Revival: Swiss Neutrality (1946): Its History and Meaning by Bonjour Edgar

Author:Bonjour Edgar [Edgar, Bonjour]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Freedom, Peace, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351253550
Google: WE8PEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43332502
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

INTERNAL THREATS TO SWISS NEUTRALITY

As late as 1827, the Austrian minister in Switzerland felt able to assure his Chancellor that the internal condition of the country would remain unchanged unless subjected to some violent shock from the outside. The revolution of 1830 provided the shock. The July Revolution, however, affected Switzerland not only internally but externally also. Thus it was of the gravest import for her independence and neutrality, and that in three respects. Firstly, the Quadruple Alliance was broken; the French move towards England created something like a European equilibrium, a distribution of weight which agrees well with Swiss neutrality. Secondly, the national regeneration resulting from the revolution in France strengthened the self-confidence of the Confederation and Swiss national feeling. Last but not least, it was these impulses which inspired the liberal leaders and gave them great effective power. On the other hand, the European revolution had awakened hostility to neutrality in the Confederation itself, a danger which threatened its existence as seriously as the previous tutelage of the great Powers.

The gravest peril to Swiss neutrality came from the idea, propagated especially by refugees, that Switzerland must take sides in the European struggle for the great ideals of humanity. She could not stand aside in the conflict between the sovereignty of the people and despotism, for that was the name given to the opposition between liberals and conservatives. Her free constitution imposed upon her the obligation of supporting the peoples of Europe against their governments. This way of thinking, developed with doctrinaire logic, naturally led to the demand that Switzerland should abandon her neutrality in favour of an international democracy. The theory bears every trace of its origin among refugees, those harried and uprooted intellectuals, so many of whom had been cast up on the shores of their Swiss asylum by the waves of European revolution. But even the extreme wing of Swiss liberals refused to countenance dogmas which might loosen the bond of their national existence, and actually turned on them with violence, even when presented in the guise of an enlightened nationalism. It was in this way, for instance, that Mazzini, the arch-conspirator, in his total misapprehension of the Swiss mentality, strove to make his doctrine of intervention palatable to the Confederation. But the Swiss recognized only too well the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Incessantly the exiles preached their doctrine of Switzerland’s mission of revolution. The very men who charged their land of refuge with being the accomplice of the great Powers were trying to make it the handmaid of international revolution. The most outstanding contribution to the press agitation against Swiss neutrality is Mazzini’s Neutralità, published in 1835. Here the Italian, with his purely deductive reasoning, proves how utterly he has failed to grasp the nature of Swiss neutrality. It is not only nonsensical, he declares, but immoral. Wildly over-estimating the importance of Switzerland, he hoped that a declaration of war by the Confederation against royalist Europe would provoke revolution in Germany and Italy.

The exiles, however, did not rest content with literary attacks on Swiss neutrality.

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