Near the end of Carol Reed’s 1949 noir classic The Third Man, Harry Lime, played by a brooding Orson Welles, disembarks from a Vienna Ferris wheel and delivers the film’s best-remembered soliloquy. Pondering the relative merits of a libertine society, Lime muses that Italy was once governed by the House of Borgia, yet managed to produce “Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance,” while the studiously inoffensive Swiss ” had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” (Which, incidentally, is of German provenance.)
Indeed, Switzerland’s international reputation has long been one of neutrality, dubious banking regulations and superior watch-making; a remarkably harmonious, multilingual country with postcard vistas and little violent crime. And as such, it’s often invoked as a model to be emulated. For Second Amendment defenders, the country’s low murder rate negates the assumption that more guns necessitate an increase in crime; Switzerland is awash in firearms, yet manages to avoid American levels of gun violence. Many even urged the provisional government in Iraq to adopt a Swiss canton-like ethnic division. Writing in Legal Times in 2003, author Gregory A. Fossedal argued implausibly that if the Bush administration was “looking to build democracy in a divided nation,” they could “learn a lot from Switzerland.”
But is this harmonious ethnic bouillabaisse liable to boil over? Last week, Britain’s Independent newspaper wondered if little Switzerland was, in fact, “Europe’s heart of darkness.” The once sedate country, the paper claimed, is now “home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations.” At issue is the latest advertising campaign from the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, or SVP), the country’s largest political party, controlling 55 of the 200 seats in the lower chamber of parliament. A recent SVP campaign poster, attempting to marshall support for the “Federal Popular Initiative for the Deportation of Criminal Foreigners,” features two sheep—both white—grazing atop a Swiss flag, while a third uses its hind legs to kick a black sheep off out of the country. The party has unconvincingly denied any racist intent, claiming that the image simply suggests that immigrants who commit crimes should, like black sheep, be ostracized from the “flock” and returned to their country of origin. http://www.reason.com/news/show/122382.html