World at the Table

Table and World begins at the Beiz, the Swiss word for the ordinary local restaurant, and looks beyond the edge of the table. World at the Table, Welt am Tisch in the German edition, goes one step further: here the world sits down.

The question this section asks is easy to put and hard to answer. What might a political culture look like that starts not from party thinking but from conversation? What does it take for people of different convictions to stay at one table, even when it gets uncomfortable?

The attitude

Every view is true but partial. No perspective sees the whole, not even your own. Whoever accepts that can listen without giving themselves up, and disagree without losing the other person.

The table is older than the party. Politics was born at tables, at the regulars' table, in the coffee house, at the open-air assembly of the Landsgemeinde. And the most important peaceful transitions of recent history succeeded at round tables, in Poland and in East Germany in 1989, in South Africa in the years that followed. At the table, things became possible that had seized up in the street and in parliament.

Switzerland has built the round table into its institutions. Consensus government, the collegial principle, formal consultation and direct democracy are all forms of it. World at the Table takes up that tradition and asks how much of it has reached everyday life, in the conversations we actually have.

Polarisation is a direction, not a force of nature. It can be observed, and it can be worked on. First in the small, at the table, before talking about the large.

The goal is a practice, not a result. The round table is a squaring of the circle: you know it will not quite work out, and you sit down anyway.

The rules of the table

You speak in the first person about your own experience before you speak in the first person plural about the world.

You restate the other person's position so that they recognise it as theirs before you disagree with it.

You name the limit of your own view when you put it forward.

You distinguish between observation and interpretation and say which of the two you are offering.

You stay at the table, even when it gets uncomfortable. That is the only rule that is not negotiable.

What World at the Table is not

Not a party, not a movement, not a programme. World at the Table takes no position between left and right, but a position on the way we talk about politics. Whoever has a standpoint brings it along. Whoever has none is just as welcome.

The invitation

World at the Table begins as an idea. What becomes of it, an evening of conversation in a Beiz, guest essays with a reply, something else entirely, depends on who sits down at the table. If the question occupies you, if you would like to think along, write along or simply be there once: write to post@tischundwelt.ch.

The essays that appear in this section will be listed below, as soon as there are any.