Neutrality and Security Policy as Components of the Swiss Model

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 23, Heft 1, S. 51-68

Abstract

IT IS NOT SO EASY TO DETECT THE SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE Helvetian model in the Switzerland of today. They should rather be sought in what has made Switzerland what it is in seven centuries of the association of different communities, often disunited, fiercely determined to maintain their own sovereignty and independence. Switzerland was born from the conviction that only a system of collective security would in the long term assure to each community the liberty to which all aspired. It was a double liberty: that which was threatened by external aggression, and that which had to be preserved against interference from those which one was committed to succour. For, in binding themselves, from the second half of the thirteenth century, by successive treaties of alliance, the first confederated cantons in no way surrendered their own liberties.The system of collective security thus set up in the thirteenth century was the cornerstone on which Switzerland was built, its spinal column. The engagements formed in the pact of 1291 were set out in a few lines, and are still valid seven centuries later. They have certainly enabled the Confederation to stand up to external danger almost until the end of the Ancien Régime in 1798. It is these secular experiences in matters of collective security which have inspired and, after many changes, fashioned modern Swiss security policy.