Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I spent two days in Geneva, wandering around with an odd, empty longing to be somewhere else. I
don't know why exactly, because Geneva is an agreeable enough place - compact, spotless, eminently
walkable, with a steep and venerable old town, some pleasant parks and its vast blue lake, glittering by day
and even more fetching at night with the multi-coloured lights of the city stretched across it. But it is also a
dull community: expensive, businesslike, buttoned up, impossible to warm to. Everyone walked with a brisk,
hunched, out-of-my-way posture. It was spring on the streets, but February on people's faces. It seemed to
have no young people enlivening the bars and bistros, as they do in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. It had no
exuberance, no sparkle, no soul. The best thing that could be said for it was that the streets were clean.
I suppose you have to admire the Swiss for their industriousness. Here, after all, is a country that is
small, mountainous, has virtually no natural resources and yet has managed to become the richest nation on
earth. (Its per capita GDP is almost twenty-five per cent higher than even Japan's and more than double
Britain's.) Money is everything in Switzerland - the country has more banks than dentists - and their quiet
passion for it makes them cunning opportunists. The country is land-locked, 300 miles from the nearest sniff
of sea, and yet it is home to the largest manufacturer of marine engines in the world. The virtues of the
Swiss are legion: they are clean, orderly, law-abiding and diligent - so diligent that in a national referendum
in the 1970s they actually voted against giving themselves a shorter working week.
And this of course is the whole problem. They are so desperately dull, and wretchedly conservative. A
friend of mine who was living in Geneva in 1968, when students all over Europe were tearing the continent
apart, once told me that the students of Geneva decided to hold a riot of their own, but called it off when the
police wouldn't give them permission. My friend swears it's a true story. It is certainly true that women didn't
get the vote in Switzerland until 1971, a mere half-century after they got it everywhere else, and in one of the
cantons, Appenzell Innherhoden, women were excluded from cantonal votes until 1990. They have a terrible
tendency to be smug and ruthlessly self-interested. They happily bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign
workers - one person in every five in Switzerland is a foreigner - but refuse to offer the security of
citizenship. When times get tough they send the workers home - 300,000 of them during the oil shocks of
1973, for instance - making them leave their homes, pull their children from schools, abandon their
comforts, until times get better. Thus the Swiss are able to take advantage of cheap labour during boom
times without the inconvenient social responsibilities of providing unemployment benefit and health care
during bad times. And by this means they keep inflation low and preserve their own plump, complacent
standard of living. I can understand it, but I don't have to admire it.
* * *
On the second day, I went for a long stroll along the lake-side - leafy, spacious, empty - past the old
and largely derelict League of Nations building, where young boys with stones were trying without much
success to break the windows, through the tranquil Jardin Botanique, and to the gates of the vast Palais des
Nations (larger than Versailles, according to the tourist brochures), now home to the United Nations
Organization. I hesitated by the gate, thinking about paying the multi-franc entrance fee to go in for a guided
tour, and aren't you glad I didn't? I am.
Instead I noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Mus￩e International de la Croix-Rouge et
du Croissant-Rouge (International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much
more promising to me. And so it proved to be. It really was a surprisingly nice place, if that isn't too
inappropriate a term to apply to a museum dedicated to human suffering in all its amazing and manifold
variety. I mean that it was thoughtfully laid out, with a confident and accomplished use of multi-media
resources, as I believe they would call it in the trade. It was virtually empty, too, and generally effective at
putting its story across, considering that everything had to be explained in four languages and that they
couldn't be too graphic in their depictions of disasters and human cruelty lest it unsettle young visitors.
Clearly too the organization's hands were tied by certain political considerations. One of the displays
was a replica of a cell no bigger than a cupboard in which Red Cross workers had discovered seventeen
prisoners being held in conditions of unspeakable discomfort, unable even to lie down, for no reason other
than that their political views did not accord with those of the rulers. But nowhere did it hint in what country
this cell had been found. At first I thought this constant discretion craven, but on reflection I supposed that it
was necessary and prudent. To name the country would have jeopardized the Red Cross's operations
