Financial Times
November 25, 2011
Switzerland presents the most perfect image of a state in the process of social disintegration.
Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austrian statesman, 1845
To a modern eye, the above observation is about as startling as it gets. Social disintegration? Switzerland? Surely not! Yet Metternich was not exaggerating. During the 1840s Switzerland was no mountainous haven of peace and prosperity. Political quarrels and economic turbulence were as familiar to the Swiss then as they are to today’s debt-laden Europeans. In 1847 Switzerland even descended into a short-lived civil war.
Still, the Swiss story ended happily. The chaos of Metternich’s era prompted Switzerland’s transformation in 1848 into a federal state that, notwithstanding various blunders and blemishes, has proved a model of freedom, affluence and social stability up to the present day.
No wonder other European Union citizens look enviously at Switzerland. Could a Swiss-type solution be the answer to the eurozone’s troubles?
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