ABSTRACT
The absolute neutrality of Switzerland as a political principle is generally dated from the year 1674, when the Federal Diet declared that the Confederation, as a body, would regard itself as a neutral state and intervene on neither side in the war which had just broken out. In this way the Confederation proclaimed the axiom of its foreign policy to the forum of Europe. It must not, however, be assumed that the fundamental principle of Swiss political life was then established by a single voluntary act. On the contrary, the principle of neutrality had emerged very slowly from the treaty policy of the old Confederation, and awakened only gradually to a realization of its own nature out of the limbo of international entanglements. It had taken two hundred years of painful experience for the Confederation to grasp its own vital necessities, for the policy of expansion to be abandoned and Switzerland trained in the political abstinence of neutrality. And for a long time to come it remained an elastic formula, in which the most manifold aspects of abstinence in foreign policy found what may be called a national expression.
