“WHY SWITZERLAND?”, asked an excellent book by Jonathan Steinberg, an academic at Britain’s Cambridge University, first published several decades ago and since updated. It is still a good question, and not as straightforward as it appears at first sight. It can be read, among other things, as asking how Switzerland has become the way it is; whether its ancient and peculiar political and economic arrangements still make sense today; and, if they do, whether other countries might have anything to learn from them.
The answer to the first question is shrouded in history. As for the second, this survey has argued that in an interconnected world, even a small country determined to go its own way cannot escape geopolitical changes and global economic trends. This has meant that in recent years Switzerland has in many ways become less of a special case. …