There is a particular kind of impatience in the air these days. Countries want results now, alliances that deliver this quarter, partnerships measured in immediate returns. Diplomacy, in this mood, starts to resemble a procurement exercise:
What do I get, how fast, and what happens if I don’t get it? Multilateral institutions are sidelined. Long-standing frameworks are questioned. Patience, once considered a diplomatic virtue, is increasingly mistaken for weakness.
I note this instinct. I do not find it wise.
On August 1st, as Switzerland marks 735 years since a handful of Alpine communities signed a founding pact, it is worth asking what actually makes a partnership endure. Not clauses. Not deliverables. Not the transactional logic that dominates so much of today’s international conversation. What endures is something quieter and, frankly, harder to quantify: accumulated trust, genuine interest in the other side, and the patience to build something that survives the news cycle.
Swiss-Egyptian relations, entering their 92nd year, are a reasonable test case for that proposition.
This past year offered more evidence than usual. In January, Cairo hosted the Swiss-Egyptian Economic Forum, a gathering of ministers, investors and business leaders built around a Joint Economic Commission we established together in 2025, precisely because both sides felt the relationship deserved a more structured and institutionalised home. Over a hundred Swiss companies operate here across healthcare, manufacturing, textiles and food security, employing tens of thousands of Egyptians. The forum was not a ribbon cutting. It was a working session on what comes next, and that, in my experience, is always where the more interesting conversations live.
Our Minister of Culture, Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider attended the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, one of the most ambitious cultural undertakings of our era and saw firsthand the scale of Egypt’s civilisational confidence. Minister of Justice, Federal Councillor Beat Jans visited Cairo to sign a migration Memorandum of Understanding with Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, the kind of practical, unglamorous agreement that rarely makes headlines but moves things forward. Switzerland also launched its 2025-2028 Co-operation Programme with Egypt, committing to inclusive urban development, citizen-centred governance and the protection and empowerment of youth and vulnerable populations, including refugees and migrants who too often find themselves at the margins of opportunity. This is not aid in the traditional sense, but an investment in shared, long-term stability, one built on the conviction that protection and opportunity are not separate goals but two sides of the same effort.
None of this happened overnight. None of it was designed to.
What I find equally revealing, though, is what unfolds at the edges of the official calendar. The Cairo International Film Festival and Swiss participation in it. The Francophonie Month activities that brought Swiss-supported programming into Egyptian classrooms, a reminder that the French-speaking world is a bigger and more surprising tent than some expectations. And last month, an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut that placed photographs of retreating Swiss glaciers alongside images of Nile communities navigating their own water pressures. Sixty-four photographs. Two photographers, one Swiss, one Egyptian. One quietly uncomfortable argument: that these two crises, separated by thousands of kilometres, are not actually separate at all.
One detail from that exhibition has stayed with me. Saharan dust, carried north by wind, settles on Alpine glacier surfaces, darkens the ice and accelerates its melting. Egypt is, quite literally, reshaping Switzerland’s landscape from afar. The connection is physical, measurable, and was there long before anyone thought to make it a diplomatic metaphor. It is a useful corrective to the idea that distant countries can simply opt out of each other’s futures.
This is precisely what gets lost in transactional thinking. The relationship between Switzerland and Egypt is not a balance sheet. It is a web of connections, some formal and institutionalised, others entirely unpredictable, that has been quietly accumulating for over nine decades. Researchers collaborating across disciplines. Companies investing with a long horizon. Students crossing borders and returning inspired. Artists holding up mirrors between two worlds that rarely see themselves as related. These are not the soft margins of diplomacy. They are, in my experience, its most durable and load-bearing core.
The argument matters beyond bilateral sentiment, because the pressures on this kind of patient partnership are real and growing. Sudan, on Egypt’s southern border, remains in the grip of a devastating civil war with an enormous humanitarian toll. Switzerland has been engaged there, supporting humanitarian operations and keeping open the channels that others have found easier to abandon. This is not naive idealism. It is a considered bet, one informed by centuries of practice, that the conversations needed to resolve such crises benefit from credible and neutral platforms and that this kind of credibility cannot be improvised. It must be built, slowly, over time.
Countries that choose dialogue over sides do not always receive credit for it. They rarely make the front page. But in a moment when the international system is under genuine strain, the countries that have spent decades constructing the infrastructure of trust turn out to be more relevant than ever, not an anachronism.
Switzerland turns 735 today. We have had enough time to learn that the relationships worth having are the ones worth tending slowly. Egypt, a civilisation that measures time in millennia, probably does not need us to make that point.
But it is August 1st, and it is our tradition to try.
