No place in Europe has clung to an anachronistic, airbrushed image longer than Switzerland. The country's oddly entrenched reputation for pristine and inviolable "neutrality" has left it ostensibly so removed from the normal give-and-take of international politics that for many Americans the place could pretty much be summed up with the sugary, beyond-politics appeal of Nestlé chocolate.
In fact, however, the myth of Swiss exceptionalism is increasingly tattered these days. The unraveling of the legend began in the postwar period, accelerating in the 1990s, as more and more stories came out on the Swiss banks' involvement in helping the Nazis and their stubbornness about concealing that role. It didn't help matters that right-wing Swiss political parties continued to make periodic gains, with the Radical Party signaling a turn to the right in the 1983 parliamentary elections, for example, by drawing more votes than the Social Democrats for the first time in 58 years.
Recent months have brought Switzerland into a vortex of unwelcome international publicity, much of this brought on by a flinty, proud brand of Swiss independence that looks less and less charming to the outside world. Burt Neuborne, a New York University professor who served as counsel to Holocaust survivors in wrangling with the Swiss, went so far last year to charge in a widely read Los Angeles Times op-ed that it might be time to dub Switzerland a "rogue state."
Here's how things got this far:
BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images
Steve Kettmann lives in Berlin and writes a weekly column on politics for the Berliner Zeitung.
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