ABSTRACT
The major argument for the abolition of the army was that it has a big credibility problem, as a conventionally armed army would not be able to defend a country successfully in case of a nuclear conflict. And it also came out again in the course of these analyses that the threat perception of the voters is changing, that there is generally a rather low fear of military threat, and that threat perceptions are redirected towards the ecological threat, the drug problem, terrorism, and related issues. The second foreign policy challenge is the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process and conventional arms control. The CSCE process is actually one of the few multilateral fora where Switzerland has participated actively from the beginning. Switzerland tries to exploit the new opportunities that have offered themselves since the middle of the 1980s. Switzerland has send a contingent of sanitary troops to Namibia.
