Foreign News: The Other Fellows

To hear them talk, the four nations gathered at Vaduz last week had the sort of grievances that often lead to war. One of them, with a swollen population of 25,000 to the half square mile, desperately needs Lebensraum. Another has the largest number of Communists per capita in Western Europe, and civil strife is frequent. A third has constant border troubles with its neighbors, who seek to change the nation’s traditional way of life.

Yet Europe did not tremble. The four pint-sized countries—Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and Andorra—have a combined population of 63,300, and their total armed forces would be insufficient to police Dubuque, Iowa. They were meeting in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, nestled in the Alps between Switzerland and Austria, to advance “the cause of peace by working for more tourism.” This project, neatly combining idealism with the hope for profit, came from the teeming brain of Baron Edward von Falz-Fein, 47, a loyal Liechtensteiner of Ukrainian origin and the leading entrepreneur of Vaduz. He runs three tourist shops and the Quick Tourist agency, is the country’s principal photographer, and, as founder of Liechtenstein’s Olympic Committee, will personally lead three local skiers to the Winter Games at Squaw Valley next February.

No Vetoes. The four delegates of tiny Andorra, whose main industry—smuggling —is frowned upon by France and Spain, had to fight their way through a snowstorm in leaving the Pyrenees, and nearly came to grief on the main street of Vaduz when their car almost collided with a herd of cows. The delegate representing the haL’-square-mile domain of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace was Monaco’s commissioner general of tourism, Gabriel Olivier, who arrived with a secretary and a head cold. San Marino, a landlocked mountain peak in northeastern Italy, sent a Belgian lawyer and musicologist who also serves as San Marino’s consul general to Belgium and Liechtenstein. “They couldn’t spare anyone from San Marino,” explained Baron von Fab-Fein, “because of the political problems there. The Communist opposition has been sentenced to ten years in jail. How ridiculous can you get—putting politicians in jail?”

The voluble baron was confident of amicable relations: “The Big Four can’t even agree to meet together. We will show the way, and reach total agreement in one day.” The number of delegates was left up to the individual countries. They eliminated the veto problem by eliminating votes. Falz-Fein was chosen president, without a vote, and he rang a cowbell to bring the first meeting to order in a hilltop motel, the only one in Liechtenstein.

Cutting Sarlc. At once tempers flared. Monaco’s Ollivier urged that the Little Four be expanded to the Little Seven with the addition of the Vatican, Luxembourg and Sark, the last a semi-autonomous island in the English Channel with .. population of 450. The baron protested that Sark has more birds than people, and added testily: “Luxembourg does not belong either. Its population of 300,000 dwarfs the rest of us put together. Be sides, Luxembourg is a member of NATO and out of our class.”

Disposing of all problems in four hours, the meeting unanimously agreed upon plans for exchanging tourist information, for special stamp cancellations at next year’s Little Summit meeting in Andorra, and for a closer check on what authors and journalists write about the tiny countries. As the delegates departed from Vaduz to report to their home governments, Liechtenstein reverted to its normal ways —the busy manufacture of needles, sausage casings and false teeth, and the sale to tourists of genuine Liechtensteiner cuckoo clocks—made in West Germany.