The Swiss Business Federation, a powerful interest group for Swiss private business

The Swiss economy is a system of liberal corporatism (Meier, Reference Meier2002: 116–19). During the Second World War, the government appointed organised interest groups to run the controlled wartime economy (Meier, Reference Meier2002: 117). The Swiss Business FederationFootnote ³ had been established in 1870 to defend private sector interests vis-à-vis the federal state founded in 1848. The organisation was the umbrella group for the regional chambers of commerce as well as for intra-trade organisations of the various industrial and trade branches. Therefore, it was the voice of the established and organised private sector. It was run by a director and overseen by a board and a chairman, who was traditionally the president of one of the large Swiss industrial companies (Nerlich and Hofstetter, Reference Nerlich and Hofstetter2002–14). During the Second World War, the director of the Swiss Business Federation was part of the federal commission that negotiated imports and exports to and from neutral Switzerland with the Allies as well as with Germany. As the Swiss Federation is headed by seven ministers (Church and Head, Reference Church and Head2013: 164), it was during the war that the director of the Swiss Business Federation was dubbed the ‘eighth minister’ (Hässig, Reference Hässig2006). As this ‘eighth minister’ was not subject to political election or in a governmental position, his range of action was, in many respects, broader and more long-term oriented than those of the elected ministers or parliamentarians. This power was made official following the war with a vote on the so-called economic articles in 1947 (Borner and Bodmer, Reference Borner and Bodmer2004: 15). One of these economic articles finally wrote the process of prior consultation of interest groups into the Swiss constitution (Borner, Reference Borner1977). This system of pre-parliamentary discussion has been a custom in Switzerland since the 1930s, and the vote of 1947 made official the influence of interest groups on policymaking, and in particular, the influence of the Swiss Business Federation (Morandi, Reference Morandi1998).Footnote ⁴

The postwar decades would become an era of power for domestic organised private-sector interests in Switzerland. Not surprising to Swiss political economists (Borner and Bodmer, Reference Borner and Bodmer2004), the decades of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were also a period of new protectionism. Compared to other Western nations, however, it seems that industrial protectionism during these decades was less pronounced in Switzerland because of the high level of global integration of Swiss industry (Weder and Wyss, Reference Weder and Wyss2013). Agriculture, however, was an exception. By comparison, Switzerland developed the highest per capita protection worldwide in its agricultural sector, where a wide range of new protectionist policies was introduced (Stiglitz and Charlton, Reference Stiglitz and Charlton2005: 218). Thus far, political economists have attributed Swiss agricultural protectionism to a strong farmers’ lobby (Frey, Reference Frey2015; Moser, Reference Moser and König1998: 51). I contest this view on the theoretical level by referring to the newest developments in political economy, which suggest that the ‘idea’ represented by an interest group, rather than the interest group itself, might be held responsible for protectionism (Rodrik, Reference Rodrik2014). Furthermore, I also contest this view with qualitative historical research, which shows that the interest group for the private business sector preserved agricultural protectionism as well (Franc, Reference Franc2016). Economic theory and qualitative historical empiricism can be linked by investigating the ‘idea’ of the Swiss farmer as the symbol of national identity as much as the symbol of the neoliberal ideal protagonist within the spontaneous order of a self-supporting society. As politico-economic theory of the last several decades has held the Western farmers’ lobby responsible for the massive agricultural protectionism, it might make sense to look at the records of farmers’ lobbies using historical methods (Moser, Reference Moser and König1998: 51). However, in light of Rodrik's groundbreaking new contribution to political economy, it seems more promising to study the interest group of Swiss private business, the Swiss Business Federation, rather than the interest group of Swiss farmers, the Swiss Farmers’ Union, in order to reach conclusions regarding European rural history of the postwar years.

The Swiss semi-direct democracy, with its many public votes, referenda and initiatives, was a valuable tool for the influence of the Swiss Business Federation. Its actual purpose was to influence votes that concerned the interests of the organised private sector, using the financial allowance from its member organisations. Another purpose, which arose in the postwar years, was the smooth collaboration or integration of Switzerland's economy into the international economic system with the establishment of the various supranational organisations such as the Bretton Woods Institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the European Economic Community and the European Free Trade Association (Nerlich and Hofstetter, Reference Nerlich and Hofstetter2002–14).

A very reliable partner of the Swiss Business Federation was the daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, or the NZZ. The newspaper was established in 1780 by the liberal movement. In 1868, the NZZ went public and, in order to acquire a share, one had to be a member of the Liberal Democratic Party or at least be committed to liberalism (Maissen, Reference Maissen2005). During the Second World War, the newspaper became Europe's liberal torch. The NZZ published numerous articles by Wilhelm Röpke, one of the founders of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) (Hennecke, Reference Hennecke2005: 129). At the same time, many of the editors of the NZZ would be invited to join the Mont Pelerin Society after its founding in 1947 (Plickert, Reference Plickert2008: 163). Traditionally, one of the editors published a summary of the MPS's meetings in the paper. Several of these NZZ editors and MPS members held PhDs; some taught at the University of Zurich, and several actually left the newspaper when they were offered tenure there. In addition, several editors were elected to national or regional parliaments for the Liberal Democratic Party. Particularly during Winterberger's term of office, the Swiss Business Federation and the NZZ engaged in an intellectual symbiosis (Franc, Reference Franc2016).

The Swiss Business Federation and the Swiss Farmers’ Union had no official organisational connections. They were simply the two most important and influential interest groups within the Swiss democratic system, and they clashed repeatedly on questions of agricultural protectionism.Footnote ⁵ Only in 1977 did the directors of the two interest groups agree to meet regularly for informal lunches,Footnote ⁶ and only in 1986 did Winterberger initiate an official task force on international trade and agriculture, including both the Swiss Farmers’ Union and the Swiss Business Federation and the third most prominent interest group, the Swiss Union of Crafts and Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises.Footnote ⁷

Neoliberal on the outside: The director of the Swiss Business Federation

Gerhard Winterberger (1922–1993) joined the Swiss Business Federation in 1961 as the secretary in charge of economics. It was his job to prepare the economic groundwork for the attention of the director. During his time as secretary, he met his contemporary, René Juri (1922–2003) (Marcacci, Reference Marcacci2002–14), who had already become the director of the Swiss Farmers’ Union in 1958, in meetings regarding the parity in salary for farmers. In those meetings, the two seem to have clashed when Winterberger attempted to convince Juri that Swiss farmers could count on Swiss taxpayers’ support only by softening their hardline demands.Footnote ⁸ When Winterberger was made director of the Swiss Business Federation in 1970, he had already influenced the course of the organisation for almost a decade in his former position. In the seventeen years preceding his retirement in 1987, Winterberger is said to have been one of the most powerful men in Swiss economic policy (Hässig, Reference Hässig2006).

Winterberger was born in rural Switzerland, the grandson of a peasant. He studied economics at the University of Bern, where he received his PhD in 1947. The war and postwar years had brought numerous eminent researchers to Switzerland, especially from Germany and Austria. At the University of Bern, Winterberger was supervised by the Austrian economist Alfred Amonn, who obtained Swiss citizenship in 1942 (Brechbühl, Reference Brechbühl2002–14). After completing his PhD, Winterberger spent semesters in London, where he became fluent in English, as well as in Geneva at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. In Geneva, he studied with the German co-founder of the MPS, Wilhelm Röpke, another eminent exile, as well as the German economist Walter Eucken, another future MPS member, who was an invited professor in Geneva at the time (Franc, Reference Franc2002–14; Jetzer and Winterberger, Reference Jetzer and Winterberger1982: 10). Wilhelm Röpke became Winterberger's mentor, and the two continued to correspond until Röpke's death in 1966.Footnote ⁹ In 1959, when Winterberger was still an insignificant secretary of a monetary association close to the Swiss National Bank, he had already received his invitation to join the MPS signed by Friedrich August von Hayek.Footnote ¹⁰

Despite this neoliberal academic influence, Winterberger was culturally rooted in the so-called Swiss spiritual defence (Mooser, Reference Mooser1997; Zimmer, Reference Zimmer2004). This mindset had developed during the Second World War when Switzerland was surrounded by nations at war and insisted on remaining neutral. The spiritual defence was based on the image of the hardworking, taciturn peasant up in the mountains minding his own business. Winterberger was a patriot first and a neoliberal second; that he was interested in the rural culture of the peasants of his home region is highly typical of the spiritual defence of the 1940s. On his own, he actually conducted a scientifically valid anthropological study (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1955). Later on, as a Bernese from the countryside in Zurich, he didn't fight his image of the down-to-earth rural peasant, but rather called attention to it. The media reported how frequently he was seen at rural events in his home area of Interlaken.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, in his contact with Wilhelm Röpke, an ardent admirer of the Swiss peasant culture, Winterberger played up his background. ‘Your pasture boy’,Footnote ¹² he signed his letters to Röpke.

Winterberger's influence was complemented and reinforced by Willy Linder (1922–2000), who was the same age as Winterberger and René Juri and headed the economic section of the NZZ from 1972 to 1987 (Scherrer, Reference Scherrer2002–14), that is, during almost all of Winterberger's tenure at the Swiss Business Federation. Linder was a member of the MPS as well; he taught as an associate professor of economics at the University of Zurich from 1977 to 1989, and from 1988 to 1993 he headed the Institute of International Studies in Zurich, the Swiss neoliberal think tank financed by private business (Scherrer, Reference Scherrer2002–14). For the fifteen years during which he wrote the economic commentary in the weekend edition of the NZZ, Linder carefully refrained from touching on the subject of agriculture.Footnote ¹³

Promoting the neoliberal agenda in the 1970s

In Switzerland, the year 1968 marked the rupture of the national intellectual union with the spiritual defence. Left-wing activists demanded a societal adoption of socialism, while eminent intellectuals such as the writer Max Frisch criticised the predominant Swiss mentality as uptight and officially endorsed the Social Democratic Party (Meier, Reference Meier2007: 97–103). A system change in the West seemed very real to people like Winterberger, particularly in the early 1970s when the acts of terrorist left-wing groups in Germany and Italy were met with sympathy by the student movement. Therefore, in his first years after taking over as director in 1970, Gerhard Winterberger decided that the Swiss Business Federation should make itself more visible and should publicly defend the Swiss private sector as well as the market economy.Footnote ¹⁴ During these years, the student movement and its elder sympathisers such as Max Frisch advocated socialism and condemned neoliberalism without bothering to consider the disruptive debates going on among the neoliberals themselves. When trained economists and members of the MPS such as Winterberger or Linder advocated a protectionist economic policy, the left was only too happy to denounce it as neoliberal (Kappeler, Reference Kappeler2011: 73).

Winterberger understood the communication of the interests of the domestic organised private sector as a moral and patriotic duty (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1989). In 1975, more than a century after the establishment of the Swiss Business Federation, he established a public relations office.Footnote ¹⁵ In the same year, the Swiss Business Federation started its own publication series, which published mostly speeches by its officials. In 1981, they even published an article by Gottfried von Haberler (1900–81), former Harvard professor and internationally known opponent of protectionism of any kind (Baldwin, Reference Baldwin1982). Haberler, like many other members of the MPS, spent vacations in the Swiss mountains with his wife and had accepted an invitation to speak at an event held by the Swiss Business Federation and later accepted a private invitation to Winterberger's home. For his article, Haberler was paid 6,000 Swiss francs from the Swiss Business Federation's war chest.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, Winterberger had managed to involve the over-eighty-year-old Haberler in the Swiss Business Federation's PR. Haberler's reputation as a clearcut free-market neoliberal served to further strengthen the neoliberal profile of the Swiss Business Federation in public.

But throughout these years, it was mainly Winterberger who toured the country speaking on numerous occasions, mainly in front of middle-class small- and medium-sized business people. Even at the most rural and communal meetings, he quoted and referred to Hayek or Röpke at length. Röpke, who had published extensively in the Swiss media before his death in 1966, was recalled with affection by many middle-class listeners in the 1970s and early 1980s. Friedrich August von Hayek had also visited Switzerland on several occasions and was a renowned figure of authority to his audience. To the press and the public, to friends and political enemies alike, Winterberger was the undisputed Swiss authority on neoliberalism. In the Festschrift presented to him on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, the introduction stated, ‘He has always countered requests for protectionism with a clear “No”’ (Jetzer and Winterberger, Reference Jetzer and Winterberger1982: 11), a dedication that shall be refuted in the next chapter. Still, by the end of his tenure at the Swiss Business Federation in 1987, Winterberger had managed to tag the organisation as well as himself as neoliberal, despite the obvious contradictions to neoliberalism. Foremost, neoliberalism sees interest groups as enemies of the free market, as they defend the special interests of members instead of the interests of society as a whole.Footnote ¹⁷ Therefore, Winterberger managed to create a public image, which, in academic economics, had to be qualified as a contradiction (Borner and Bodmer, Reference Borner and Bodmer2004: 15). But beyond that, he managed to hide the even more obvious contradiction of the fact that he not only defended the special interests of the private business sector, as was his actual role and as neoliberal theory would have expected of him, but he went further and used his influential position to strongly defend the interests of Swiss farmers. This defence of agriculture was in no way part of his job profile and can only be attributed to his deep commitment to peasant culture, to the ‘idea’ of the family farm, which he fought fervently to maintain. Winterberger's affinity for agriculture is a typical example of ‘when ideas trump interests’ (Rodrik, Reference Rodrik2014) and how neoliberal ideas were ‘converted in untenable caricatures’ (Burgin, Reference Burgin2012: 218) by the practitioners on the ground.

Röpke for agriculture

Thus, agricultural protectionism particularly stands out in the economic policy followed by the Swiss Business Federation during the long office of Gerhard Winterberger. Agricultural policy developments in Switzerland were so opposed to what the MPS stood for that, as mentioned before, Willy Linder, a member of the MPS like Winterberger, carefully omitted any comment of them in the NZZ. Footnote ¹⁸ In the early days of the MPS, agricultural protectionism was a very important and heavily debated topic. It was Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow who argued in favour of the traditional family farm as a stabiliser of society and, as such, in need of a particular policy (Plickert, Reference Plickert2008: 238). Röpke and Rüstow were, however, at the far end of the spectrum. In the MPS debates, they were extensively countered by Karl Brandt, who had specialised in agricultural economics in Germany and then emigrated to the United States. Unlike Röpke and Rüstow, Brandt did not want to preserve the number of small family farms, but he pleaded for social measures to smooth the structural adjustments, that is, the exit of small farmers from agriculture (Plickert, Reference Plickert2008: 235–40). These debates took place in the MPS in the 1950s, when agriculture in Germany still employed about half of the population (Plickert, Reference Plickert2008: 235–40). In Switzerland, however, agriculture employed only 16 per cent of the population in 1950 and 10 per cent in 1960 (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1961). At the MPS meeting in St Moritz in 1957, Hayek pushed Wilhelm Röpke and his friend Alexander Rüstow into the conservative corner. In his famous speech, ‘Why I am not a conservative’, Hayek classified agricultural protectionism as conservative (Hayek, Reference Hayek1960: 397–411). In 1960, in his masterpiece The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek devoted an entire chapter to the ‘irrationality and absurdity of modern agricultural policy’. He explains the ‘remarkable solicitude which the public shows . . . for the fate of farming’ with ‘aesthetic considerations’. Obviously, Hayek was addressing Röpke and his followers when he added: ‘The same [aesthetic considerations] is true to an even greater degree of the concern shown by the public in countries like Austria or Switzerland for the preservation of the mountain peasants’ (Hayek, Reference Hayek1960: 362–3). With the withdrawal of Röpke and Rüstow from the MPS in the course of the Hunold affair in 1961 (Hartwell, Reference Hartwell1995: 100–33), nobody except Gerhard Winterberger was left in the MPS to propose the vague, cautious and romantically tainted ‘third way’ of protecting family farms. With Milton Friedman's matter-of-fact condemnation of agricultural protectionism in the form of ‘parity price support’ or ‘sugar quotas’ in his classic Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman and Friedman, Reference Friedman and Friedman1962: 35), agricultural protectionism was banned from the neoliberal canon for good.

In Switzerland, however, more so than in the United States or even in Germany, Röpke was a local hero and much better known and quoted than Hayek or Milton Friedman (Solchany, Reference Solchany2015). After his exit from the MPS, and despite his very deep dissents with Hayek and the young Americans around Friedman, Röpke still stood for neoliberalism in Switzerland. His declining health and early death in 1966 kept Röpke from analysing and commenting on the spiralling developments in agricultural policy in Switzerland and in most other advanced countries. The following decades saw a sharp decline in the number of people employed in agriculture in advanced nations as well as a massive increase in agricultural protectionism because of competition between these nations as well as from developing countries (Patel, Reference Patel2009). The ‘new protectionism’ of the 1970s and 1980s was, first and foremost, an agricultural protectionism, and when the GATT was transferred to the World Trade Organization, agriculture had to be left out in order to achieve any sort of agreement (Bhagwati, Reference Bhagwati2000).

In addition, in the 1960s many former colonies gained their independence and intended to compete with European countries not only in commodities, but also in processed food products. When the renowned economist and author of the Prebisch–Singer Thesis Raul Prebisch became the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development of 1964 (Toye and Toye, Reference Toye and Toye2003), the advanced nations could not just brush aside developing countries’ demands for market access (Stiglitz and Charlton, Reference Stiglitz and Charlton2005). Therefore, the context of European and particularly Swiss agriculture was already a profoundly different one in the early 1960s, some years after the debates on agriculture in the MPS in the mid-1950s. Thus, first, Röpke's position on agriculture, as long as he still belonged to the MPS, was a very isolated one, and second, the context of this position changed dramatically in the decades that followed. These two aspects were, however, not taken into account by his Swiss followers.Footnote ¹⁹

Gerhard Winterberger started publishing on agriculture in the mid-1950s, not only in prominent Swiss newspapers such as the NZZ and Der Bund,Footnote ²⁰ but also in small regional or organisational papers.Footnote ²¹ He also published two books on the economic structure of his rural home region around Interlaken (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1955; Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1960a). He understood rural conditions like the back of his hand and had personally witnessed the deep structural change that took place in Swiss agriculture with dramatic speed in the postwar years. Winterberger was an expert on issues such as the regional differences in the decline in salaries for professional cheese makers employed by agricultural cooperatives in relation to the disappearance of independent milk buyers.Footnote ²² His articles in the media often represented debates with regional officials about some minor changes in the laws. In the matter of the professional cheese makers, he advised the agricultural cooperatives to raise the salaries of their employees in order to prevent the disappearance of the profession and a decline in cheese production. This, he argued, was crucial in order to fulfil the so-called cheese-and-butter plan, which foresaw the import of cheap butter in favour of the export of high-quality Swiss cheese. Winterberger did deplore the loss of entrepreneurship in Swiss agriculture, such as the disappearance of independent milk buyers, but he did so within the narrow frame of an increasingly planned agricultural policy (Baumann and Moser, Reference Baumann, Moser and Jorio2002–14).

Working in the city of Zurich in the postwar years, Winterberger found that his colleagues frowned upon his commitment to agriculture. In a letter to Röpke in 1956, he complained about the disdain of his work colleagues, urban Zurich central-bank economists, for farmers and small businesses:

Röpke wrote constantly about the importance of family farms and small businesses in Switzerland as well as in Germany. In the pages of the NZZ alone, every few weeks Röpke's name would appear in relation to agriculture. Röpke introduced agricultural protectionism as ‘the last attribute of national individuality’.Footnote ²⁴ He prepared the ground for Winterberger, who would eventually win over the urban Zurich intellectuals – or at least keep their critiques at bay. In numerous articles in the 1960s, published mainly in the monthly magazine Schweizer Monatshefte, which was the core publication of the circle of Zurich's neoliberal intelligentsia around the NZZ, Winterberger debated the various policy mechanisms that supported small, mountainous family farms (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1965). This was possible because the constitutional economic articles of 1947, which had made official the influence of the Swiss Business Federation among other things, had also authorised the federal state to take measures to preserve Swiss agriculture, if necessary by deviating from the article guaranteeing freedom of trade and business.Footnote ²⁵ With the 1952 federal law on agriculture, this authorisation was made more concrete by actually excluding agriculture from the market economy (Baumann and Moser, Reference Baumann, Moser and Jorio2002–14). Gerhard Winterberger was – despite his neoliberal appearance – in favour of these judicial developments and invested in the debate on how agricultural policy should be designed following the coming into force of the 1952 law on agriculture. In 1961, he positioned himself in disagreement with his former teacher, Alfred Amonn, in a review of Ammon's book on Swiss economic policy (Amonn, Reference Amonn1959). Amonn, also a member of the MPS, had criticised Swiss agricultural protectionism, which was, in retrospect, only about to begin in these years. Winterberger scolded him for neglecting historical, traditional, sociological and supply security aspects and reproached him, indicating that rational economic thinking had prevented Amonn from seeing the true importance of agriculture (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1961). The spiritual defence of the war years, which particularly drew on food autarky provided by the Swiss peasants, as well as the tradition of military conscription – another issue where Swiss members of the MPS renounced neoliberalism – was an important factor for agricultural protectionism: security considerations were an important aspect of the agricultural laws.Footnote ²⁶

After his instalment as the director of the Swiss Business Federation in 1970, Gerhard Winterberger lobbied in favour of the various agricultural laws presented in those years. One representative example was the so-called chocolate law of 1976 (Franc, Reference Franc2016), which introduced import duties on processed food containing agricultural commodities and allowed for export subsidies for Swiss food processors, namely, the chocolate companies.Footnote ²⁷ Following a consumer group petition, the law was put up for a referendum, and Winterberger organised the campaign in favour of it. The opponents of the law called it neo-protectionist and with good cause. They feared a consequent rise in consumer prices caused by import duties and increased taxation to fund export subsidies. Even though the law concerned the food-processing industry, the respective member organisations were not interested in campaigning, let alone financing the campaign. The only exception was the chocolate industry, which was in critical condition in the 1970s. To finance the campaign, Winterberger actually gathered the support of the Swiss Farmers’ Union and various other farmers’ organisations, but although these organisations prepared and partly financed the campaign, the political argument visible to the public was that the law would help to preserve jobs in the food industry. And, by a very narrow margin, the people voted in favour of the chocolate law (Franc, Reference Franc2016). While consumer group opponents called the law neo-protectionist, neither Swiss members of the MPS nor neoliberal commentators publicly criticised Gerhard Winterberger, who orchestrated the political campaign in the background as the director of the Swiss Business Federation. The records of the Swiss Business Federation do, however, contain a letter of one of the member organisations, the Swiss Association of Importers of Colonial Goods, which attacks Winterberger's lack of devotion to the neoliberal cause directly:

While Gerhard Winterberger's answer to this letter is not in the records, there are numerous publications in which he defends his position against exactly this reproach. His argument against such allegations was, as documented in numerous articles, the ‘Swiss uniqueness’ (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1960b).

This ‘Swiss uniqueness’ is a leitmotif of Winterberger's attitude towards agricultural policy, which, over the decades, evolved considerably. In the 1950s and particularly in the 1960s, when Winterberger was economic secretary at the Swiss Business Federation, he must have contributed critically to the implementation of the parity salary for farmers (Jetzer and Winterberger, Reference Jetzer and Winterberger1982: 11), which had been introduced as policy in 1954 and remained in effect until 1998 (Moser, Reference Moser2002–14). While the sources don't reveal Winterberger's particular contribution, they show that the Swiss Business Federation was obviously involved in shaping the price mechanisms to support the parity salary.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, Winterberger never denounced the parity salary, which offered the legal base for planned prices and subsequent overproduction.

By the 1970s, Winterberger's position was oscillating between a general wish to support family farms and a critique on overproduction and heavy subsidisation, which must have led to ‘disagreement’ with the Swiss Farmers’ Union. From 1958 to 1987, Winterberger's counterpart was, as mentioned, René Juri. The hardliner was the director of the second most important Swiss interest group for almost two decades, even longer than Winterberger led the Swiss Business Federation. Juri stood for an uncompromising and never-contending policy of protecting and subsidising the large productive family farms in the plains. Neither milk lakes, nor butter mountains nor the highly unusual public intervention of the president of the Swiss central bankFootnote ³⁰ seemed to make Juri waver the slightest in his position. Next to him, Winterberger had no trouble coming across as a neoliberal.

The wake-up call for Juri as much as for Winterberger must have come in 1985, when the continuation of the law supporting domestic sugar productionFootnote ³¹ finally came to a referendum and was rejected by Swiss voters. Juri and the Swiss Farmers’ Union had demanded not only a continuation of the subsidising of beet sugar production but even an extension of its arable area and production. Winterberger, in his recommendation to parliament, spoke out against an extension of area and production and called for an examination into whether there weren't economic instruments that would render subsidisation unnecessary but he backed the protection of Swiss beet sugar production by import tariffs.Footnote ³² Apparently fed up with milk lakes, butter mountains, high prices and the Swiss Farmers Federation's blatant refusal to consider organic or animal-friendly policies, the Swiss people refused to accept any effort to further the support of domestic sugar production.

It was only in the mid-1980s, after the debacle of the referendum on the sugar law, that Juri started considering accepting a system change to direct subsidies and certain ecological obligations. Winterberger seems to have played the mediator between the Swiss Farmers’ Union and the head of the parliamentary commission responsible for the agricultural agenda to be implemented in 1986, when Switzerland had to be ready to participate in the Uruguay Round of the GATT. Incidentally, the head of the parliamentary commission happened to be Winterberger's colleague Richard Reich (1927–91) (Peter-Kubli, Reference Peter-Kubli2002–14), at the time the national councillor for the Liberal Democratic Party and director of the Society for the Promotion of the Swiss Economy,Footnote ³³ which worked closely with the Swiss Business Federation. In the 1960s, Reich had worked as an editor at the NZZ, and in 1982, he had become president of Schweizer Monatshefte. Reich, a declared neoliberal himself, finally came around to publicly defending the introduction of direct payments to farmers in Switzerland. Winterberger managed to convince him that the state had to offer the hard-line Swiss farmers a financial incentive to produce less.Footnote ³⁴ Again, face to face with René Juri, Reich's public image of a neoliberal wasn't even scratched.

Next to Richard Reich, Winterberger converted a whole generation of Swiss liberals of the postwar decades to serve the ‘idea’ of the family farm as the core and root of a good, free and self-reliant society. Not only did he portray the smallholder in the mountains as representing the true spirit of liberalism (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1980) and therefore the secret of neoliberalism, he also portrayed the mountain farmer as the symbol of Swiss uniqueness and therefore appealed to national pride.

The ‘Swiss uniqueness’

Many intellectuals before Gerhard Winterberger had used the term ‘Swiss uniqueness’ (Kury, Reference Kury2003), which was used to strengthen the Swiss spiritual defence during the war years. Wilhelm Röpke, in particular, had in his work from the 1940s onwards referred to Switzerland as the ideal country and as ‘an exception in history’ (Röpke, Reference Röpke1942: 47). During the war years, in the spirit of the spiritual defence, Switzerland developed a more ‘organic’ nationalism (Zimmer, Reference Zimmer2004) that relied on the image of the self-reliant peasant people in the mountains. The federalist structure of the Swiss nation, particularly, and its direct democratic instruments and, furthermore, the absence of a tradition of a strong central state in the form of a monarchy led to the idea of Switzerland as an exception, of being a unique sort of nation. Winterberger, who had conducted anthropological research and kept himself updated on historical and anthropological research in Switzerland, in the postwar years further developed the theme of the ‘Swiss uniqueness’ and the idea of Switzerland as an exception in his writing and speeches. This development was an applied process; his writings were often prompted by current legislative projects, and in order to emphasise his position on these issues, he expanded upon the term ‘Swiss uniqueness’. After Friedrich August von Hayek's return to Europe as a professor at the University of Freiburg – which, though in Germany, is very close to Zurich – Winterberger began a polite correspondence with him. He sent Hayek his own writings, which Hayek used to comment on briefly, and for Hayek's eightieth birthday, Winterberger wrote a tribute in Schweizer Monatshefte (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1979).Footnote ³⁵ Subtly, between the lines of these writings, Winterberger's differences with Hayek become apparent. In the birthday tribute, which was several pages in length, Winterberger, who published, spoke and politically lobbied on agriculture, did not mention Hayek's position on agriculture. But he did send Hayek his publications, which strongly supported ‘Swiss uniqueness’, and, in one example, he elaborated on the centuries-old cooperative agricultural structures in some of Switzerland's farming areas (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1983b). Winterberger uses the ancient cooperative farming structures as an argument in favour of the ‘naturalness’ of the exceptionally weak Swiss trust law, which was the basis of Swiss liberal corporatism and the power of the interest groups for which he was a representative (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1983a). But mainly, Winterberger's texts convey the pride and self-assertion that he, and with him a great number of Swiss people, drew from their identification with the Swiss peasant culture. Winterberger would become a master of painting the organic ‘Swiss uniqueness’, which on its surface aligned so well with neoliberal theory. In 1960, a year after his invitation to join the MPS and becoming part of the Swiss Business Federation as its economic secretary, he published an article with the title ‘Swiss uniqueness and European integration’ (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1960b). The article used the theme of the Swiss peasant society, cloaked with neoliberal attributes, to construct an organic-historical argument for why Switzerland should not join the European Economic Community.

As Winterberger puts it, the free Swiss peasant republics assured their citizens a greater extent of personal liberty than the lower aristocracy in Europe. The evolution of Switzerland contrasted with the rise of feudalism in the rest of Europe. For many centuries, the European aristocracy hated the peasant republics in the heart of the Alps, which were equal or even higher than they were. In Germany and France, the aristocracy looked down on their own peasantry; the peasant was regarded as a simpleton.

Winterberger's words reveal how neoliberalism was able to strengthen Swiss self-confidence as a nation of free farmers. Thanks to the slow but steady breakthrough of neoliberalism, Swiss peasants were no longer the ‘simpletons’ of Europe. They represented both the ideal citizens of Wilhelm Röpke's utopia and the intelligent information bearers who created the optimal ‘spontaneous order’ described by Friedrich August von Hayek (Hayek, Reference Hayek1960; Sugden, Reference Sugden1989). Winterberger managed to link bits and pieces of neoliberal theory to the nineteenth-century Swiss author of peasant literature Jeremias Gotthelf, who had called the Swiss peasant a ‘tool of god’ (Winterberger, Reference Winterberger1965: 517). Thus, on the ground, far away from the academic literature of neoliberal theory, an actual member of the Mont Pelerin Society was at the forefront of introducing extensive agricultural protectionism. Gerhard Winterberger managed to hide the fact that, by the 1980s, agriculture in the Western world,Footnote ³⁶ and more so in Switzerland, had become the opposite of a spontaneous order. It had become a heavily planned state sector, producing a thicket of bureaucracy and swallowing billions of Swiss francs in subsidies.Footnote ³⁷ The Swiss peasant was no longer a tool of god but at the mercy of Swiss taxpayers willing to finance agricultural protectionism on the seemingly neoliberal agenda.