Switzerland by Design: The Co-Shaping of Secure Messaging and National Identity Among Geopolitical Controversies

This article investigates how a domestic secure messaging platform, Threema, participates in the co-production of Swiss national identity amid rising digital geopolitics. Arguing that infrastructures are not neutral tools but ideological artefacts, the study combines document analysis (N = 30) and semi-structured interviews (N = 32) to trace how Threema’s technical architecture, institutional, and individual adoption encode and reproduce values of neutrality, privacy, and sovereignty. The article has two main sections: firstly, we use the concept of infrastructural ideology to show how seemingly technical choices, like randomised user IDs, metadata minimisation, and Swiss data localisation, perform (geo)political work by materialising and reproducing national identities. Empirically, the article identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which Threema materialises and reshapes Swissness: neutrality by design, privacy by infrastructure, and institutional reception and national branding. These mechanisms operate reciprocally: national identity legitimates Threema’s infrastructural choices, while the platform’s existence and institutional use update and modernise Swiss identity in digital form. In particular, the analysis outlines three components of Swissness: Swiss exceptionalism, the attitude towards foreign dependencies, and the neoliberal statecraft. In the second part, the study bridges International Relations and Science and Technology Studies to show how identity functions as a strategic resource and how private infrastructures can enact forms of territorial authority normally associated with states. Practically, it reveals a bottom-up pathway to digital sovereignty in which private firms operationalise jurisdictional claims through design rather than relying solely on regulatory instruments. Ultimately, the Swiss case highlights how small states can leverage culturally resonant infrastructures to pursue strategic autonomy, while also underscoring the ambivalence and fragility of sovereignty enacted through private-sector artefacts. This analysis contributes to debates on techno-nationalism, digital sovereignty, and the political life of infrastructures by showing that code, servers, and protocols are central arenas where identity and geopolitics are produced and contested.