WE ALL APPROACH THE POST-WAR PERIOD THROUGH THE PERspective of our own pre-war experience and, for those who lived through it, of the war itself. We approach it, with a country as a starting point, on the basis of the experiences and books which formed our vision of Europe and the world and made us aware of the problems facing contemporary societies. For me, the country is Switzerland: a federal state which has remained fundamentally a confederation of sovereign states, linked by an alliance, the framework of which has been filled in by the successive adaptations imposed upon it, but which have not led to anything which could be called integration. The political structure has been built by delegation from the grass roots, through crises which, although they have sometimes been violent, have never called into question the fundamental principle of cantonal sovereignty. Each canton has preserved its originality which, although it may not immediate1 strike the passers-by, is expressed in the different shades of accent and in the variations in daily life, even more than in the folklore, touching and sometimes almost a caricature, which surrounds it.