Meeting Place of the World

By Otto Friedrich

Geneva's shining city greets the eye:/Proud, noble, wealthy, deep, and sly.

--Voltaire

It has been the worst of winters. Temperatures down to -14 0 F. Shards of ice glittering on the Gothic towers of John Calvin's church, the Cathedral of St. Peter. The glacial wind known as the bise whipping the beautiful lake into whitecaps all along the quais that fan out from the Mont Blanc Bridge. Just last month, two feet of snow suddenly blocked all avenues to the Palais des Nations, the U.N.'s European headquarters, and forced the postponement of an international conference on human rights. Incroyable. Nobody could remember such a thing ever happening before. Swiss army recruits had to clear away the snow.

This is a city that holds 30,000 conferences a year, on the tsetse fly, on slave labor, on trade tariffs, on the future of the Australian wombat. Conferences are supposed to begin and end punctually, and then the delegates depart to make room for the next set of delegates. That is the system, and the motto on the Swiss 5-franc coin is "Dominus providebit" (The Lord will provide). This week the $100-a-day hotels are filling up with visitors to the world's biggest auto show, which is being held at the new Palexpo exhibition hall. Next week U.S. and Soviet diplomats arrive to resume arms-control talks. Such things are Geneva's biggest business; it is the meeting place of the world.

Geneva probably feeds and shelters more diplomats per capita than any other city. (More than 35% of the city's 160,000 inhabitants are foreigners, and foreign visitors total 2 million a year.) Quite aside from the new arms- control conference, there has been a U.N. disarmament conference more or less permanently in session since 1962. Geneva is not only the European headquarters for the U.N. but world headquarters for ILO, WHO, GATT, UNCTAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization.* Also the International Commission of Jurists, the World Meteorological Association and the International Civil Aviation Organization. Not to mention less official institutions such as the World Scout Bureau, the World Council of Churches and the International Council of Osteopaths. Plus foreign business offices beyond counting.

One reason for this swarm of organizations and conferences is that Geneva has few peers in such conveniences as luxurious hotels (12,000 rooms in all), myriad telex lines and multilingual interpreters. Says a U.S. diplomat: "Geneva is an ideal place to talk. It has square rooms, long rooms, high- ceilinged rooms, rectangular tables, round tables and horseshoe-shaped tables. It has restaurants, great shops, beautiful mountains and a lake."

Geneva authorities spend a good deal of their $1 billion annual budget in supporting all the talk. During the 1954 conference on the French withdrawal from Indochina, when no hotel wanted to house the Soviet delegation, the city actually bought the lakeside Metropole Hotel to accommodate it. Some of the newer hotels have become conference sites on their own. The Intercontinental, a sort of nouveau Kuwait-style palace where Secre

tary of State George Shultz stayed during his meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in January, is a regular setting for OPEC meetings. Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani maintains a pied-a-terre there. Manager Herbert Schotte, who transformed the 18th-floor restaurant into a four-room, $1,430-a- night royal suite, complete with Chinese dining room furniture, now describes it as "all ready to receive President Reagan if they ever decide on a summit here."

Geneva is a world diplomatic capital not only because of its beauty and its convenience but also because of its unique traditions and style. It is dedicated to neutrality, like the rest of Switzerland, and yet it is not at all like the rest of Switzerland. It was the last territory to become a canton of the Swiss Confederation, in 1815, after centuries of independence. Its patriotic holiday, known as the Escalade, commemorates the December night in 1602 when an old woman roused and saved the sleeping city by throwing a pot of soup at the invading troops of the Duke of Savoy. Geneva sheltered both the ascetic Calvin and the libertine Voltaire. Lenin conspired here, and so did the anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Geneva's international role derives from its location, in a gap between the Alps and the Jura Mountains. Here Lake Leman, Western Europe's largest, narrows into the foaming torrents of the Rhone River. Wandering tribesmen settled at the lake's edge as early as the Bronze Age. The Romans conquered the place in 120 B.C., and Julius Caesar came to fortify it for his Gallic Wars. In what is now the Place du Bourg-de-Four, where a stone fountain gently splashes through the seasons, the Roman road from Italy once crossed the road to southern France.

An autonomous city-state throughout the Middle Ages, Geneva welcomed the Reformation in the 16th century and welcomed as its priest the fierce young French theologian Calvin. He not only preached against sin but organized a * theocratic state that punished it. Wearing jewelry or playing cards was made illegal. A woman caught in adultery was drowned in the Rhone. A theologian who disputed Calvin was burned at the stake. Yet Calvin's teachings attracted followers from all over Europe, and his disciples spread his stern version of Protestantism to France, Scotland and New England.

When Louis XIV outlawed the Protestant Huguenots in France, thousands of them came to Geneva, bringing their skills as watchmakers, jewelers, merchants, bankers. Within a century they had helped make dour Geneva one of the richest cities in the world. It still forbade theatrical performances as sinful, so Voltaire acquired a new house just across the French border in order to stage his plays. Today Geneva boasts a refurbished Grand Theater (it had been gutted in 1951 when something went wrong during one of the more fiery scenes in Wagner's Die Walkure), but there is still very little night life. Since most forms of gambling are illegal, the casino across the frontier at Divonne is the busiest one in France.

Geneva lost its independence to the French Revolution. France, which almost completely surrounds the city, annexed it in 1798, but after the fall of Napoleon it finally became the 22nd canton of Switzerland. By then it was just a peaceful backwater. Franz Liszt came here after eloping with the Countess d'Agoult, and he composed a piano piece inspired by the city's church bells. "Happy is he who can stay long by these shores," wrote another aristocratic visitor, Lord Byron.

The city's role in modern diplomacy began with the Battle of Solferino in Italy in 1859. A Genevan traveler, Henri Dunant, was so appalled by the spectacle of the wounded French and Austrian soldiers left to die on the battlefield that he wrote an indignant book titled Un Souvenir de Solferino. From that book came the Geneva Convention of 1864, in which 16 nations agreed for the first time on humane treatment for the wounded. From Dunant's protest also came the creation of the International Red Cross.

When the victorious Allies of World War I decided to embody their hopes for peace in a League of Nations, some urged Brussels as the symbolic capital of the world, but President Wilson pressed for Geneva. The Swiss later commemorated his support by naming the quai leading toward the Palais des Nations the Quai Wilson. By the time the sprawling marble palais was completed in 1937, however, the league was so moribund that Geneva was sometimes ( referred to as the City of Lost Causes. (This experience inspired C. Northcote Parkinson to include in Parkinson's Law the thesis that the building of a new headquarters is invariably a symptom of institutional decay.) Very little remains of the old dream, except perhaps the peacocks still strolling serenely in the gardens that surround the palais.

But although the once again victorious Allies decided after World War II to establish the United Nations in New York City, Geneva soon proved indispensable as a European headquarters. For one thing, it was undamaged, and its shops were full of chocolates, cigarettes, watches, all the luxuries that were being stolen and bartered elsewhere in Europe. What better place to stage a conference or two?

Or 30,000. Geneva is still a splendid place in which to discuss the world's ills. The best lakeside restaurants, like La Perle du Lac or the Lion d'Or, serve a magret de canard with a fine bottle from neighboring Burgundy for about $40. Geneva also has good Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean and Indian restaurants, not to mention modest brasseries that offer a delicious newly caught perch for about $10. Any American who wants to take advantage of the strong dollar (now worth 2.8 Swiss francs, up from 1.7 five years ago) will find the Rue du Rhone lined with windows displaying Rolex and Patek Philippe watches, Gucci and St. Laurent clothes. Booming Geneva is also second only to Zurich as a Swiss banking center.

Foreigners posted here find that the cost of living ranks with the highest in Europe. A three-bedroom apartment near the Palais des Nations rents for $1,500 a month and up, and lakeside villas sell for $1 million and more.

Perhaps inevitably, the foreigners who flock to enjoy the benefits of Geneva tend to denigrate their hosts as cold and avaricious. Voltaire called Geneva "a city where no one ever smiles." One of his contemporaries, the Duke de Choiseul, jeered at the Swiss penchant for making money, "If you see a Genevean jumping out the window, jump right after him: there is 15% to be gained." As a defense against their isolation, Geneva's 4,000 resident Americans have an American Club, an American women's club, eight English- speaking churches, a drama society and a bridge club.

The Genevans respond to accusations of haughtiness with a certain haughtiness. Many have never even visited the Palais des Nations on the northeastern edge of the city. The aristocratic families that have lived for centuries in the narrow streets around St. Peter's rarely open their heavy doors to any foreigners, diplomatic or otherwise. "People call us cold and unfriendly," admits Robert Vieux, the city's chief of protocol, "but that's because we respect everybody's privacy." And the Swiss do take very seriously the crime known as filouterie d'auberge (nonpayment of hotel bills), which is punishable by three months in jail and a fine.

It is one of Geneva's peculiarities that the mayor of this capitalist citadel is a Communist. He is Roger Dafflon, 70, who is also the chief of the city police. A onetime electrician, born and raised in a working-class section known as the Grotto, Dafflon is one of only ten Communists in the 100-member cantonal parliament, but he is one of the five city councilors who take turns serving as mayor for a year. Says a tolerant Geneva banker: "A Communist mayor is a luxury we can afford."

And anyway, the long winter is ending. Soon the lilacs will be in bloom, and the tulips will flower in the Jardin Anglais, and this week the local authorities are once again turning on Europe's tallest geyser, which sends a shimmering column of water 400 up from the lake into the spring sky. Dominus providebit.

FOOTNOTE: *A.k.a. WIPO, it deals chiefly with trademark and copyright problems. The other initials stand for the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

With reporting by Robert Kroon/Geneva