ABSTRACT
Neutralism was partisan, European in origin, ideological in character, and a threat to the development of a rule of law that was the only hope for a durable peace. The neutralism of the decades after 1945 was far removed from the traditional neutrality recognized in international law. Such states as Switzerland and Sweden adopted neutrality as a conscious policy out of unwillingness or inability to become involved in the nineteenth-century system of alliances. Well before the countries that became the chief exponents of neutralism achieved independence, dissident Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians formulated the basic ideas of neutralism. The European neutralists had had extensive experience in explaining away the peculiarities of the Soviet regime. With amazing gullibility, the neutralists accepted at face value Soviet professions of concern with peace and with the welfare of the working class everywhere.
