Paul Widmer: «Freedom is Switzerland's raison d'être».»7 reading minutes

With its hostile territory, Switzerland had to find another recipe for success. So it developed a counter-model. In his essay L'identité suisse au défi, former diplomat Paul Widmer looks at the ingredients of Swiss success, the better to perpetuate it.

Conversing with Paul Widmer is a soothing exercise. With Olympian calm, this former diplomat from New York, Washington, Berlin, Zagreb and the Holy See switches from German to French. In the course of the exchange, it quickly becomes apparent that this polyglot is talking about the subject that drives him: Switzerland. Its past and its future. The writer Jean Giono liked to say that «what's important is to be a cheerful pessimist». A reasonable alarmist, Widmer fits this description perfectly. Like Elzéard Bouffier, Giono's hero in L'Homme qui plantait des arbres, who strives to revive his region by planting trees.