal system of representation. On March 29, 1863, an amendment to the constitution was adopted by the people, which turned the veto into a veto referendum (similar to today's optional referendum ). The new state constitution of January 29, 1875 was based on the federal constitution of 1848 and its revision of 1874 as well as the constitutional revisions of 1863 and 1869.
The development of the Lucerne legal covenant into an optional referendum also took place in other cantons. The good political experience with the veto created new majorities for the further development of direct democracy, including the liberal forces.
Elements of a theory of direct democracy: natural law, cooperative principle, popular sovereignty
Modern natural law with its personal image of man is an indispensable prerequisite for the formation of direct democratic structures. With the establishment of the School of Salamanca , the transition from Christian to modern natural law began on the basis of the personality principle , which was taken up by the Enlightenment of the 18th century. In Lucerne's legal veto , the cooperative ( regional ) community democracy , which was based on Christian natural law, was merged with the modern natural law idea of the Enlightenment with its individual rights.
In the canton of Lucerne, state sovereignty was formed from the centralized power of the original sovereign Lucerne state and on the basis of the decentralized cooperative community of farmers and citizens in the free municipalities. According to the historian Adolf Gasser, this communal freedom was shaped by communal communal ethics, which are an important basis for a democratic state structure from the bottom up. The cooperative principle, as a counter-model to the feudal system of rule that is widespread in Europe, developed a community-building and integrating force, without which a willing nation Switzerland could not have come into being.
The popular sovereignty built up from the practice of autonomous, cooperative communities had to be constitutionally secured with political instruments such as the veto or referendum at cantonal and federal level so that it did not remain a dead letter. The rural Democrats Lucerne transferred basically the idea of a natural law founded popular sovereignty from the social contract of Rousseau in their constitution. In his sense, they were of the opinion that only that people could be called sovereign who recognized no foreign will as a legislator beyond their own. And that the sovereignty of the people follows a doctrine which, flowing from the nature of man to the formation of the social condition, makes the people master of himself.
Today's canton constitution
The state constitution of 1875 was partially revised over forty times and adapted to the new circumstances. The most important partial revisions were the financial referendum (1969), the women's right to vote (1970), the parliamentary, government and administrative reform (1995), the municipal reform (2001).
In 1998, the Conference of Cantonal Governments (KdK) decided to support the Federal Council in developing and implementing the internal reforms that would be necessary in the event of Switzerland's accession to the EU, and to play an active role in shaping them. Experts and the working group agreed that the important reforms should come into force before or at the latest at the time of any accession decision, because some of the innovations should already take place during the accession negotiations.
The new cantonal constitution of 2007 replaced the state constitution of 1875. The total revision was initiated in 2001 by the government council (executive), which justified this with deficiencies in content and form in the current constitution. The draft constitution was drawn up by the constitutional commission from 2002 to 2004 for submission to the government council. At the end of 2005, the government council resolved the revised draft of the cantonal constitution after the consultation and passed it on to the cantonal council (under the previous constitution it was still called the Grand Council). The Cantonal Council set up a special commission to advise it. On June 17, 2007, the Lucerne population adopted the new, totally revised constitution, which came into force on January 1, 2008, with a majority of 64 percent. On June 12, 2008, the federal councils approved the constitution of the canton of Lucerne.
All cantonal referenda since 2000 are listed in the list of cantonal referendums for the Canton of Lucerne .
literature
- Ludwig Snell : About the position of the Canton of Lucerne in the Swiss Confederation . Yearbooks of History and Statecraft, Volume 1, 1830.
- Rolf Graber (Ed.): Democratization processes in Switzerland in the late 18th and 19th centuries . Research colloquium as part of the research project “The democratic movement in Switzerland from 1770 to 1870”. An annotated selection of sources. Supported by the FWF / Austrian Science Fund. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Vienna, 2008. 93 p. Series of publications by the International Research Center “Democratic Movements in Central Europe 1770–1850”. Vol. 40 Edited by Helmut Reinalter, ISBN 978-3-631-56525-4 .
- René Roca, Andreas Auer (ed.): Paths to direct democracy in the Swiss cantons . Writings on Democracy Research, Volume 3. Center for Democracy Aarau and Verlag Schulthess AG, Zurich, Basel, Geneva, 2011. ISBN 978-3-7255-6463-7 .
- René Roca: Bernhard Meyer and the liberal Catholicism of the Sonderbund period: Religion and Politics in Lucerne (1830–1848) , Diss., Verlag P. Lang, Bern 2002, ISBN 3-906769-85-2 .
- Roca René: «True popular sovereignty» or «Ochlocracy»? The debate about direct democracy in the canton of Lucerne during regeneration , in: Der Geschichtsfreund, 156th volume, Altdorf 2003, 115–146.
- René Roca: If popular sovereignty is really to become a truth ... Swiss democracy in theory and practice - the example of the Canton of Lucerne . Writings on Democracy Research, Volume 6. Center for Democracy Aarau and Verlag Schulthess AG, Zurich, Basel, Geneva, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7255-6694-5 .
- Bruno Wickli: Political culture and “pure democracy”. Constitutional struggles and rural popular movements in the canton of St. Gallen 1814/15 and 1830/31 , St. Gallen 2006.
Individual evidence
- ^ Eduard His : Lucerne Constitutional History of Modern Times (1798–1940), Lucerne 1940
- ↑ Peter Blickle, University of Münster: Aims of peasant resistance and the "good old law". Towards a Peasant Rebellion Model - Summary . In: Peter Blickle, Peter Bierbrauer, Renate Blickle and Claudia Ulbrich: Riot and outrage? Studies on peasant resistance in the Old Kingdom . Munich 1980, 296-308
- ↑ Pirmin Meier: The Lucerne Conservatives - Losers in History? In: Luzerner Zeitung, November 6, 1998
- ^ Gasser: Community freedom as the salvation of Europe. Basic lines of an ethical conception of history, Basel 1947
- ↑ Thomas Fleiner: The autonomy of the Lucerne community in the system of Swiss community autonomy, Wauwil 1986
- ↑ Schweizerische Bundeszeitung, April 3, 1840, editor: Constantin Siegwart-Müller
- ↑ Working group "European reforms of the cantons": The cantons facing the challenge of joining the EU . Conference of the cantonal governments under writings on Swiss legal policy (ed.). Schulthess Zurich, 2001. ISBN 3-7255-4235-X , pages 2 and 331