{"id":501,"date":"2007-05-28T07:59:26","date_gmt":"2007-05-28T06:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=501"},"modified":"2007-05-28T07:59:26","modified_gmt":"2007-05-28T06:59:26","slug":"forgotten-world-81-switzerland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=501","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten World (81): Switzerland"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A major theme of NightHawk is that we live in a wide and varied world and we should know more about other countries and other cultures and learn to respect them. Therefore, on 16 occasions now, I&#8217;ve had a week-long feature devoted to parts of the world that tend to be under-reported or even forgotten. You can check out the previous 80 entries <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/ForgottenWorld.html\">here<\/a>. This week, I am going to run an 17th series of postings on this theme.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Switzerland\">Switzerland<\/a> is a country in the middle of Europe that is most famous for its legendary neutrality of the last 500 years &#8211; informally for about 300 years and then formally since just after the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century. It remains in some ways an isolated country  &#8211; it only joined the United Nations in 2002 and it is one of the few countries in Europe that is not a member of the European Union.<br \/>\nIn spite of &#8211; and maybe because of &#8211; its neutrality and isolation, its 7.5 million citizens enjoy one of the most stable and one of the most affluent countries in the world.  The country has a strong system of local devolution with much power in no less than 26 cantons. Under the constitution, the make-up of the government is not determined by parliamentary majority but in accordance with a four-party power-sharing agreement, established in 1959 and known as the &#8220;magic formula&#8221;.<br \/>\nSwitzerland is a European cultural and linguistic crossroads; about two-thirds of the population speak German, around one-fifth French and about 7% Italian. Romansch, the fourth national language, is spoken by less than 1% of the population.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A major theme of NightHawk is that we live in a wide and varied world and we should know more about other countries and other cultures and learn to respect them. Therefore, on 16 occasions now, I&#8217;ve had a week-long feature devoted to parts of the world that tend to be under-reported or even forgotten. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}