How America shaped Geneva’s international role

After the First World War, American leaders regarded Geneva as a city on a par with Jerusalem or Rome. The Swiss city first gained attention as a centre for international law thanks to an American warship – the Alabama. International Geneva would likely not be what it is today without the United States. Its rise as a city of international organisations was buoyed by admiration and advocacy from across the Atlantic. American enthusiasm for Geneva as a city, but most of all as an idea, reached its peak after the First World War. Geneva was now on a par with Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and Constantinople, declared National Geographic in 1919. The city, the magazine added, could become “the centre of the moral universe of mankind” as the new seat of the League of Nations. George Washington and the Geneva Academy The recurring American fascination with Geneva goes back to the time when the US was founded in the 1770s. Some of the founding fathers were admirers of Geneva philosophers and ...