Non! Why the Swiss rejected stricter neutrality
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Issued on:
06:19 min
From the show
Reading time 1 min
A referendum on whether Swiss neutrality should be more strictly, legally enforced in the Constitution.
We have to go back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, to the moment Swiss neutrality was internationally recognised. After the defeat of Napoleon, European powers wanted a stable buffer as the balance of power was being reconstructed. There were no camera phones back then; it is the work of the great French artist Jean-Baptiste Isabey that captures the meeting.
In 1907, Switzerland codified its stated neutrality, not militarily supporting one belligerent or another. But it doesn't apply to economic measures, and Switzerland joined the EU in sanctions on Russia in 2022.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.