Sustaining Neutrality in Polarized Conflict: A Generative Relational Account of the Swiss Case

A neutral party in a polarized conflict withholds the alignment that each side requests, and each side reads that withholding as a favour to the other. Ordinary accounts answer this difficulty by describing neutrality as a position between the parties, as equidistance, or as the suspension of judgment. This paper proposes a different object. Neutrality is treated as the governance of a field of relational conditions: the set of arrangements under which the parties retain the capacity to form, revise, and resume relations with one another and with the neutral party. A viability formulation states the maintenance requirement, namely that the set of arrangements from which some continuation remains available stays non-empty for each party. A reduction makes that requirement decidable without enumerating the field, by replacing the field with the structure of possible contacts that the standing conditions support; the reduction is a lower bound, detecting total foreclosure rather than narrowing. Two results follow from that formulation. A modality constraint separates the influence a neutral party may exercise from the instruments through which it may exercise it: judgment, testimony, and public argument remain available, while control over access, hosting, procedure, and channel may not be used to secure a substantive outcome. An accumulation asymmetry separates a declared position, whose abandonment costs other parties nothing, from relational infrastructure, whose accumulation places a stake in the hands of others and thereby raises the cost of reversal. The asymmetry is stated as one source of durability among others rather than as a prediction of which neutralities survive, and the Austrian case is the reason for the weaker form. The Swiss case supplies the illustration. International recognition in 1815, the separation of the law of neutrality from the policy of neutrality, the concentration of institutional hosting in Geneva, armed neutrality, and the sanctions and re-export decisions of 2022 through 2024 are read as operations on a field of conditions rather than as adjustments of a position. Failure receives a two-part treatment. Mechanism failure describes the loss of the capacity itself through capture, unpredictability, or loss of relational utility. Normative defeat describes the separate case in which the capacity survives and its maintenance becomes the instrument through which a party loses the standing to be a party. The wartime record of Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross tests both. The account is a revisable conceptual proposal. Its empirical use requires comparative cases, independent measures of relational infrastructure, and the separate evaluation of accuracy, distribution, contestability, and accountability.