You could look at it another way.Mort wrote:Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
The Borgia weren't even Italian and it took French and Spanish intervention to mostly bring city-state feuding to an end, and and a French/Swiss family to bring Italy together as a real country. (As a side-note Michelangelo and da Vinci had more to do with the Medici family than the Borgia
). Nowadays, Italy has a generally apathetic youth with rife unemployment and little ambition to leave the security of the nest, a next to useless government with virtually non-existent support/cohesive admin, and widespread corruption throughout the country. And a terrible PM, you think Cameron is dicey... youtube.com/watch?v=qtMiH9UjtXMSwitzerland has world-class pharmaceutical, medical instrumentation and timepiece industries, is the home of WHO, CERN and UNHCHR to name a few, has the most comprehensive rail network in Europe and maintains one of the highest standards of living in the world, all without ruining their countryside or economy.