The End Through a Thousand Exceptions: How Switzerland is Dismantling Its Neutrality

Neutrality rarely dies because parliament abolishes it one morning, lowers the familiar flag that once symbolized it, and officially announces that from now on the country belongs to one military camp. Neutrality dies more slowly and more quietly. Every new departure is declared an exception, every step toward a bloc becomes "technical cooperation", and every sanction a moral obligation that supposedly changes nothing. The term remains somewhere in the official documents, while its substance is gradually hollowed out.

Switzerland is approaching precisely such a moment. Granted, many would say it has been approaching it for some time, but now it really is galloping toward it. On September 27, citizens will vote on an initiative seeking to give neutrality – the very neutrality whose substance is being eroded – clearer and stricter constitutional protection, and the polls suggest that a majority will reject it. The paradox is striking: an overwhelming majority of Swiss people still say they "want a neutral country", yet they may simultaneously reject an attempt to restrict the government's further alignment with the sanctions and security policies of the Western bloc.

According to the latest poll by the GFS Bern institute, 54 percent of voters oppose the initiative, while 42 percent support it. A few days earlier, another poll showed an even wider gap, with 62 percent opposed and just 32 percent in favor. Switzerland is therefore not split neatly down the middle, but 42 percent – if we take the first poll as the more accurate one – is hardly an insignificant rebellion from the political fringe when the proposal would severely restrict the government's room for maneuver. A substantial part of Swiss society clearly believes that Bern is already pursuing a fundamentally different foreign policy under the old label.

The figures from broader public-opinion research show just how complicated this conflict is. According to ETH Zurich's "Security 2026" study, 85 percent of citizens want to preserve neutrality and 87 percent believe it allows Switzerland to mediate in international conflicts. At the same time, 56 percent support closer ties with NATO, although only 32 percent favor full membership. Curiously, most people apparently do not believe they have to choose between neutrality and ever-deeper cooperation with Western security structures. Yet that assumption lies at the heart of the entire dispute.

The current neutrality initiative is an attempt to eliminate precisely that ambiguity. It would write the principle of permanent and armed neutrality into the Swiss Constitution, prohibit membership in military or defense alliances and cooperation with them except in the event of a direct attack or the immediate preparation of an attack on Switzerland, and prevent the country from taking part in wars between third states. Among other things, Bern would no longer be able to impose sanctions on belligerents on its own initiative. Only sanctions approved by the United Nations Security Council would remain possible, along with measures designed to prevent Switzerland from being used to circumvent them. The state would also be constitutionally obliged to use its neutrality to mediate and prevent conflicts.

The political engine behind the initiative, it must be said, comes from the right. After Switzerland adopted European sanctions against Russia, the cause was vigorously championed by Christoph Blocher, the longtime heavyweight of the Swiss People's Party, or SVP, and one of the country's most influential opponents of closer ties with the European Union. The campaign is led by former SVP lawmaker Walter Wobmann and organizationally supported by Pro Schweiz, the successor to several sovereignty-oriented movements that have spent decades defending military neutrality and the country's political independence. Of the major parliamentary parties, only the SVP officially supports the proposal.

It would, however, be a mistake to reduce the whole movement to Blocher, the populist right and rural cantons. On the same side of the referendum stands a separate pacifist and internationalist committee bringing together people from the Swiss Party of Labour, the Communist Party, the Swiss Peace Movement, the Cuba friendship association and other anti-war organizations. They are not motivated by a desire to preserve traditional conservative identity, but by opposition to NATO, the militarization of Europe and sanctions as an instrument of economic warfare. The broader neutralist camp also includes academics, former diplomats, trade unionists and politicians outside the SVP. In other words, the right talks about national sovereignty and the left about imperial blocs, but both arrive at the same conclusion: neutrality without clear boundaries eventually becomes an empty declaration.

On the other side stand the Federal Council, the parliamentary majority and practically the entire political center (what a "surprise"!), together with the Social Democrats, liberals and Greens. Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis warns that the proposal could "isolate Switzerland", complicate relations with its neighbors and "make the country less secure." Bern also argues that, in a serious crisis, it cannot wait for the first missiles to arrive before beginning to establish cooperation with partners.

All of that, of course, amounts to rather hollow rhetoric and an attempt to frighten the public. Genuine Swiss neutrality would provide far greater protection than any air-defense system. If the country wants to buy military equipment on top of that, fine. But the claim that current conflicts – and obviously the war in Ukraine is what is meant – require Switzerland to gradually degrade its neutrality is absurd and opportunistic. The Swiss political center, like political "centers" across Europe, has ideologically aligned itself with a project that has abandoned not only neutrality but pacifism as well. They are not demanding an end to the war; they are demanding a Russian defeat. The only tangible anti-war forces are found at two apparently incompatible, yet evidently sometimes very compatible, margins – the left and the right.

The word "partners" itself reveals the problem. A neutral state can cooperate with its neighbors, exchange technical expertise and prepare for its own defense. But that does not mean every form of security integration remains neutral simply because it stops short of formal alliance membership. If cooperation for decades moves exclusively toward one military bloc, if weapons systems, command procedures and communications are gradually brought into line with those of that bloc, then the boundary between neutrality and quiet alignment ceases to be legal and becomes semantic.

The structure of the electorate itself shows that this is about more than technical constitutional provisions. According to the GFS poll, the initiative is supported by as many as 86 percent of SVP voters, while supporters of every other major party predominantly oppose it. Support is stronger in rural areas and among people who distrust the federal authorities, while cities are more clearly opposed. Interestingly, the oldest voters, who still remember Cold War Switzerland, are more inclined to reject the proposal. Some of them apparently trust the country's traditional flexibility – the idea that neutrality survived precisely because it was never turned into a completely rigid formula.

That argument, of course, carries considerable historical weight. Swiss neutrality has been internationally recognized since 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, while the obligation to preserve it has been embedded in the constitutional order since the creation of the modern federation in 1848. The Hague Conventions later defined the basic duties of neutral states in wartime: no direct participation and no military favoritism toward either side. Naturally, neutrality has never meant that Switzerland is forbidden from having an opinion, condemning aggression – although it would be useful if it condemned either every act of aggression or none, rather than doing so selectively! – or applying exactly the same moral judgment to every action taken by belligerents.

What is legally permissible, however, is not necessarily politically wise. The government argues that economic sanctions in themselves are not prohibited under the law of neutrality and that Switzerland may adopt them "when they serve to defend the international order." But this is precisely where the argument becomes weak, because European Union sanctions are not universal measures imposed by the United Nations. They are an instrument of one geopolitical bloc in its confrontation with another.

This became obvious after February 2022. Switzerland adopted much of the European Union's sanctions regime against Russia, froze Russian assets and politically joined the Western response to the invasion of Ukraine. Bern continued to insist that it remained neutral, but Moscow, unsurprisingly, no longer saw it that way. Russian authorities rejected the possibility of Switzerland leading or mediating a peace process, while the Ukraine conference at Bürgenstock was held without Russia and was therefore, in terms of actually making peace, entirely worthless.

Nor does Switzerland's drift toward Western security structures end with sanctions. The country has been part of NATO's "Partnership for Peace" since 1996, and in late 2025 it agreed with NATO on a new partnership program running through 2028, openly designed to intensify cooperation. It has joined the European Sky Shield Initiative, signed up to European Union projects on military mobility and cyber ranges, and expanded cooperation with NATO's Science and Technology Organization. The government declares each of these steps, taken individually, to be "compatible with neutrality."

How long can this continue? Will the absurdity eventually reach the point where Switzerland becomes a "neutral member of NATO"?

Some will argue that the initiative could have drawn a more precise distinction between defensive technical cooperation and political or strategic integration. But the proposal's possible shortcomings do not make the underlying problem disappear. On September 27, voters may decide that the proposed constitutional formula is too rigid while still genuinely wanting neutrality. The most dangerous outcome – and, by all indications, the most likely one – would be for the political establishment to interpret victory for the "no" side as permission to continue down the same road: one more exercise, one more interoperability program, one more sanctions package, one more exception, until all that remains of neutrality is a flag, a historical myth and a tourist slogan.

Neutrality does not disappear when the word is erased from the Constitution. It disappears earlier – when both sides in a war already know which side Bern is on.