By Patrick LAWRENCE
We must contemplate a world without the Swiss as facilitators of peace processes if the neutrality initiative fails on Sept. 27.
As reported here and there in Western media, although not very often or well or honestly, the Swiss will shortly vote in a referendum on whether their long tradition of neutrality will be written into the constitution and so be made a matter of law.
Let us all pay close attention, I urge. Swiss neutrality is an international public good, to put the case simply. Any citizen of the West desiring to see the U.N. Charter observed, international law upheld, centrist authoritarianism checked and diplomacy rescued from the Western powers' serial sabotage - altogether a world order worthy of the name - has an interest in the outcome of the Sept. 27 vote.
So, unfortunately, do NATO, the European Union, Switzerland's business and political classes and the media clerks serving these constituencies, all of which have it that Swiss neutrality - you will have trouble believing this but take my word for it - is a dangerous Russian plot to weaken the West and its supporters who are creatures of the Kremlin.
Referenda of this kind are a feature of the direct democracy the Swiss were wise enough to choose as their form of government in the 1840s. Direct democracy allows the Swiss to start what are called popular initiatives and when enough people sign one of these - 100,000 is the threshold - the government in Bern is obliged to take up the question the initiative puts before the nation's 9 million citizens.
Pretty good, especially if you put this next to America's post-democracy, wherein it doesn't much matter what voters decide they want: If those with money - "the donor class," as it is obscenely put - don't want what voters want voters will not get what they want.
The Neutrality Initiative was written four years ago - more on the timing shortly - and has 130,000 signatures affixed to it. It is now the subject of vigorous campaigning for and against in the runup to the referendum. Here, verbatim, are the four provisions the initiative proposes to write into the federal constitution:
- Switzerland is neutral. Its neutrality is permanent and armed.
- Switzerland shall not join any military or defence alliance. This is subject to cooperation with such alliances in the event of a direct military attack on Switzerland or in the event of actions preparatory to such an attack.
- Switzerland does not take part in military conflicts between third countries, nor does it impose non-military coercive measures against belligerent states. This is subject to obligations towards the United Nations and to measures aimed at preventing the circumvention of non-military coercive measures imposed by other states.
- Switzerland utilises its perpetual neutrality to prevent and resolve conflicts and is available to act as a mediator.
I have been watching the campaigning lately from this village, an hour or so east of Zürich.
Out my door are sloping meadows of grazing cows, sheep and a few goats. Along the roads, the signs in front of houses: "Kein Krieg. JA zur Schweizer Neutralität." No war. YES for Swiss neutrality.
You see a lot of these since the open campaigning - legally limited to several months - began earlier this summer. In French-speaking Switzerland, south of here, the placards read, "Pas de guerre. OUI à la neutralité Suisse."
You might never guess that, beneath the order and clarity of purpose for which the Swiss are known, those powers intent on subverting a principle with seven centuries of Swiss history behind it have turned the neutrality question into the sort of political circus anyone living in the Western post-democracies would find depressingly familiar.
I look at the cows, the fruit trees, the wildflowers, the farmers cutting hay and think: These disruptive ideologues think nothing of destroying an identity, a way of life, the right to make choices, sovereignty, independence - all of this in the name of technocratic authoritarianism, the reconstruction of Cold War blocs and the interests of the arms suppliers and war-profiteers dependent on the maximization of Russophobia.
Take a sec to consider the text of the initiative. Switzerland is neutral, it does not join military alliances, it does not wage wars but in self-defense. You are right to wonder what is new in any of this, and the answer is, "Not much." Swiss neutrality was written into the constitution of 1848 and reaffirmed in an 1874 revision.
But those documents stop short of declaring neutrality a matter of law, leaving it vulnerable to interpretation and various constituents, among them those previously noted, have weakened the principle over the years. The talk in Bern now is of "flexible neutrality," a phrase favored by, among many others, Ignazio Cassis, Switzerland's foreign minister.
Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, (center) with Cassis (right), and Federal Councillor Martin Pfister, Head of the Department of Defence, during a meeting at the University of Zurich in March. (European Union / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)
Cassis, by all appearances a man of little principle, was photographed last year embracing Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian dictator, while the latter was on a visit. The image has since been reproduced in various media, and few here miss its significance.
Cassis is typical of the technocrats and opportunists who favor Swiss membership in the E.U. and NATO. "He's not stupid, exactly," Guy Mettan, a prominent journalist and political figure in Geneva, said of Cassis the other day. "He's just a political marshmallow."
Four years ago it became evident that flexible neutrality will mean no neutrality if it becomes Swiss policy. This was when, with no national debate, Switzerland enforced the sanctions regime the E.U. put in place after Russia's February 2022 intervention in Ukraine. The Neutrality Initiative was drafted in response, and the signature-gathering began.
At this point there is no missing the larger questions at issue as the referendum vote draws near. This is a fight about national independence, sovereignty and authentic democracy on one hand, and on the other the prevalence of neoliberal orthodoxies, the power of the E.U.'s anti-democratic technocracy and the perverse determination of European "centrists" to lead the Continent into war with "Putin's Russia"- a term European Russophobes like as much as their Americans counterparts.
Alfred de Zayas, lead lawyer for the U.N. High Commission for Human Rights, is a co-founder of the Swiss Neutrality Council, a gathering of international attorneys, historians and former diplomats and military officers and a good man to talk to for his straight-to-the-point assessments of the war Switzerland wages against its enemies without and within.
"This has nothing to do with Putin or Russia," he said by telephone from Geneva last week. "It's a strictly Swiss initiative to stop the drift into NATO and the E.U. The latter has morphed into an authoritarian, even totalitarian bureaucracy imposing a trans-Atlantic order whether or not any nation wants it."
De Zayas in Geneva in 2017 at a conference on Justice, Human Rights and the eradication of Tax Havens. (Cancillería del Ecuador / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)
How good it is to hear people of de Zayas's stature speak so plainly of the pernicious dynamic that goes some way to defining the West in the third decade of the 21st century.
And how awful it is to witness the grotesque machinery deployed not only against the long tradition of neutrality here but more broadly against the nation's very identity.
NATO and the E.U. have been attacking the Swiss for resisting their authority, covertly and at times overtly, for many years. But the popular initiative launched in 2022 has escalated these diplomatic and political aggressions - and I insist on this term.
NATO opened an office in Geneva two years ago - "not big," Guy Mettan told me, "but emblematic." Like others, Mettan is half amused and half repelled to note the NATO delegation is located in a building called Maison de la Paix.
"Orwellian," de Zayas remarked when this came up in conversation.
Rafael Lutz, a German-Swiss journalist with Weltwoche, the Zürich weekly, just published a book whose title Pascal Lottaz translates as The NATO Network in Switzerland: How Neutrality is Being Sacrificed to Global Interests .
In it Lutz describes an extensive web of Swiss "crypto-Atlanticists" - his excellent term - that has been subverting Swiss sovereignty for many years, intensely so since the Ukraine war broke out.
Defense and Foreign Ministry officials, diplomats, senior bureaucrats in Bern, think-tank denizens, scholars, most political parties - the Swiss have been subjected to "a massive influence operation" run by all of these.
Hardly can we leave out Swiss media. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the leading German-language daily, almost all the Geneva newspapers and broadcasters - these have taken a leading role in casting the Neutrality Initiative as a dangerous Russian plot.
Mettan and others prominent in the neutrality movement are marked down as Putin puppets and Kremlin sympathizers. Never is any of this substantiated, never does one find in mainstream Swiss media any engagement of the actual issue.
It is blanket censorship, name-calling and labelling - propaganda tactics familiar enough to any American.
"There's very little responsible free press in Switzerland. It's all in the hands of the globalists," de Zayas said on this topic. "Only the alternative press is worth anything."
The prize for fraudulent argument and repellent propaganda on the neutrality question must go to Amnesty International, an organization that long, long ago surrendered its integrity to the interests of its funders, which reportedly include the European Commission and the British, U.S. and Dutch governments as much as Amnesty may try - assiduously, indeed - to obscure these relationships.
On Aug. 25, Amnesty came out forcefully against Swiss neutrality in a release headlined, " The neutrality initiative threatens Switzerland's ability to act in support of human rights." I suppose it is because Amnesty still travels on a residual reputation for standing on human principle that I find this document so disgusting.
It is signed by Alexandra Karle, who heads Amnesty's Swiss office. Here are two passages in it. The mentioned Swiss People's Party, conservative and long Europskeptic, supports the initiative and is the only major party to do so:
"From a human rights perspective, its [the initiative's] acceptance would be problematic. It would limit Switzerland's ability to respond, through non-military means, to serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Economic or diplomatic sanctions would become more difficult to implement, while arms exports to states involved in armed conflicts could continue to be permitted under certain circumstances, given the relaxation of the law on war materiel adopted at the end of 2025....
It is also shocking that the Swiss People's Party is using the dove of peace as a campaign symbol and adopting slogans such as 'for peace' or 'no war.' This initiative would not promote peace. On the contrary, it would limit Switzerland's non-military means of exerting pressure, while arms exports to states engaged in conflicts could remain possible...."
And now to Amnesty's true purpose in standing against the initiative. This is nothing more than cheerleading for the trans-Atlantic order of which NATO and the E.U. are pillars:
"In a context marked by rising authoritarian tendencies, the weakening of the rule of law, the shrinking of civic space, and the questioning of multilateralism, the defense of human rights and international law is more necessary than ever. The initiative promotes a concept of neutrality based on isolationism. Switzerland should instead strengthen its commitment to multilateralism, civil society, and human rights."
This neoliberal junk simply enrages me, as it has every proponent of the initiative with whom I have spoken. To borrow a locution from John Lindsay, New York's enlightened mayor long ago, Alexandra Karle can go perform the love act on herself.
I have met no one here who is confident the Neutrality Initiative will prevail in the Sept. 27 vote. There is too much propaganda and subterfuge - even the opinion polls are suspect - to give its supporters much confidence.
In their favor, as these people reason it, they have started a process that will go on. "I'm not optimistic," Mettan told me. "But if we lose with support of 42 or 45 percent it can count a success. They will have to be careful now on the E.U. and NATO questions."
We must all nonetheless contemplate a world without what the Swiss call, with merited pride, their "good offices" - their customary services as mediators, as reliable diplomatic channels, as the facilitators of peace processes.
If those who have worked hard to advance the Neutrality Initiative lose Sept. 27, all of us will.
Footnote: Guy Mettan contributes to The Floutist, the writer's Substack newsletter.
Original article: consortiumnews.com