The Death of Switzerland

In the third man, Orson Welles famously mocks Switzerland by saying, "Five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." This was never quite true. While 20th-century Switzerland often displayed a clocklike efficiency, with a skilled workforce and an enviable road-rail network, it also represented something more profound. Its unique blend of nationalities, languages, and religions, of farmers, bankers, and engineers, showed how forces that tore other nations apart could be formed into a relatively harmonious whole. The World Economic Forum does not hold its big annual meeting (which convened late last month) in Davos by accident. For the evangelists of globalization, Switzerland has long been the model nation.