Am Rande des Sturms: Das Schweizer Militär im Ersten Weltkrieg / En marche de la tempête : les forces armées suisse pendant la Première Guerre mondiale

Michael M. Olsansky

• Publisher: Hier und Jetzt
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9783039199457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching History

Konfliktbeladen zeigt sich die Geschichte des Militärs im Ersten Weltkrieg - auch wenn die Schweiz nicht aktiv am Krieg teilgenommen hat. Nicht minder kontrovers war der Stoff für geschichtspolitische Kontroversen. Sei es die personell schillernde Armeeführung, sei es die Disziplinierung der Wehrmänner durch Offiziere und Militärjustiz, seien es die Ordnungsdiensteinsätze der Armee im Innern. Der Band führt Forschungsergebnisse der letzten zwanzig Jahre zum Schweizer Militär im Ersten Weltkrieg zusammen. Er liefert eine multiperspektivische Gesamtschau und hinterfragt eingefahrene Sichtweisen und Narrative. Hauptbetrachtungsfelder sind die Armeeführung, der Militäralltag, die Militärjustiz, die Ausgestaltung der Landesverteidigung, die Ordnungsdienste und der Landesstreik von 1918 sowie die Verortung der Schweizer Armee im internationalen Kontext.

Kapitel 1: Internationales Spannungsfeld

Maartje Abbenhuis

On the Edge of the Storm?
Situating Switzerland’s Neutrality
in the Context of the First World War

Historians often conceptualise the First World War as a «total war», a conflict in which the totalising effects of warfare eroded the distinctions between civilians and soldiers and in which whole societies were seconded to the needs of the military-industrial complex. The conceptualisation is an appropriate one, but it begs the question: Where does it leave the war experiences of neutrals? Should we consider neutral countries like Switzerland marginal to the war, sitting, as the theme of this collection suggests, on the edge of the storm? This chapter asks questions of neutrality in the period before and during the First World War and argues that only by fully integrating the history of neutrality and neutrals into the history of warfare can we begin to comprehend the totality of the between 1914 and 1918 conflagration.

The historian Hugh Bichenko defines the term «total war» as pertaining to a conflict in which «the whole population and all the resources of the combatants are committed to complete victory and thus become legitimate military targets».¹ In total war, the distinction between armed force and civilian population is either eradicated or becomes less clear. In total war, the principle that armed forces should only attack designated military-strategic sites erodes. Civilians become justifiable targets for the enemy, enabling their destruction and justifying increasingly violent behaviour towards them. Few wars in history meet the conditions of totality as Bichenko describes the concept. Thus, a «total war» for Bichenko is «a term to be used sparingly».² The general consensus among military historians, however, is that the First World War is one such war.³

If we accept Bichenko’s definition, the «totality» of the First World War was defined by the commitments of the belligerents to victory at any cost. By implication, only those societies actually at war could participate in the war’s totalisation. The belligerents were simultaneously the war’s perpetrators and its primary victims (the targets of their enemy’s total warfare campaigns). Bichenko’s definition leaves historians of neutrality in a quandary: How can we write the history of the First World War and acknowledge its totality for many (although not all) of the belligerent societies involved, and leave room for alternate war experiences?

Between 1914 and 1918, could we say that neutrals like Switzerland were also involved in «total war»? Were neutrals impacted by the «total war» waged by others? And, if so, how should we describe those neutral war experiences? The First World War was a globalised industrial conflagration from which almost no society escaped unscathed, be it neutral or belligerent. But how people were affected by the conflict differed substantially depending on their geographic location and their level of military involvement. The longer the war endured, the likelihood of a person being drawn directly into the war’s maelstrom of violence, revolution and upheaval increased exponentially.

I do not wish to revise the idea that the First World War was a «total war». The descriptor is a perfect adjective for the 1914–1918 conflict. But I do want to argue that by looking only at the belligerents to make sense of the parameters and impacts of the conflict as it totalised, historians miss a vital piece of the story. For the First World War did not start out as a «total war». It developed into that reality over time: as an increasing number of states ended their neutrality and joined the war and as the great power belligerents expanded their military violence, heightened their economic warfare, militarised the world’s seas and oceans and devastated the global economy. My argument is that we can only fully understand the totality of the First World War if we integrate the history of neutrals and neutrality in it and acknowledge that as non-belligerents, neutrals were key actors in the globalisation of the war and its violence.⁴

The Dutch professor of military history, Wim Klinkert, grapples with similar questions. He argues that the vital distinction between a neutral state and a belligerent one has to be maintained: that the difference between a belligerent being «at war» militarily and a neutral «waiting» for (or «expecting») to become involved in a military conflict is essential. He argues that successful neutrals had a war experience but that their war experience was distinctly different from that of the belligerents because the neutrals did not enter into combat, suffered very few military casualties and endured limited military damage. At best, neutrals were indirect military agents in the war and should not be classified as the war’s primary victims. They experienced the military impact of the conflict either tangentially or as vicarious witnesses. The war existed for them but only at a distance. As such, Klinkert argues that for the neutral Dutch, the First World War was not a «total war».⁵

Instead, Klinkert ascribes the term «total mobilisation» to the war experiences of the Dutch, retooling Ernst Jünger’s idea of totale Mobilmachtung to make his case.⁶ Klinkert is very careful to stress that the Dutch endured many of the same wartime developments and privations as civilians in belligerent societies, including the militarisation of everyday life (and the mobilisation of large numbers of citizen-soldiers), the imposition of restrictive rationing and distribution measures, heightened state control over the lives of citizens, an influx of refugees and foreigners and high levels of economic insecurity. But the Dutch did not go to war. They did not have to deal with the grief of innumerable military casualties. They did not see their cities bombed into oblivion, their homes torched or their lives and livelihoods end. Only rarely did they experience the inherent violence of total war (for example, when a belligerent aeroplane accidentally dropped a bomb on a Dutch village, when a loosened sea mine exploded on a Dutch beach, or when a Dutch fishing vessel was lost at sea due to military operations conducted there). For Klinkert, then, the Netherlands’ neutrality differentiated the country from the rest of wartime Europe, indicating that the Dutch had a different kind of war experience. Klinkert agrees with Bichenko: total war cannot apply to a neutral.

Klinkert’s argument is an important one and can be extended to other neutrals as well (Switzerland included). While defending the principle that the neutrals in the First World War deserve and need to be studied, Klinkert also insists that the distinctions between neutrals and belligerents should be preserved. I agree: neutrals were not belligerents and their war experiences were (by and large) quite different from most belligerent societies. The danger of accepting Klinkert’s premise, however, is that it risks marginalising the neutrals to the edges of the war and potentially denies them a degree of agency in the conflict. It tends to assume that because the «military war» happened outside neutral borders the neutrals’ role in the conflict was peripheral. Leaving the neutrals out of the mainstream history of the war or removing them to the edges of the storm, makes their war histories exceptional. It also suggests that neutrality was an exceptional response to warfare in general.

The purpose of this chapter is to argue that there was no such thing as exceptional neutrality in 1914 (not even for Switzerland), that neutrality was an expected and desired response for states going into the war and that the totalisation of the First World War should be considered within the framework of the collapse of the viability of nineteenth-century conceptions of neutrality. For neutrality did not have the same meaning attached to it in 1918 as it did in 1914. The war transformed the ways in which belligerents conducted their warfare and the ways in which non-belligerents could survive a military conflict. In the process, the war altered the global balance of power and mitigated the application of neutrality in international affairs.

With very good reason, the Swiss consider their history as a neutral country exceptional. Charting it from its inceptions in the early modern era to the present, neutrality has had extraordinary impact on Swiss national and cantonal history. This chapter is not going to revisit or engage directly with that vast historiography. I am not a historian of Switzerland. However, my research on the uses, applications and conceptualisations of neutrality in the period 1815–1918 suggests that Swiss neutrality in the «long» nineteenth century and during the First World War was neither extraordinary nor exceptional.⁷ Or to put it slightly differently: although Switzerland was an exceptional state with a unique past (and a particular and unique national history), its neutrality was neither exceptional nor unique during these about hundred years. Its neutrality would become unique in part because of the changes to the international system brought about during the First World War. The point is particularly important for when the First World War broke out, the Swiss state behaved in very similar ways to other neutral states and did so within a framing of neutrality that was founded on international legal precepts, rights, obligations and precedents.

Exceptional Swiss neutrality? Europe and the neutral states 1914 at the outbreak of war (Source: Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr, ZMSBw).

We commit the historical sin of anachronism if we apply our twentieth-century bias towards neutrals and neutrality in analysing the nineteenth-century world and the Great War that brought that century to a dramatic and disastrous close.⁸ For in the European world that evolved in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna (1815), neutrality underwent a transformation. It no longer operated as an exceptional status in time of war as it had during the early modern era. Neutrality would undergo another transformation during the First World War itself. Charting the longer-term history of neutrality highlights just how flexible neutrality is (and was) as a concept that moulds itself to and is moulded by the international system in which it operates.

Between 1815 and 1914, in all the wars of the world, there were always more neutrals than belligerents. Some of these neutrals were neutralised by great power decree (like Switzerland and Belgium), others volunteered their neutrality as a long-term position (like the United States, the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands), but most declared their neutrality at the outbreak of war. They were occasional neutrals.

After 1815, most European governments, in fact, took care to announce their declarations of neutrality when others went to war. This fact ensured that the «long» nineteenth century was an age of limited war, by which I mean do not that the conduct of particular wars were militarily limited (although they sometimes were) but rather that their geo-strategic and economic reach was purposely restrained and restricted. Only the Crimean War (1853–1856) involved more than two great European powers but even this conflict did not extend much beyond the Crimean Peninsula, the Russo-Ottoman border regions and the Baltic Sea. Importantly, in all these wars, there was almost no distinction made between the expected behaviour of neutral states. That is to say, it did not matter if a country was permanently or voluntarily neutral or a great or small power: the same expectations existed in terms of their relationship with any belligerents, to the global economy, to the laws of war and neutrality, and to each other.

Nevertheless, neutrality remained a contested idea – it was not always welcomed or supported – but its internationalist values were on the rise. Nineteenth-century neutrals were often seen to do «good» in the world. Neutral states facilitated humanitarian aid in time of war. Their existence promoted peace and internation...

Table of contents

• Umschlag
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhalt
• Vorwort/Préface
• Einleitung
• Kapitel 1: Internationales Spannungsfeld
• Kapitel 2: Operationsplanung und Kampfführung
• Kapitel 3: Militäralltag
• Kapitel 4: Meutereien und Militärjustiz
• Kapitel 5: Ordnungsdienst und Landesstreik
• Kapitel 6: Die Perspektive des Auslandes
• Autoren/Auteurs