A citizen in Tunis shows off a memento of his first free and fair vote. Creative Commons / Freedom at Issue

Tunisia has just held the first free elections of the Arab Spring, nine months after the fall of former President Zinedine el Abidine Ben Ali. There are also feverish meetings, summits galore in Brussels and elsewhere to save the Euro. Then there are the questions around Col Muammar Gaddafi’s death. I guess news in the US is headed by President Obama’s announcement that the last American soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of this year, drawing to a close an eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 US troops. Over 10,000 Iraqi troops and police, and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

But there’s another event that I’m pretty sure hasn’t been dominating your foreign news headlines. Well below the radar screens of all but the most fanatical ‘world-watchers’. A general election for the Swiss parliament.

I’m a convinced democratic. Lower case – a believer in democratic values. As a non-American I wouldn’t hazard a comment on US politics here. My Swiss daily newspaper had a cartoon of a Swiss couple walking past some of the many posters that mark our campaigns, and the man’s saying ‘the only country in the world where we vote to change nothing’. As a dutiful citizen, I read through the 32-page booklet that I got through the post of ‘spicy recipes’ of the different parties for the Federal stew that makes Swiss politics, ending with a real recipe for Engadine barley soup.

The dance of time: quick time, slow time; quick, quick, slow. I’m fascinated by the times of history. Evil usually takes time to prepare and to grow, but then often only instants, minutes to inflict, and then again a lifetime or more to heal. This seems to be part of the tragic of human nature and human existence. A massacre, rape, violence, horror in all its many forms… Time does not heal of itself.

I recall meeting a Swiss journalist in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, after the withdrawal of the Serb army. Serbs and Kosovars had been living together for generations, for hundreds of years, perhaps not with any great affection, but living as neighbors, she said, sharing the same schools, landings in apartment buildings, often going to each others’ marriages, sharing birthdays. And then a slow poisonous rise of nationalisms, and suddenly Serbs were turning on their Kosovar neighbors, telling them to leave, now, within minutes, with what they could carry. A certain level of tolerance destroyed in hours that may take generations to heal, to restore. And the enemy was not a faceless unknown, had a first name.

There’s a lively debate among experts in the field of paleo-anthropology about intriguing signs of ‘compassion’ among our distant ancestors. Compassion: ‘A feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.’ Based on old bones and burial sites, there seems to be some evidence not just respect for the dead, but respect for the living.

Shanidar Cave is an archaeological site in the Zagros Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan (in northern Iraq). It was excavated between 1957-1961 by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University and yielded the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60-80,000 years ago. The Shanidar fossils show a very high frequency of injuries, healed injuries of all different kinds. The most extreme example of this is an arm bone from Shanidar I – the designation of one of these ancestors. It’s an upper arm bone that’s withered, has a healed fracture, and a healed over amputation just above the elbow. It shows that this individual lived with an important handicap for 20 or 30 years. “And what that says is that these people were taking care of their injured kin. They were taking care of people who had serious injuries so they could survive them and continue to be functional members of the social group for many years. It was a dangerous lifestyle, but they were compassionate, they were caring, they were human,” says Erik Trinkaus.

We Europeans find a lot of news of the United States in our media. Many of us follow with interest, much puzzlement and relatively little understanding of the posturing, the insults, the exaggerations. Obama doesn’t look much like a socialist to us… But I was hurt the other day by the nameless Republican figure who sneered that Obama was trying to make the US more like Europe – but that Europe was 20 years behind. Behind what?

I believe that we should all be able to cultivate a healthy nationalism, a pride and love of country. But perhaps we all also need to work harder to work our way up the league tables, by learning from each other’s best practice. Take education. The United States objectively has much to learn here; her ‘end of term report’ reads much like my school reports: ‘Could do much better. Needs to try harder.’ (see UNICEF’s “big picture” comparison of the performance of schools in the world’s rich industrialized nations.) The US is close to the bottom of many league tables of school achievement. But who has got it right? Here in Europe, the Finns seem to have got a lot of things right, and apparently they’re rather overwhelmed by the visiting delegations wanting to pick up good tips. But I find that highly encouraging: clearly in some fields, we are getting more ready to look around and see what we can learn from those who seem to be doing better than us.

Photo: courtesy of the Swiss canton of Glarus

In many countries, the concern is to get away from Presidents for life, from power-hungry politicians changing constitutions to allow incumbents to have another term, bending the rules to stay in power. Here in Switzerland, the government ministers take it in turns to act as President. So probably a pretty shocking percentage of Swiss would not be able to tell who this year’s President is!

The President’s responsibilities and powers mainly involve chairing the meetings of the coalition government that includes all the largest parties represented in Parliament, and welcoming foreign heads of state and dignitaries, who otherwise might find it hard to understand shaking hands with all seven of the wise men and women. And the world, which rightly shows little interest in the strange ways of a small country in the middle of Europe, has shown some interest in last month’s election of two new ministers being elected by the parliament, giving Switzerland for the first time a majority of women in the government. Switzerland now has a woman President, and both houses of parliament are chaired by women. So there’s feminist rejoicing (and I count myself a feminist) in a country where women only got the right to vote in Federal elections in 1971.

The conference center at Caux, Switzerland

I spend my summers, like many Swiss, up in the mountains. But my summer ‘chalet’ is a former Palace hotel, now an international conference centre, with hundreds of participants, from around the world (see: www.caux.ch).

We enjoyed a magical evening of Klezmer music in the Caux theatre. It’s slightly amazing that after the almost total destruction of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe that gave birth to this musical idiom, this haunting, joyful, dancing, sad music is played and enjoyed by many. I’m not well-known for my dancing, but it is almost impossible NOT to dance to this music! A moving revenge on Hitler.

I’ve also taken part in a workshop on ‘Religious diversity and anti-discrimination training’, a training that has been modeled by an NGO called CEJI and is billed as ‘A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe’ (www.ceji.org). And there were also a number of people taking part in this conference on ‘Learning to Live in a Multicultural World’ from the pedagogical movement for children’s rights inspired by the Polish-Jewish victim of the Holocaust, Janusz Korczak.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the former Caux-Palace, then the Esplanade Refugee Camp, housed some 1,600 Jews. In 1999, we inaugurated a plaque at the foot of an oak tree planted in 1997 to mark this little-known chapter of history. The simple plaque looks out over the breath-taking view over the Lake of Geneva to the Franco-Swiss pre-Alps. The text on the plaque reads: ‘In remembrance of the Jewish refugees who stayed here, and of those who were not admitted to enter Switzerland during World War II. We shall not forget.’

I guess I’m not alone in sometimes being mystified by myself and my reactions. I want to be a peace-maker – yet I sometimes lose my cool, and can provoke others to rage, without meaning to. I am part of an inter-faith committee in Geneva, Switzerland, the city where I live. We’ve built up some good friendships, relationships across divides – but the tensions in the world beyond our borders often touch us. Which is no big surprise. At one meeting, with a full agenda, I was trying to hurry things along, to encourage the chair to cut short a debate that I saw as going round in circles. Two Muslim friends stormed out of the meeting, one of them saying that they’d had enough of colonial attitudes…

I can easily forget that I’m British, and that others may see in me part of the colonial past that for me is ancient history, not personal experience. I also learned afresh that some old hurts lie like nerves very close to the skin, and I forget that at my peril.

At another meeting, a Buddhist nun made a for me rather patronising remark about the monotheistic faiths being responsible for so much of the violence in the world, unlike her own more pacified tradition. I hit back with ‘What about Buddhist religious extremism in Sri Lanka?’ I knew nothing, I was told, the Buddhists were simply defending themselves and responding to Hindu terrorism. And I was off into another spiral of anger and violence of my own. And again, I had to swallow my pride and apologise.

But I’d rather go through the anger and apologies, and live in the real, than just avoid all conflict and resolutely stick to the polite and superficial.

Marrying a foreigner and living in their country — as both my brother and I have done (we’re English but I live in Switzerland and my brother in the States) — can be a challenge: not just to fit in but to work out when to contribute by not exactly fitting in. My own experience leaves me doubly impressed by my old friend Rob Corcoran, a Scot and a white man, who married an American and went to live in Richmond, the former capital of the Southern states. When they arrived there, they moved into a mixed race neighbourhood, and quickly a couple of African-American neighbours became good friends. As an outsider perhaps my friend was better placed to see old problems with fresh eyes.

Out of their experience grew a programme called Hope in the Cities. Rob has now written a book about the experience: Trustbuilding: An Honest Conversation on Race, Reconciliation, and Responsibility published by the University of Virginia Press. It is in part a history of a trust-building and reconciliation work that started in Richmond, but has now reached out to individuals and communities in many other parts of the world. But the book is also a helpful text book, a ‘how to build trust’ handbook. Simple questions (such as ‘Who is not taking part in the conversation?’) challenge the would-be do-gooder. Do I only interact with those who already think like me? Corcoran quotes African-Americans who are meeting whites in an ‘honest conversation’ for the first time; and Republicans who have never really talked in deeper interaction over several hours with a Democrat.

One fascinating practical realization that Corcoran and his friends helped with is The American Civil War Center in Richmond, ‘the nation’s first museum to interpret the Civil War from Union, Confederate, and African American perspectives.’ I look forward to visiting it the next time I’m in the USA. I want to dream about an Israeli-Palestinian museum that tells the history of that troubled part of the world from different perspectives.

Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan is one of the most visible Muslims in Europe. Charismatic, loved, hated, feared. A source of inspiration for many young European Muslims, a reference; suspected and accused of double talk by many non-Muslims.

I consider him a friend; I wrote a review for Tikkun, defending him against Caroline Fourest’s book attacking him.

At a conference that I helped to organize, Ramadan was coming to speak. There were also two Muslim imam friends present, and I asked each in private what they honestly thought of him. One told me: “I hope that I don’t shock you, but I think that he is the Martin Luther of Islam.” The second said: “He is a dangerous reformer.” Interesting. They seem to agree, I thought!

Personally, I like and trust him. But I sometimes wonder whether I’m too trusting by nature. Am I naïve? Blind to the real dangers around? The other day, I met an academic, Swiss, who worked with Ramadan for several years. He told me that he’d been a little suspicious, given the things that he’d heard in the media. He found friends whose knowledge of the Koran and of Arabic was up to the task, and asked them to discretely check. Was there any suspicion of the much discussed “double language”? He also got to know the family and the children. “Children can’t fool you,” he said — and he found no trace of any sinister, hidden message.

Perhaps trust is not such a bad default mode for our relationships?