Meeting Place of the World

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