‘Why Switzerland?’ is really two questions not one. The first is the understandable question which any English-speaking reader who picks up a book on Switzerland must ask: ‘Why should I read about Switzerland, when there are so many other things to read about?’ The second, less obvious question is why there is a Switzerland at all. The present chapter will try to answer the former question; the whole book is devoted to the latter. What you have in your hands is not a guidebook. You will not find places to eat in Solothurn nor the height of the Matterhorn here. It is not a conventional history. The chapter called ‘History’ starts in the middle then goes backward in time and only after that does it proceed in the usual way. It is not journalism either, although most of the raw material which has been worked into the argument is drawn from our own day. If it has any clear claim to be any specific category of literature, I suppose that Why Switzerland? is a latter-day version of those eighteenth-century philosophical histories in which the thinkers of the Enlightenment thought they discerned underlying laws. It is a history in the way that Dr Johnson thought of history, ‘contrary to minute exactness, a history which ranges facts according to their dependence on each other, and postpones or anticipates according to the convenience of narration’.

If the book is odd, so is its subject. There is no place like Switzerland and hence any attempt to catch its meaning must be pretty odd too. The sheer variety of Swiss life, what I think of as its ‘cellular’ character, makes it hard to write a coherent account of the place. Then there are the various institutions, habits and customs unique to Switzerland: its unbelievably complicated electoral procedures, its referenda and initiatives, its specialised economy with its banks and watches, its cheese and chocolates, its complicated federalism of central government, cantons and communes, its three official and four national languages, its neutral status, its astonishing wealth per head, its huge proportion of foreign workers, its efficient public services, and its religious divisions. For most of the twentieth century, Switzerland had an enormous number of small newspapers. It was extremely common to meet people, even journalists stationed in Bern, the capital, who got a hometown paper delivered every day.