Coping with deviance: Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century OLIVER ZIMMER University College, Oxford ABSTRACT. This article highlights two processes that shaped Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century. The first concerns the competition between different nation-states and the nationalist visions these contests engendered. In a Europe dominated by the norm of the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation, the Swiss authorities, public intellectuals and various political representatives were desperate to display an image of national authenticity to the outside world. The result was a nationalism that combined voluntaristic and organic elements. In the second and main part of this article, the focus turns on citizenship; it is conceived not only as a social and legal institution, but also as a cognitive prism through which people defined their membership in the national community. Remarkably, the authority in granting national citizenship to foreign nationals remained firmly in the hands of the cantons and, above all, the Swiss municipalities. In practical terms, this meant that the Gemeinde provided the institutional and cognitive frame through which nationhood was primarily experienced, imagined and defined. While Switzerland represents a particularly strong case of a communalist polity, it should not be treated as unique. Instead, it should alert us to a potentially fertile yet little-explored area of research: what might be called the communal embededdness of the national(ist) imagination. KEYWORDS: Bu ¨rgerrecht, citizenship, communalism, conceptions of nationhood (civic, ethnic, voluntarist, organic), Gemeinde, nationalism, naturalisation, Switzerland, Wesensgemeinschaft, Willensnation. Introduction The decisive factor shaping Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century was the country’s structural inability to satisfy the premises of ethnic nationalism. For the Italian radical democrat Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, Switzerland did not constitute a nation because it lacked the ethno-linguistic homogeneity that he, like most of his contemporaries on all sides of the political spectrum, regarded as the hallmark of true and authentic nation- hood. Those few prominent voices that challenged the normative authority of ethnic nationalism – including, most famously, the French scholar Ernest Nations and Nationalism 17 (4), 2011, 756–774. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00518.x r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011 EN AS JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM NATIONS AND NATIONALISM