Gregory A. Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland, 2002.
Switzerland's army cannot be fully understood except in combination with Swiss neutrality, and Swiss neutrality likewise cannot be understood in isolation from the Swiss army. Even as the country prepares to enact significant changes in the size and structure of the army in the early twenty-first century, it remains a uniquely universalist institution, and a force for social integration. Whatever adjustments are made to it in the coming years, the Swiss army is likely to remain such a force for the foreseeable future. 17
ArmyUnlike most other neutrals throughout history Swiss forces, while small, have been tenacious fighters and even, for several centuries, one of the most powerful armies in the world. Twice in two thousand years have the ferocious peasant Helvetii of the Alpine redoubt been defeated and occupied. The first time was by Julius Caesar, who, in 58 B.C., stopped the Helvetii when they tried to migrate en masse to what is now Western France. Caesar carefully co-opted the beaten adversary into the Roman security system, the Helvetii guarding the Rhine against Germanic invasions and enjoying a measure of self-rule in their internal affairs in exchange. Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1796-97, consciously imitating Caesar, conquered upper Italy for France and wanted to assure himself of the Swiss alpine passes. The Swiss resisted in 1798, but not as strenuously as could be expected. Part of this was due to initial sympathy to the values of the French Revolution. Part was due to the fear of confiscation on the part of Swiss elites -- dividing a society whose poorer members mainly wanted to resist. The French left and returned twice, but continued to enjoy predominant influence in Switzerland until 1813. Napoleon, like many French emperors before him, found the soldiers of Switzerland to be a formidable addition to his armies. "The best troops -- those in whom you can have the most confidence," Napoleon advised one of his generals, "are the Swiss." In this he mirrored the assessment of Machiavelli, who considered them, "the new Romans."
Unlike the other nations of great bravery, meanwhile -- such small but tenacious powers such as Israel, Britain, Mongolia, Vietnam, or Afghanistan -- the Swiss have been able to maintain a policy of honest neutrality, and a state of peace and freedom from external invasion, for centuries. The Swiss felt tempted to engage themselves in the conflicts swirling around them more than once. In 1914, there was significant popular sentiment for Germany. More than one Swiss official had to be removed for actions contrary to neutrality. Nevertheless, the country has maintained a strict neutrality for nearly five centuries, all the while remaining sufficiently armed to scare away all but a handful of attempts at invasion.
Its toughness gives Swiss neutrality teeth. Meanwhile Swiss neutrality and equality temper and discipline the toughness to be ready to die, but only for defense of the country. "The Swiss have not fought a war for nearly five hundred years," John McPhee writes, "and are determined to know how so as not to."1
Today, Switzerland is no longer one of the most feared military establishments in the world. Yet it is not inconsiderable. Some 2,000 or 3,000 airstrips dot the country like Band-Aids, ready to help repel enemy air power and conduct Swiss defensive operations. Mountains, caves, hills, and forest cellars the size of a Home Depot Store are loaded with ammunition, explosives, food, trucks, and other military equipment. People's barns, garages, and even tool sheds are available for use for storage, hiding troop movements, housing troops overnight -- and are all mapped out and accounted for in elaborate mobilization plans. Bridges and other transportation chokepoints are mined to be blown up at a moment's notice. While the Northern strip of Switzerland -- a lowland of gently rolling hills and dense population -- is highly vulnerable to assault, the Southern "redoubt" would be an attacker's nightmare. "You could defend the Gotthard highway with ten men," a Swiss officer estimates.
At the battle of Morgarten, the fourteenth-century Swiss triumphed shortly after the signing of the Bundesbrief. Austrian knights trapped in a narrow pass were attacked by peasants rolling logs, boulders, and other falling objects. There was a sensation, according to one later perhaps mythologized report, that "the rocks themselves" were rising up to take arms against the attacker. "Thorn and rose, there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that would not sell a calendar, and -- valley after valley, mountain after mountain -- there is scarcely a scene in Switzerland that is not ready to erupt in fire to repel an invasive war," McPhee writes.
The real story of Switzerland's military bite, however, lies not in hardware, but people. With a population of only six million, the Swiss can place 400,000 trained, armed, highly skilled troops in the field within forty-eight hours. On any given day, considering this, the Swiss might have the third- or fourth-largest fighting force in the world.
There is only one way, of course, for such a small country to man a force of this size. Every male Swiss from the age of twenty until approximately age forty-two is a soldier. The enlisted men serve a total of 300 days over that twenty-year period; officers, sometimes more than 1,000, continuing on to age fifty-two. Women are allowed to join, and do, though not in combat roles, but they are not obligated to do so. Men and women are paid by their regular employer while they are on training, and the employer is reimbursed by the government -- though only for 70 percent, not 100 percent, of the lost time. Given the number of hours put in informally by the Swiss on army matters, especially by officers, this amounts to a significant subsidy of the military by the private sector. Some companies are happy about this, some acquiesce, some grumble.
After an initial "basic training" course of some 120 days, the Swiss soldier will drill approximately fifteen days a year, and probably commit some hours every month to filling out paperwork, keeping his equipment in repair, practicing his shooting. The Swiss must pass a shooting test every year, and take remedial practice if they fail the test. Gun clubs and shops dot the city of Bern the way used bookstores dot a college campus in the United States. More than 500,000 assault rifles are kept at home by Swiss men, in part so that their sons can get used to having a gun around.
One cannot but notice, even in peacetime, the signs of a nation the whole population of which is involved in active defense. On a Friday afternoon you see the young men in their early twenties boarding trains in Bern, Zurich, or Luzern in military uniform. Businessmen in a coffee shop in Geneva pull out their small military service book to make notations or do paperwork on their lunch break. Walking down a country road you hear regular gun bursts in the distance -- too many for a hunter -- and know that someone is practicing. On a porch is an old man, probably by now limited to one of the auxiliary services, cleaning a pair of army boots.
The Swiss not only enjoy widespread volunteer involvement in the army; they rely to an unusual degree on individual citizens to take personal responsibility for their own perfection in military technique. Simulator rooms, which help infantry and artillery forces practice in battle, are open for training during off-duty hours and are used heavily, according to an officer with the army's skeletal full-time staff. Rifle training, of course, is everywhere.
On a Saturday, touring a 600-year-old castle ruin on the heights above Baden, my solitude was broken by the sound of a gentle but high-pitched hiss coming down the road. All of a sudden, three young men in camouflage fatigues and white helmets -- hiss, zip, hissss -- whizzed by me, guns on their shoulder. It appeared to me at the time as if they were on their way to a training session somewhere, perhaps a bit late. But a few hours later the same three young men were at the Banhof, enjoying a bratwurst and bottles of beer at stand-up tables. One of them struck up a conversation with me, during which he explained that the men were not on their way to on-duty training, nor even taking part in a formal training session itself. They were practicing reconnais-sance runs and moving about while keeping in electronic contact over the hills, crags, and electronic interference of Baden -- on their own time.
The Swiss, it turns out, use not only mountains and barns in their defense, but until recently common passenger bicycles. "The bicycle is fast, quiet, cheap, and flexible," a staff officer later told me with a ninja-master-like tone. "We use anything that contributes to the defense of the country." The man or woman at work is always a citizen -- and the citizen does not leave his private skills and ideals at the door, but brings them with him to the collective enterprise of managing and defending the state. There is, in short, a great trust in people. This trust tells much about Swiss assumptions regarding people and the society. It is a sign, surely, of one of the most developed and capable societies in the world.
Universal service thus works on many levels. It generates numbers. If a comparable number of U.S. citizens were members of our army or naval reserve, America would have some twenty-five million men at arms. It also establishes a presence in society. The fact of citizens doing their duty, universally, is too ubiquitous to be unseen. Military activity is legitimized, and linked into practically every home and family in the country. The people's consciousness is raised of the sacrifices that are being made for the national safety. There are even certain practical benefits to promoting an informed citizenry, and one with a strong immediate interest in sound management of the military. Nearly every male voter is also a military man -- and, with a full-time military establishment of only about 1,000 officials or less, nearly every military man earns his living in the civilian economy. No doubt this is one reason there have been relatively few of the military scandals in Switzerland, either as to over-priced procurement items, what weapons to purchase, or other matters.
The militia system is egalitarian in imposing its burden. There are a few ways to get an exemption from military service, but only a few, and none is advanced by social standing. Absolute mental or physical inability will get you out. Policemen can sometimes earn a waiver since they might be needed in two places at once. A 1977 ballot initiative sought to allow men to fill their service obligation outside the armed forces -- cleaning parks, teaching reading, and so on. It was rejected by more than 60 percent of the voters. A decade later, a smaller proposed exception passed, but is still socially frowned upon.
Importantly, all Swiss men start off as privates. The son or daughter of a Swiss president, member of parliament, or captain of industry is a grunt. The earliest promotion to officer generally takes place after several years of service. Thus there is no separate officer class as in most countries, even the democracies. Most of these officers (roughly 98 percent or more) are part-time or "reservist" soldiers with regular employment. A small, full-time force of less than 1,000 staff constitutes Switzerland's entire professional military.
There is, to be sure, a tendency for military and professional advancement to correlate -- but both are based on merit. Generally, many of those who are advancing in their career often thrive in their military service, and vice-versa. "The colonel and the barrister, the banker and the captain, the major and the businessman are one," McPhee writes. And while there are many cases of parallel advancement, there are others of social criss-crossing -- of nonprofessionals in daily life advancing in the military, or of high-ranking business executives continuing to serve as privates or sergeants. "There are at least two bank presidents who march with the rank and file. An army captain has told me that he once leaped to his feet because the soldier serving him food was an executive vice-president of the company he worked for in Basel. To be high in business and low in the army is less unusual than the reverse."
Perhaps the most important impact of the militia is the way it integrates the military and the society as a whole. In most developed societies there is alienation between the people and the military class, one of the reasons the American Founding Fathers, rightly, feared such a class. The citizen-based force of the Swiss, by contrast, is practical and efficient in military terms, and wholesome for the society.
Can there be any higher function of the state than the preservation and protection of the state and the people from external violence? As in other walks of Swiss political life -- making laws, altering the constitution, defending the nation -- we see supreme acts of sovereignty being carried out, for the most part, by ordinary citizens.
In perhaps every fourth or fifth meeting with a Swiss of any length, army contacts and experiences are likely to come up. Christian Kuoni, the president of one of the largest privately owned manufacturing companies in Switzerland, Jakob Miiller, asks about my meetings later in the day. One is with Carlo Schmid, an attorney, Landamann of Canton Appenzell, and a member of the federal senate. "Carlo Schmid?" he asks. "We drilled in the army together for years." And Kuoni whips out his little service book, proceeding to tick through some of his assignments with various other corporate officers, workers from his own factory and others, journalists, a union leader from Geneva, the fellow who runs the local post office. As he ticks along, it strikes me that the Swiss have their confessional and other differences, but there is one church they all attend: the army. There is, of course, no even remotely comparable experience in the United States and most of Europe. The Swiss Army slashes across all walks of life, institutions, interest groups, and people and brings every citizen of the state -- or rather, every male citizen, but through them, involves a majority of the women as well -- together for an act of regular communion.
It is important to note that early in the twenty-first century the Swiss began a reduction in the size and universality of their military service. This reduction, of about one-third, was hard to argue against in terms of the relative military peace in Europe, but the change will have social impacts. The reduc-tion especially of the principle of broad, almost universal service, will change the psychology and role of army service. Switzerland's rate of military service will still far exceed that of nearly any other country in the world with the exception of Israel. For this reason, the Swiss Army, albeit smaller, will continue to play a significant social and economic role in the country.
As the Swiss army makes Swiss neutrality muscular, so Swiss neutrality gives the army -- and the society -- both a strong moral raison d'etre in foreign affairs and, to a degree, an ethos not only for the nation as a whole but for the individual.
Swiss neutrality's roots are as deep as the oath on the Riitli, but the decisive event in its development came with the Swiss defeat of 1515 at the hands of the French army at Marignano. "I have conquered those whom only Caesar managed to conquer before me," boasted King Francois I. Actually, he had not conquered the Swiss; he had defeated them in battle. The impact, however, was still great. Switzerland was a poor country, and, indeed, still only a country in the most generous sense of the term -- a loose confederation of thirteen cantons, linked by a small, impermanent court that floated from one capital city to another every year like Gulliver's island of Laputa. They decided, quite prudently, that this was no core from which to build a vast empire through military conquest. Nicholaus von der Flue, the respected friar and political-religious activist, added powerful moral arguments to these practical ones, and the policy took root.
For centuries, of course, neutrality as a policy of the confederation was really something of a statement of impotence by that rather thin body of government. The cantons aligned themselves with competing princes all over Europe -- usually renting the services of their highly sought armies or units of them as mercenaries. For hundreds of years, as one military historian has written, arms of this sort were "Switzerland's leading export."
This practice indeed helped enrich the region, while at the same time maintaining what De Gaulle called "the edge of the sword" -- and thus, while Switzerland was neutral, the Swiss were fighting all the time: hard, sharp. This practice, however, led to its own absurdities. It helped keep Switzerland divided and even encouraged foreign meddling, since it was well known that for the right price most cantons could be swayed to shift alliances. It also led to the repeated comedy -- a sad comedy at that -- of Swiss troops from different cantons facing one another in battle. With grim logic, the Swiss fought bravely in such struggles, killing many of themselves.
On the more glorious side of the ledger, Swiss soldiers participated in (and played a key role) in some of the most important battles of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The French kings saw the Swiss in action and hired them to guard the royal person. While many French guards deserted during the seizure of Louis and Antoinette during the Revolution, the Swiss fought to the death, and were thereby honored and respected even by the revolutionaries for performing an honest duty so bravely. Centuries before, the Popes, having seen the Swiss bodyguards in action, decided to retain their own units for protection of the Vatican. The brave Swiss guards of canton Fribourg remained in this service at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
As a practical benefit most foreign powers, even the great empires, while they certainly looked to the cantons for troops, generally thought of any occupation or absorption of Switzerland as a high-cost enterprise with few likely benefits. Thus the policy of neutrality, while viewed with an understandable skepticism by some modern-day critics, grew and evolved over time into something solid.
Franz Muheim, a typically Swiss Swiss -- former industry leader, military officer, senator, author, intellectual -- explains some of the deep roots and wide branches of that broad concept, Swiss neutrality.
"There is a basic point of view that you could call Swiss," he tells me in English -- his third or fourth language -- at the Hotel Metropol in Luzern, over a pleasant luncheon. "It is not predetermined by the mountains and the geography, but certainly, these make it very natural.
"The Swiss, you see, are not so much a mountain people, as a valley people -- separated by mountains. Farmers, small manufacturers, gate keepers. The land makes it not inevitable, but certainly very easy, for small, independent communities to form.
"If one of these communities even wanted to conquer and enslave one of their neighbors, it would not be an easy task," he continued. A picture of Jean-Jacques Rousseau flashed into my mind, with his classic commentary on the impossibility of slavery in the state of nature, from the essay on the origins of inequality to the Academy at Dijon. "Of course, you could not do it, nor did the Swiss ever want to do it.
"The Swiss wants primarily to be left alone by the next village, and to cooperate with his friends and neighbors while retaining a certain autonomy and independence even within this intimate cell. He does not want to be involved in fights against or between his neighbors, both because he knows how hard it is to intervene usefully, and because he recognizes the limited ability his small village would have to influence matters anyway."
"This way of thinking applies from the individual Swiss of those villages, hundreds of years ago, up to the state -- and today, as well, from the state down to and through the individual."
Neutrality, thus, is a state of mind and personal philosophy, a broadened version of that very wise beginning of the doctor's Hippocratic Oath: "First do no harm." It is policy, but it is more thar. that.
Likewise the Swiss military-industrial complex is an arm of the government -- but not just an arm of the government. It is, like many Swiss institutions, inextricably linked with the society -- achieving something akin to the Maoist dictum that the guerrilla must be as a fish is to the sea.
"You must understand," as Swiss Divisionnaire Adrien Tschumy, told the journalist McPhee, "there is no difference between the Swiss people and the Swiss Army."
Note 1. La Place de la Concorde Suisse, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984. McPhee's book is a quiet classic for Americans, but among the Swiss, it is almost at the level of a cult. McPhee, a New Yorker editor, drilled with several Swiss units and described his conversations and experience in some detail. It is a bragging point among the Swiss not merely to have been mentioned in the book, or to have had some contact with McPhee, but to know someone who has. "I once drilled with someone who had previously drilled in that unit, though he was not there at the time McPhee was," a Swiss businessman, who heads a Fortune 500 company, told me proudly.