Am Rande des Sturms: Das Schweizer Militär im Ersten Weltkrieg / En marche de la tempête : les forces armées suisse pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Группа авторов
relationship with any belligerents, to the global economy, to the laws of war and neutrality, and to each other.
Nevertheless, neutrality remained a contested idea – it was not always welcomed or supported – but its internationalist values were on the rise. Nineteenth-century neutrals were often seen to do «good» in the world. Neutral states facilitated humanitarian aid in time of war. Their existence promoted peace and international stability. They offered viable options for advancing international order, transnational cooperation, and the regulation of international law. And they provided essential services to mitigate the impact and spread of war, including «good offices», mediation and arbitration. The Swiss delegate at the first Hague peace conference of 1899, Édouard Odier, for example, referred to neutrals as pacigérants («the managers of peace») and deemed neutrals to have a particularly important role in stabilising world affairs.9 By 1900, there certainly were a lot of long-term and voluntary neutrals about. In the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), for example, all of Europe professed its neutrality, as did the United States, all of Latin America and most Asian governments, including China and Korea. The neutrality of both these countries was complicated by the military conduct of the war.
In a world where war was an acceptable choice for any government, the nineteenth century made not going to war an acceptable choice as well. By the early twentieth century, in fact, the only legitimate choice for war between supposedly «civilised» states was in defence of vital interests.10 For those states that opted for neutrality (in contrast to those whose neutrality was a permanent reality), the choice of non-belligerency often came with benefits: protecting trade with other neutrals and in non-contraband goods and to profit from not having to make the choice to go to war. Neutrality aided industrialisers, imperialists, entrepreneurs and those seeking to advance the inter-connectedness of the world. Britain’s on-going neutrality particularly guaranteed the freedom of the seas and protected the global movement of ships, people, resources and ideas. Nineteenth-century globalisation thrived on the reality of limited war and global neutrality.11
In other words, through the course of the nineteenth century, neutrality developed into an «international good». Anglo-European states proudly adopted neutrality and imbued their assertions of nationhood with neutral values. For example, the Belgian politician and jurist, Éduard Descamps, noted in 1902 that neutrality was a «natural vocation» for Belgium, situated as it was between the might of France and Germany, helping to sustain the political equilibrium in Europe.12 Similarly, Dutch projections of their national virtue focussed on the internationalist, cosmopolitan, liberal and anti-militarist values promoted by their neutrality in Europe and the wider world.13 Often, these projections were commercially self-serving.
Because the choice to avoid war was deemed valuable by the great powers, its regulation in international law was prioritised at the second Hague peace conference of 1907. The experience of the Russo-Japanese War in particular impressed on the great powers that if they wished to take full advantage of neutrality, they needed greater recognition of neutral rights (as opposed to belligerent rights) in the international arena. This conference created a comprehensive, if controversial, set of rules that neutrals and belligerents were to apply in time of war. Most of them related to the regulation of economic warfare, the defence of territorial sovereignty and the requirement for neutrals not to give military assistance to belligerents. The concept of impartiality was less well defined in the conventions, although the idea of neutrals «not giving undue favour» was firmly entrenched. All the great power attendees, Germany included, looked to influence the shape of these Hague rules. They did so to benefit as much from the regulations when they declared themselves neutral as when they were at war. And, by and large, they applied those regulations fastidiously for profit and stability. For example, during the two Balkan Wars fought between 1911 and 1913, the neutrality of the world’s industrial states ensured both a steady supply of arms to the warring factions and enabled the great powers to mediate and bring the conflicts to a speedier end.14 Altogether then, neutrality was a most useful tool for diplomacy and statecraft in the nineteenth-century age of limited war. On the eve of the First World War, neutrality was a respectable, practical and much-used international norm.
The Great War ended neutrality’s golden age as surely as it collapsed the nineteenth-century international order. In the process, the First World War transformed the meaning and applications of neutrality. This was as true for Switzerland as for any of the other states. The implications of this statement are numerous and profound. Although on the eve of war in 1914, neutrality was a stable and recognised international reality and (arguably) more stable than it had ever been in the history of war, peace and international relations, by war’s end in 1918, neutrality was no longer a stable reality or much valued in the international system (although it had some value).15 The countries that managed to maintain their neutrality during the war did so not as much by upholding the rules, regulations and expectations attached to neutrality in international law as they did by negotiating their on-going relationships with the belligerents. The diplomacy of neutrality and the maintenance of a «neutral (and impartial) face» increasingly defined the politics of the relationships between most neutrals and belligerents. The legal parameters of neutrality continued to matter, but they were often negotiated. The cultural interpretation of neutrality gained ground.16
The idea that neutral states and their people were victims of the competing demands of the enemy camps was a common and important one within the neutral countries themselves. So were attempts at promoting the on-going humanitarian and internationalist functions neutrals performed in the international system and for the belligerents. To this end, the work of the International Red Cross came to take on greater relevance as did the «good offices» neutral states performed in representing enemy interests in belligerent countries. In other words, throughout the war, neutrals were active agents and promoters of their non-belligerency and advocated that their neutrality offered essential services to the warring states. From the neutral governments’ perspective, the neutrals were essential agents of the war and helped to mitigate and limit some of its totalising impacts.
However, such professions of the virtues of neutrality came up against increasingly hostile responses. It did not take long for the belligerent press (on both sides) to depict neutrals as wanton war profiteers or as shirking from international responsibility. In a «just war», of course, there is no escape from doing the right thing. How could a neutral stay neutral when the very future of the world and its civilisation were at stake? How could a neutral not fight the «good fight»?
These oppositional perspectives on the value of neutrality were part of a much larger public and transnational investigation into the nature of the war and the post-war world order. The horrors of the First World War were exposed to the world’s press (belligerent and neutral) and thus to the world’s opinion makers. Public perceptions of who was fighting on the side of «right» and «justice» mattered within belligerent and neutral countries alike. The fact that all the major belligerents, and many of the smaller powers too, engaged in decisive press campaigns in neutral states suggests just how important the war for the «hearts and minds of neutrals» was and how integral a sense of global awareness was to contemporary ideas of war. Of course, a neutral could become a belligerent (and many did), so influencing their populations’ perspectives on the war was an essential tool of war.17 To that end, the media war was a signal of the totalising impact of the war. Above all, the media war suggests that neutral space was a conceptual and intellectual theatre of war.
Increasingly, the opinion that neutrality was no longer a feasible or viable position for a state to adopt also grew in the belligerent states. In 1915, the Irish playwright Sir Bernard Shaw commented that neutrality was «utter humbug».18 He was not alone. That same year, another Irishman, judge James Creed Meredith, responded to Spain’s declared neutrality in the most scathing tones:
«A nation […] that has refrained from expressing the slightest concern in the ultimate issue of the struggle [of war] and avoided indicating the least sympathy with any belligerent however outraged [cannot be] entitled to be heard with particular respect on the conclusion of peace.»19
In 1918, the German international lawyer Alex Lifschütz argued a similar point that the «end of neutrality» was nigh and any