Abstract Swiss neutrality is traditionally understood as a doctrine governing Switzerland’s relationship with external powers. While historically accurate, this interpretation captures only part of neutrality’s role within the Swiss political system. This paper advances a broader thesis: neutrality is not merely an external posture but one of the mechanisms through which Switzerland has repeatedly preserved national coherence despite enduring internal differences. Switzerland is a federation composed of multiple linguistic communities, religious traditions, economic regions, political cultures, and layers of authority. The continued stability of the Confederation depends not only upon constitutional structures but also upon principles that allow these differences to coexist without permanent domination by any single component. The paper traces the historical evolution of neutrality through four successive functions: survival neutrality, federal neutrality, active neutrality, and recognition neutrality. It argues that each emerged in response to a distinct threat to Swiss coherence. The principal challenge confronting contemporary Switzerland differs from those of previous eras. The problem is no longer primarily military conquest, religious conflict, or ideological polarization. Increasingly, democratic societies face situations in which observable conditions are widely recognized while the causal structures producing them remain contested. Using the 1992 EEA referendum as an illustrative case, the paper argues that democratic legitimacy becomes vulnerable when constitutional authority attaches prematurely to disputed explanations rather than shared conditions. Recognition neutrality is proposed as a governance discipline that preserves legitimacy by maintaining restraint in the recognition of contested causal claims while allowing democratic action to proceed. The paper concludes that Swiss neutrality may be understood as an evolving architecture of national coherence. Its historical function has been to preserve Switzerland’s capacity to remain one political community despite persistent differences in identity, interest, ideology, and interpretation.
Robert J. Blanchette (Mon,) studied this question.