At the beginning of the 20th century, people still referred to the ‘Bern Bundesregierungspalast’ (Bern Federal Government Palace), as on this school geography slide from about 1930.
Swiss National Museum

Consolation prizes

Bern subsequently received the Federal Archives and the National Library. In an effort to achieve a balance, in 1855 the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and in 1891 the National Museum were moved to Zurich. In 1874, Lausanne got the Federal Supreme Court. Lucerne has been the location of the Federal Insurance Court (now the Social Law Division of the Federal Supreme Court) since 1917 and of the Swiss National Accident Insurance Fund since 1918. For Lucerne as the centre of Catholic Switzerland, in 1848 it was even proposed that, as a consolation prize, the city be made the seat of an archdiocese… The decentralisation has been further intensified since the 1990s. The Federal Statistical Office, Federal Office of Communications and Federal Office of Housing are now based in Neuchâtel, Biel and Grenchen. The new Federal Criminal Court has been based in Bellinzona since 2004, and the Federal Administrative Court has been in St Gallen since 2012.

Result: Switzerland, a polycentric country

Although Switzerland plays a disproportionately major role internationally in terms of the economy and to some extent also with regard to politics, it has a modest ‘capital city’. There are four main reasons for this:

1. Bern is small, and the aim has always been to keep it that way: the Swiss political system pursues a very marked degree of federalism and distributes courts, universities, museums and administrative bodies throughout the regions of the country. In doing so, it has also paid careful attention to the language areas.

2. With the selection of Geneva as the headquarters of the League of Nations (1919), Bern lost some of the international clout it had managed to retain thanks to Switzerland’s neutrality in the 19th century – with the establishment of organisations such as the International Telegraph Union in 1868, the Universal Postal Union in 1874, the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1891 and the International Peace Bureau in 1892, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910. The choice of Geneva as the second UN headquarters in 1948 cemented that city’s role as a platform for international relations.

3. During the 20th century, Bern lost economic power compared to Basel and Zurich. Resident larger companies were taken over (Wander, Tobler, Volksbank). And with the decision not to host the intercontinental airport, which was then built in Kloten, economic dominance passed definitively to Zurich.

4. Probably in connection with that, in the media sphere too a very prominent market leadership emerged in the city of the Limmat. Today, Zurich is the press, radio and television centre for the entire German-speaking area of Switzerland.

Robert Barth

Switzerland – a country without a capital