Keywords

1 Introduction

1.1 The Question of Swiss Exceptionalism

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cooperative emerged as a new form of organizing consumers and producers across much of Western Europe. In their origin in England and later other European countries during the Industrial Revolution, the cooperative served the function, for example, of securing vulnerable populations against price fluctuations, especially for food stuffs and other basic household goods or pooling the resources and capital of producers.

Switzerland is no exception to this trend: what started as a movement of small consumer societies—such as bakery self-help associations—in response to the pressures of urbanization and industrialization grew over the course of the century and into the 20th in scope and scale. Today, Switzerland is home to a broad pallet of cooperatives, including some that occupy a commanding position within their sectors. Notable among this latter example are the Coop and Migros grocery retailers, who collectively account for over 70% of the retail market in Switzerland (Statista, 2020) (see Chap. 2).

There is, on the one hand, a great degree of overlap between the Swiss experience and that of its neighboring countries during the Industrial Revolution and into the twentieth century. At the same time, however, Swiss observers are and have been keen to stress the uniqueness of the Swiss experience vis-à-vis that of its European neighbors. Writing a century after the first modern Swiss cooperatives emerged, the historian Richard Feller commented rather matter-of-factly that,

The contemplation of our past cannot start from the basis of similarities, but from the uniqueness which has chosen and distinguished our small earthly space. We see this special feature in the cooperative and thus call up an ancient, life-giving force, which today has melded into the word Confederation [Eidgenossenschaft]. To be sure, the cooperative was not peculiar only to Switzerland but to all the original European peoples. But while elsewhere it withered and died away, it became our destiny, the pulse of the whole people. Why it happened differently with us than with the larger peoples around, that cannot be fathomed completely, but can only be hinted at with the assumption that our mountain nature was favorable and prosperous for the cooperative (Feller, 1962, p. 1).

A similar sentiment is evident 50 years later in the introduction to Swiss historian Franco Taisch’s work Genossenschaftsunternehmen. Ein Leitfaden. Taisch explains what he sees as a fundamental element of cooperatives, “namely the responsibility to promote the well-being of members of cooperatives.” He continues to argue that exactly this virtue is and has been a particular presence in Switzerland. He writes, “thinking in categories of values is part of the Swiss ‘national‘consciousness, a part of the identity of the Swiss Confederation” (Taisch, 2012).

In both of these observations, separated by half a century, then, we hear that cooperatives are somehow uniquely imbedded in the Swiss consciousness; that despite the largely parallel nature of their development to other European countries, cooperatives occupy a special meaning in the Swiss imagination; and that this is linked to the mountainous nature and past of the country. It needs to be noted here that the two above-cited examples are not extraordinary—the sentiment can be widely observed in texts, both academic and popular, that address cooperatives in Switzerland. Moreover, some authors have hinted at the exceptional nature of the Swiss cooperative experience, but suggested that once established in their modern form in the past century and half, cooperatives affected other aspects of Swiss cultural, political, and economic life in ways not found in comparable cases.

We are thus confronted with a question of what historians usually term exceptionalism, often found in discussion of the USA, Britain, and Germany (Blasi & Kruse, 2017; Escosura, 2004; Blackbourn & Eley, 1984). Put differently, is there historical evidence to suggest that the Swiss experience with cooperatives differed substantially beyond some general story or beyond the variances evident in any individual country’s trajectory when compared to an aggregate norm? Did, in other words, the cooperatives that emerged during the Industrial Revolution in Switzerland meet with more fertile cultural and political soil than in other countries? Was there something like a cooperative spirit? Did they, further, contribute to the political culture of Switzerland in ways out of the ordinary when compared to its neighboring countries?

Therefore, this chapter will examine the topic of Switzerland’s unique—or oft-supposed unique—experience through a historical perspective. Specifically, it seeks to discuss two questions:

  1. 1.

    How has the Swiss historical development of cooperatives differed from comparable European and non-European countries?

  2. 2.

    What accounts for these differences?

As with any question of exceptionalism, this chapter cannot provide a definitive answer. In fact, in the section below I provide a series of limitations to the present study. What this chapter can and will do, however, is chart the historical development of cooperatives in Switzerland and pair this with observations from comparable countries and try to situate any insights within recent findings in the global historiography of cooperatives.

1.2 The Limitations of Comparative Studies of Cooperatives

Both questions are challenging to answer with certainty, for a number of reasons. First, despite their prevalence in the past 200 years, cooperatives have remained until recently an understudied form of economic cooperation, especially when compared to corporations (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 97). In fact, while cooperatives were a frequent object of discussion and analysis in the early stages of Industrialization, they conspicuously disappeared from economics textbooks after the Second World War (Kalmi, 2006). While there has been renewed interest in the history of cooperatives in the past decade, there are many aspects of their development that remain understudied or poorly integrated into more recent trends and insights in historical studies.

This is even more so true in Switzerland. In what can be called one of the few formative texts on the subject, Robert Putschert writes that, “In academia and the public, questions about the Swiss cooperative system meet with little resonance” (Purtschert, 2005, p. 5). Bernard Degen, writing on the history of Swiss cooperatives in the comparative volume A Global History of Consumer Co-operation since 1850, states that, “During the past few decades, there has been very little historical research on consumer societies in Switzerland” (Degen, 2017, p. 615). For this reason, beyond broad discussions of cooperatives in Switzerland, we cannot speak of a sound foundation of studies or anything approaching a scientific consensus. In fact, most works that examine cooperatives in Switzerland are of the commemorative type, many of which emerged in the centennial celebrations of various Swiss cooperatives in the decades following the Second World War.

For this reason, Switzerland has often eluded the comparative studies that deliberately and intensely compare the cooperative experience in one country with another. While there are many examples of comprehensive studies—studies that profile cooperative movements and developments in multiple countries—there are few genuinely comparative studies (Kalogeraki et al., 2018, p. 870). Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that beyond basic metrics of the number of organizations and members, data, terminology, and classifications tend to vary between countries. Moreover, Switzerland being relatively small precludes it from being included in larger, well-funded studies, which have traditionally focused on the UK, the USA, France, Germany, and, more recently, India and other countries in the Global South.

Another complicating factor is that comparative histories are in and of themselves difficult to write. For one, similar terminology may hide widely different definition contours. This makes comparisons based on qualitative or quantitative historical evidence a challenge. Exemplary of this challenge is, for example, the fact that in the Swiss research community, cooperatives have usually been included within the nonprofit space (Purtschert, 2005, p. 3). However, in most other countries, cooperatives are not classified as part of the non-profit landscape and therefore fall outside of the purvey of the many research groups that deal with this space. This means that for the present study, perhaps the most authoritative comparative study is only marginally useful: the Johns Hopkins Non-Profit Sector project. This project stands out for its longevity and comprehensive nature and for bringing contributors from multiple countries together. According to the study methodology, cooperatives that foreground profit distribution do not meet the criteria to be included in the study. However, “those cooperatives, mutuals, and similar organizations for which the profit motive is secondary, and the primary intent is to offer services that benefit the broader local community could be included” (Center for Civil Society Studies, 2004). The result of this is that the center’s excellent work only applies to a difficult-to-define subset of Swiss cooperatives.

Another such challenge related from inconsistent categorization is emerging studies in the Social and Solidarity Economy [SSE] space (see also Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4.2). During the last decade of the twentieth century, social and environmental concerns gave rise to SSE initiatives aimed at tackling pertinent issues (Sahakian & Dunand, 2015), in a process reminiscent of the emergence of consumer and worker-owned cooperatives in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. In Switzerland, too, many such new types of organizations, ranging from work integration social enterprises, not-for-profit organizations, and new forms of cooperatives emerged in the past decade, especially clustered around the “Geneva Chamber of Commerce of the Social and Solidarity Economy” (Sahakian & Dunand, 2015). The difficulty is, as with the nonprofit literature, that some for-profit organizations fall within the purview of SSE—as long as, “it is aligned with the main SSE principles” (Sahakian & Dunand, 2015)—and, at the same time, some of the large cooperatives firmly integrated into the market economy are not. The emerging literature on SSE then, too, though one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of alternative economic arrangements today, is only marginally applicable to a historical study of cooperatives.

1.3 Chapter Organization and Starting Point

This Introduction is followed by two main parts. The next section provides a substantive comparative examination of the emergence and development of cooperatives in Switzerland. It sketches the stories of cooperatives in Europe and, more specifically, Switzerland from their emergence in the Industrial Revolution to the present period. It also provides a brief overview of the historiography of cooperatives with a particular emphasis on recent interventions. The third and final section of the chapter reflects back on our two primary questions and seeks to elucidate how the history of cooperatives in Switzerland aligns with and differs from the comparable cooperative experience in Europe and beyond and what may account for these differences. As such, I have chosen to anchor any speculation into the causality and effect of Switzerland’s experience with cooperatives in existing findings from the international historiography on cooperatives.

While highlighting differences, it is important to note that the research suggest that the Swiss cooperative experience has in fact a significant overlap with comparable European countries. The same forces that shaped the emergence of modern cooperatives during the Industrial Revolution impacted Switzerland in ways comparable to, say, Denmark or Austria. Nonetheless, as we will see, both in its longer-term antecedents and in its trajectory throughout the past 200 years, cooperatives in Switzerland have displayed some unique dimensions. Thus, the primary research question attempts at qualifying those differences, though in doing so, their highlighting does not suggest an a priori overvaluing.

Before proceeding, we will do well to briefly define cooperatives, especially as this becomes a critical dimension in the discussion of historiography below. The International Co-operative Alliance today defines cooperatives as, “people-centred enterprises jointly owned and democratically controlled by and for their members to realise their common socio-economic needs and aspirations” (International Cooperative Alliance,). A more academic definition is offered by Jonathan Michie, Joseph Blasi, and Carlo Borzaga, who speak of “organizations that assign ownership rights and governance control to stakeholders other than investors” (Michie et al., 2017a, p. xxiii). From this perspective, the type of members who own the cooperative is the key variable in cooperative typology: employee-, producer-, consumer-, or other member-owned, such as community-owned. There are, of course, other models for categorizing cooperatives, most notably focusing on the economic sector rather than ownership (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 99) (see also Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 for further discussions of the definition of cooperatives).

In this chapter, I employ the ownership model. Moreover, while all four types of cooperatives are discussed, I pay particular attention to consumer-owned cooperatives, since these were particularly prominent during the nineteenth century in Switzerland.

2 A Comparative History of Swiss Cooperatives

2.1 The Industrial Revolution and the Emergence of Cooperatives in Europe

The middle of the nineteenth century was a period of rapid transformation across much of Western Europe. What British historian Eric Hobsbawm famously called the “dual Revolution” saw both the overhaul of long-standing forms of political organization and the mechanization of production, paralleled with a growing integration of non-urban populations into large, eventually global markets, both as consumers and as producers. It is hard to overstate, how much change this Industrial Revolution drove. Joshua Freeman has pointed out that annual per capita growth was “essentially zero” until the Industrial Revolution. However, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has remained at 1% (Freeman, 2019, p. xiv).

In response to the disruptions and challenges ushered in by the Industrial Revolution and the onset of Capitalism, cooperatives emerged as a collective attempt by workers, farmers, and consumers to join forces (Ortmann & King, 2007). Robert Owen’s mill at New Lanark Scotland is a case in point; Owen transformed it into a cooperative village at the turn of the nineteenth century. Another regularly cited example is the founding of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844 (Gurney, 2017, pp. 109–132). Cooperatives proliferated over the following decades, in Europe, North America, and across the world (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 14).Footnote 1

While England eventually saw the emergence of most types of cooperatives, it stands out as the site of the first consumer cooperatives, such as Rochdale. France, in turn, saw the first workers’ cooperatives, such as the associations of carpenters, goldsmiths, and bakers, that emerged in Paris in the 1830s. Noteworthy, too, is the fact that the first legal framework for cooperatives emerged in France in 1848 (four decades before Switzerland, for example) (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 102). Cooperative financial institutions, on the other hand, first emerged in Germany—many of which were affiliated with religious agendas—whereas farmer cooperatives first emerged in Scandinavia (Michie et al., 2017c, pp. 102–103). As such, while the origin story of cooperatives has a British focus, it cannot be seen as exclusively so.

Many of these early cooperatives have earned a prominent place in economic and social history through their longevity or influence. Cooperative banks modeled on Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen’s credit union established in Germany in 1849, for example, are a fixture in Central Europe to this day. So too, the principles on which the Rochdale cooperative functioned were adopted widely by later cooperatives. In fact, the International Cooperative Alliance [ICA] credits Rochdale with “founding the modern cooperative movement” (International Cooperative Alliance ). The founding of the ICA in 1895, in turn, facilitated an exchange, coordination, and representation of cooperatives at an international level (Hilson, 2018).

2.2 The Industrial Revolution and the Emergence of Modern Cooperatives in Switzerland

Though different in details, Switzerland’s trajectory in the middle of the nineteenth century aligns with this larger story. After a civil war in 1847, Switzerland drafted a modern constitution and emerged as a federalist state in the mold of the United States. Factories sprang up, the rural population flocked to the cities, and railroads began crossing the plains and later the high reaches of the Alps. Emblematic of both was the opening of the Gotthard rail tunnel in 1882, which linked not only northern Switzerland to its southern enclave of Tessin but served, and continues to serve, as a vital channel in European economic integration.

There are, however, a few noteworthy differences between industrialization in Switzerland and the surrounding countries. A major one involves economic specialization. One Swiss economic historian describes that “Because of the lack of raw materials, because of the high-quality standard of the labor force, and not least because of the almost abundant capital, a specialization virtually imposed itself, which was constantly pushed forward in the second half of the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the high per capita value of exports” (Im Hof et al., 1986, p. 656). Another distinguishing characteristic of industrialization in Switzerland is the fact that with the absence of surface coal deposits, early sites of industrialization clustered around water rather than urban centers (Degen, 2017, p. 617). With the construction of the dense network of railways in the second half of the century, however, this early distinction lost most of its significance.

Where there is less of a difference in Switzerland than perhaps supposed is in the agricultural sector. While agriculture as a political and cultural issue has remained engrained in Switzerland to this day, as an economic sector, it aligned closely with comparative countries (Anthamatten & Dümmler, 2020). In fact, depending on the numbers one consults, the rate of transfer from farming to industrial labor progressed fast in Switzerland. In 1850, 57% of the working population remained in agriculture, in 1870 43% and in 1888 37% (Im Hof et al., 1986). By comparison, the average across developed countries in 1900 still stood at 48% (Griggs, 1975, p. 194).

Nonetheless, in taking the variety of experiences in industrialization in the various Western European countries, including Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, there is scant evidence to suggest that the Swiss experience is fundamentally unique. The same can be said for the early development of cooperatives.

On a superficial level, Swiss cooperatives emerged from similar forces and developed along similar lines to their other Western European counterparts (Sahakian & Dunand, 2015). Unlike in Britain, urban pressures that spawned the classic cooperatives were absent in Switzerland. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Britain’s urban centers were swelling, Switzerland only counted eight urban centers with a population above 10,000 (Kellerhals, 1990, p. 15). Basel, Switzerland’s largest city in the nineteenth century, counted only 60,000 residents as late as 1880 (Degen, 2017, p. 617). England, in the meantime, counted 11 urban centers with a population above 100,000 in the middle of the century, with London creeping close to the 3 million mark (Great Britain Census Office, 1861). As such, the household remained the most important site of production, with most Swiss families producing what they consumed in their homes.

From 1850 on, however, industrialization picked up pace in Switzerland, with the result of rapid urbanization and a proliferation of cooperatives. The first cooperatives arising in an urban setting and resembling those of Great Britain were the Allgemeine Arbeitergesellschaft in 1847 and the 1851-founded Konsumverein Zurich (KVZ). Already 2 years later, the latter called for an assembly of cooperatives. Though their efforts failed, the fact that 36 other cooperatives attended an exploratory meeting in 1853 points to the rapid expansion of the form (Kellerhals, 1990, p. 17).

One of the many new cooperatives that bears mention is the Konsumverein Schwanden, founded in 1863. It is noticeable because it based itself deliberately on the Rochdale model, after the textile manufacturer Jean Jenny-Ryffel encountered the famed organization on a business trip to England. The KVZ, by comparison, had not been open to new members, and “thereby breached an important Rochdale principle” (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 59). By 1881, cooperatives were established enough to be entered as a legal form through the Code of Obligations (Natsch, 2005). Until this point, cooperatives in Switzerland had been forced to register as corporations (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 59).

As in other countries, there are various antecedents to these formal cooperatives. Consumer associations centered on specific foodstuffs or hard goods, such as fuel, formed already in the early 1800s to mitigate price fluctuations. Such efforts remained tied to local urgencies. Exemplary of this are the bakery associations Boulangerie Mutuelle in Geneva (1837) and the Aktienbäkerei in Schwanden (1839) (Brassel-Moser, 2008). Another notable early cooperative—or consumer society Konsumverein, as they were almost uniformly known in Switzerland until well into the twentieth century—was the Basel-based ACV. With the cooperative not yet a legal form, the ACV was founded as a stock company in 1865. While focusing initially on the sale of bread, the ACV quickly expanded both its product range and its membership—attracting members beyond the traditional working class.

The ACV rose to particular significance when, in 1890, it called for the formation of a society of cooperatives, the Verband Schweizerische Konsumvereine, or VSK in German and USC in English—composed of 48 member societies. The USC expanded its reach and operations considerably during this period. In 1907, it opened a dedicated storage facility outside of Basel and constructed its own food processing mills, including for coffee, flour, and spices. In 1914, they registered the name CO-OP, under which name the USC as a whole functioned after a fusion in 1970. By the start of the First World War, the USC counted 387 cooperative members (up from the founding 43) and 263,034 member households (up from the founding 32,666) (Degen, 2017, p. 626). The USC read its mandate to support consumer societies broadly, and in addition to centralizing core functions in production and distribution, it offered support and training in functions such as accounting and management, and later expanded into publishing and political advocacy. First World War, VSK invested in agriculture and horticulture to aid in food security of the country (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 119).

2.3 Swiss and European Cooperatives in the Twentieth Century

In the twentieth century, cooperatives’ fortunes waxed and waned in response to enabling and restraining factors, such as favorable or hostile political and regulatory climates, as well as competitive market forces. The main contour of this history includes the challenges of Taylorism and Fordism’s dominance of production at the turn of the century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s promotion of cooperatives as a “third way,” National Socialist, Fascist and Soviet suppression of cooperatives, and the challenges of competing with corporations in the post-World War Two boom (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, pp. 18–20). More recently, cooperatives have reasserted themselves as viable alternatives to securing social justice and sustainable development (Mayo, 2013, p. 139), a development marked by the International Labor Organization’s explicit promotion of cooperatives in 2002 and the UN’s designation of 2012 as the “Year of the Co-operative,” as well as growing interest among various stakeholders following the financial crisis of 2007 and, more recently, climate action protests (Michie et al., 2017b, p. xxiv).Footnote 2

Within these broad trends, each country’s experience with cooperatives varied according to more localized factors. Switzerland is, in this sense, no exception. In 1914, cooperatives in Switzerland had 276,000 members in 396 societies. While these numbers pale in comparison to the 3 million members in the UK and the 1385 societies, per capita only Denmark had more members than Switzerland in cooperatives (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, pp. 89–90). In non-comparative terms, the period from 1890 through the end of the Second World War can be read as the high tide of cooperatism in Switzerland, with absolute numbers rising steadily, from 373 in 1883 to 1551 in 1890 to 7113 in 1910 (Brassel-Moser, 2008). While in 1900, roughly half were in the agricultural and foodstuff sector, this period also saw the steady emergence of cooperatives in other sectors, including insurance, banking, and utilities (Brassel-Moser, 2008)—though some have much earlier origins, such as the Mobiliar insurance, founded in 1826 (Ochsenbein, 1926).

Along with the USC, the other undoubted success story in the Swiss cooperatives retail space—Migros—traces its origin to the post-World War One period. It provides a fitting complement to the evolution of the Coop: whereas the USC was founded in a broad, multi-stakeholder fashion as an umbrella association for cooperatives, the Migros has its roots in the vision and drive of one individual only. As such, the two form the two extremes of cooperative origins in Switzerland that have, from the perspective of consumers today, merged into organizations difficult to discern from one another.

In 1940, Gottlieb Duttweiler founded the Migros as a cooperative (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 4). Its origin traces decades back, however. Dutweiller, a stalwart in Swiss economic history, was born into a middle-class family in 1885. He began his career working for a Zurich trading company. After an unsuccessful venture in Brazil, Duttweiler founded Migros in 1925 as a mobile store. His concept was innovative—limited selection of staples priced with a small margin—and immediately generated headlines, especially as rival retailers sought to fend Migros off through legal challenges (Winkler, 1991, pp. 57–60). Duttweiler’s charismatic nature and ceaseless drive also translated into a political career.

The lawsuits against Migros—at the time not yet a cooperative—were not the only challenges faced by cooperatives. Already at the turn of the century, small retailers sought to curtail the work of the often much larger cooperatives in the food space (Degen, 2017, p. 630). Unlike in many other European countries, however, consumer societies avoided much of the scrutiny by industry and finance faced in France and Germany, for example. In the interwar period, however, small retailers managed to generate sufficient political support to pass a decree in 1933 banning department stores from expanding or new ones from being founded (Degen, 2017, p. 635), a blow both to Migros and the USC until its reversal in 1946.

During the First World War, Switzerland was spared the deaths and physical destruction that scarred so much of Europe. The government and a number of cultural institutions sought to bolster Swiss solidarity in the face of a potential fascist influence (Mooser, 2000). Though military concerns remained largely theoretical during the war, food became a palpable problem, as some key imports lagged pre-war levels. Both the USC and Migros worked to bolster food security, with, among other initiatives, an expansion of farmable land. The wartime experience of Switzerland is a broad subject of study; the war touched the lives and institutions of the Swiss in innumerable ways. Cooperatives, their actions, and the sentiments of the population toward them, are a small and peripheral story in the larger scheme of the war. Nonetheless, that positive associations with them were awakened as part of the spiritual national defense is entirely conceivable, especially as the centennial celebrations of many cooperatives occurred in the immediate post-war period.

Where Switzerland’s trajectory again intersects with that of the rest of Western Europe in the post-war boom. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, global economic growth was steady, and exceptional in the post-WWII decades, with a stout 3% (Freeman, 2019, p. xiv). The transformative effects of this growth on all aspects of the economy were comprehensive, and here Switzerland is no exception. From 1945 to the 1970s, the Swiss economy modernized and grew steadily. Some cooperatives struggled to keep up with new forms of production and consumption, a pattern evident in most Western European countries, including the UK (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 158). Other cooperatives, however, both in Switzerland and elsewhere, adapted.

According to Espen Ekman, cooperatives struggled with three dimensions of this change in particular, what he calls the three revolutions: the supermarket revolution, the chain store revolution, and the consumer revolution (Ekberg, 2012). While some smaller Swiss cooperatives struggled with these three revolutions the same way that others did in neighboring countries, the USC and Migros were more than up for the challenge. In fact, they can be seen as the spearheads of these revolutions in Switzerland. In the retail sector, for example, the USC and Migros were quick to open self-service stores and true supermarkets, with smaller retailers often trailing behind in this development (Winkler, 1991, pp. 171–172). More recently, Migros and Coop played a significant role in popularizing fair trade in Switzerland (Nicholls & Huybrechts, 2017, p. 473).

With adaptation to changing markets also came a transition to contemporary styles of management and organizational forms. While the Coop remains to this day legally a cooperative, some historians have noted the series of steps in this transition, from the changing of its name in 1970 to today. Already a few years earlier, it stopped publishing its annual pamphlet Genossenschaftliches Jahrbuch. It transitioned from a consumer to a purchasing society—in which anyone could shop for the same price—and canceled its membership in the International Co-operative Alliance in 1998. In subsequent years, its governance and management took increasingly corporate forms, with a suite of managers, a CEO, and a President (Degen, 2017, pp. 638–640).

Ruedi Brassel-Moser succinctly summarizes this trend stating that, “In 2002, 12,975 cooperatives were registered in Switzerland. The majority of cooperatives have become a mere legal form, the choice of which is rarely based on socio-political preferences“ (Brassel-Moser, 2008). The few comparative studies that include Switzerland point to this professionalization trend as well. This can be seen both in the decline of Swiss cooperatives that address urgent social needs, such as housing and shelter, which are more prevalent in Greece (66.3%) than in Swiss SSE organizations (42.5%). (Kalogeraki et al., 2018, p. 865). However, the Spanish numbers (22.6%) here suggest that Switzerland is not an outlier in this trend.

3 Swiss Exceptionalism: A Myth or Reality?

Before highlighting differences in the Swiss experience, we may begin by briefly examining how Switzerland is characterized in international cooperative studies—a rare case. Put differently, how do non-Swiss studies assess the cooperative landscape in Switzerland? An oft-cited insight is that Switzerland has, relative to its size, a large cooperative landscape—measured by the number of cooperatives, by revenue, or by members. Writing in the authoritative The Oxford Handbook of Mutual, Co-operative, and co-owned businesses, Vera Zamagni remarks that Switzerland stands out as, “another small European country with a large presence of co-operatives” (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 108). One number to support this view is a survey of the 300 largest co-ops in the world by turnover in 2012: Switzerland was home to seven of these 300 and $73 billion in turnover. Comparatively-sized neighboring countries, such as Austria (3 of the 300 with $24 billion), Sweden (6 of the 300 with $28 billion), and Belgium (5 of 300 with $11 billion), come up short (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 100). Such figures alone, however, are not a testament to a fundamentally different integration of cooperatives into the Swiss economy, nor a particular link between cooperatives and Swiss political culture. For this, we will have to look more closely at the historical emergence and development of cooperatives, in Switzerland and beyond.

Some peculiarities in the Swiss experience vis-à-vis the collective European experience require little elaboration since they are, on closer inspection, a “normal” variance of the type that every individual country displays vis-à-vis the collective whole. For example, the particular propensity for consumer cooperatives in Switzerland is in and of itself not extraordinary since most countries have, for a variety of historical, economic, or legal reasons, been prone to one form of cooperatives—financial cooperatives in Germany, worker cooperatives in France, and so on.

So too, the size of cooperatives and cooperative memberships in Switzerland, while on the higher end seen globally, are noteworthy, they are not exceptional when compared to Scandinavia, Italy, and Spain, for example. A recent study compares SSE organizations in Greece, Spain, and Switzerland along the “main features associated with their organizational structure, type of activities, type of beneficiaries, social and economic aims and their main means to achieve them” (Kalogeraki et al., 2018, p. 858). Their findings suggest that cooperatives are today more formally anchored in Switzerland than in Spain and Greece and “in line with its interrelations with the Swiss market economy, shows a greater degree of formalization and professionalization that defines its management structure, main activities, types of beneficiaries, goals, and means to achieve them” (Kalogeraki et al., 2018, p. 856). For example, whereas informal organizations in the SSE space, such as “citizens and grassroots solidarity” organizations account for 77% of observations in Greece and 28.1% in Greece, they represent only 11.2% in Switzerland. Moreover, within the broader SSE landscape, a full 28% in Switzerland are cooperatives, whereas they represent under 14% in both other countries studied (Kalogeraki et al., 2018).

Two peculiarities in the Swiss story, however, require further elaboration. This is the question of the origin of cooperatives in Switzerland and the question of their link to the Swiss political system. The question of intellectual origin is particularly difficult to answer with certainty in Switzerland. Clearly, the Konsumverein Schwanden and other cooperatives that formed in the throes of the Industrial Revolution took their most direct inspiration from British examples. Additionally, the influence of cooperative pioneers in France (Charles Fourier) and Germany (Victor-Aimé Huber, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch), for example, has also been documented in historical studies (Brassel-Moser, 2008).

At the same time, Swiss cooperative pioneers, as well as later observers, have stressed to point out Swiss pre-industrial antecedents to the cooperative movement that crystallized in the middle of the nineteenth century. Exemplary of this is the writing of Richard Feller, as we saw in the Introduction. Moreover, the view that in the case of Switzerland, the timeline of cooperatives needs to be extended back beyond the Industrial Revolution is essentially taken for granted among scholars. Martin Arnold, for example, writes, “The cooperative system looks back on a long tradition in Switzerland” (Arnold, 2005, p. 69). Arnold is quick to add that by “long tradition,” he means the cooperative arrangements enacted by Alpine farming communities in the Middle Ages. In his legal history of cooperatives, for example, Arnold cites farming communities’ arrangements for the use of common fields as an example. Moreover, Arnold argues, the village cooperatives were directly anchored in the Swiss municipal and state foundings (Arnold, 2005, p. 89).

Here then, is one particularly strong link between two features of Swiss identity: food and cooperatives. This link may partially explain why the act of cooperatives selling foodstuffs to members, which was legally constrained in neighboring countries such as France in the second half of the nineteenth century, was consistently viable in Switzerland (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 95). In both the First and Second World Wars, too, Swiss cooperatives were not only active in distributing food but also in the cultural-political discourse around food security and Swiss sovereignty.

While we can state with some conclusiveness then that there were significant antecedents to the Swiss cooperatives that emerged in the Industrial Revolution, this alone is not significantly different from comparable countries. While Switzerland saw its antecedents in the Alpine farming communities, as we saw above, so too American observers traced its cooperatives to the frontier, while in India, antecedents to the British-importer cooperative ventures were seen in earlier farming self-help ventures. Therefore, the presence of antecedents alone is not sufficient to deem the Swiss experience exceptional. What may be exceptional is the extent to which Swiss commentators, then and now, referred to these antecedents. The former, in particular, is as far as this author is aware from the existing literature, unique. It is not only commentators in hindsight who link Swiss cooperatives to Alpine farming traditions. Early pioneers of Swiss cooperatives themselves frequently called on the long tradition of cooperative work in Switzerland, such as Karl Bürkli and Johann Friedrich Schär of the ACV Basel.

Closely related is the fact that cooperative spirit also bled into political culture. This point, too, has been made by some contemporary observers, including Purtschert and Im Hof. The former, for example, writes,

The self-help idea of cooperatives had a significant influence not only on the federalist Swiss state system, but also on the association system [Vereinswesen] and thus on the third sector in the 19th century. The early development of associations, the formation of functional communities, was another important expression of the republican understanding of society in Switzerland (Purtschert, 2005, p. 6).

In this assessment, Purtschert aligns with the many other historians and cooperative functionaries who have echoed the sentiment that a Swiss predilection and experience with social cooperative forms had and continues to have a palpable impact on the shape of Swiss cooperatives. Purtschert, however, takes this argument one step further. He suggests that this long Swiss cooperative experience and mentality shaped the structures and culture of Swiss politics as well. He continues,

In summary, it can be said that the modern cooperative system in Switzerland forms a developmental unit with the cooperative living and economic communities of earlier centuries and has had a significant influence on the Swiss state system in terms of its institutional and intellectual content (Purtschert, 2005, pp. 6-7).

According to Im Hof, a Swiss historian, too, the citizens of the city see themselves as a cooperative unit and cooperative principles were growing in parallel to the country’s political culture development (Im Hof, 2007).

This may in part explain a noticeable difference in the development of Swiss cooperatives in the early twentieth century—vis-à-vis some but by no means all—comparable European countries: the link to working class movements. In Switzerland, writes Bernard Degen, “only a few of these [cooperatives] may be viewed as genuine working class organizations.” Instead, he continues, “their membership included a broad spectrum of social groups” (Degen, 2017, p. 615). Moreover, several Swiss cooperatives stand out for explicitly banning political and religious discussions in their charters (Degen, 2017, p. 621).

Here too, however, it is difficult to say to what extent this differs from the norm other than in the details of the Swiss context. In many countries, cooperatives were more important than merely solving economic problems. In fact, as we saw in the historiographical discussion above, cooperatives have served to address a variety of problems throughout history, including political ones.

Italy is a good example in this regard. In Italy, the first consumer cooperatives appeared in 1854. Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the country’s founding fathers, was a vociferous advocate of cooperatives, and he believed that one way to ensure the unity of Italy (not yet a reality in the 1850s) was through enabling a culture of cooperation between labor and capital. He believed, in the words of one historian, in cooperatives, “as a valuable way of bringing Italians together in the struggle for Italian independence and unification” (Patmore & Balnave, 2018, p. 59). So too, after the country’s fascist experiment, the cooperative was resurrected as an Italian institution and anchor of democracy. Cooperatives were explicitly promoted and fixed in the country’s legal framework as a means of re-anchoring democracy (Restakis, 2010, p. 63).

Similarly, cooperatives are deeply rooted in the identity and politics of some rural communities—perhaps the most famous example being the Mondragon cooperative in the Basque country (Barandiaran & Lezaun, 2017). It should be noted that cooperatives have been particularly associated with food in other countries as well, by the 1930s, for example, nearly half of Denmark’s population was a member of a cooperative, most of which were agricultural cooperatives (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 103).

While there is some evidence to suggest that cooperatives influence and, at the same time, a cooperative culture feed into the Swiss political system, current studies fall short of establishing a Swiss exceptionalism in this regard. Further studies, especially of a comparative nature, would be needed to make this point.

4 Conclusion

Cooperatives in Switzerland enjoy a high degree of trust from the Swiss population across the political spectrum. In a survey conducted in 2016, 81% of the population had a “high to complete degree of trust” in cooperatives, versus only 32% in listed stock companies (Taisch, 2012) (See Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2.4). They are, as we have seen, also firmly anchored within the Swiss economy, both in terms of their market reach and in terms of their adaption of modern management and governance practices. There is, from the perspective of the available research, no reason to suspect that this will change. While Britain has seen a decline in cooperatives since the end of the Second World War, Switzerland is not alone in seeing stability and even growth in the organization form (depending on how this is measured). Italy, Spain, and many other countries continue to have vibrant cooperatives (Michie et al., 2017c, p. 105). According to a McKinsey study, contemporary cooperatives grew at comparable rates to publicly traded companies (McKinsey, 2012). If Switzerland’s history is any guide, as technology and the boundary conditions of the Swiss economy change, Swiss cooperatives will be able to adapt accordingly.

Looking back, however, the question remains of whether or not cooperative organizations and cooperative forms of organizing the economic processes have been particularly compatible with Swiss culture and political traditions. The answer, if one adheres to Swiss scholars, is yes. The extent to which this makes the Swiss experience with cooperatives exceptional, however, remains more difficult to answer with any certainty. To do so would require further studies not only of cooperatives in Swiss history but of how this compares to the European norm. And, as we have seen in this chapter, even this European norm is difficult to nail down with any precision, given both the highly individualized nature of the cooperative experience in many European countries and the new directions that recent historiography has taken.