The Alpine Glow Fades for Swiss

In the dying light of a September day, friends and co-workers met on the shore of Lake Geneva to grieve for Dario G. Lampietti, one of the 229 people who perished in the still-mysterious crash of Swissair Flight 111.

Lampietti, 34, lover of fast Porsches, cook of gourmet lasagna and recently hired sales representative for a Swiss asset-management company, had been returning from Wall Street on the ill-fated jumbo jet. While the organist in the small Catholic church here played a Bach dirge and a lone candle flickered on the altar, people who knew the Italian-speaking Swiss businessman couldn’t hide their shock and bewilderment.

“This is simply unfathomable. I mean, Swissair--it’s synonymous with security, isn’t it?” co-worker Laura Cantini asked.

But the jetliner’s still-unexplained plunge into the cold Atlantic waters off Canada on Sept. 2 was only the latest in a series of jolting events to confound ancient and sturdy Swiss certainties. People here also have had to cope with mass murder by terrorists, slayings in the ranks of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards, economic gloom in the ‘90s and rancorous arguments over Switzerland’s role in World War II.

Not surprisingly, in the very year that the Swiss are marking the 150th anniversary of the constitution that founded their democratic confederation, the notion known as Sonderfall Schweiz--meaning that this small, multilingual and prosperous enclave in the Alps is a blessed exception among nations--is under strain as never before.

“It’s true that Switzerland is rather helpless today, stark naked in fact, because the old myths have been shattered,” said Jean Ziegler, a University of Geneva sociology professor, member of parliament and author of a scathing book on wartime collaboration between his country and Nazi Germany.

“Gone are the old myths of neutrality, of having resisted Hitler through sheer courage, or being the world’s most charitable country, the good soul of the planet,” Ziegler said.

For the past three years, as the outside world looked on, Switzerland’s banks, industrial establishment and government have been raked over the coals for having colluded with the Third Reich, and for having done little or nothing to restore the property of thousands of European Jews who, fleeing Nazism, cached their savings in supposedly secure and trustworthy Switzerland.

People here had grown used to praise from abroad for Swiss uprightness and charity. So they were stunned when a State Department report last year accused Switzerland of cynically exploiting the policy long at the heart of its world view--strict neutrality in global affairs--to deal in gold stolen by the Nazis and sell the Germans locomotives, ammunition, weapons and other goods, commerce that allegedly prolonged World War II.

Some Swiss have solemnly accepted the findings and conclusions of the U.S. report; others angrily dispute them.

“Look how the Americans treated their Japanese citizens in World War II--and now they are coming to give us lessons in morality and justice?” Marie-Claire Benoit, 68, a retired teacher in the French-speaking canton of Vaud, said indignantly.

Holocaust Bank Deal Draws Mixed Reaction

Last month, to head off boycotts threatened by state and local officials across the United States and class-action lawsuits, two of the largest Swiss banks, Credit Suisse and UBS, agreed to pay $1.25 billion in compensation to Holocaust survivors.

For many in the banks’ home country, the agreement was welcomed as justice long delayed. Many other Swiss, though, believe that their small country was bested in a power struggle by a tag team of foreign heavyweights: the Clinton administration and international Jewish organizations.

“You hear in the speech of a lot of people that it was blackmail,” remarked Thomas G. Borer, a career diplomat who heads a Swiss government task force dealing with the controversy, who has been traveling throughout Switzerland explaining the August deal.

There is a middle ground--probably held by the majority--that says wrong was done during the war but that all Swiss have been unfairly tarred with the brush of “Nazi collaborator” by outsiders who don’t know or care how much this nation also did to aid victims of Nazism, and how precarious its own position was.

“The Swiss have been greatly marked by this exercise, didn’t expect it, weren’t prepared,” said Rolf Bloch, 68, chairman of a chocolate company and leader of Switzerland’s 18,000-member Jewish community. “What happened is that the Swiss became the Jews of other people. They were collectively blamed for a whole host of misdeeds.”

The lessons of Switzerland’s most searing national ordeal since World War II are still being pondered. Obviously, in the age of a globe-girdling economy and when effective public relations is as vital as deft diplomacy, Switzerland’s long-standing policy of neutrality and its large and well-trained citizens army have been insufficient to safeguard national interests.

Perversely, right-wing and isolationist forces seem to have been given a boost from the persistent attacks from abroad. Other Swiss have concluded that their deliberate policy of splendid isolation--their country is neither a member of the United Nations nor the European Union--has left it without reliable foreign friends, and that Switzerland should join both organizations.

“Our task is to signal that we are a country like others, with our peculiarities, a political culture that is often different,” Swiss President and Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti, an advocate of both U.N. and EU membership, said in an interview in Bern, the capital. “But at the same time, we are a country that is not better than the others, and we must collaborate intensely with them.”

Contrast Cotti’s views with those of an influential 19th century Swiss thinker and politician, Carl Hildy, who believed that his country was so exceptional it had been elected by God to fulfill a divine mission.

It was less than a year ago that Switzerland, which twice in the present century looked on as its European neighbors went to war, received a grisly wake-up call that these days, a red-jacketed Swiss passport no longer serves as protection against the dangers threatening other Western societies.

On Nov. 17, 1997, in the ruins of a Pharaonic temple near Luxor, Egypt, Muslim extremists equipped with machine guns and daggers went on a rampage against foreign tourists, and 35 of the 58 people they killed were Swiss.

But why us? the nation asked as a minute of silence was observed on sports fields. A shattered tree stump, meant to symbolize the lives abruptly cut short and the searing blow dealt to Swiss society as a whole, was placed on the steps of the cathedral in Zurich, the country’s largest city.

Even the Vatican’s venerable Swiss Guards, who provide bodyguards for Pope John Paul II, were thrown into bizarre disrepute in May when a member of the detail killed his commander, a former Swiss army colonel, and the officer’s wife for still unclear motives. The soldier then turned his 9-millimeter Swiss-made pistol on himself.

The mundane backdrop to these sensational events was national economic stagnation and unprecedented joblessness throughout most of the 1990s, shaking the old Swiss belief of superiority over other Europeans.

“We used to make fun of the French, but for a few years, we had higher inflation than they did,” recalled Stephane Garelli, an economics professor at the University of Lausanne. “We used to think that in economics, gravity couldn’t touch us.”

Water Fountains Are Shut to Save Money

Though the economy is now experiencing an upturn, few Swiss dispute their vulnerability to the problems confronting other Western societies. Ironically, Geneva, a city known in the 18th century for its tightfisted Calvinist bankers, is now so broke that it shut off the water at city fountains a few months ago to save money. With a budget deficit of nearly $350 million a year, the city government owes 400,000 hours of overtime pay to its police, who walked off the job for a day this month in protest.

The Swiss were in the vanguard of European politics 150 years ago when they created a multilingual, multireligious and multicultural democracy on a continent largely ruled by unelected monarchies. Now, today’s Swiss worry that the rest of the world is passing them by.

“For a long time now, we’ve had a discussion about who we are, and where we’re going,” said Hugo Buetler, editor in chief of the most influential Swiss newspaper, Neue Zuercher Zeitung. In his columns, the Zurich journalist has put the question succinctly and bluntly: “In some ways, Europe is becoming more Swiss”--that is, multicultural with a diffusion of decision-making power. “Can Switzerland in turn muster the strength and courage to become more European?”

The question was already on the table when the tragic end of Swissair’s New York-to-Geneva flight plunged Switzerland into a mood of collective self-doubt that to an American might be reminiscent of U.S. gloom after the 1986 Challenger disaster.

“We had been living on another planet, living in permanent security and permanent peace,” explained Ziegler, the sociology professor. “But when 35 tourists are killed in Luxor, there is no peace. And when a Swissair plane crashes, there is no security.”

Forty-one Swiss, including 13 members of the MD-11 jetliner’s crew, were among the victims of the tragedy. It was the greatest aviation disaster in Swiss history, and for a nation of 7 million, the carnage was appallingly high.

Adding to the widespread bewilderment has been the absence so far of an answer to the essential question: What went wrong?

“We cannot understand what has happened. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not the day after,” Philippe Bruggisser, president of Swissair’s parent company, told a memorial service for the victims in Geneva’s St. Peter’s Cathedral.

Diplomat Borer flatly rejects suggestions of a Swiss identity crisis as “intellectual rubbish” and the psychobabble of journalists. But Pascal Borgiat, a psychologist with the Geneva police, is a believer.

In the hours after Flight 111’s tragic end, Borgiat was one of the many health professionals and members of the clergy recruited by Swissair and government authorities to assist families of the victims. For the 38-year-old former police detective, it was evident that his country was going through collective trauma.

“There really has been a cascade of dramatic events of late, which the media have relayed to each and every Swiss,” Borgiat said. “Once we felt more or less protected, but these situations have shown that Switzerland is like other countries. In the modern world, there is uncertainty, and we have to get used to it.”

People Lobby for Ties With Other Nations

Earlier this month, President Cotti’s government said it wants to make the Swiss neutrality policy elastic enough to allow cooperation with other countries in security matters and greater Swiss participation in international peacekeeping. The president and business leaders also have met to discuss whether to launch a $100-million fund to finance a pro-Swiss public relations campaign overseas.

Across Switzerland, volunteers have begun collecting signatures to again put the question of U.N. membership to voters, who turned it down by a lopsided 3-to-1 ratio in a nationwide referendum. But that was in 1986, long before the dramas and trials of recent years.

Ambassador Walter Gyger, official host to Geneva’s 33,000-member diplomatic community, is certain his fellow citizens’ answer this time will be yes.

Some Swiss, he said, remain nostalgic for “Heidiland,” a pristine, tradition-minded place that keeps the outside world at arm’s length. But most, he said, recognize that “we have been living in a quite artificial world, and built a foreign policy on a myth that we are the best and the strongest.”