Why was German speaking Switzerland not part of any Gross Deutsch nationalist movement?

by CharizardTurtle

Klein Deutsch was German states uniting with Prussia, and Gross Deutsch was the same but involving Austria. Why were German speaking Swiss Kantons such as Zurich and Schywz not involved in the Gorss Deutsch nationalist sentiments?

Notamacropus

For obvious geographical reasons the area is sort of isolated by mountain ranges. The start of the Swiss Confederacy is arguably the Charter signed in 1291 between the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, which later others joined.

During the Middle Ages the Swiss as a whole were part of the Holy Roman Empire, the great confederation of German states. But they weren't particularly keen on many of the new developments in the 1490s. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. (only the second ever Habsburg on the throne) managed to instigate several large centralisation reforms in the Diet of Worms in 1495:

  • Ewiger Landfriede, the ban on the right of vedetta (Fehderecht) to settle claims

  • the Reichskammergericht, a fixed supreme judical body to settle disputes between members, especially for now-forbidden vendettas, supplanting the old system of taking your claims to the Emperor wherever he be (especially tricky if he was off at war some place outside the Empire)

  • the Reichspfennig, a tax to be paid by any subject over the age of 15 to finance Maximilian's wars

The Swiss disregard for the reforms, which they saw as an attack on the ancient rights, and strategic needs eventually in 1499 led to Maximilian using his claims (the Habsburgs being originally from the Habsburg in today's Aargau) to try and subjugate the Swiss again. The Swabian War went hilariously wrong for Maximilian and he had to eventually sign the Treaty of Basel in the same year, which many people regard as the de facto independence of Switzerland. Although they left the HRE de jure only in 1648 as a result of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War, it's true that Swiss involvement in HRE affairs was minimally.

Also, it is important to note that the Swiss Confederation was an incredibly early republic surrounded by old autocracies so they had that to bind them together over several centuries as well.

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And for the person who criticised the OP's spelling of "großdeutsch": Switzerland actually doesn't (and hasn't colloquially for most of their history) use the ß, so when talking about Swiss-Germans it would actually be perfectly acceptable to say "grossdeutsch".