 We understand the English, let's try if it's possible to understand the Swiss. I never call Switzerland a model because nobody is able to copy it. I call it an experiment. And in the view of a libertarian it is a political experiment on the road to Central State to serve them. But we are still better on than all our neighbors in the European Union. There is a small difference. As a Swiss I am part of the experiment and I try to understand what happened and what happens now. I am happy to be your guide on a tour of the Swiss, but as an insider I only can offer some impressional images and I try to illustrate it by some pictures. I concentrate on 14 impressions. It means two minutes for impression. So our journey will resemble the traditional 14 stations of the cross, the so-called Bjar Kruzys. Only this time it's the Swiss Helvetik Cross which stands at the top of a mountain covering a tightly closed box to which we'll together try to find the key. I don't start with we the Swiss or we the people of Switzerland. Who is we? Ask my good friend Tony de Jazeil. And even more importantly who is the people? I don't know it. Let me draw your attention to station one, our king and our president. The Swiss love kings and queens, especially if they roll abroad. The king of Switzerland is the so-called Schwinger König. Schwingen is a special type of wrestling somewhere between American wrestling and Japanese sumo wrestling in a ring. The main prize is a young bull. The Schwinger König is also the world king of Swiss wrestling. By the way, if you invent a national sport, it's relatively easy to belong to the world's best. Our second national sport you know is banking. And here we are in global competition. And maybe this is the reason why the winners get more than just a young bull. Now as for political kings and queens, Switzerland has never had any. And we never have missed them. Fear of powerful individual is very deeply rooted in the Swiss mentality. It's actually more of a fear of centralized power than fear of power as such. The Swiss are born non-centralists. Station two, the Landsgemeinde as a model of direct democracy. Landsgemeinde is an annual general assembly of all eligible voters under open skies. Now I can save some time and put my contribution to the Festschrift Hoppe, where I express my sympathy for this concept while acknowledging some disadvantages. For one day in the year, each man is a homo politico. The other 364 days belong to the Hamatli. It's the home farm. It still makes sense for me one day for politics and 364 days for family, business, neighbors, culture, and small private community. I suggest the same ratio for income taxes. One to 364. An open vote by a show of hands under the leadership of the chairman is so widespread in Switzerland and in Swiss private associations that the procedure holds a central key to understand the country. As you can see on the right side picture, we even build monuments to the voting individual, where other nations build monuments to their kings. The Landsgemeinde is kind of direct, democratically controlled monarchy on demand. The Swiss relationship with authority can nicely be illustrated on the next picture. That's a card game in which the lowly jack trumps the king. In one of his published lectures, the Czech American political scientist Carl W. Deutsch summarizes his observation thus. Throughout European history, the farmers became a despised lower class. Only the Swiss play a card game called Yas, in which the card with a lowly farmer, Jack, trumps the king. In a popular variant of the game, furthermore, player can choose, depending on the hand he has been dealt, whether the lowest card, the sixth, can trump the highest card, the ace, or whether the ordinary heresy of cards applies. Sometimes it's played top-down, and sometimes bottom-up, a game which challenges all ordinary heresies. I prefer bottom-up, a subsidiarity principle. Station four. We don't love each other. Switzerland is not a traditional nation state. Our population is comprised of overlapping minorities, who do not like each other very much, but at the same time they don't hate each other. That's important. They share overlapping and asymmetric sympathies and antipathies between languages and traditional churches. We don't love each other like we would some of our kind, but at least we trust each other internally a little bit more than we trust non-Swiss. And that's enough for business. And so the Swiss live together, they do good business together, but they always keep their distance from each other and from their neighbors. This is beautifully illustrated by H. Hawks' dilemma, a fable of Schopenhauer. I don't tell the whole story, but it starts no more in here. It's the story of two H. Hawks, and if they are close together, they start to hurt themselves. If they are apart, they are too far away to go in business and to give internal, mutual warmth together. So the most important thing is to keep your distance. The Swiss do not love other Swiss, but how do you feel about Switzerland? Let me offer a few observations in it. For many Swiss intellectuals, journalists and artists, Switzerland is just a relic of 19th century, a country full of egoists, shopkeepers, bankers and cherry pickers, and they keep on apologizing for that to the international community. I never apologize for that, because I don't feel any collective guilt, nor collective proud. At the World Expo in Seville in 1992, visitors and many critics in Switzerland were outraged by the French-speaking Swiss artist, Ben Votier, and his motto, Switzerland No Existe, La Suisse N' Existe Pas. I, on the other hand, like the slogan. Very much, La Suisse, as a strictly definable phenomenon, indeed, doesn't exist. Why do we always pay homage to the generally outdated concept of nationalism at such exhibitions? I personally think that both the provoking slogan, as well as all the fuss around it, are typically Swiss. In the recent years, patriotism has been rediscovered by commercial advertising for mass consumption, the symbol of the Helvetic Cross can now be found on almost anything from baseball caps to bras and panties. There is also one political party, the Swiss People's Party, that has grown up to 30% of voters on the base of more patriotism and more Swissness. Station 6 is Switzerland a special case. According to a century-old saying, Switzerland is governed by confusion of people and foresight of God. The formulation combines politics with religion in a tricky way. It can explain success as well as failure and no person or group is made responsible. That's politics. It's part of the ideology of nationalism that all nations think of themselves as being something special, something unique, a chosen group which can lead others, for example. In reality, most states are forged with blood and iron, out of the melting pot influenced by the spirit of conquest, according to Benjamin Constant and Franz Oppenheimer. The Swiss Confederation arose as a peaceful alternative to a similar military conquest. The Confederate forefathers claimed their land from nature, from the primeval forests of the mountains, not from their neighbors. Again, something opposite to the customary form of occupying. Instead of the spirit of conquest, therefore, the early Swiss were guided on their quest by the spirit of cultivating nature, the spirit of secession and its siblings, the spirit of autonomy and the spirit of self-government. Just like other successful sessions at the Netherlands or the United States, it is a good experiment for the post-national and post-nation state period. I hope we will go. Switzerland does show us that besides the tradition of violent conquest and subsequent perpetuation of the conqueror's power, there also exists something like a state start-up through a contract. But it's a special case. That alone may encourage future state founders and secessionists to choose their path of peaceful contractual merger. This will irritate greatly the neighboring blood-sirsty statists. So all future founding fathers need to prepare self-defense against such aggressiveness. Old Switzerland was forged together in the 13th century as voluntary association of rural valley communities with relied heavily on mutual economic and social self-help with a high degree of autonomy, was more economy than of power politics. This, how the special case has started, but is not every country a special case. Is Switzerland really a special case? Are we so unique? We are not. We are normal. We are what happens when you let people live together and do business together in peace. And all the other involved in a global competition of the powerful and mighty are special cases. Perhaps you are familiar with the anecdote of the driver who takes the wrong turning and goes to the wrong way down a highway. When he encounters the first car, he calls the police anxiously and reports, officer, there is a wrong-way driver on the highway. No way, there are two, there are three, no four. Oh no, they are all going the wrong way. In the same fashion when I suggested early that Switzerland may be a special case, I'd now like you to consider that perhaps everyone else other than Switzerland is a special case. We all know war has been more frequent in human history than peace. But in terms of the preferences and aspirations of a vast majority of people prefer to be left in peace and develop the feeling that peace is normal and war is criminal. Ludwig von Mises once described Switzerland idyllically as a successful capitalist island of peace in the sea of nationalist, socialist and mercantilist failed experiments. If peace is the goal, then the civil society is something normal. And each aggressively expanding nation state is a special case of some particular military history. So instead of being an ancient relic of some mythical good old days, Switzerland is in fact precursor of the future normality of a peaceful civil society with capitalist economy. Station seven between anarchism of William Tell and the communitarianism of founding fathers of the Rütli. I mean the picture shows everything. The German poet Schiller described the story in 1803 as an ideal case of successful revolution and he contrasted it with the blood bath of the French Revolution with only result in a new tyranny. Rütli is the name of a forest clearing on a hillside overlooking Lake Lucerne. The story is of the common oaths remains very important for understand today's Switzerland. But let's come to station eight. The defeat of Marignano and the cradle for neutrality. I call it the Marignano principle. If you want to begin to understand Switzerland, you must appreciate the principle of neutrality. I will try to be brief on this huge topic here. In the Swiss case, the principle comes directly from the devastating defeat of confederate forces on the battlefield on Marignano on 1515 on the outskirts of Milan. There will be 500 years and I hope that there will be a celebration of this defeat. Station nine very important integration and xenophobia. So how do you integrate immigrants? In Switzerland, this naturalization takes the special form of a political act of voting and acceptance into a community. Switzerland is a world record holder in this. Contrary to popular belief, full 20% of the population are immigrants. Among violent criminals, this ratio is exactly reversed. 20% of them are not from abroad and 80% are foreigners in our prisons. Equally though, foreigners make up 75% of our COs of larger Swiss companies. I don't make any analogies. We have benefited from our openness to immigrants, selective immigration for those who are needed and from good networking with Swiss experts. But what does citizenship actually mean? And what does it mean to be admitted into a community? These questions are interesting not only for individuals, but also for whole seceding states that create new independent entities. Being granted a citizenship or even the right to immigrate should therefore be conditional on being elected as a new member in a community. Station 10, my favorite, non-centralism. A little explanation for this term. I use the term non-central. Advocately, everybody talks about decentralization and promotes centralization. But the word decentralization assumes a prior centralization which is being deconstructed. I say, why should there be an assumption of centrality in the first place? I am a confirmed localist, but I am most interested in what makes local communities work. Small, non-central authorities will still have to create rules against crime, set price for immigration, very important, neutral defense against aggressors, you can discuss about that, penalties for non-fulfillment of contract and so on. My friend Hans Hoppe calls his model a private law society. So even he sees a role for something like law or rights, or without an organized method or their enforcement. In the field of various competing political experiments, as well as experiments abolishing politics, it is not the vote at the ballot box that matters the most. What matters is whether a given experiment incorporates voting by feet, otherwise known by exit option. I grant you, such exit is not always very easy. You have to find another group that will take you as a free citizen. And you have to pay the entry price and residence fees that the new group has set. It is nevertheless precisely the exit option that makes the small mental state units so attractive. They also do make mistakes, but even bigger mistakes, but they can copy from the other what works and avoid what doesn't work. But the effect of their member states are much less bad. It is much easier to avoid the consequences or indeed to avoid the whole community by emigrating. Station 11. Militia principle. The double principle of non-professional politics and non-professional military defense, sometimes slightly precisely labeled as militia principle, but I don't know another term, is another key to unlocking this risk. Militia tasks are undertaken on vocational, part-time and usually voluntary basis. Such volunteering can nevertheless be professional when the individuals bring in their respective knowledge and skills. The dark side of Militia principle is that when nobody is professional politician, everybody has to be part-time politician. So what would a Swiss person recommend? As a libertarian first base is say no to any kind of politics in the sense of exercising power and using force. Even if it has been politically legitimized. But second best, if you can beat them, join them a little bit, have a say in how this power is to be exercised and force used. Compared with determination from outside, a co-dermination is at least a step up in influence. The smaller the group which I co-determine, the greater my influence. You have to forgive me that as a citizen of a small, never influential state, I have a slight preference for the second best solution. I know such preference is neither consistent nor heroic. You can even call it opportunistic and cowardly. But I would rather have the soul of a shopkeeper than of a war hero. In a world dominated by aggressive nation state, this attitude has proven to be economically rewarding and successful. Okay, but what about the army? Switzerland has no army. It is a potential army in case of attack. I support that everybody has the right to be armed and I show you my two granddaughters with the gun of my son and of my father. I have to admit that I also am in favor of compulsory conscription. In fact, would you expect anything else from a Swiss guy? Yes, I know. It's a hard blow for libertarians. But hear me out. I support the compulsory conscription only in an army that exists only to defend its country and never sets foot out of the own territory. I know that conscription is the most cruel form of taxation and you pay with your time and with your blood. Even worse, I'm not horrified that my two lovely granddaughters on the picture are holding rifles. If you defend a country with a weapon and have been trained and equipped, you have to learn to kill. But only kill in order not to be killed yourself. And after you many others, otherwise, thou shalt not kill. Of course, using the weapon to kill is a massive disgrace for anyone required to kill by the constitution to kill. This action can only be morally acceptable if you are forced to do it. Nobody may make other people kill only in order that he himself does not get killed or does not have to do the killing. Overall, it is a case of generalization on the potential moral guilt and I do not believe that it can be exchanged for volition or for money. But as always, I'm more than happy to discuss it in the afternoon. For now, it's to turn quickly to the two last stations. Station 13 is death and taxes. Everyone in this audience will be familiar with the fact that there are only two certain things in life, death and taxes. And our Swiss tax system is based on three levels, local taxes, continental taxes and federal taxes. And the best thing is that there is a competition on all the three levels. And the identity of taxpayers and tax eaters and the possibility to vote against higher taxes is another secret of our success. Station 14, the last one. Humor and self-criticism in Swiss culture. Literature holds an important key to understanding a country. We heard it yesterday. In Switzerland, we have no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goethe and Schiller. In fact, there is no Swiss national literature. So how do Swiss poets and writers express their relationship with their country? Overall, nobody glorifies it. They all offer their constructive criticism, all express themselves constructively critical, but not without positive emotions. Some of you may find the following observations surprising, but it holds. The best and most famous authors are those who employ the important sign of high IQ. That's humor. And they never overestimate the possibility, never their own nor their countries. I'd like to conclude by summarizing a passage from one of his last and best texts, from one of the last best texts of Friedrich Dürrenmann. By now an infamous and still misunderstood speech he gave in honor of Bartzlaff Havel. That's Dürrenmann. He opens with a reference to Havel's imprisonment in Prague. Having introduced the theme of prison, he then compares Switzerland to a prison. And immediately he offends everyone left, right and center. Left, right and center. How dares he? What a cheek. Well, Dürrenmann is a satirist who works with challenging metaphors. If you read the text carefully, you'll appreciate Dürrenmann's anarchistic attitude. For him, each nation state is formed over prison. A prison that demands obedience from its inmates, but also provides for them more or less reasonably. But, and here comes the big but. The Swiss are uniquely both prison inmates as well as the prison guards, because of their unparalleled political rights, they hold the key to both the exit and the entrance and essential requisite for freedom. So if you read the whole speech, you arrive at its amazing Swiss friendly conclusion. Dürrenmann concludes with a reference to the last chapter of Plato's The Republic, and its story of legendary heroes who are given a chance to select a new form of second life. Some of them choose position of power, others opt for strong wild animals and so on. The last one to make the choice is Ulysses. And the last remaining position is that of a withdrawn, unremarkable, private person. But that's okay says Plato and Ulysses. He had filled his life with challenges and heroic deeds and is now highly satisfied with this lot. Ulysses probably has, so Dürrenmann, settled in Switzerland and has become Swiss. Thank you for your attention. I also wish you, lives full of heroic deeds like personal and communal secession, let's reinvent Switzerland, but first have lunch.