This is a CTP of initiative: BIEN-SUISSE (BIEN-Switzerland)
The interviewee, Bridget Dommen, daughter of Nobel laurate in economics James Meade, is an economist by training and had been working on social security and health-related topics. Through her work she became interested in basic income and in the year 2000, she attended the 8th BIEN International Congress, held in Berlin. At the Congress she met then co-chair of the BIEN network, Guy Standing, who was the director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva at the time. Dommen joined the ILO and, together with Guy Standing and a number of academics based around Lake Geneva, formally founded BIEN-SUISSE in 2001 to organise the next BIEN Congress that was to be held in Geneva in 2002.
On 12 September 2002, during a half-day workshop that was entirely dedicated to Swiss papers and that preceded the international congress, BIEN-SUISSE pitched the idea to perpetuate the association. About 30 people were present at this assembly when the president, Andràs November was elected. November was a politician in the Genevan government and had played a leading role in the introduction of a Revenu minimum de réinsertion (RMR, a guaranteed minimum income with a number of conditionalities)*. Other members of the committee included another well-known, more conservative politician who was also the former director of the Bureau of Statistics in Geneva, a protestant pasteur who was also a public figure in the social policy world at the time and Dommen herself who remained centrally involved in the association for several years to come.
The emerging, rather academic BIEN-SUISSE network thus had, especially in its early stages, close connections to the social policy domain. Some of these connections remained intact. For example, the member of the Genevan government who provided the BIEN International Congress in 2002 with a large subsidy, is still well-known today and played a public role in the popular vote on the introduction of a basic income in the summer of 2016.
While the set-up of this committee implied a firm, local embedding and closeness to (local) politics and policy-making, “it remained really very Geneva” because beyond that canton, the group did not really know a lot of people in Switzerland who were interested in or already working on the topic. Largely due to its emergence in Geneva, BIEN-SUISSE somewhat lacked, in its initial stages, national connections.
*November, A. (2003). Le revenue minimum social à Genève: Douze ans de débats politiques. In: A. November & G. Standing, Un revenue de base pour chacun(e), Genève, Swityerland: ILO
The event around which BIEN-SUISSE was founded was, quite literally, a co-production by a number of committed individuals. The interviewee took care of the local organisation of the BIEN International Congress and put together the half-day programme focusing on Switzerland and Guy Standing, who was BIEN’s co-chair at the time, communicated with the transnational BIEN network and filled the Congress programme with paper presentations and renown key note speakers. In addition, ten other people, all based in Geneva, were part of the congress organising committee.
The founding of BIEN-SUISSE can thus be considered a development that was supported both by a group of people based in Geneva and by the inter- or rather transnational BIEN network. The interviewee states that the local group was “riding on the back of the international congress” and she is convinced that the start of the Swiss branch would not have received as much attention otherwise: “We would not have had the same visibility if we had just done it out of the blue.” In addition to the media attention the International Congress got, the possibility to use the BIEN mailing list and newsletter (NewsFlash) to circulate the call for papers, the preliminary programme and other relevant information ensured that word about the Congress and BIEN-SUISSE travelled far among basic income supporters.
Moreover, the BIEN International Congress received a large financial contribution by the Genevan state government and additional support by the Rockefeller Foundation. Although the ILO does not have a formal position on the basic income, it hosted the congress, thereby lending legitimacy and adding significantly to local, national and international visibility.
The International Congress started with an afternoon programme on the 12th of September when four speakers from Geneva and one from Fribourg (a city in another Swiss Canton about 140 km from Geneva) discussed (the history of) social security policies on canton and national level. This session was followed by a general assembly of BIEN-SUISSE with about 30 participants, held in French. During that assembly, a president, treasurer and secretary were elected and the continuance of BIEN-SUISSE thus ensured.
Over the next one-and-a-half days, the actual BIEN International Congress took place, kicked-off with a welcome note by then Director-General of the ILO, Juan Somavia, and a speech by the Prime minister of Mozambique Pascoal Mocumbi, who wanted his country to experiment with basic income schemes and came to learn from existing schemes in other developing countries. The programme of the Congress was filled with speakers from all over the world; from Europe, mainly, but also from the USA, Brazil, India, South Africa or New Zealand. In the afternoon of 14 September 2002 the International Congress concluded with BIEN’s general assembly.
The establishment of BIEN-SUISSE went smoothly due to the relentless work of those organising the congress, those participating, those taking on formal roles and those joining the first committee. A lot of ‘things (in the sense of people, resources and timing) came together’ that brought about a successful BIEN international congress and start of the Swiss network.
Although the interviewee remained centrally involved in the network for a number of years and contributed to several activities (book/booklet publications, public events, a citizen initiative in the Genevan state), she did not play a key role in all developments described in the following. The information presented below is therefore largely based on the BIEN-CH website and notes from the network’s general assemblies in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
As noted before, the BIEN International Congress in Berlin two years prior to the one in Geneva marked the beginning of the interviewee’s and Guy Standing’s cooperation. Without this pivotal encounter, the connection between BIEN and people interested in Basic Income in the Swiss context would not have been made at that time and would not have brought about the founding of BIEN-SUISSE (BIEN-Switzerland) in 2001.
From the start, BIEN-SUISSE focused on stimulating and facilitating academic exchange and political debate on the topic in Switzerland, for example by organising seminars, round-table discussions or other public events, and by publishing papers (2007, 2008) or books (2004, 2010 and 2013). Quite a number of the papers presented at the BIEN International Congress were published in a book edited by Guy Standing in 2005.
In 2009, a new cantonal constitution was to be developed in Geneva and BIEN-SUISSE submitted the proposal for two constitutional articles that outlined the right to a basic income. For such a submission to be considered, 500 signatures of local residents had to be collected. Within less than one month, BIEN-SUISSE had collected more than 1,870 signatures. The cantonal parliament rejected the proposal, arguing that a basic income would do away with work incentives with negative consequences for the labour market and, hence, the economy. BIEN-SUISSE prepared an elaborate, written response counter-arguing this perception by pointing out that the only sector where this argument may in fact hold is low-paid labour.
Linguistically, BIEN-SUISSE expanded quite quickly from its French-spoken beginning to other languages, especially German. At the general assembly in 2005 it was agreed to establish the position of a vice-president to better cover and cater to the linguistic diversity of its membership. BIEN-SUISSE participated in, hosted or helped organising the three German-spoken, international congresses on basic income held in Vienna (2005), Basel (2007) and Berlin (2008). One development that followed from these three congresses was the European Citizens’ Initiative for an Unconditional Basic income which was launched in 2010 and closed on 14 January 2014. Although the initiative did not succeed in collecting the 1 million signatures necessary to achieve a consideration by the European Commission, it helped to make the idea of a basic income much more widely known across the EU and sparked the emergence of many local or national initiatives.
In 2006, BIEN-SUISSE acknowledged the Initiative Grundeinkommen (Initiative Basic Income) as another group that had emerged in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The general assembly discussed whether this group should be considered a competitor. BIEN-SUISSE recognised the visibility the Initiative Grundeinkommen achieved and wondered whether a collaboration would be possible. At the BIEN-SUISSE general assembly in 2007 it was noted that Daniel Häni, who had started the Initiative Grundeinkommen (Initiative Basic Income) in 2005/6 with the goal to eventually launch a citizen initiative for a popular vote, had communicated to BIEN-SUISSE that his efforts to promote the idea of a basic income should not be viewed as competition to BIEN-SUISSE but that both groups should be viewed as one network of basic income supporters (as discussed in the other ‘critical turning points’ in the history of basic income in Switzerland, the two groups later joined forces for a citizen initiative).
According to the interviewee, there was absolutely no contestation around the founding of BIEN-SUISSE because everyone agreed on the cause of the network: the academic study and public debate of basic income in the Swiss context.
The interviewee herself preferred not to be the network’s first president although she would have been an obvious choice after all the work she had done around the BIEN International Congress and during the network’s early phase of existence. She remained a committee member and continued being centrally involved. This decision was a strategic choice. It was – and still is – the interviewee’s conviction that the network received more support and recognition and achieved a higher visibility and “better press” because it was led by people who were well-known in the social policy sphere already. This as well as the affiliation with the transnational BIEN network also lent reputation and legitimacy to the newly founded association.
It was anticipated that the official launch of the Swiss branch of the BIEN network would be successful because it occurred in tandem with the BIEN International Congress that gathered interested and committed individuals who were likely to support the continuation of collective efforts.
In terms of anticipating this group’s future activities, committee members “always had it in the back of [their] minds in Geneva that [they] would one day launch an initiative to get a referendum”. However, the committee thought it was too early and “wanted to get better known” first. When another network that had formed around the Initiative Grundeinkommen (Initiative Basic Income) and a group of people in the Swiss-German cities Zürich and Basel decided to go ahead with a citizens’ initiative for a popular vote in 2008, BIEN-SUISSE was taken somewhat by surprise but decided to go along with it and support the initiative as good as they could. The interviewee, although she was no longer actively involved in the network then, helped collecting signatures, for example. Developments around the citizen initiative for a popular vote in Switzerland are discussed in the ‘critical turning points’ in the history of basic income in Switzerland after 2008.
First and foremost, the network swiftly learned how to refute all the arguments that are commonly raised in opposition of a basic income, namely the assumption that a basic income would do away with any incentive for people to work and that a basic income cannot be financed.
BIEN-SUISSE, especially its committee members, learned a lot about different aspects of basic income in the Swiss context in the early years of the network’s existence. First, they published a series of booklets that were meant for a broad audience. The interviewee wrote a large number of articles for different Swiss journals for professionals in social work or social policy. Also, a number of books were published, including “Un revenue de base pour chacun(e)” in 2003, which comprised contributions by different committee members, and was edited by then president of BIEN-SUISSE Andràs November and BIEN co-chair Guy Standing. Another book, for which the interviewee wrote the introduction, was published by BIEN-SUISSE in 2010. It focused on the financing of a basic income and discussed how a basic income could be put to practice in Switzerland but also in South Africa or England. Next to publications by academics for academics or professionals, a number of events for the general public were organised over the years.
Arguably, many of these communication efforts mostly reached people who were already interested in the subject or came in contact with it through their professional lives. Publications and public events certainly serve to elaborate the moral justification, the financial feasibility and the social necessity of a basic income and to spread insights and ideas among an interested audience. At the same time, they are probably less effective at communicating the concept widely, beyond the proverbial ‘usual suspects’. The interviewee recounted that all the activity around the citizen initiative that was launched in 2012 (see ‘critical turning points’ after 2008) certainly achieved this as well as broad, societal debate.
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