Neutrality as an indispensable part of Switzerland’s independence and security of supply

Our continued commitment to Switzerland’s security of supply now requires a firm commitment to Switzerland’s comprehensive neutrality.
  However, Switzerland’s neutrality is being fought more and more fiercely. There are warring parties who try to stigmatize the neutral position in a conflict as helping the other party and thus directly attack neutrality.
  If the Red Cross is resented for statements that do not agree with the opinion of a warring party, then war is also being waged directly against neutrality. If neutrality is attacked, it must defend itself by clarifying the circumstances and the accusations derived from it.

Attack on a Swiss state principle

Currently, Switzerland as a state is not being attacked, but a principle of the Swiss state is being attacked by saying that Switzerland’s neutral non-partisanship for a militarily attacked country is an open partisanship for the attacker.
  The party at war presents the course of events in such a way that it is in the right and the opponent is guilty.
  But this is the perspective of every warring party.
  The neutral, on the other hand, is not subject to the perspective of a warring party. He can and must view the conflict from different directions. He thus has a better view of the conflict process and the reasons for the conflict’s origin, which the warring parties want to conceal.
  The neutral position is superior to the one-sided perspective. It is closer to the truth and from there it can also open up possible solutions that are not visible and accessible from the perspective of the conflict parties.
  Of course, conflict parties who are aware of their superiority do not wait for conflict solutions from neutrals. They therefore consider the neutral position to be superfluous.
  However, comprehensive neutrality is indispensable for Switzerland, its development and its position in the world.
  We therefore held a symposium on Switzerland’s neutrality and security of supply on 29 November 2022. On the same date, exactly 175 years ago, on 29 November 1847, the Sonderbund War came to an end.
  In the 700-year history of the development of the Swiss Confederation, it was then once again demonstrated how neutrality and the ability to lead and promote peace processes are interrelated.
  Switzerland has persistently won its neutrality with its economic development on a meager basis in the course of its history in the middle of Europe. Switzerland as a state and stable democracy with a secure supply in an open world market is the result of an intensive political refinement process, which could not be more topical in view of the current political aberration in Europe.

The contribution of the
neutral position of Switzerland
and its 2014 proposal in the OSCE 

Switzerland’s proposal was unjustly opposed by a warring party. As a result, Switzerland’s neutrality has increasingly come under fire and has come under massive pressure.
  However, because it was clear to everyone in 2014 that Ukraine had committed a war crime by shelling its own population, it was not possible at the time to avoid negotiations and an agreement as proposed in Minsk.
  Neutral Switzerland played an important role in this process with its proposal to cantonize the provinces of eastern Ukraine. However, instead of implementing this solution, it was not supported by the United States.
  In retrospect, the Western signatories to the Minsk agreement even boasted that they had only signed the Minsk agreement to buy time for Ukraine’s military buildup against Russia.

Observations of the conflict development
 from a neutral perspective

Neutrality requires constant and attentive monitoring of conflict developments. Neutrality is precisely not an opportunistic retreat into a political niche that is ignorant of all this – as it is accused today – in order to force it to dissolve. The “coalition of the willing”, according to the ideas of the USA, only tolerates joining the ruling war party and not a neutral stance. This is because the neutral stance is based on the fundamental liberal idea that only the clarification of the conflict processes can lead out of the immaturity of war! The neutral stance also enables to recognise threatening assaults by individual actors in their early stages – before the conflict breaks out. This is also the core idea of the OSCE: to maintain the European order after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and to keep it in balance so that no one feels threatened!
  This achievement of the OSCE as a peace dividend has hardly interested the USA. As early as 1993, the General Staff of Switzerland had realised that if the USA, through NATO, continued to push its military infrastructures eastwards in Poland and Romania, a conflict with Russia would become inevitable. The USA claimed at the time that these missile bases in Eastern Europe served to defend against ballistic missiles from Iran.
  In the aftermath of the coup in Kiev and the reneging on the agreement of 21 February 2014 to hold democratic elections and to wipe them out with a coup Russia occupied Crimea in 2014 because otherwise it would have been added to the US’s network of 800 US military bases worldwide. The previous occupation of Kosovo and the establishment of the US military base at Bondsteel broke the OSCE rule in advance and exposed the OSCE’s inability to enforce the agreements. Under this obviously not “rule-based order” and the goal of pushing NATO eastwards, ethnic, religious and spatial economic overlaps were used to enforce conflicts from the outside.
  Just two short years earlier, in 2012, the European Football Championships were held in various cities in Poland and Ukraine. In 2014, barely two years later, the Ukrainian army destroyed the showpiece of Donetsk airport, sending a signal of terror to the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and thereby demonstrating its will, to destroy and its destructive power. Contrary to the agreements – also with the signature of the [current] President of Germany – the agreed new elections were not held, the legally elected government in Kiev was overthrown and a coup government was installed. With violence and crimes in the context of the Maidan that have not been solved to this day, the people and parliament were terrorised, the command structures in the army were replaced and the political opposition was banned. Kiev had issued decrees banning the Russian-speaking population from speaking their own language, suspending pension payments in the eastern provinces and creating a climate of criminal terror through the shelling of residential areas by the state-owned Ukrainian army.

Imposed self-defence

Russia can be accused of having occupied Crimea. However, this never gave the Ukrainian government the right to use its army to shell the housing estates of the country’s own population for years, resulting in 13,000 deaths.
  Not only does it matter that this action by the Ukrainian government and army is a war crime, it also matters that Ukraine, with this state terror, has inevitably challenged Russia to protect its population, which has strong ties with Russia. It was this that led to the Russian army advancing into Ukrainian territory. And this, nota bene, only after repeated requests by Russia to the US to disclose its intentions of arming Ukraine and the objective of massing troops on the borders with the rebellious eastern provinces and to seek a negotiated settlement. The USA never answered these urgent requests by Russia at the end of 2021! On the contrary, the self-defence thus imposed on Russia is now weighted more heavily by the USA, NATO and the EU than the years of shelling residential areas in their own country by the Ukrainian army.
  Now it is being debated that the USA and Great Britain waged war against Russia in Ukraine: some say that the blame lies with Russia – and more precisely in the crossing of the Ukrainian state border by the Russian army on 24 February 2022. The afore mentioned course of the conflict is cut off and replaced by the complaint, set up outside the course of the conflict, that this war is the result of Russia’s autocratic power politics and that NATO must stop Russia from invading further states.
  This account is just as inconclusive as the claim that NATO’s advance against Russia is to ward off the Iranian threat in order not to have to comply with the OSCE agreements. In other words, rational analysis and reasoning are being sidelined and eliminated. The geostrategic claim to power and the right of the strongest are now openly emerging behind the conflict development that has been built up with small steps for years. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact is ostensibly seen as Russia’s admitted defeat and its assigned role as a regional power as the result of history. The war, in turn, feeds on the hope of the more powerful to be able to enforce its claim to supremacy militarily.
  This brings us back to imperialism and the reversion of the equality of all peoples to the rule-based domination of the “value West”. It is a renewed attempt to propagate neo-colonial global domination. Russia has had to experience this since the nineties, economically serving only unilaterally as a “petrol station” (John McCain).

Reminder

On 24 July 1917, the Russian newspaper “Worker and Soldier” carried the following: “Russia is going through difficult days. The three-year war, which has claimed innumerable victims, has brought the country to exhaustion.” And it warned that “Russia is transformed into a colony of England, America and France”. Two months later – still during the First World War – Russia’s provisional (liberal) government complained that it was “compelled to warn certain foreigners who behave in Russia as Europeans do in Central Africa” (“Labour Way”, 12 September 1917).
  The conflict then continued until the Second World War. This was followed by the Soviet Union’s loss-making victory over Hitler’s army, which is in doubt today. The Cold War followed. The fact that the Soviet Union’s offer (Stalin’s note of 10 March 1952) to withdraw if Germany did not join NATO and became neutral was rejected also played a role.
  This was followed by repeated appeals from Russia, Putin’s speech at the Bundestag in 2001, that Germany should no longer be threatened and could turn its attention to economic reconstruction. Putin’s legitimate question at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 about the purpose of NATO’s advance was not answered. They did not understand this question, they pretended in hypocritical dissimulation.
  The “third attempt” to colonise Russia will come down to the existential question of to be or not to be.
  It is about the problem of a world economy in which all may participate equally advantageously.
  These achievements of the European Enlightenment, to solve the increasing conflicts with orderly methodical thinking, are at stake under penalty of a further progressing immaturity, followed by senseless processes of destruction.
  “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” (Albert Einstein)  •

(Translation Current Concerns)

* The text is part of the Annual Report of the Swiss Association for Industry and Agriculture (SVIL) for the year 2022 of June 2023. Hans Bieri, dipl. Arch. ETH/SIA, spatial planner, is Managing Director and Chairman of SVIL.