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After 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Cold War ended. Switzerland suddenly had a problem. For decades, the country sat comfortably between East and West. Neutral. Special. The Sonderfall. Now there was nobody to be neutral between. The whole foundation of “we are different and that is fine” started cracking.

Chapter 9 of the book. Honestly, it reads like a political thriller.

The army nobody needed

First shock: in late 1989, over a third of Swiss voters said yes to abolishing the army. They lost the vote, but still. One third. For a country that built its identity around militia defense, that stung. Even worse, after Germany reunified, Switzerland realized its army of 650,000 was nominally the biggest in Europe. A pacific neutral country with the largest army on the continent. Kind of awkward.

Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Michio Kaku ISBN: 978-0385548366

Chapter 10 opens with a simple question: how long can you live? For most of human history, the answer was “not very long.” Average life expectancy hovered between twenty and thirty years. People died from things we now treat with a cheap pill from the pharmacy.

Kaku walks through the major medical milestones that got us to where we are today. Better sanitation in the 1800s added fifteen to twenty years. European wars pushed doctors to actually publish results that worked instead of protecting their useless potions. Then came antibiotics and vaccines, adding another ten to fifteen years. So now many countries sit around seventy years life expectancy.

After the war, Switzerland had a bit of a reputation problem. Did not last though. Within a few years, the economy was booming so hard that everyone forgot the awkward questions about wartime neutrality. The Swiss started telling themselves a new story: we are special. Different. Better. They called it the Sonderfall Schweiz. The Swiss special case.

This chapter covers how that identity was built, tested, and cracked.

The economic miracle

Swiss factories were untouched by war. Their workforce was educated and ready. When Europe needed goods for rebuilding, Switzerland delivered. Production tripled between 1960 and 1974. GDP growth hit 12 percent in some years. By 1970, this tiny country with 0.15 percent of the world’s population handled 2 percent of global trade.

Book: Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything Author: Dr. Michio Kaku Published: 2023, Doubleday ISBN: 978-0385548366

Edison vs Ford: A Bet Nobody Expected

Kaku opens Chapter 9 with a story I didn’t know. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were actually close friends. They used to vacation together and make bets about which energy source would power the future. Edison backed the electric battery. Ford backed gasoline.

Retelling of Chapter 7 from A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head (Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0).

In 1914, Switzerland felt pretty good about itself. Democratic, prosperous, neutral. Then two world wars and a depression happened. Everything got tested. Not everything passed the test.

World War I: Neutrality is Hard Work

When WWI broke out, Switzerland mobilized 220,000 men in days. Parliament gave the government full powers and elected a General for the duration. They picked Ulrich Wille, a 66-year-old with Prussian connections. French-speakers were not happy about that choice.