BORDERING ON TOTALITARIANISM: PHILIPP ETTER’S DISCURSIVE SPACE

Abstract

This paper clarifies characteristics of the discourse elaborated by Philipp Etter, a conservative Swiss Catholic politician, using his speeches from the 1930s. During 1933 to 1939, Etter, a State Councilor from the canton of Zug, was elected to Federal Councilor and eventually declared Switzerland’s transition to general mobilization as Federal President. This coincided with the period when Nazi Germany seized power and precipitated World War II. Most scholars have viewed Etter negatively as a Catholic conservative who sought to transform Switzerland into an authoritarian corporatist state that bordered on totalitarianism. This paper sheds light on Etter’s thoughts by using text-mining methods to objectively identify the arrangement of key terms in Etter’s speeches from the 1930s, while remaining unbiased regarding the ideology of the research subject. The analysis shows that Etter transformed from an authoritarian conservative to a defender of Swiss specificity within the framework of consensus democracy.