When Why Switzerland? appeared twenty years ago, I asked my readers to understand its title as two questions: why a place as idiosyncratic as Switzerland existed, and why non-Swiss should care. Today, a third, much more ominous, question joins the first two: why Switzerland should continue to exist. Twenty years ago, Switzerland saw itself threatened from within and without by the Soviet empire. The still living experience of the second world war with its ‘fortress mentality’ reinforced Swiss defensiveness. Yet inside Switzerland the Swiss felt good about themselves. They believed that their will to resist had forced Hitler to drop his plans to invade them. They were proud of their historic liberties, their institutions, their religious peace, their wealth, their efficiency and their social harmony. Switzerland had, they believed, no strikes, no slums and no debts.

That complacency has vanished. Switzerland has drugs, AIDS, unemployment, huge public debts and one of the highest adult male rates of suicide in Europe. As former Federal Councillor René Felber said in 1990, Switzerland has become ‘normal’. Yet if Switzerland has really become ‘normal’, then why have a Switzerland at all? The European Union asks ‘why Switzerland?’ almost every day. Switzerland obstructs the final integration of Europe. Its peculiar laws interfere with road traffic. Its government can never promise to fulfil treaties because the citizens say ‘No’. Brussels sees Switzerland as tedious, and unreliable. But it is not Norway. The EU cannot ignore the fact that Swiss trade matters to the EU and that Switzerland controls vital land routes across the Alps.