Switzerland’s primary export is its landscape, or rather, the perception of its landscape. While statistics on industrial production may suggest that this honor belongs to chocolate, watches, or medical technology, all of these products are sold with bucolic panoramas emblazoned on their packaging, suggesting that what is being sold is the myriad of qualities that make the product Swiss, as embodied by the infamous landscape. True, the labor is highly skilled and specialized, ensuring that a watch will tick perfectly or a hip replacement won’t tick at all; the cows are beautiful and healthy, promising smooth chocolate that somehow evades the plague of factory farming that tarnishes the Hershey’s chocolate we must take responsibility for stateside. Yet, all of these qualities are embodied in the presentation of solely the landscape as the ultimate Swiss commodity. Ironically, in discussions of Swiss urban planning, the repeated trope is that Switzerland has, “no resources, no land.” In fact, its greatest resource is its land--not as a material to be mined or as a surface to be developed, but rather as the receptacle and embodiment of a collective ethos that pervades across the many autonomous Cantons. Thus, the question herein becomes, how is it that a nation’s greatest export and resource is a projection? The answer lies in the wanderwege—the network of footpaths that intertwine across the varied terrain of Switzerland and into its neighboring countries.
Eliana Dotan