How Switzerland stays neutral — the actual legal and military architecture behind it

Switzerland, the European country that will not fight in your war, keeps more soldiers under arms per capita than most countries that will. And they keep the rifles at home.

Around 147,000 military personnel, operating on the militia model. Civilian gun ownership at 27.6 firearms per 100 residents — among the highest in Europe. A country constitutionally committed to not taking sides, whose government is currently resisting a popular referendum that would make that commitment harder to walk back. A country that, in 1940, drew up military plans to surrender its own cities and fight on from mountain fortresses rather than capitulate.

The Document Nobody Reads
Swiss neutrality is not a tradition. It is not an attitude, a cultural inheritance, or a natural expression of Swiss temperament. It is a contract, and like most contracts, it was designed to serve the interests of the parties who wrote it rather than the party who signed it.

On March 20, 1815, eight Great Powers — Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Portugal — issued a Declaration recognizing Switzerland’s “perpetual neutrality” (Annex XI A of the Vienna Congress Treaty). Switzerland accepted the terms through a separate Act signed in Zurich on May 27, 1815 (Annex XI B), with final ratification arriving November 20, 1815, through the Treaty of Paris. The language was precise. Switzerland could not join wars. It could not allow belligerent troop movements across its territory. It could not permit foreign military recruiting on its soil. In exchange, the Great Powers guaranteed the integrity and inviolability of Swiss territory.

This arrangement is usually described as the Great Powers recognizing Swiss neutrality. It would be more accurate to say the Great Powers created it, because Swiss neutrality served their purposes. France and Austria were coming out of twenty years of continent-rearranging warfare. The last thing either power needed was the other absorbing a strategically positioned alpine territory between them. A permanently neutral Switzerland was a buffer nobody could weaponize. The Powers weren’t admiring Switzerland’s restraint. They were installing a firewall.

The framework they installed carried real obligations. The Hague Conventions of 1907 codified what neutrality actually requires of a state during active conflict: neutral states cannot transfer arms in ways that favor one belligerent over another, cannot allow combatant corps to organize on their territory, and must intern any troops from either side who cross into their borders. Article 9 of Hague Convention V is particularly important: any restriction on weapons or supplies must apply equally to all belligerents, or it becomes a violation of neutrality itself. The rules are symmetric by design.

Hague Convention V (1907) — Key Obligations for Neutral States

Articles 1–26 govern the duties and rights of neutral powers in land warfare. The core prohibitions: neutral states may not allow belligerent forces to move troops or supplies across their territory (Article 2), may not allow belligerents to use their territory for military communications infrastructure (Article 3), and must intern any troops from belligerent forces who enter neutral territory (Article 11). Article 9 establishes the impartiality requirement — any arms restriction must apply equally to all belligerents, not selectively. The flip side: Article 10 grants neutral states the right to resist, by force, any violation of their neutrality. Switzerland’s military posture is the exercise of that right, not a contradiction of it.

The Swiss Federal Constitution does not actually define what neutrality means. Articles 173 and 185 assign to the Federal Assembly and Federal Council the duty to “safeguard” it — and stop there. The word is not operationalized. This is not an oversight. The deliberate ambiguity gives Switzerland interpretive latitude it has used repeatedly, and that the government is currently fighting to preserve against a constitutional initiative that would remove it. The vagueness is load-bearing.

The 1815 arrangement established the central logic that runs through everything that follows: Swiss neutrality is viable only when it is useful to surrounding powers. When it stopped being useful, no document would have saved it. Which means Switzerland could never just hold the document — it had to maintain the conditions under which powerful states would find neutrality worth respecting.

The Price of Being Believed
A neutral state that cannot defend its neutrality is not neutral. It is occupied.

Military planners in Bern have been working from this logic since 1815, and it’s what transforms the paradox from an irony into a system. Switzerland’s militia army — currently around 147,000 personnel, with mandatory service for all male citizens — is not an accident of Swiss culture or a legacy institution nobody got around to dismantling. It’s the cost of being taken seriously.

Roughly two-thirds of men screened at 18 are found suitable for military duty. Basic training runs 18 weeks — 23 for special forces. Defense spending reached USD 7.591 billion in 2025, up from USD 6.536 billion in 2024. As a share of GDP that’s roughly 0.72%, modest by NATO standards. But parliament has voted to push it toward 1% by 2030, which would represent a significant increase in real terms.

The civilian firearms picture is equally deliberate. Approximately 2.332 million firearms are in civilian hands — 27.6 per 100 residents, by the Small Arms Survey’s 2017 estimate, which remains the most-cited figure. The home storage of service rifles traces to the logic of the militia model: if mobilization needs to happen fast, you can’t afford to wait for soldiers to collect their weapons from central depots. The practice of keeping fully automatic service rifles at home ended in 2007, when ammunition was also centralized and rifles had to be converted to semi-automatic before civilian transfer. The principle, however, didn’t change. A trained civilian population with weapons at home is not a security risk in this framework — it is the security architecture.

A neutral state must be expensive enough to invade that no belligerent views seizure as strategically cheap. Switzerland’s geography did half the work — mountains are one of the oldest force multipliers known to warfare. A trained population ready to use them did the other half. No one looking at Switzerland in 1939 could do the math of conquest and feel good about the result.

The Réduit National (National Redoubt)

In the summer of 1940, with France fallen and Germany surrounding Switzerland on three sides, General Henri Guisan issued his defense orders at the Rütli meadow — a site chosen for its symbolic resonance as the birthplace of the Swiss Confederation. The plan known as the Réduit national called for withdrawing all Swiss forces from the populated lowlands and concentrating them in fortified Alpine positions. Cities, including Bern and Zurich, would be left to whatever fate the Germans chose. The plan was not about winning. It was about making the cost of occupation prohibitive. Even if the Wehrmacht took the cities, it would face a fortified Alpine interior that would tie down divisions Switzerland could not be worth. The Réduit was not a military strategy for victory — it was a deterrence calculation dressed in military uniform. Whether it was ever seriously tested is debated; that it shaped German operational planning is not.

The army also protected something beyond territory. If Switzerland had been easily occupied — seized quickly and cheaply — it would have ceased to function as neutral ground. And its value as neutral ground, as we’ll get to, was worth a great deal to parties on both sides of both world wars. The military posture didn’t just defend Switzerland. It defended Switzerland’s usefulness.

The Vault at the Center of Europe
Military deterrence explains why Switzerland was hard to take. It doesn’t explain why nobody particularly wanted to.

Plenty of countries with armies didn’t make it through the twentieth century’s first two major wars intact. The deciding factor — the thing that made Swiss neutrality worth guaranteeing rather than simply circumventing — was that both sides needed Switzerland accessible. The banking system is what made that true.

Swiss banking privacy has roots in 1713, when Geneva established regulations protecting account holder information. But the operative legal moment is the Federal Banking Act of 1934, which made it a criminal offense for banks to reveal account holder information. The standard explanation — that this was designed to protect Jewish depositors from Nazi persecution — is false, and the way it became false is instructive.

The 1934 banking secrecy provision predated meaningful Nazi persecution of Jewish financial assets. The actual motivations were Depression-era banking stability concerns, the failure of a significant Geneva bank that had accelerated into the crisis, and pressure from France following the Herriot government’s 1932 campaign against tax evasion — which had exposed wealthy French citizens using Commercial Bank of Basel accounts. The Jewish protection narrative was fabricated by Swiss banks in the 1960s and officially endorsed by the Swiss Federal Council in 1970. It is a more sympathetic story than “we made it easier to hide money from your government because your government was asking inconvenient questions,” which is roughly what happened.

None of which is to say the banking system didn’t serve Jewish depositors — it did, as it served everyone with money to protect. But the infrastructure was built for tax evasion and capital flight from unstable economies, and its role in protecting Jewish assets during the Nazi period was incidental, not designed.

During the First World War, Swiss banks became the monetary refuge of choice for European capital. Surrounding states were at war; their financial systems were either mobilized for the war effort, subject to capital controls, or simply unreliable. Switzerland was none of those things. Money flowed in from everywhere because everywhere else was a combatant.

During the Second World War, the picture is darker. Swiss banks maintained what historians have characterized as intense collaboration with the Axis. They held German gold, cleared transactions for the Reich, and maintained business relationships that the neutrality framework technically didn’t prohibit — because the neutrality framework didn’t prohibit financial activity, only military activity. It clearly served one side more than the other. The Bergier Commission was eventually asked to answer exactly that question — not by Switzerland, but by international pressure that took decades to become unavoidable.

The Bergier Commission

The Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland — Second World War, known as the Bergier Commission after its chairman, historian Jean-François Bergier, was established by Federal Decree in December 1996 following sustained international pressure over Swiss wartime conduct. It delivered its final 25-volume report in 2002. Key findings: Switzerland accepted looted gold from Nazi Germany; the Swiss National Bank’s governing board knew or should have known that gold purchased from the Reichsbank had been looted from occupied territories; and Swiss banks had systematically obstructed Holocaust survivors from recovering assets held in dormant accounts. The Federal Council acknowledged in 1996 that Switzerland’s wartime behavior had sometimes fallen short of its legal obligations.

Two distinct responses followed, which must not be conflated. The Swiss Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust/Shoa, established 1997, distributed 265 million CHF to surviving victims. A far larger proposed Swiss Fund for Solidarity — approximately 7 billion CHF — was rejected by Swiss voters in a 2002 referendum. Separately, the Volcker Committee (Independent Committee of Eminent Persons), led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, audited dormant accounts across 54 Swiss banks. Its December 1999 report identified 53,886 accounts with probable Holocaust-era links. A USD 1.25 billion settlement between the World Jewish Congress and Swiss banks was reached in 1998, before the Volcker audit concluded.

The structural point is the one the Bergier Commission couldn’t quite say because it wasn’t its brief to say it: both Allied and Axis parties needed Swiss banks to function. Both had an interest in Swiss territorial integrity. Not because they admired Swiss principles but because they needed Swiss financial infrastructure. The banks weren’t merely a feature of Swiss neutrality. They were its guarantee. Whatever Germany was doing with Swiss clearing accounts and Swiss gold holdings, it was also doing business in a system it couldn’t afford to destroy.

This is where neutrality-as-principle and neutrality-as-calculation become indistinguishable. Switzerland was not neutral because it believed in non-involvement. It was neutral because non-involvement was the condition that made it useful, and useful things don’t get absorbed. The moral case for Swiss neutrality and the cynical case for Swiss neutrality produce the same output: a Swiss banking system that served everyone’s money and asked no political questions.

Neutral, But Not Indifferent: The Modern Pressure Test
On February 28, 2022 — three days after Russia invaded Ukraine — Switzerland announced it was adopting the EU’s entire sanctions package against Russia.

This was described, accurately, as unprecedented. Not because Switzerland had never imposed sanctions before. But because it had never adopted non-UN-mandated sanctions against a permanent UN Security Council member. The distinction matters because the UNSC framing sometimes applied to this episode is precisely backwards: Russia’s permanent veto meant there could be no UNSC sanctions against Russia. Switzerland’s legal justification was built entirely on other foundations — the Federal Act on the Implementation of International Sanctions (the Embargo Act of 2002), which authorizes Switzerland to align with non-military sanctions from major trading partners, and the neutrality-law distinction between military participation — which the 1907 Hague Conventions prohibit — and economic or political measures, which they do not. Constitutional Articles 184 and 185 gave the Federal Council the emergency authority to act.

The contrast with 2014 is the specific evidence of what changed. When Russia annexed Crimea, Switzerland declined to follow EU sanctions. That decision was neither unusual nor widely criticized — Switzerland had a long practice of treating economic sanctions as discretionary in ways that military neutrality was not. 2022 was different in degree and in political cost. The Federal Council called Russia’s attack “unprecedented,” invoked the gravity of the violation, and crossed a line it had explicitly avoided for eight years.

But adoption is not enforcement. And this is where the modern story looks most like the wartime one.

Public Eye, the Swiss investigative organization, documented what happened next in the commodity trading sector. Swiss trading companies — long embedded in the Russian oil and gas markets, with Geneva and Zug as their operational centers — established “legally independent” subsidiaries in Dubai, which imposes no sanctions on Russia, and continued transacting through those entities. The legal basis was explicit and official: Switzerland’s own sanctions framework states that “legally independent subsidiaries of Swiss companies established abroad are in principle not subject to Swiss law.” A Dubai-registered entity with a Swiss citizen as director and a parent company in Geneva could, on paper, operate as a separate legal person. In practice, the oil kept moving.

Switzerland implemented successive EU sanctions packages, including the 14th in October 2024, while declining to extend the subsidiary provisions that would close this route — explicitly judging that extension incompatible with its interpretation of neutrality. SECO, Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, later began probing specific firms. The Swiss Attorney General opened preliminary investigations. But the mechanism remains legal as currently structured.

The Federal Council, meanwhile, was fighting a different battle at home. On June 26, 2024, it recommended that the people and the cantons reject the Neutrality Initiative — a popular initiative backed by the Swiss People’s Party that would enshrine “permanent and armed” neutrality in the constitution. The initiative would constitutionally prohibit Switzerland from joining military or defense alliances except in response to a direct attack, and would restrict sanctions participation to measures authorized by the United Nations — which, for any action against a UNSC permanent member, means no sanctions at all. Parliament rejected the initiative 128 votes to 60. Because it is a citizens’ initiative that cleared the signature threshold, it will go to popular referendum regardless.

If it passes, it converts the government’s existing policy flexibility into a constitutional straitjacket. The flexibility the Federal Council used in 2022 to adopt Russia sanctions — the same flexibility it has used in every significant geopolitical maneuver since 1815 — would be locked away. This is why the Federal Council is fighting it. Not because the government is uninterested in neutrality. Because it understands that the tool it is being asked to enshrine is what makes the tool unusable.

And then there is the EU. The “Bilaterals III” package — a comprehensive set of Switzerland-EU agreements covering free movement of persons, transport, electricity, food safety, and health — reached substantive conclusion in December 2024 and was formally signed on March 2, 2026. Switzerland is not an EU member and will not become one. The bilateral approach is the same architecture applied to economics: maintain independence, preserve relationships, buy access without joining the system. Switzerland contributes financially to EU regional development funds. That contribution is not charity — it is the price of access without alignment, the economic equivalent of the 1815 arrangement: you get to stay outside, and you pay for the privilege.

All of this — the Russia sanctions, the Dubai loophole, the EU bilateral dance, the constitutional fight — is the same logic as 1815. Switzerland is managing neutrality actively, continuously, with an eye to what it costs to remain strategically useful to the powers that matter.

Its defenders call this sophisticated neutral management. Its critics call it having it both ways. The structure built in 1815 was designed so that both descriptions are simultaneously accurate. And that indistinguishability is not the system’s most embarrassing feature. It is its most important one.

The armed neutral, seen now from the other end of the argument: the rifles at home, the banks that ask no political questions, the sanctions adopted while the oil moved through Dubai, the government fighting to preserve its own room to maneuver.

Neutrality is not the absence of a position. It is the most expensive position of all, because it must be purchased continuously from every party who might otherwise find it inconvenient. The 1815 Great Powers installed it for their own reasons. The Axis and Allied powers left it intact for their own reasons. The EU tolerates it for its own reasons. Russia has been, until recently, able to use it for its own reasons.

Switzerland has built a system that works, at a price that includes periodic complicity — the Bergier Commission findings, the Dubai loophole, the 2014 non-adoption of Crimea sanctions. Celebrating it as Swiss genius misses that it was built by Great Powers for their own purposes. Condemning it as Swiss hypocrisy misses that the hypocrisy is the architecture, not a departure from it.

What 2022 revealed is not that the system is failing. It is that the system is working — producing exactly the outputs it was built to produce, at exactly the political cost neutrality always carries when it is real rather than rhetorical. The Dubai subsidiary is not a glitch. The Bergier Commission findings are not a repudiated past. They are the system operating as designed: maximum utility to all parties, minimum accountability to any.

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主な情報源と参考文献

Annex XI A and XI B, Vienna Congress Treaty, 1815 Treaty of Paris, November 20, 1815 Hague Convention V Respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land, October 18, 1907 Swiss Federal Constitution, Articles 173, 184, 185 Federal Act on the Implementation of International Sanctions (Embargo Act)

2002 Swiss Armed Forces — Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport. https://www.vtg.admin.ch/en

Small Arms Survey 2018 — Civilian held firearms, Switzerland estimate 2017 SIPRI Military Expenditure Database — Switzerland. https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex

Swiss Parliament approves extra CHF 4 billion for army — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/4-billion-more-for-the-army-offset-by-other-items/87579804

Number of Swiss armed forces exceeds specified limit — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-armed-forces-have-around-147000-personnel/88040089

Federal Act on Banks and Savings Banks, November 8, 1934 — Swiss Federal Legislation (Fedlex). https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/51/117_121_129/de

The Origins of Secret Swiss Bank Accounts — JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/origins-secret-swiss-bank-accounts/

Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland — Second World War (Bergier Commission), Final Report, 2002. https://www.uek.ch/en/

Volcker commission reaches end of the road — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/demographics/volcker-commission-reaches-end-of-the-road/1425876 [Note: the 53,886 figure is from the commission’s December 1999 final report (ICEP); this swissinfo article covers the commission’s later closure and cites a revised post-deduplication figure.]

Swiss Banks Holocaust Settlement — Claims Conference. https://www.claimscon.org/about/history/closed-programs/swiss-banks-settlement/

Twenty years ago: when Swiss banks settled with Holocaust survivors — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/twenty-years-ago_when-swiss-banks-settled-with-holocaust-survivors/44315844

Switzerland imposes full EU sanctions against Russia — SWI swissinfo.ch, February 28, 2022. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/switzerland-imposes-full-eu-sanctions-against-russia/47388280

Public Eye — Russian oil trade: Dubai pulls out all the stops to edge out Switzerland. https://www.publiceye.ch/en/topics/commodities-trading/russian-oil-trade-dubai-pulls-out-all-the-stops-to-edge-out-switzerland

Public Eye — Sanctions on Russian oil: Switzerland’s enforcement refusal. https://www.publiceye.ch/en/media-corner/press-releases/detail/sanctions-on-russian-oil-switzerlands-enforcement-refusal-leaves-its-traders-to-regulate-themselves

Swiss authorities investigate firms dodging Russia sanctions — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-authorities-investigate-firms-dodging-russia-sanctions/87753203

Neutrality initiative: Federal Council recommends rejection — SWI swissinfo.ch (covering June 26, 2024 Federal Council announcement). https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-government-rejects-neutrality-initiative/88352809

Swiss parliament rejects neutrality initiative — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-parliament-rejects-neutrality-initiative/91044053

Package Switzerland-EU (Bilaterals III) — Swiss government. https://www.europa.eda.admin.ch/en/package-switzerland-eu

How the neutrality initiative could affect Swiss policy — SWI swissinfo.ch. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/neutrality/how-the-neutrality-initiative-could-affect-swiss-policy/90344837