by Judy Jones
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That while Switzerland is devoutly neutral and has been for centuries, it’s not the least bit pacifist. Not only does it have a long history of supplying mercenaries to the rest of the world (of which the Swiss Guards in the Vatican are the last vestige), it maintained, throughout the Cold War, Europe’s second-largest army (after Germany) and a reserve system that kept every able-bodied man in the country on twenty-four-hour call until he turned fifty—all to defend a population of six million. Today, the Alps are alive with the fifteen thousand or so armed bunkers and secret tunnel systems built throughout the twentieth century, major cities are still ringed by underground hangars ready to disgorge fighter jets at the first alarm, and it wasn’t until 2002 that voters finally ditched the law that had, for half a century, required every Swiss home and business to have its own fallout shelter—although these had already been doing interim duty as laundry rooms and wine cellars for decades.
Also, that the exponential growth of the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and the election of its billionaire industrialist leader to a seat on the federal council in 2003 (the party’s second) finally upset the genteel power-brokering arrangement known as the “Magic Formula,” which had, for forty-four years, put collegiality above partisanship and allowed differing political viewpoints to coalesce into a remarkably stable federal government. The rising influence of the nationalist SVP has encouraged the Swiss to shelve—yet again—any nascent idea of joining the EU and prompted Swiss banks to resist increasing international pressure to loosen the secrecy laws that have made Switzerland a money-laundering Shangri-la for corrupt dictators, drug cartels, and terrorist groups worldwide.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A SWISS: That all that materialism, conservatism, claustrophobia, and early-to-bed-early-to-rise stuff can get a person down. Who, after all, really enjoys feeling as if he’s permanently on sedatives and confined to his bed in the local sanitarium? (And who could really take much pride in the fact that he’s a citizen of the one European country that might never be mentioned in a college-level European-history textbook and not even be missed? Ditto that, apart from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its literary tradition is pretty much summed up by William Tell, Heidi, and The Swiss Family Robinson?) Even if your date seems content to follow Papa in the watchmaking, banking, or pharmaceuticals business, he or she may seem a little down—just like the Swiss economy, which recently discovered that even putting your currency and trade laws in perpetual quarantine won’t keep you from catching a global recession. Try to cheer up your date with a stimulating debate over why it took women until 1971 to get the vote in Switzerland (at least in most of Switzerland; women in one German-speaking canton weren’t allowed to vote on local issues for another twenty years). If that doesn’t work, excuse yourself and discreetly search the house for a military rifle and a locked box of ammunition. Until recently, these were required gear for every man in the army reserve. U.S. opponents of gun control love to point to the heavily armed Swiss citizenry as the ne plus ultra of homeland security (and to gloat over the country’s low gun-crime rate), but the Swiss themselves recently decided differently, given that astronomical suicide rate.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: Well, Switzerland is Europe’s oldest republic, and that’s nice. Also, it’s been officially neutral in every conflict since 1815, and that’s nice, too, provided you don’t get hung up on how, as a neutral, it sold corn, wheat, and armaments to the Nazis and made a bundle shipping all of the above on its strategically located Germany-to-Italy railways. On second thought, best not to rock the boat at Sunday dinner. So before you get going on the morality of isolationism (Switzerland didn’t decide to join the United Nations until 2002), compliment your hosts on running such a well-ordered country and on their reputation as a haven for émigrés, of both the rich and fashionable and the dissident and brooding varieties. (Visitors during the twentieth century included Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara plus, in the former category, various deposed royals and overreaching fashion designers.) Don’t expect necessarily to be taken to your date’s parents’ bosom, however: Many a Swiss mother to this day advises her daughter not to marry “foreign”—a category that includes not only the world beyond the Alps but those areas within them that don’t speak the same language she does. TAIWAN
THE LAYOUT: Small, teardrop-shaped island—a.k.a. Formosa, Taipei (after its capital), and, officially, the Republic of China—located less than a hundred miles off the southern coast of the other China. One of the most crowded countries in the world, and, because of the rugged and heavily forested Chungyang mountain range running spinelike down its middle, things are even more congested than they sound: 23 million people eat, sleep, love, plow (less and less of this, as farmland is converted into industrial parks), tool around on their motorbikes, and make laptop computers in an area considerably smaller than Connecticut.
THE SYSTEM: A wildly successful capitalist-style democracy (the democracy part only since 2000). Was under strict martial law for four decades, with local legend Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, followed by his son, the panda-like Chiang Ching-kuo, as president. It was Chiang junior who in 1986, two years before he died, sniffed the Taipei air, realized the middle class wasn’t going to put up with repression forever, and got liberalization rolling. Out of the blue, opposition parties were legalized, press restrictions eased, and the imprisonment, torture, and killing of political opponents phased out. He also opened up lines of communication with the mainland. Today there’s a multiparty setup, with a president, a national assembly (currently ceding power to a legislative one), and a clutch of yuans, or councils. The biggest difference, though, is that now not only can you actually vote for your president and representatives, you don’t have to anticipate their being in office for the rest of their, and your, lives.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: Let’s cut to the chase— in this case the 1949 chase by a zillion Red Chinese of two million defeated Chinese Nationalists, the Kuomintang (KMT) of Chiang, who ferried them across the Formosa Strait and set them all down on Taiwan to catch their breath and take a bath before turning around to recapture the four million square miles of territory they’d just lost to Mao. Nearly four decades later, they were still waiting, an increasingly autocratic bunch of very old men—the native Taiwanese referred to them behind their backs as the “old thieves”—who, in the meantime, held office season after season, year after year, because, given that Chiang saw himself and his men as the legitimate government of all China, new elections couldn’t possibly be held until all Chinese, from the Vietnamese border to the Mongolian one, could be gotten to the polls. (Meanwhile the mainland Chinese believed that they were the true rulers of all of China, although they didn’t waste valuable time worrying about niceties like voting, plus they, at least, really did account for 95 percent of China’s area and population.) A couple of additional mad-tea-party touches here: First, as a result of both Taipei’s and Peking’s claims, talk of the former’s simply declaring its independence and moving on to some next thing was, in terms of logic, let alone the gunboats the Reds kept threatening to send over, out of the question and, more than that, proof of sedition. (Yes, you could talk about reunification, not that anybody thought it was in the cards.) Second, that for as long as the KMT were camped out on the island, the native Taiwanese, who probably wouldn’t have minded hosting Chiang and his men for a couple of months, or even years, were relegated to the status of nonpeople, and on home turf yet. For years, things went Taiwan’s way: The West endorsed its we-are-China stance, not only keeping it in the United Nations but preserving its veto power on the Security Council. The trouble started in 1964, when France recognized Mainland China and “derecognized” Taiwan. In less time than it takes to stir-fry bean curd, Taiwan was ousted from the United Nations altogether and the People’s Republic installed. In 1972, Nixon visited Beijing; in 1978, Carter s
evered relations with Taipei and normalized them with the mainland (though pointing out that the United States still wouldn’t look favorably on a third party’s invading the island). Since the early 1990s, when Taiwan finally declared an end to war with the mainland and gave up its cockamamie claim to be China’s legitimate ruler, and the Chinese government, for its part, came up with the ambiguous “one country, two governments” formula to describe what it still sees as an estrangement that must inevitably lead to reunification, cross-Strait business has been booming. In recent years, China has edged out the United States as Taiwan’s number-one export customer and Taiwan has become the biggest investor on the mainland, where a million Taiwanese now live and work. Still, the reunification-vs.-independence debate never stops being a cliff-hanger, as the ever richer and more outspoken Taiwanese—who increasingly see themselves as, well, Taiwanese—wonder why they have to keep pretending to be China’s prodigal child when they’re obviously a grown-up nation with an apartment of their own, and the mainland government, which keeps hundreds of missiles pointed across the Taiwan Strait, sends crystal-clear messages that—with all due respect to family ties—it would rather blow the island off the map than allow it to secede.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A TAIWANESE: It really has been one big Confucius-meets-Horatio-Alger, electricity-comes-to-the-straw-hut, annual-per-capita-income-soars-from-a-postwar-$162-to-$25,000-today-and-still-growing tale. And unlike such fellow “Asian tigers” as Hong Kong and South Korea, with their high-profile multinational corporations, Taiwan made its money largely through hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop shops and factories, with Mom and Pop working day and night, reinvesting their earnings, and cheating on their taxes (a time-honored custom here, along with accepting bribes on election day). Your date may be too spoiled to want to follow the parental example, but he or she is likely to believe wholeheartedly in ambition, success, and money—and to cheat on his or her taxes. Depending on where he lives and whether his parents were refugees from the mainland or native Taiwanese, your date may be consumed by politics, caught up in the tensions between the old KMT, which favors eventual reunification with China, and the newly powerful Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is vociferously pro-independence. Feel free to provide your date with assurances of America’s interest in and commitment to Taiwan, but be darned sure you stop short of promising that we’ll actually intervene if China ever decides to invade the island. Don’t worry, though: Your date, like just about everyone else in the world, would probably just as soon keep matters the way they are—unsettled and relatively copacetic—as long as he or she can be guaranteed a high-paying job.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: That long before the economic miracle, long before Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, there was an island, a beautiful island, called Taiwan, full of people, beautiful people, called Taiwanese—and that, despite the influx of those millions of Chinese Nationalists, they still constitute over 85 percent of the island’s population. Long-suffering (and, some say, slightly lacking in imagination), they’ve had to deal not only with the Nationalists, in the course of whose arrival some ten thousand of them were killed in riots—traumatic, sure, but ultimately less galling than the fact that the Chiang people put on airs, drinking tea and playing chess all day. Before that there was a fifty-year stint under the Japanese, including the tension-filled war years, and before that various snoopy Europeans. Of course, the Taiwanese, who emigrated en masse from the mainland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (in an effort to, even then, avoid paying taxes) were originally interlopers themselves, forcing the local Malayo-Polynesian aborigines into the mountains, where most of them, perhaps wisely, have chosen to stay. On a happier note, how about planning a family weekend in the People’s Republic? Everybody who can come up with a cousin—or the name of a cousin, or, for that matter, just a name—is free to visit the mainland and take a look around, although you, like any other commodity, have to travel through Hong Kong to do it. When you finally get to, say, Guangzhou, your date’s parents will probably be overtly contemptuous: Mainlanders still spit on the street and even today, most don’t own any mode of transportation more upscale than a bicycle. TURKEY
THE LAYOUT: East meets West—or tries to. Most of Turkey’s in Asia, where it takes the form of a bulbous peninsula known to geographers and 70 million Turks as Anatolia, and where it’s located next to several Neighbors from Hell: Syria and Iraq to the south, Iran to the east, and to the northeast the onetime Soviet republics of Georgia and Armenia, both engaged, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, in ethnic feuding. Note, too, that European snippet, which, in addition to poignantly recalling how the Ottomans used to run the whole Balkan peninsula, also keeps Turkey in touch with traditional enemies Greece and Bulgaria. Istanbul (originally Byzantium, then Constantinople) sits on the crack, the Bosporus Strait, which controls traffic from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean—a passage lusted after for centuries by Russia. Inland you’ll find Ankara, the capital, at which point fertile plains turn into rugged mountains and, if you hang a ralph, Turks give way to longtime Turk-hating Kurds.
THE SYSTEM: The other Middle Eastern democracy. In theory a republic ever since 1923, when a defeated Ottoman Empire, severely retrenched by the victorious Allies at the end of World War I, suddenly and against all odds, began to behave as if it had been Western for years, with a president, a prime minister, and a parliament you actually got to vote for. Even so, until 1947 Turkey had only a single political party, and for at least a decade after that the incumbent government was inclined to announce who’d won at the polls before bothering actually to count the votes. Today, Turkey’s all grown up, with nearly fifty political parties that tend to be as mutable as the political weather. In the parliamentary elections of 2002, nearly all of the ten or so significant ones were swept out of the National Assembly by the landslide victory of the Islamist—but apparently West-leaning—Justice and Development Party (AKP), headed by the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip “Whose Side Is He Really On?” Erdogan (pronounced “AIR-dow-an”). Two political influences worth noting: the Kongra-Gel, made up of former members of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which was known for its demands for a freestanding Kurdistan and its willingness to shoot schoolteachers as well as Turkish security officers; and the adamantly secular Turkish army, which is currently docile enough but has seized power three times in three decades.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That Exoticism (minarets, opium, a non-Indo-European language, and falaka, the custom of beating political prisoners on the soles of their feet) notwithstanding, Turkey has done everything it can think of to become a full-fledged member of the Western family, and it’s beginning to lose patience with the ongoing rejections. Not out-and-out rejections, necessarily. Turkey does belong to NATO, after all, and in fact fields its second-largest army. And after a few years of big-deal legislative reforms—including the abandonment of the death penalty (which is more than you can say for Texas) and of its traditionally tolerant, Turks-will-be-Turks attitude toward marital rape and police-station torture—Turkey finally got the European Union to stop misplacing pages 4 through 11 of its membership application and get down to serious negotiations, even if the talks will take ten years and may not really lead to membership. It’s the little things: the way some other EU members seem quite ready to call off the whole party rather than have Turkey invited in. The way Turkish guest workers in Germany and other white-bread countries are made to feel that their seams are crooked (when, that is, they’re not being firebombed in their sleep). The way the West still seems to side with Greece in the perennial Greco-Turk rivalry, dating back to the Trojan War and currently being played out on the island of Cyprus, where Turkey gave in and did everything Brussels demanded of it, only to have its offer to kiss and make up scorned by the Greek Cypriots. And then there’s the war in Iraq. As if Turkey hadn’t gotten into enough trouble with its neighbors when it helped the United States dur
ing the first Gulf War, now it’s being treated like some kind of pariah (and being cut no slack on its sizable foreign debt) for refusing to serve as home base for the U.S. invasion of Baghdad—which 90 percent of the Turkish population ferociously opposed, occasionally with car bombs. Meanwhile, the United States hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the PKK, happily hunkered down in the shelter of northern Iraq, from launching raids on Turks. It’s all been enough to enrage the local Islamists—who, like fundamentalists everywhere, have a louder voice now than they did even a decade ago—and drive secular Turks to start waving their fists and singing the national anthem.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A TURK: First of all, that there’s a good chance he’s in the army. This is not a bad thing. The military plays a unique role in Turkey: It’s a political force, it’s a major employer, it’s the single most cohesive element in Turkish life (many of whose other elements carry bombs and machine guns in their briefcases), and it’s a time-honored way for a young man to get ahead. So if your date gets a little overheated when he talks about who his all-time favorite general is, don’t roll your eyes: This military is best viewed as a progressive force, the obvious heir to Kemalism, the secular, pro-Western spin given the new nation by its soldier-founder (see below). Women don’t serve in the army—or, for that matter, in restaurants—but they do work in offices and have made inroads in law, medicine, education, journalism, and telecommunications. In 2002, women were finally given full legal equality with men, although women’s rights had been sanctioned by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who got Westernization rolling in Turkey more than half a century earlier. Feminism, it’s true, is still a bit of a dirty word, at least among Turkish men, and a girl would have to be crazy even to utter the words “sexual harassment suit.” Virginity is still prized, at least by the men, and honor killings (avenging illicit sex) weren’t outlawed until 2004. Read about all of the above in the Turkish version of Cosmo. Male or female, your date will certainly be Muslim, like 99 percent of the population, though whether or not she wears a headscarf or he actually answers the call to prayer that comes crackling over public loudspeakers five times a day has a lot to do with geography and social class. Does your date live in the richer, more developed western region of the country or the poorer, more traditional eastern part? Are the two of you strolling through downtown Ankara, the capital, where you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single mosque, or in the outlying gecekondu, one of the shantytowns (literally, “built in a night”) that surround all of Turkey’s big cities, where yesterday’s peasant farmers, having traded the endless tedium of the countryside for urban squalor, struggle to maintain some sense of identity? Either way, if you decide to stop for a glass of tea you’ll have to sit in separate rooms. Don’t make a big deal about the Muslim thing; most Turks don’t. It’s true that Islamist fervor is on the rise, but then, what can you expect after it was suppressed for at least seventy years? Even for most secular Turks, the idea of religious freedom implies the freedom to be religious if you want to.
