SWITZERLAND--THE BOURGEOIS ELDORADO

SWITZERLAND--THE BOURGEOIS ELDORADO ‘Neutres dans les grandes revolutions des Etats qui les environnaient, les Suisses s’enrichirent des malheurs d’autrui et fondèrent une banque sur les calamités humaines.’ (Chateaubriand) ‘Switzerland does not exist’. (André Gorz) From a political point of view, Switzerland represents three things: a haven for international capital, the embodiment of the petit-bourgeois spirit, and an apparent challenge to Marxist theory on the national question. Though these phenomena are swiftly conjured up by the word ‘Switzerland’, they are not seen as forming an essential unit. Yet Switzerland is all these three things precisely because it is not an ordinary nation-state: it was created, by both internal and external forces, against the nation-state at a strategic moment of history. Switzerland is a unique construct—an international mercenary state, first of feudal militarism, and now of world capital. If Engels was correct (Der Schweizer Bürgerkrieg, 1847)—though this position is disputed by Grimmfootnote1—the Swiss displayed their profoundly reactionary propensities as early as the 13th century when they performed the extraordinary feat of breaking away from Austria at the one and only time in history when Austria was a relatively progressive state. Switzerland’s mercenary role in the feudal ages is even today evidenced by the fossil Swiss Guard of the Vatican—the only such surviving relic in Europe. Pictet de Rochemont, the Swiss delegate to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, subsequently wrote a book whose title is the summation of his country’s role: De la neutralité de la Suisse dans l’intérêt de l’ Europe. For, on the one hand, Switzerland specifically designed herself as nothing other than a disembodied refuge for international capital: she had to lack the characteristics which would make her like other states: others’ wars had to be her peace, her peace had to be others’ wars. On the other hand, international capital co-operated in the construction of this enclave, conveniently situated in the heart of Europe (where else?), and populated by the optimal combination of lumpen peasantry and petits bourgeois. In origin, therefore, there was a clear structural connection between the class composition of the area that became Switzerland, the role assumed by the Swiss state and the cultural characteristics of the population: what Gorz has called the ‘miserly opulence of Zurich’ is more than a figure of speech, it condenses a historical reality that is both prehensile and warped. Given this, it was only natural that Switzerland should become the home of the two major symbolic institutions of international capitalism: the League of Nations (an institutionalization of imperialist legality for the first time, designed to preserve the status quo in the ‘third world’ in the interests of the established imperialist powers; the League only activated itself over new initiatives like Manchuria and Ethiopia); and the Red Cross (an institutionalization of international charity of a not dissimilar character). But, as is brilliantly brought out by JeanBaptiste Mouroux in his excellent Du Bonheur d’Etre Suisse sous Hitlerfootnote2, the mere siting of the League in Geneva detonated intolerable political contradictions: the integral relationship between the nauseating tranquillity of Geneva and the world order of violence which that tranquillity represented could only be sustained if not made explicit. The Swiss economy was basically complementary with that of Germany; Motta, the strong man of Swiss politics in the inter-war period, was a rabid admirer of Mussolini. Thus it was that in 1935 Switzerland refused to comply with the League charter in applying sanctions against Italy; in 1936 was one of the first countries to recognize Italian fascist sovereignty over Ethiopia; and in 1938 decided to withdraw from the League in order to evade its responsibilities vis-`-vis Germany—on the grounds that to take action against Germany would infringe its own neutrality! Mouroux goes on to detail the massive complicity between Berne and Berlin: major Swiss credits to Germany (535,000,000 Swiss francs in 1941, approximately 1,100,000,000 by 1943). By the end of the war Switzerland was providing 80 per cent of all the anti-aircraft guns in use throughout the entire Reich. The local Nazi party (the nsdap) was allowed to flourish unmolested—until May 1st 1945. As well as this, Mouroux quotes copiously from the secret circulars issued to the Swiss frontier guards, which reveal an explicit anti-semitic approach throughout the most atrocious periods of the war (clause III of the instructions of September 26 1942 explicitly orders border posts on the frontier with France to exclude Jews from the status of political refugees and refuse them admittance). But the most abominable aspect of all is that at the very time when the Nazis were surreptitiously expelling numbers of Jews from Germany and Austria, the Swiss took the initiative to make this extremely difficult by insisting that the Germans bureaucratize and formalize the operation by affixing a special sign to Jewish passports—to allow them to enter Switzerland! The Germans not surprisingly asked the Swiss to reciprocate. All this would hardly surprise anyone who had scrutinized the Swiss Constitution of 1848, whose authors were recently eulogized by the Economist in a special supplement (February 22nd 1969) in these words: ‘This remarkable middle class, which . . . wrote the constitution which is the real starting-point of modern Switzerland, is one of the last, best flowerings of the Protestant ethic. Highly cultured by Anglo-Saxon standards, . . . endowed with a liberal social conscience . . . these people are the quintessence of Swissness.’ The Constitution of 1848 was in fact a racist document, and it was only because of the contradiction between the number one interest of the bourgeoisie—commerce—and secondary superstructural concerns such as anti-semitism that it was subsequently modified (in 1863 both the Netherlands and France refused to ratify commercial treaties unless Swiss anti-semitic measures were lifted). Discrimination, however, has continued in innumerable forms up to this day, including the disenfranchisement of women. In the labour camps where refugees were interned during and after the war, women were paid roughly one-sixth the wage of men. Almost 100 years ago Adhémar Schwitzguébel put his finger on the extraordinary contradiction between the essentially international nature of the role of the Swiss bourgeoisie (‘the bourgeoisie is, in the full sense of the word, a really international class’) and the fervent repression of any internationalism on the part of the Swiss workers. The modern condition of the mercenary is the parasite, and the key requirement is peace. ‘A war with one of the large neighbouring States would be the ruin of this bourgeois Eldorado where, under the most republican and democratic appearances, the Swiss bourgeoisie is constantly strengthening itself and its own class interests in utter tranquillity—a social revolution being impossible in a country where legality and the spirit of sage progress have so profoundly penetrated political life.’footnote3 But Switzerland is not in this condition by a purely ‘natural’ process. Ideologues of reaction like Carl J. Friedrichfootnote4 have fostered the image of a paradise without contradiction. But this involves a denial of the country’s history and in particular of the great events of November 1918 (when a quarter of a million Swiss workers launched a massive general strike), which were seized on by the bourgeoisie to introduce oppressive legislation banning the right to strike for all government employees, including railway workers, postal officials, etc. If the bureaucracy is ‘responsible’, it is responsible to the ruling class, and it has been made responsible by straightforward class pressure. Badly shaken by the memory of working-class militancy in the streets in 1918, the Swiss bourgeoisie has since the end of the Second World War preferred a solution in which racism and class hatred converge—the importation of a foreign proletariat. The Swiss road to capitalism is a subject worthy of more attention than it has received: it is a new phenomenon in capitalist development— domestic imperialism. First, capital accumulation takes place, through the acquisition of domestically-controlled foreign funds, not through primitive accumulation or industrialization. Then second, this accumulated capital is used to buy foreign labour on horrific terms (abysmal housing; racist persecution; a general ban on wives accompanying male workers, leading to grave sexual isolation). This oppressed foreign proletariat is exploited to construct the material bases of a new leap forward, and then abruptly expelled. It is a noteworthy inversion of the normal capitalist process, with the crucial bonus for the bourgeoisie that it has not lumbered itself with either heavy social service costs or with a permanent proletariat. This is one-sided internationalism with a vengeance—internationalism for one class (even Swiss tourism has well-defined class characteristics). Even to nationalize the productive forces, as André Gorz points out, ‘First you would have to nationalize Wall Street and the City, start the revolution in France and Italy, constitute the Soviet States of Europe . . . a fascinating undertaking, stamped with the same sterility as this tedious country.’footnote5 The dialectic of the international and the national, and its pure class determinations, that is concentrated in the entity of Switzerland is surely cogent argument for returning to the resolute positions espoused by Marx and Engels. Boundaries erected to protect the running-dog of world capital can have no validity. Switzerland is indeed, alas, there—its present character must be destroyed.