The Group for a Switzerland without an Army condemned Putin’s military aggression against Ukraine as imperialist. Although the organization opposes NATO, advocates disarmament and military abolition worldwide, the GSoA supported Ukraine’s right to resist.

— First we would like to ask about the history of your organization — the Group for a Switzerland without an Army? 

— The GSoA was founded in 1982 in the Swiss city of Solothurn. Initially, it was a movement stemming from the Socialist Youth (JUSO, youth branch of the Socialist Party), which then evolved into a separate movement. Many members come from the peace movement, especially in connection with the NATO double-track decision [Note: On December 12, 1979 NATO decided to deploy over 500 Pershing II missiles in Europe by 1983, while offering the Warsaw Pact to mutually limit the number of intermediate range missiles]. The movement started from a popular initiative for a referendum to abolish the Swiss army, and it got this huge support: 35.6%, i.e. more than a million votes. That was really unexpected. Although we failed to win the majority, we managed to partly reconsider what the army is about and how security is defined. We also — to some extent — succeeded in overcoming the militarism that has been present in Swiss politics and institutions for a long time. In the 1980s, the Federal Council commented on the initiative to abolish the army: Switzerland does not have an army, it is an army.

“This shows that the military can be considered a sacred cow in Swiss politics and society. With the initiative, GSoA could not slaughter this sacred cow but it could take away its halo”

Next to the abolition of the army, the initiative called for a comprehensive peace politics that goes beyond avoiding war and military conflicts. We followed pacifist and antimilitarist approaches that focusing on prevention by addressing the root causes of conflicts such as poverty, inequality, or environmental destruction. To this day, we call for peace politics that promote justice, social security, ecological sustainability as well as support of civil conflict resolution. That is an approach we follow in all our projects to this day, but since then the GSoA has also evolved. We are still close to party politics, but we have always been at the interface between social movements and institutional politics. Sure, we live from our members’ donations, but meanwhile we also have a secretariat with people who are paid a small amount of money for what they do. We are one of the few NGOs that has an influence on Swiss peace or security politics at the national level even though we are just young people trying to make a difference.

— You mentioned that the GSoA initially succeeded in changing public opinion about the Swiss army and militarization of society. Do you feel this opinion has changed after the start of the war in Ukraine?

— The discussion has changed, that’s for sure. I think that seeing there is a war in Europe does something to people — in a way, it’s something that has always been considered to be either far away from the public discourse or something that happens in places far, far away. When it comes to institutional politics, I see a shift towards more militarization. There’s a huge discussion around the army budget — whether it should be increased and to what extent. In Switzerland, we have huge discussions about our legislation on the export of war materials that could be weakened for industries that profit from global development or rearmament. Both in politics and in the army, I see a lot of effort to normalize military activities or to make the army more attractive. But for me, it’s hard to see what people in civil society really think: I feel that some people are scared, but I don’t think that necessarily means that they’re militarized, right? We try to work against militarization of society: in Switzerland there is an ongoing debate about women having to join the army. In a way, I think it’s interesting because they are trying to sell it as having an adventurous year of life and they are trying to normalize women wearing military uniforms and carrying weapons. But nobody really talks about what it means to be in the army or what it means to give life for your country or kill innocent people as a consequence of decisions made by a few powerful people. And this is what the army is about.. For me, it’s a hard question to answer, actually. What if there’s really a shift in people’s opinion? I guess if you look at the polls, it’s true that most people would agree that we need an army that is well equipped. But in Switzerland, for example, many people still think that neutrality, diplomacy, or mediation have their value. So, there is no simple yes or no answer to that. I think it’s really different for different groups of people.

“I see a tendency for people to be scared and agree that we need more militarization, but I also see the opposite. Especially in times of conflict and war, many people have a strong desire for peace”

— You mentioned Swiss neutrality. Is there still a consensus about it in Swiss society? Do you think that the way your organization sees neutrality is different from the mainstream approach?

— Yes. Neutrality is really an issue on which the majority still agrees. There is a yearly poll from ETH (Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) that shows that about 90% of the people believe that Switzerland should still be neutral. But, of course, the meanings of neutrality really differ.There are two dimensions of neutrality. There’s a legal one that is clearly defined in the Hague Conventions on Military Conflicts. But then there’s a political dimension of neutrality, like how you act neutral or how you seem neutral in a way because it also depends on the perception of other states. I will first start with our conception. We understand neutrality as more of a universalistic unit. It is based on international law and human rights. These are the principles that we should be referring to. Neutrality does not mean that we take no sides. We should condemn violations of these rules and principles, like in the case of sanctions, which were a huge discussion in Switzerland. Politicians from the right were against adopting the EU-sanctions as they considered we would not be perceived as neutral anymore. They argued that Russia is not going to perceive us as a neutral state and we will not be able to offer our diplomatic mediation. And we say “no” — Putin’s aggression was a clear break with the international law that states agreed about. And that is why we have to take action. And that, for us, is really in agreement with this military neutrality that we have in our law — we call that ‘active neutrality’, the one that orients itself towards international law and human rights so that we can be credible in our actions. But we are currently far away from our conception of neutrality.

“I think the Swiss neutrality that was at work in the past was one oriented toward gaining economic profit. It starts from the concept on the Right: neutrality is perceived as something where you just don’t take a position on injustice in order to hold on to the ability  to do business with everyone”

With this strategy they contribute to feeding autocratic regimes with either money or war material. That is something that has happened a lot in Swiss history, including the Second World War. There are also initiatives at the moment, the Swiss neutrality initiative launched by far-right SVP (Swiss People’s Party) — which is also the most powerful party in Switzerland — that say that Switzerland should only take the UN sanctions, for example, and keep neutrality in the Swiss constitution. But they still understand neutrality as a way to make profit and just not condemn anything that is happening in order to protect ourselves. 

Actually, there’s also a third point of view coming in from the center and the liberals, which is really contradictory. They know that neutrality is really accepted in Switzerland, but they also want to join NATO. So they always talk of cooperative neutrality, which basically means we just work closer with NATO, but keep the neutral status officially. It is a way to profit on both sides, like to be neutral, and not to be actively neutral. That’s why I often say that Switzerland has always had a very opportunistic mindset.

I would say these are like the three main streams of thought concerning neutrality that are important in this debate. At the moment, we have our security Minister aligning with the third position. She is from the middle and she drives a course of approaching NATO, but avoids talking about the implications of this for neutrality. She just keeps on saying “Oh no, this cooperation will do nothing to our neutral status”, but we have no open or broad public debate about how we want to frame our neutrality. I think that her course is very dangerous as she provides the far right with arguments that support their conception of neutrality.

— The Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a discussion across the Western Left about the role of NATO and imperialism and about the question of the  extent to which imperialism is a western phenomenon. Could we consider Russia and China imperialist powers? This discussion affects the positions which the Left take regarding the Ukrainian war, the arms export and how they should approach the aggression. GSoA in its statement condemns the Russian aggression in Ukraine and offers a Swiss response to it. Could you elaborate a bit on this topic?

— It’s also complex in our organization. We also had a divide, especially about war material exports and  imperialism, i.e.on who are the imperialist powers in this conflict.

The big topic, especially in the beginning of the war, was the war material exports, of course.While we do have different opinions on this, what is clear at GsoA is that Putin is an imperialist aggressor. There are other movements within the peace movement in Switzerland that say this is a war provoked by NATO. That is something that we absolutely cannot accept. We point to his responsibility. Of course we condemn any imperialism. We have also criticized NATO in other wars where they did unlawful things. But in the context of the Ukraine war, we distanced ourselves from, for example, the Friedensbewegung (Peace Movement) in Switzerland, who clearly abstain from condemning Putin’s actions. And this also had implications on the war material exports, where we were kind of caught in a contradiction because Switzerland is a neutral country and isn’t allowed to do war material exports legally. So, in the beginning, there was this dimension for us, but then there was also a discussion about indirect exports.

“Personally, I think it’s good that NATO states deliver weapons to Ukraine. They have a right to self-defense. If they cannot exercise this right, it remains an empty phrase”

There are people in GSoA that see that differently. And then if we talk about Switzerland, there was a discussion about if we delivered arms to Germany, if they would be able to give them further to Ukraine or not. And there GSoA took the position that Switzerland had another role: Ukraine has the right to defend itself from this unlawful aggression, but as a neutral country, we think that it is not in agreement with the neutrality status, because you have to treat warring parties equally in the law of war material exports. And then there’s also the dimension of Switzerland being an international diplomacy and humanitarian actor that has to have a certain credibility. I think the Bürgenstock Conference would not have taken place in that form in June if Switzerland had exported weapons either directly or indirectly. As an organization, we were clear about the fact that Switzerland should not export war materials to Ukraine. But we had a discussion about whether we support NATO countries in providing war materials; we have different opinions there. 

— I wonder what is the political reason for not supporting the export of Swiss military equipment to Ukraine? Are you trying to prevent the Swiss military-industrial complex from gaining more political power in the country?

— The thing is, in Parliament, we had maybe eight different approaches from different parliamentarians coming from almost every party, attempting to find a loophole in the war material export law. The majorities in Switzerland are right wing. So propositions that found a majority pretended to be about Ukraine, but in fact were  propositions to make a loophole for exports to Saudi Arabia, for example, or for other markets that the industry is interested in. So we had to do something against it. If you look at how long it takes to do such a revision of the law, it’s not about the real immediate aid. The Federal Council [government] has also always clearly said, because of neutrality that “There’s just nothing we can do right now. We cannot just directly deliver arms to another country in this case, even if we do export in other cases”. There was one motion from the Social Democratic Party that tried to combine these indirect exports with a decision in the UN General Assembly, which was the best one among the propositions because it only opened up a possibility of export in very specific cases. 

However, the whole discussion contributed to avoiding the question Switzerland should really be asking itself: oil and gas trading on the Swiss stock market. Geneva, Ticino, Lugano, and Zurich are really important trading places for these raw materials. Until February 2022, up to 60 percent of Russian oil was traded in Switzerland. And honestly, there has been barely anything done from Switzerland in this regard. Another topic is the dual use goods that are delivered or that have been delivered to Russia before the war. Now it’s forbidden because the parliament has taken the EU-sanctions. But after the annexation of the Crimea, it was the politicians on the right who wanted to circumvent the EU-sanctions with regard to Ukraine in order to be able to export dual-use-goods. However, some studies have shown that certain components are still being exported.

“For example, in Kyiv, there has been a strike to the children’s hospital where Swiss components were found in the missile”

This goes way back to the history of looking away. People knew that they were exporting this kind of thing to a repressive regime. After 2014, it was obvious that Putin doesn’t really care about international law or human rights, right?

There has been an initiative by the GSoA to tax the war profits of Swiss corporations. It’s basically a way for Switzerland to get involved in the conflict in a non-militaristic way. We said: we have big corporations like Glencore in Switzerland who pay their taxes in the country. They have made record profits because of the war in Ukraine, so we say: we need an extraordinary tax on these overprofits in order to help with the reconstruction in Ukraine. Often it’s these companies that help fuel this war by profiting from the Russian oil and gas industry, and make a lot of money from this. That is where the money for reconstruction should come from.

We really tried to point to this issue, and it was really shocking (for me) to what extent it was just ignored. Also, the media did not really write about it. We wanted to point out that the possibility for Switzerland to change or contribute something meaningful can be found elsewhere. But the people in charge didn’t listen.

— We were thinking about a question on internationalism and how the issue of Western European corporations profiting from trade with Russia could be addressed at the European Union level or at the broader international level. Does the GSoA have any international cooperation at the EU level to work to prevent this kind of war profiteering?

— Directly, no. But the petition was supported by, for example, Greenpeace and Public Eye. The problem was that we didn’t really feel strong support in Switzerland. The public opinion was like: “Oh, it’s for nothing. It will just be declined in parliament and that’s it.” Nevertheless, we managed to bring this topic into a discussion.

— Your movement has a very long history. In the eighties there was a feeling that history is coming to an end and that there will be no wars because the cold war is over. But then the Yugoslav war happened and now the Ukrainian war is here. Could you give us a short overview about the arguments from the eighties? We wonder about the development of reflection within the movement since that time.

— Yeah, I think you are right that at the time the discussion was also more about: so, look at the state of the world. We don’t need an army anymore. It’s just a waste of resources that we can really invest in the welfare of society and the environment. Of course, it didn’t convince the majority but I think it was an argument that worked at the time. For many people today this wouldn’t work, I agree. When it comes to GsoA — being a pacifist organization, our vision is still Switzerland without an army and the world without armies, but of course we wouldn’t do a popular initiative right now about the abolition of the army. Not because I think that the army will really save us from anything, honestly, but it’s also strategic: what discussions do you want to promote, in which context, in which situation? Now we debate about the UN treaty [on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons] that Switzerland doesn’t want to join and yes, that seems less radical than the abolition of the army was, but in a way the idea is still the same. We’re just working with another topic, sometimes with different means. We try to find the right thing to talk about in order to reach what we can at a given time, but without losing sight of our vision.

— We have a question on the ways forward, particularly on the contribution of your organization to resolving the Russian-Ukrainian war, on what are you planning to do in that regard and what the European Left could do?

— I think our focus will stay on the responsibility of Western countries through their war material exports: how they contribute to augment wars and conflict. At the moment, we are focused especially on the dual use discussion. We say that much stronger export controls are needed. Exporters have to orient themselves on the military potential these dual use goods have in the countries they’re supposed to land in. I think that’s a discussion in which we really engage in Switzerland but I think it could also be important on the level of the European Union, because so many countries export dual use goods as well as war material export to authoritarian regimes. I think Switzerland has a rather strict war material exports law but there are many countries in Europe that could also use more restrictions. 

I think our work is preliminary prevention work. We say: okay, you don’t want this happening again so this is what we need to do in order to prevent new wars happening. That’s what antimilitarism is about. What annoys me is when people say: “Look at what happened in Ukraine, pacifism is bullshit” and then I answer with something like:

“Yes, but it’s not about what we should do in the case of conflict but primarily about what we need to do before the conflict happens”

Now we have a popular initiative on Switzerland joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and I think that also has a lot to do with the Ukrainian war and all the developments in the discourse of rearmament. This initiative, even though it may seem a bit symbolic, holds a potential to start the discussion on nuclear disarmament and on why that is an absolute necessity; not just an ideal or an option but something we need to strive towards too. I think this is a discussion that should also happen in other European countries and that is important for the European Left. 

— What do you think, what is the best response to the global far right turn? What can be done when we cannot really criticize Western governments, which have embraced a nationalist and isolationist agenda?

— I don’t know if I have a good answer to this, but I think the most important is that we join forces and try to fight these developments. There are many people whose view is very different from that of the far right. I think we also have some explaining or some persuasion work to do as well as to demonstrate and believe in our ways of solving the problems we are facing and to eventually not give up.

“The only thing I see is that we should try to work more together with leftist and progressive forces inside and outside the parliament and try to talk with as many people as possible”

Well, maybe the election in France can be an example of working together, organizing, and mobilizing people to vote. Because it was looking very bad for a while there. I was really scared. And then in the end, the result was a lot better than anyone could have hoped. It gave me some hope. Probably Macron thought that the Left were too unorganized and then they managed to join forces and prevent the worst thing from happening.

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The interview was prepared in cooperation with the Institute for Global Reconstitution as part of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) program.