Clean Streets, Dirty Linen
Credit and debit on the Swiss balance sheet
Switzerland has given the world humanitarian law, educational reform, scientific brilliance and remarkable public institutions. It has also excluded women, exploited vulnerable children, turned away refugees and mistreated migrants. Both accounts belong in the ledger—but responsibility belongs to people, parties and institutions, not to an imaginary national personality.
I seldom write about politics. This is an exception, but not a departure from the concerns running through my other writing: appearances can deceive, and all that glitters is not gold. Propaganda—whether it spreads antisemitism, exploits fear of outsiders or wraps self-interest in the respectable language of neutrality—must be seriously questioned. History is one of our best guides because it shows where fine words and convenient myths have led before. In plainer language: do not simply swallow the bullshit politicians hand us.
On 27 September 2026, Swiss voters will decide two very different popular initiatives. One seeks to place a stricter form of neutrality in the Constitution. The other proposes a more sustainable and self-sufficient food system. Both are presented in the language of safeguarding Switzerland. Yet they also demonstrate a truth often lost in discussions of national character: Switzerland does not hold opinions or make moral choices. People do. Political parties, governments, businesses, voters, churches, charities and public officials do.
It is tempting to speak of “the Swiss” as though more than nine million people across four language regions and twenty-six cantons shared one mind. Admirers describe an orderly, democratic and humanitarian nation. Critics point to secrecy, conformity, xenophobia and moral complacency. Both find ample evidence because both traditions are real.
Switzerland’s streets are clean, its public services generally work and its international image is polished to a high shine. There is much here that deserves admiration. But pride becomes propaganda when it demands selective memory; criticism becomes caricature when it refuses to recognise anything admirable.
The more interesting story lies in the tension between the two.
Humanity—in principle and in practice
Any fair balance sheet must begin with Henri Dunant. Horrified by the suffering of wounded soldiers after the Battle of Solferino, the Genevan businessman helped inspire the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention. The idea that even war must have limits has affected millions of lives. The modern Red Cross and Red Crescent movement is international, but its origins are unmistakably Swiss.
Switzerland has also served as a protecting power, a diplomatic intermediary and a home for international organisations. International Geneva is more than national advertising. It has provided actual machinery through which governments, aid organisations and adversaries can meet. Swiss neutrality, when used actively, has helped create space for diplomacy and humanitarian action.
Individual Swiss people have sometimes embodied those values with extraordinary courage. In Budapest, diplomat Carl Lutz and his colleagues used protective documents and safe houses to help rescue tens of thousands of Jews. At the Swiss-Austrian border, St Gallen police commander Paul Grüninger falsified dates and disregarded orders so that Jewish refugees could enter Switzerland. He was dismissed, prosecuted and left in financial difficulty.
That last detail matters. Grüninger’s actions were Swiss, but so were the orders he disobeyed and the punishment he received. A national history that claims his courage while forgetting the state policy he resisted is engaging in precisely the selective accounting this article questions.
Neutrality is a policy, not a halo
Switzerland’s conduct during the Second World War is more complicated than either patriotic mythology or wholesale condemnation allows. The country was surrounded by Axis-controlled territory and faced genuine military and economic danger. It admitted many refugees, mobilised for its defence and performed important humanitarian functions.
But complexity must not become an alibi. The Bergier Commission found not merely a few regrettable mistakes but failures running through refugee policy, government, finance and private business. Swiss authorities tightened the border while Jews and other persecuted people were trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe. The surviving records led the Commission to estimate that more than 20,000 civilian refugees were refused entry or expelled during the war—an incomplete figure, not a ceiling. Decisions were shaped not only by fear of German retaliation or limited supplies but also by xenophobia and antisemitism. People were turned away when their likely fate was already apparent.
Trade with Nazi Germany continued because Germany needed Swiss machinery, weapons and other goods, while Switzerland needed coal, food and access through Axis-controlled territory. Yet the relationship went beyond unavoidable subsistence. The Swiss National Bank acquired large quantities of Reichsbank gold, including gold looted from occupied central banks. The Bergier inquiry concluded that senior bank officials knew early that they were handling unlawfully acquired gold; Switzerland helped convert it into currency with which Germany could buy abroad. Swiss firms and their foreign subsidiaries also profited from the Nazi economy, and some used forced labour. After the war, survivors and heirs seeking dormant assets met banking secrecy, bureaucracy and resistance, while restitution of looted assets was grudging and incomplete. The picture was not of a country secretly allied with Hitler, but neither was it the spotless island of heroic neutrality preserved in patriotic memory.
Separate archival research has supplied an especially grotesque detail. Henry Guisan—the General's son—sat on the board of Extroc SA, a company involved in a multimillion-franc deal to supply Nazi Germany with thousands of prefabricated wooden barracks. Barracks from the transaction were used at concentration camps including Sachsenhausen and Dachau. That does not establish that General Guisan directed or even knew of the deal, and claims about what his son knew of the final destinations should be made cautiously. But the episode brings economic accommodation uncomfortably close to the family of the man later made the symbol of national resistance.
The wartime federal government was dominated by the established bourgeois parties: the Radicals, Catholic Conservatives and the BGB, which later became part of the SVP. The SP entered the Federal Council only near the war’s end. That does not make every Radical or conservative personally responsible, nor does it make the left historically spotless. Banks, businesses, civil servants, military planners and voters all formed part of the story. But it is more accurate to identify that governing establishment than to say vaguely that “Switzerland” made every choice.
The Neutrality Initiative now brings the meaning of neutrality back to the ballot box. It originated in the political world around Pro Schweiz and the SVP. It would define Switzerland as permanently and militarily neutral, restrict military cooperation and generally prevent participation in coercive sanctions unless they were imposed by the United Nations or intended to stop sanctions being circumvented.
That is not a minor clarification. Because a permanent member of the UN Security Council can veto sanctions against itself, the proposal would severely restrict Switzerland’s ability to join measures adopted by neighbouring democratic states in response to aggression. In the case of Russia, it could require Switzerland to lift sanctions adopted after the invasion of Ukraine.
The SVP describes this as the preservation of an ancient national principle. But its interpretation is not identical with Switzerland itself. The Federal Council and Parliament oppose the initiative, as do the FDP, the Centre, the SP, the Greens, the GLP and the EVP. Among the major national parties, the SVP stands alone in recommending acceptance.
There is a further contradiction over weapons. The initiative itself would not give Switzerland permission to “sell arms to anyone”: neutrality law and the War Materiel Act are separate, and the latter currently places tighter limits on exports than neutrality law alone. Under the law of neutrality, however, private weapons exports are compatible with neutrality if belligerents are treated equally. Meanwhile, in December 2025, a National Council majority assembled from the SVP, FDP and Centre backed a loosening of the War Materiel Act. The revision would permit exports to a selected group of twenty-five states even when they are involved in armed conflict, subject to exceptions, and would make onward re-export easier.
So the same SVP that wants a constitutional rule making it harder to sanction an aggressor has supported opening wider markets for the arms industry. Switzerland could stand aloof from coordinated economic pressure while Swiss-made weapons travelled more freely through allied markets. At its most cynical, the real Swiss neutrality can sound less like “we will take no side” than “we'll take money from anyone.” The phrase is deliberately harsh, but the wartime gold trade and the modern arms debate give it something harder than rhetoric behind it.
The money did not come only from countries at war. For decades, Switzerland's political stability, banking secrecy and discreet professional services made it an attractive destination for fortunes belonging to dictators, corrupt officials and their entourages. The roll call is dismal: Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Nigeria's Sani Abacha, Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Haiti's Jean-Claude Duvalier all had assets deposited or frozen in Switzerland. So did Vladimiro Montesinos, intelligence chief under Peru's authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori. Not every foreign ruler's Swiss account was necessarily criminal, but vast sums later shown to have been stolen from some of the world's poorest populations found a comfortable home in one of its richest countries.
The law has tightened substantially. Switzerland froze Marcos's assets in 1986, adopted stronger mutual-assistance and anti-money-laundering rules and, in 2016, brought a specific law on freezing and returning illicit assets of foreign politically exposed persons into force. It has now returned more than USD 2 billion to countries of origin and has sometimes pioneered arrangements intended to ensure that the money benefits the population rather than disappearing into corruption again. That belongs in the credit column.
But restitution is also evidence of the original failure. The money had to be returned because banks, lawyers, fiduciaries and regulators had allowed it into the system. For too long, the profitable question was not “What did this ruler do to obtain such a fortune?” but “Is the paperwork in order?” Swiss neutrality did not cause every case, but the culture surrounding it—discretion without curiosity, commerce without moral alignment—made a useful sales pitch. The banker's republic could condemn the ruler in public, ask too few questions in private and collect its fees.
The immediate beneficiaries were private financial institutions and intermediaries, but the rules protecting the business were political. The long-dominant bourgeois establishment—particularly liberal defenders of the financial sector—treated banking secrecy as an economic asset and almost a patriotic principle. Yet it would be too simple to paste an FDP label on every suspect account: secrecy enjoyed broad public and institutional support, individual banks made their own decisions, and later reforms were driven by Swiss campaigners as well as international pressure. This debit belongs chiefly to a financial and political establishment, not to every citizen and not to neutrality law alone.
The central contradiction deserves to be stated plainly. Refusing to place economic pressure on an aggressor while continuing to trade with it is not necessarily an absence of choice. It can benefit the aggressor. Neutrality in military participation does not require neutrality between invasion and resistance, persecution and refuge, or fact and propaganda.
Switzerland’s best humanitarian tradition is not passive. Dunant did not respond to suffering by saying that both sides were someone else’s concern. Lutz and Grüninger did not preserve clean hands by obeying every convenient rule. They acted. If neutrality becomes an excuse for avoiding moral and economic inconvenience, it ceases to be a tool of peace and becomes a form of self-protection dressed as virtue.
A country of teachers, thinkers and scientists
Switzerland’s contribution to education and knowledge is considerable. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi argued that education should develop the whole child—head, heart and hands—and that poor children deserved education rather than contempt. His influence spread far beyond Switzerland.
The creation of the Federal Polytechnic in 1855, now ETH Zürich, was a remarkable public investment in scientific and technical education. ETH and EPFL have become institutions of international importance. Leonhard Euler and the Bernoulli family transformed mathematics and physics. Jean Piaget changed the study of how children develop and think. Carl Gustav Jung founded analytical psychology and gave the wider culture concepts such as introversion, extraversion, archetypes, the shadow and the collective unconscious.
Albert Einstein was born in Germany, but Switzerland can fairly claim an important part in his formation. He studied at the Zürich Polytechnic, became a Swiss citizen, worked at the Federal Patent Office in Bern during his revolutionary year of 1905 and later taught at ETH. Switzerland did not create his genius, but it provided much of the educational and civic setting in which it matured.
Switzerland was also a place of refuge and intellectual exchange. Lenin’s stay in Zürich before returning to Russia in 1917 is hardly a Swiss contribution to place uncritically in the credit column. It does, however, illustrate an older willingness to provide space for political exiles—including people whose ideas the authorities did not necessarily share.
Yet the land of Pestalozzi also took children from poor and unmarried mothers and used many of them as cheap labour.
Children taken from the poor
The history of the Verdingkinder is among the clearest examples of order being valued above humanity. Children were removed from families unable to support them and placed with other households, frequently on farms. Many came from poor, unmarried, divorced or widowed mothers. Some of those women had suffered violence, abandonment or exploitation. Instead of being helped, they were labelled incapable or immoral. Poverty was treated as evidence of personal failure.
Some children were adequately cared for. Many others endured exhausting work, hunger, humiliation, beatings and sexual abuse. They occupied the lowest position in the household and knew that complaints could be dismissed. The authorities meant to supervise their welfare were often the same local authorities that had removed them.
There was no single date on which the Verdingkinder system was abolished. Practices varied between cantons and faded unevenly. Federal criminal law protected children against mistreatment from 1942, yet abuse continued. Only in 1978 did a nationwide ordinance governing foster placements establish uniform supervision.
Responsibility cannot honestly be assigned to one present-day party. Municipal welfare boards, cantonal authorities, farmers, churches, doctors and private organisations participated over many decades. Politicians from the established parties governed while it happened, and the wider respectable public largely accepted the assumptions behind it. This was not an SVP programme or an FDP programme. It was an establishment consensus, which is in some ways more disturbing.
The treatment of the Yenish reveals the same mentality in a more targeted form. Between 1926 and 1973, Pro Juventute’s Kinder der Landstrasse, working with public authorities, removed around 600 Yenish children from their families. Its purpose was not merely to protect particular children; it sought to eradicate a travelling way of life regarded as inferior. Children were scattered through foster homes, institutions and psychiatric facilities, and family connections were deliberately broken.
Until 1981, authorities could also place adults and young people in institutions or prisons through administrative Versorgung without a criminal conviction or necessarily a proper judicial hearing. Poverty, pregnancy outside marriage, alleged laziness, alcoholism, sexual behaviour or resistance to authority could be enough. The later expert commission called its report Mechanics of Arbitrariness. The title captures a particularly Swiss-looking form of violence: coercion made respectable by files, committees and official signatures.
These histories do not cancel Pestalozzi, Piaget or ETH. They expose the gulf between Switzerland’s educational ideals and the treatment of children and adults whom respectable society considered troublesome.
Democracy—for whom, and when?
Switzerland has created a durable federal state in which German-, French-, Italian- and Romansh-speaking regions have largely coexisted peacefully. Its direct-democratic institutions give citizens an unusual ability to challenge governments and legislation. Local government is tangible rather than remote. These are real accomplishments.
But democracy is not made exemplary merely by holding many votes. The first question is who may vote; the second is whether a majority respects those who cannot protect themselves through numbers.
At federal level, Swiss women did not gain the vote until 1971. In 1959, male voters rejected women’s suffrage by 66.9 per cent. Appenzell Innerrhoden continued excluding women from cantonal voting until the Federal Supreme Court compelled it to stop in 1990. Equality within marriage did not take effect until 1988.
Here the party record can be stated with unusual clarity. In 1959, the SP, Landesring der Unabhängigen and Party of Labour supported women’s suffrage. The FDP and the Catholic Conservative Party issued no recommendation, leaving their supporters free to vote as they wished. The BGB—the direct predecessor of today’s SVP—recommended rejection.
This does not mean every left-wing man favoured equality or every conservative opposed it. Nor did party recommendations cast the ballots: male citizens did. But saying only that “Switzerland was late” conceals the fact that organised Swiss movements fought for women’s rights while identifiable political forces resisted or declined to lead.
Direct democracy is therefore both credit and debit. It offers unusual popular power; it also allowed the enfranchised half of the population to decide whether the other half deserved a voice. The instrument was democratic. The result was exclusion.
Social capitalism—and the people prosperity excluded
Gottlieb Duttweiler belongs firmly in the credit column, not because Migros is beyond criticism, but because he challenged entrenched commercial interests and treated business as carrying a social obligation. He converted Migros into a cooperative, helped lower the price of basic goods and established the Kulturprozent, directing part of the company’s turnover towards cultural and social life. He also created the Landesring der Unabhängigen rather than fitting comfortably into the conventional left-right division.
More broadly, Switzerland has built public systems that improve everyday life: integrated rail and bus services reaching small communities, strong vocational education, technically competent administration and infrastructure that is maintained rather than merely announced. Swiss precision has produced more than expensive watches. Euler’s mathematics, engineering, pharmaceuticals and practical inventions such as Velcro and cellophane have had international consequences.
But post-war prosperity was also built by people whom Switzerland wanted as workers without accepting as neighbours.
Under the Saisonnierstatut, workers—many from Italy, Spain and Portugal—could build roads, homes, tunnels, hotels and businesses while being denied long-term security. Their freedom to change jobs was restricted and family reunification was severely limited. Some children lived hidden in Switzerland because their presence was not permitted. Labour was welcome; belonging was not.
That system reflected the demands of employers, federal migration policy and a broad political willingness to keep foreign workers temporary. Right-wing parties and later the SVP made opposition to Überfremdung especially prominent, but the system cannot be laid at their feet alone. Bourgeois parties governed it, economic interests benefited from it, some labour organisations accepted restrictive compromises, and voters repeatedly rewarded exclusionary politics.
The same need for precise attribution applies today. The SVP is the most consistent and forceful national party in portraying migration as a threat and connecting foreigners with crime, welfare costs and social disorder. Yet asylum laws are passed by parliamentary majorities and frequently approved by voters; cantons and municipalities decide how many rules are applied; and parties of the centre and right have supported many restrictions. It would be too convenient for everyone else to place the entire debit in the SVP’s column.
Blamed for the conditions imposed upon them
The political manoeuvre is familiar. Different groups—labour migrants, recognised refugees, asylum seekers, rejected applicants and people without papers—are compressed into a single category of outsider. When housing is scarce, migrants are accused of taking homes. When a public drug scene is visible or a crime makes headlines, foreign nationality becomes the explanation.
First place people in conditions that make an independent, ordinary life extremely difficult. Then point to their poverty, idleness or isolation as proof that they do not belong.
Asylum seekers are not all subject to a permanent blanket ban on employment. Depending on status and stage of procedure, some may be permitted to work. But restrictions, uncertainty and administrative hurdles can leave people unable to support themselves or form the relationships later demanded as evidence of “integration.” Their enforced dependency is then presented as a burden they chose to impose on the state.
The distinction matters. Recognised refugees and temporarily admitted people may work, but an asylum seeker in a federal centre may not. After allocation to a canton, an employer must seek permission; labour-market conditions, preference for the domestic workforce and cantonal limits on sectors may still stand in the way. Swiss research has found that such restrictions reduce refugees' employment and earnings, with damage that can persist after the restrictions end. A state cannot close the front door to lawful independence and then profess shock when some people enter undeclared work, become vulnerable to exploitation or seek other means of survival.
That is not an excuse for offending, and it is certainly not a claim that migrants generally commit crimes. It is the opposite: crime is too readily treated as an ethnic trait when poverty and policy are part of the explanation. Preventing people from earning is a direct invitation to dependency and an increased risk of survival economies, some illegal. To manufacture idleness and desperation, then use the resulting marginality as evidence against the people subjected to it, is political hypocrisy.
Assistance is deliberately lower than ordinary welfare. Rates vary between cantons and municipalities; the Swiss Refugee Council reports that asylum welfare can be 20 to 70 per cent below normal social assistance. Rejected applicants receive emergency provision only and, where cash is supplied, commonly around CHF 8 to CHF 10 per day.
Accommodation can mean an underground civil-defence shelter designed for temporary survival rather than dignified habitation. Reports describe overcrowding, inadequate privacy and violence prevention, poor ventilation and lack of natural light. People are housed apart from ordinary society and subsequently criticised for failing to integrate into it.
Those who reach the ordinary rental market encounter another barrier. In a nationwide 2018 field experiment involving more than 11,000 enquiries, otherwise comparable applicants with Turkish or Kosovo-Albanian names were less likely to be invited to view a flat than applicants with Swiss names. Swiss citizenship did not remove the disadvantage. Repeated exclusion narrows the market available to migrants and can funnel them towards overcrowded, inferior or overpriced accommodation—the least desirable rooms, sublets and streets—while public debate blames them for the housing pressure from which they also suffer.
The Sonderabgabe auf Vermögenswerten makes the contradiction still clearer. Asylum seekers, certain protected people without residence permits and temporarily admitted people may be required to reimburse welfare, emergency aid and enforcement costs through a levy on their assets. Official guidance allows the levy to reach CHF 15,000. Normally CHF 1,000 is exempt if lawful provenance can be demonstrated; where the authorities are not satisfied about provenance, the allowance can fall to CHF 100. The burden of proof falls upon a person who may have fled without the documentation a settled Swiss resident would possess.
The state restricts a person’s ability to earn, supports them below ordinary subsistence, may claim much of what they brought and then records the cost of maintaining them. Politicians can subsequently complain about their expense.
Even citizenship can depend upon parochial notions of conformity. In 2017, Funda Yilmaz—born and raised in Aargau, fluent in Swiss German and successful in the formal citizenship test—was initially refused naturalisation in Buchs. Among the considerations were that she shopped at Aldi and Migros instead of village businesses and did not participate in activities such as hiking. The decision was eventually reversed, but the fact that such matters entered an official judgment remains extraordinary.
Local democracy should bring power closer to people. In naturalisation, it can also place a person’s belonging in the hands of neighbours empowered to invent cultural tests they themselves never had to pass.
Food security in a changing climate—not a party label
The second initiative on the September ballot provides a useful warning against overly tidy political attribution. Despite being widely associated with environmental politics, the initiative for secure food is not a Green Party initiative. It was launched by environmental activist Franziska Herren and an independent committee.
It proposes that Switzerland raise net food self-sufficiency to at least 70 per cent within ten years, encourage more plant-based food, reduce food waste and protect drinking water, soil fertility and biodiversity. Supporters present it as a response to import dependency and the inefficiency of using arable land and imported feed for intensive animal production. Opponents argue that the fixed target is unrealistic, would restrict consumer choice and could conflict with trade obligations.
That argument cannot sensibly be conducted as though the climate were stable. The federal government's Climate CH2025 scenarios report that Switzerland had already warmed by about 2.9°C above the pre-industrial level by 2024—far more than the global average. They project hotter and drier summers, more intense downpours and further loss of snow. Federal hydrological research expects falling summer runoff just as agriculture's need for irrigation rises. Heat, drought, exhausted soil, flooding and competition for water are no longer distant environmental themes; they affect what can be grown, where it can be grown and how reliably people can be fed.
Climate change therefore makes the initiative's subject much more important than an ordinary quarrel over farming preferences. A food system dependent on imported feed, vulnerable supply chains and intensive use of soil and water may produce impressive yields in favourable years while remaining dangerously brittle. Growing more food for direct human consumption, wasting less and protecting soil, biodiversity and water are not decorative green aspirations. They are forms of insurance against conditions that are already changing.
That does not prove that every clause of the initiative is wise. A fixed 70 per cent target may be too blunt, and domestic production is not automatically sustainable or secure merely because it is domestic. Switzerland will continue to need trade, and climate shocks will strike foreign and Swiss harvests alike. But opponents should have to offer a credible alternative for making the food system resilient; dismissing the proposal as unnecessary interference is no longer an adequate response to the physical world. Climate change shifts the burden of proof. The question is not whether the present system works in the climate Switzerland used to have, but whether it can feed the country in the climate that is arriving.
No member of either chamber of Parliament voted for the proposal. The Greens issued Stimmfreigabe rather than supporting it nationally, and the other large parties oppose it. Whatever one thinks of its details, calling it simply “the Green proposal” would obscure the actual politics.
That is instructive. The Swiss agricultural landscape is both an environmental and cultural achievement and a heavily subsidised political construction. Farmers are not one bloc; environmentalists do not agree on every instrument; a proposal with recognisably green aims may still be rejected by the Green Party as drafted. Political responsibility must be traced through actual positions and decisions, not assumed from a label.
A colonial history without colonies
Some responsibilities sit outside the party system almost entirely. Switzerland possessed no formal overseas empire, but Swiss merchants, financiers, manufacturers, missionaries and scholars participated in colonial economies and racial thinking. Some profited from enterprises connected with slavery or goods produced by enslaved people.
Much of this activity preceded the modern party landscape or took place through private networks. The absence of a Swiss flag over a colony makes the history less visible, not nonexistent. Economic participation without formal political responsibility was an especially convenient arrangement—and one that makes easy party attribution impossible.
Who belongs in which column?
A truthful national balance sheet should name the actor whenever the evidence permits.
Henri Dunant deserves credit for an idea; the Red Cross and countless workers developed it. Pestalozzi deserves recognition for an educational vision; he does not absolve the authorities who exploited poor children. Duttweiler’s social conception of business deserves credit without sanctifying every later act of Migros. ETH helped nurture Einstein and generations of researchers, although genius cannot be nationalised. Lutz and Grüninger deserve honour precisely because they chose humanity when officials and rules pointed elsewhere.
Likewise, responsibility should not dissolve into the word “Switzerland.” The BGB opposed women’s suffrage in 1959; the SP and others supported it. Wartime refugee policy was made by a bourgeois-led federal government and administered by identifiable officials. Pro Juventute ran Kinder der Landstrasse with public cooperation. Municipal and cantonal authorities operated coercive welfare systems. Employers profited from seasonal labour. Parliamentary majorities wrote asylum law. Voters repeatedly endorsed some of these arrangements.
Much of the resistance to reform did indeed come from the conservative side: from patriarchal ideas of family, fear of social disorder, nationalism and suspicion of outsiders. But economic liberalism also benefited from vulnerable workers and discreet wartime trade. Meanwhile, institutions across the political establishment accepted coercive welfare practices for far too long. The deeper recurring fault was a culture of authority and conformity, although conservative politics was often its most determined defender.
Parties change, split and rename themselves. Cantonal branches can differ sharply from their national organisations. Policies may survive governments of several colours. The point is not to manufacture a prosecution table in which every historical wrong receives a modern party logo. It is to replace a vague national accusation with more exact accountability—and to remember the reformers, campaigners and dissenters who were Swiss too.
The cleanliness of forgetting
Switzerland has eventually investigated several of these histories. Governments and institutions have apologised, commissions have reported and compensation has sometimes been offered. That matters. But much of the reckoning came painfully late, after victims and campaigners spent years trying to be heard.
Official acknowledgement can itself become a way of containing the past. Label an injustice a “dark chapter,” hold a ceremony, publish a report and return it neatly to the archive. The phrase suggests an unfortunate interruption rather than recurring habits: deference to authority, suspicion of outsiders, moral judgement of the poor, confidence in respectable institutions and a preference for social order over inconvenient human beings.
The votes on 27 September are not repetitions of the past, and it would be dishonest to pretend that they are. They do, however, continue the argument between different ideas of Switzerland. Is neutrality a flexible instrument for peace and independent judgment, or a constitutional reason to stand aside? Is food security best protected through ambitious ecological targets or through the existing agricultural and trading system? Neither answer comes from a mystical national character. Citizens will choose between political arguments and must accept responsibility for the result.
Switzerland has produced humanitarians and exclusionists, courageous dissenters and obedient officials, scientific openness and social conformity. Its finest achievements are not invalidated by its failures. Its failures are not erased by its achievements.
The streets may be clean. The books should still show every entry.
Sources and further reading
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Swiss Confederation, federal vote of 27 September 2026
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Swiss Confederation, summary of the Neutrality Initiative and its sanctions provisions
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Swiss Parliament, Neutrality Initiative parliamentary dossier
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SRF, party recommendations on the Neutrality Initiative
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Initiative committee, Initiative for Secure Food
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SRF, party recommendations on the food initiative
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National Centre for Climate Services, Climate CH2025 scenarios for Switzerland
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National Centre for Climate Services, climate change, drought and agricultural water demand
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International Committee of the Red Cross, history and humanitarian mission
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Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Carl Lutz and the protection of Hungarian Jews
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Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Paul Grüninger
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Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland–Second World War, reports on Switzerland during the Second World War
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Swiss Federal Council, statement on the Bergier Commission's final report
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Pierre-Th. Braunschweig, Secret Channel to Berlin: The Masson-Schellenberg Connection and Swiss Intelligence in World War II (Casemate, 2004), especially pp. 126–151
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Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, neutrality law, sanctions and war-materiel exports
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Swiss Parliament, National Council decision on loosening the War Materiel Act
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Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, asset recovery involving foreign politically exposed persons
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Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Switzerland's record of returning illicit assets
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ETH Zürich, Albert Einstein: student and professor
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Nobel Prize, Albert Einstein—biographical
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C. G. Jung Institute Zürich, analytical psychology and Jung’s legacy
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Swiss National Museum, Lenin in Zürich
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Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, “Pflegekinder”
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Independent Expert Commission on Administrative Detention, research and final report
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Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, women’s suffrage and party positions
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Swiss Parliament, the new marriage law
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State Secretariat for Migration, special levy on asylum seekers’ assets
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State Secretariat for Migration, N permits and access to paid employment
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State Secretariat for Migration, employment rules for people seeking or granted asylum
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ETH Zürich Research Collection, The Labor Market Effects of Restricting Refugees' Employment Opportunities
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Federal Commission against Racism, structural discrimination in the Swiss housing market
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Conference of Cantonal Social Services Directors, social and emergency assistance in the asylum system
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Swiss Refugee Council, welfare support in the asylum system
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European Council on Refugees and Exiles, Swiss asylum accommodation conditions
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SWI swissinfo.ch report reproduced by The Muslim Times, reversal of the Funda Yilmaz citizenship decision
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Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Swiss inventions including Velcro and cellophane
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Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, political parties
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Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, projects on coercive welfare measures and colonial entanglements
