Abstract: This chapter compares the institutional setting and integration processes in Switzerland and the European Union (EU). It shows that EU integration is trying to achieve more political integration and the accommodation of a much higher degree of diversity in much less time than has ever been the case in Switzerland. Direct democracy has acted as a federator in the Swiss context. There has been a slow and iterative process of adaptation of structurally similar institutions of direct democracy at all levels (communal, cantonal, federal) roughly between 1830 and 1891. The EU is only incipiently in a process of introducing direct democracy. Mobility of residence, the one element on which the EU has based the construction of EU citizenship and identity, has not been actively facilitated and is implicitly discouraged in Switzerland, formal freedom of movement notwithstanding.