The July 14 issue of Zurich's Tages-Anzeiger carried a story entitled, "Ah, but how beautiful it would be, to be Swiss."  ("Ach wie schoen es doch waere, Schweizer zu sein.")

As someone who has had this thought more than a few times, usually after a direct encounter with some instance of Swiss rationality--scheduled maintenance springs to mind--I was drawn to this story.  Die Weltwoche had conducted a representative poll of registered voters in regions of France, Germany, Austria, and Italy that bordered on Switzerland.  A majority of respondents indicated they would prefer to be Swiss--or for their regions to be part of Switzerland.

More than half of the respondents in the Vorarlberg and Como/Varese regions of Austria and Italy (respectively) said they'd be pleased if their regions joined Switzerland.  In the German and French regions of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Savoy/Upper Savoy, slightly fewer than half the questioned voters (48%) shared this view.  These pluralities were still greater than the negative responses.

Respondents particularly liked Swiss direct democracy and the lower taxes levied just over their borders in Switzerland.  

What prompted this exercise in opinion sampling was not a sudden flowering of a hitherto unnoticed strain of Swiss imperialism, but rather a parliamentary motion introduced by SVP "Nationalrat" Dominique Baettig.   In his motion, Baettig proposed that it be made easier for neighboring regions to be integrated as Swiss cantons.  It isn't clear whether this motion was introduced whimsically or seriously.  In some quarters it was written off as nonsense or a bad joke.  For the SVP politician the political playfulness may have reflected serious skepticism about Swiss integration into the EU.  If integration is such a good idea, why not encourage integration into the model that works?  

Whatever the political background, the polling stimulated the imaginations of the Tages-Anzeiger editors, who developed a photo essay asking the question, "if Switzerland expanded, what cultural treasures would fall into Swiss hands?"  A photo of the Mont Blanc massif (in France) was displayed with a caption pointing out that this chunk of the Alps would complete the palette of Swiss alpine tourist offerings.  The radio tower in Stuttgart was offered as another possible tourist attraction.  The hapless "Oetzi"--the mummified murdered traveler who turned up in a glacier and who has been the object of much study would become a Swiss cultural treasure.

And, most importantly, Switzerland would be able to claim that George Clooney's vacation home in the Como-Varese region was in Switzerland.

Also in the Swiss news...

The Foreign Minister recites in Berndeutsch

For the Swiss TV program Donnschtig-Jass (which seems to combine very Swiss-specific humor and traditional music with the card game Jass in a spectacularly unintelligible mix)  the French-speaking Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey agreed to memorize and recite a portion of a song (in the Bernese spoken dialect) popularized in the 70's by a singer named Mani Matter.  This was to be accomplished within the span of the broadcast and would be judged by a language professor from the ETH in Zurich.  

The enthusiastic moderator from Donnschtig-Jass walked into the federal capitol in Bern, buttonholing functionaries and asking for directions to the Foreign Minister's office--affecting to be lost.  Once in her office he affects a wide-eyed admiration for her office and its appointments.  She somewhat apologetically explains that she spends a lot of time there so it needs to be comfortable.  (To American eyes it is a remarkably spartan office.)  

After the pleasantries, the TV personality hands over the text and Calmy-Rey agrees good-naturedly to try to learn it by the end of the broadcast--offering a couple of disclaimers about her abilities with Swiss German.  At the end of the broadcast, she declaims the text with some care.  The learned expert from the ETH describes her work as flawless.  

The Foreign Minister smiles.  The professor smiles. The moderator congratulates--and smiles.  

Now, to my untrained ears, Calmy-Rey's recitation sounded suspciously like high German.  But then I tried to think of what sort of language challenge an American TV show's host might present to the Secretary of State.  Would Secretary Clinton be asked to recite  some lines from a Cajun song in the original Cajun patois or "You Are My Sunshine" in Spanglish?  

The possibilities are endless.