9

During the interwar period, economic independence and retreat into national identity became the twin horizons dominating the Swiss answer to economic crisis and social and political uncertainty. The Alpine space constituted the symbolic focus of this vision, crystallizing the fears of a rural world which would end up depopulated and unable to feed the country. In order to allay these fears, and as early as the 1920s, Switzerland took measures regulating agricultural markets. Simultaneously, and on the basis of surveys conducted in mountainous areas, other measures promoted the modernization of the Alpine economy. This two-pronged effort, which found its concrete translation in increased federal funding for agriculture, was nonetheless hampered by the limitations of a modernizing model derived from the plains, both economically and agriculturally, and thus ill-fitted to the specificities and constraints of the mountains, and by the continued subordination of mountain management policies to the goals of the federal agricultural policy, which focused its priorities on the national food supply.