A Low-Stress Nukes Story

Here's a nukes anecdote that will not freak you out.  My friend Roy was part of the team that built nukes in France--the ones designed to blow towards Germany, I assume.  He used to tell how he would assemble teams that played to the strengths of varying nationalities.  "And the Swiss provided the glue," he said.

I assumed he meant management skill, organizational knowhow, team spirit.

"No, no man, the glue.  The  Swiss make great glue."

Afterthought:  You hold together a nuclear power plant with glue? 

The Vagaries of Language: Two Accounts

Tricky business, language. Two illustrations. First, a discussion of how folks in the Italian corner of Switzerland manage "dialect":

Dialect...in Italian Switzerland...runs along the edges of social divisions, age, sex and class in fascinating and complex ways. ...Dialect is the language of neighbourliness and the commune, but ... its use reflects very subtle canons of social behaviour. The country man or woman in a city shop may use dialect with impunity, but the middle-class city-dweller wil use Italian, certainly at first, less the shop girl feel insulted by such excessive familiarity. Similarly, the middle-class city dweller who returns to the village of his origin would give even greater offence if he did not speak dialect from the beginning.

...In traditional middle-class families, parents speak dialect with each other, as do the children, but children speak to parents and parents to children in Italian. ... Teachers chat in dialect int he common room but speak Italian to pupils in the classroom and in all other encounters. Children speak dialect among themselves and, of course, Italian to teachers. ... [In one research study] the boys spoke dialect among themselves but Italian to the girls, and the girls dialect among themselves but Italian to the boys. ... Adult men use dialect more than adult women, especially in towns and cities. ... Italian is the language of public life and dialect the language of private social relations. Hence it is not surprising that, as soon as a political organization or government body becomes larger than, say, twenty people, which it will generally not do on village level, Italian replaces dialect

--Jonathan Steinberg, Why Switzerland? 143-4 (2d ed. 1996)

And here, a more straightforward of all solutions, from the most British of azll 20th Century political leaders, India's Jawarhalal Nehru (Harrow, Cambridge, Inner Temple), who spoke English far more easily than he spoke any Indian language:

In any discussion Nehru would listen carefully to his interlocutor's accent, then carefully calibrate his own so that it would sound at least one social cut above.

--Arthur Herman, Gandhi & Churchill(Kindle 2009)

[Sourcing Nirad Chaudhuri,]

The Dog Did Nothing in the Moonlight (Surplus Men Dept.)

I've been reading Jonathan Steinberg's Why Switzerland? in the hope of finding out something about how this mountain fastness became a banking power. On that point I think I may come away unenlightened, but I'm picking up some fascinating stuff along the way. For example, about the Peace of Aarau.

You remember? Course you do. That's the one that ended the Second Villmergen War (with me now?) in 1712. By Steinbserg's account, it was a bloody and bitter conflict, essentially a religious war, a fit successor to the dreadful Thirty Years' War that tore Europe asunder between 1618 and 1648. Yet it ended with in a settlement, shaky at first but enduring. More: it was a treaty in which (as Steinberg says) "[t]he Catholic party lost its commanding position ... and was forced to accept parity of faiths ..." He marvels:

Here was a group of defeated states, profoundly convinced of the God-given rightness of their cause, accustomed to think of themselves, and rightly, as the founders of the Confederation, and absolutely sure that the heretical beliefs preached by the Reformed pastors brought death and damnation. In the wings, a powerful Catholic ally [sc. France] with inexhaustible funds stood ready to finance their crusade. A war of revenge seemed natural, inevitable and right.

No war took place. The Confederation survived. Another turning point pased at which nothing turned.

Why not? Exhaustion may have been a factor--Protestants had been fighting Catholics here for 200 years. Realpolitik certainly played a part, but that only begs the question. But Steinberg offers another reason, bound to suit the prejudices of staff and management here at Underbelly--something about surplus men:

A very shrewd Englishman travelling in Switzerland at jsut this period put it well: "If they did not continually drain their Country, by keeping troops in foreign service, they would soon be so much overstocked in proportion to the extent and fertility of it that in al probability they would break in on their neighbors in swarms or go further to seek out new seats." Obviously the service of the Bourbon King of Naples was a better place to see a turbulent young Obwaldner than at the gates of Basel, and no doubt the acceptance of compromise owes much to the export of the uncompromising.

--Jonathan Steinberg, Why Switzerland? 35-37 (Second ed. 1996)

But I'm still looking for the bankers. I have a vague sense that I've heard somewhere about banking families from Lucca coming up to settle when things got too hot for them at home during thee counter-reformation. But I haven't yet been able to put any flesh on those bones.

Update: That stuff about Lucca--apparently I said it before.

Afghanistan: The New Switzerland

London bookies peg Ashraf Ghani, currently the chancellor of Kabul University,as either first or second in the running for the Presidency of the World Bank (link). That’s a natural segue to a hobby-horse of mine. Call: it Afghanistan, the new Switzerland.

It’s not that crazy. A hop, skip and a jump ago, Switzerland was mountainous, landlocked, desperately poor, the producer of nothing in surplus except warriors.

Now, Afghanistan. Mountainous, check. Landlocked, check. Desperately poor, ooh checkeroo. Producer of—well, I’m not sure Switzerland ever did opium.

I’m really not clear exactly why or how Switzerland vaulted from nowhere into financial preeminence, although I have the impression it has something to do with Italian bankers driven out of Lucca by the Counter-reformation. At any rate, I strongly suspect the Swiss aren’t all that clear themselves. Oh, they may think they know, but it happened so fast (in geologic time) they probably haven’t had the time or the inclination to follow the breadcrumbs back to the source.

Okay, frivolous, but not entirely. Compared to Switzerland at its takeoff, there is really nothing Afghanistan needs that it doesn’t have already, except perhaps luck. Wonder how they are at cuckoo clocks and chocolates.

Fn.: Looks like I said it before (link).

Gnomes of Where?

A couple of blogs (link, link) are beating up on Tom Friedman for this:

If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland.

I don’t want to get into this fight directly (for one thing, I haven’t actually read the column—wouldn’t want to compromise judgment, now would I?). I’d rather suggest this: right point, wrong country.

Look at it this way: not too long, Switzerland was an island of poverty and isolation whose only known export was warriors famous for being nasty, brutish and tall.

Somewhere along the line, they morphed into the pointy-headed gnomes that we know and love today (I think it had something to do with Protestant bankers from Lucca, driven out of Italy by the Counter-reformation, but I can’t put my finger on a good link): stable, secretive, prudent, cautiously avaricious (and rich).

Who is equipped to follow that trajectory in the next century? Where can we find a country remote, mountainous, misunderstood and feared, with a population strong and savage yet ripe for better things? Why, here, of course: only a matter of time before we are all fussing about the gnomes of Kabul. Maybe they’ll put up a set of twin towers.