The Real Reason SWITZERLAND Is So Different | WorldWise

A country with no access to the sea. Surrounded on every side by great powers that have spent centuries waging war on each other. Most of its land is steep mountains where almost nothing grows. No oil. No coal. No significant mineral wealth. And stranger still — this country doesn't even share a common language. Its people speak four different ones. It doesn't share a common religion — it's split between Catholics and Protestants who once killed each other over that very difference. It doesn't even share a common ethnicity, in the way many nations define themselves. By every textbook on nation-building, a country like this "shouldn't exist." It should have shattered into pieces long ago. And yet, today, that same country is one of the wealthiest, most stable, and most peaceful nations in the world. It's home to banks the entire planet trusts. It makes the most precise watches, the finest pharmaceuticals, the most sophisticated machines. And it hasn't fought a major war in over two hundred years. That country is Switzerland. Today we're going to tell the story of how a nation that "shouldn't exist" managed to build itself — and the more interesting question we'll spend most of our time on: why has no country, anywhere in the world, ever successfully copied the Swiss formula? =Timestamp= 00:00 Intro 01:30 CHAPTER 1 03:28 CHAPTER 2 06:07 CHAPTER 3 09:55 CHAPTER 4 12:10 CHAPTER 5 14:05 CHAPTER 6 15:04 Outro