61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

the Star of David. 51 Swiss civil servants used this system of stamping documents
from 1936 onwards, and thus well before the introduction of the notorious
stigmatisation in 1938. 52
Culture of stability and overcoming crises
A paradoxical mixture of rhetoric about the class struggle and the common
belief of the political parties in the advantages of a currency based on gold
characterised the inter-war period. The Swiss Federal Council, in its return to
the gold parity of the pre-war period, had already re-entered into the currency
system of the restored gold standard by the middle of the 1920s. This may be
interpreted as a binding regulation and also a self-obligating mechanism which
restricted the scope for action in economic policy and prioritised currency policy
and the interests associated with it. On the basis of the fact that the labour
movement supported the gold standard in principle, despite the sometimes
violent disputes with the middle-class powers, it was not unreasonable to talk
of a domestic culture of stability. 53 This consensus with respect to a strong franc
was also of great importance during the Second World War. Beyond the partypolitical
differences, the prevailing impression was that a small state dependent
on foreign trade and therefore vulnerable should be interested in an international
currency system based on fixed exchange rates and that there was no
workable alternative to the gold parity of the franc.
However, the concentration of economic and financial policy on maintaining
the Swiss gold standard restricted the possibilities for intervention in economic
policy during the crisis years. The government, dominated by the bourgeoisie,
and parliament opted for a rigorous deflationary policy which was implemented
with the aid of emergency legislation, i.e., by abolishing the rights of the
people, and was aimed at restoring the international competitiveness of the
Swiss export economy by way of a general wage and price reduction. The
bourgeois camp rejected the labour movement’s demands for a «Keynesian» and
social interventionist reflationary policy through deficit spending, and pillorying
it as an attack on the stability of the value of money. In the battle against
the «crisis initiative» («Kriseninitiative») of the trade unions, which was
moderate in its demands and thoroughly conformed to the market, the Swiss
Bankers Association (Schweizerische Bankiervereinigung, SBVg) did not hesitate to
make considerable funds available to the front movement which aimed to
destroy the labour movement. The «crisis initiative», which was oriented
towards the American «New Deal», was rejected in the referendum vote in the
middle of 1935 though with a respectable 43% of the voters in favour. The
initiative launched by the other end of the political spectrum for the total,
authoritarian revision of the Federal Constitution in the same year, was rejected
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