Workshop “Transnational Histories of Switzerland”—University of Zurich—24 March 2016 1 Beyond Switzerland Reframing the Swiss Historical Narrative in the Light of Transnational History Discussion paper prepared by Pierre Eichenberger 1 in collaboration with Lea Haller, Christa Wirth, Thomas David, Matthieu Leimgruber and Bernhard Schär “National history is a trap,” wrote a generation ago historian Hans-Ulrich Jost. “The Nation as a reference for historical writing leads to such a narrow focus that historical understanding collapses. Historical myths,” he added, “were created to fill in the gaps created by this lack of historical understanding” (1994, p. 19). If one were to understand the history of society, he concluded, what was needed was a “European history of Switzerland” (p. 35). This intellectual project was formulated against the bulk of Swiss historiography, which was, and still is, characterized by a sense of national specificity—the Sonderfall Schweiz (Holenstein, 2014; Tanner, 2015). In that sense, Swiss historiography does not radically differ from its counterparts in other countries, as national historical narratives have long constituted a key tenets of nation building (Berger & Lorenz, 2010; Thiesse, 1999) and have decisively shaped the “imagined communities” that nations are (Anderson, 1983). National historiographies do have in common the fact that they are—by definition—framed by some “methodological nationalism,” which translates into an a priori framing of the research questions, fields of investigation and the fact that the mental horizon is fit into a national framework (Amelina, Nergiz, Faist, & Schiller, 2012; Wimmer & Schiller, 2003). Furthermore, the most important institutions contributing to the everyday practice of historians, such as public archives, professional associations and historical journals, were also nationally organized and contributed to give a national frame to the development of historical research. Geographers and historians have coined the expression “container history” to describe this framing of historical research (Taylor, 1995; Wimmer & Schiller, 2002). For historians specializing in the 19th and 20th centuries, the national framing of research questions is all too obvious since nation-states have shaped this period so deeply. Although researchers working on either the Middle Ages or the modern period—identifying trans- regional patterns of kin connections (Teuscher, 2011; Warren & Teuscher, 2011)—and those specializing in research on extra-European regions have long acknowledged the limitations of the “national container” for giving a full account of their objects of study, the national framing of historical questions is a characteristic of most historical writing, most obviously in contemporary history. In that sense, this nationalized vision of history has tended to offer a somewhat “partial view of reality” (Conrad, 2016, p. 15). Building on the pioneering work of key figures in the study of history—i.e., Fernand Braudel’s focus on Mediterranean space— and influenced by debates on the process of globalization during the 1990s and 2000s, historians have attempted to find ways out of the nationalist trap and have used concepts such as “circulations” to question the primacy of national realities, using “transnational,” “global,” “connected,” “crossed,” “compared,” “entangled,” “shared” or “(post)colonial” approaches. Although these approaches have specificities, which are developed in different contexts and which cannot be confused, they all have in common the questioning of the national framework in historical writing. Following a seminal definition of transnationalism by Akira 1 Corresponding author: pierre.eichenberger@fsw.uzh.ch