Last weekend, as sunshine blazed over Europe’s ski slopes, I went on holiday in Switzerland to visit some of my family who live in Val Müstair in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. It is a corner of Europe that could make your head spin if you were a cartographer or a linguist – or if you naively cherish the idea of nation states.
My cousins’ native language is Romansh but my uncle and aunt converse in French and everyone is fluent in German and Italian (which is used interchangeably with Romansh in the region). And while my cousins technically live in Switzerland, the borders of Austria and Italy twist around their region in lines that defy logic. Just down the road, for example, is a district called Livigno, which is part of Italy – but, amazingly enough, is actually cut off from Italy for part of the year and only accessible via a tunnel from, er, Switzerland.
Unsurprisingly, this complex ethnic patchwork has provoked plenty of wars. But these days it works well. That is partly because Switzerland is wealthy, small and a commercial crossroads. But there is another crucial factor too: nobody in the region thinks that a “state” needs to match ethnic identity or linguistic heritage. “Switzerland is not a nation state but a corporation of interests,” my Uncle Marco quipped over dinner. “That’s probably a good thing!”