Switzerland

The holes made a country into a cheese.

American usage calls emmental-style cheese simply Swiss, and the phrase now describes anything full of holes.

Swiss secrecy became law in 1934 and was largely dismantled by 2018.

A 1934 banking act made disclosing a client's identity a criminal offense, turning discretion into a national industry and a thriller cliche. Switzerland began automatically exchanging account information with foreign tax authorities in 2017 and 2018, so the phrase now describes a past more than a present.

A chemist drew two molecules shaped like national flags and named them after the countries.

David Ginsburg introduced helvetane and israelane in Nouveau Journal de Chimie in 1982, in a piece written as a joke: one skeleton echoes the cross of the Swiss flag, the other the Star of David. Neither has ever been synthesized. Helvetia is the Roman name for the land of the Helvetii and serves as Switzerland's neutral label on stamps and coins, since the country has four official languages. Later chemists took the molecules seriously enough to calculate their strain energies.