Preface

William E. Rappard’s preface presents Waging Peace as a postwar inquiry into Switzerland’s distinctive political achievement. He introduces William B. Lloyd, Jr. among American Friends who came to Europe seeking peace, but he treats Lloyd’s book as an intellectual rather than merely humanitarian act. Its question is whether Switzerland, small, divided, and surrounded by stronger powers, discloses a usable art of peace.

“Here in the heart of the Old World was Switzerland which, throughout the centuries, had succeeded in maintaining within her own narrow borders the peace that her infinitely more powerful neighbors had constantly striven for in vain.”

Rappard sharpens the problem by rejecting sentimental explanations. Swiss peace did not arise from innate pacifism, since Swiss soldiers had long been known abroad for bellicosity. It did not arise from instinctive centralism, since cantonal autonomy remained fiercely defended. Nor did it rest on superior diplomatic genius. The achievement matters because unity endured among communities divided by language, religion, tradition, and local allegiance. Switzerland therefore appears not as a nation without conflict but as one that repeatedly contained conflict before it became national ruin.

“What was it then, in their history, that explained why, in spite of their quarrelsome instincts, their proverbial gruffness and their perennial desire to be the sole masters of their local destiny, they had been able to retain and indeed to consolidate their national unity in the midst of European anarchy and strife?”

The preface then makes Lloyd’s outsider status interpretively important. Swiss historians, Rappard suggests, knew their country intimately, yet that intimacy could obscure the strangeness of its endurance. Lloyd approached Swiss materials through the contemporary problem of international peace, and so saw in constitutional history a wider political repertoire. Rappard’s own introduction thus converts national history into an experiment in peace-making: the Swiss past becomes valuable because it records concrete procedures tested under recurring intercantonal strain.

Rappard also insists that Lloyd’s readable narrative rests on arduous research. The minutes of the federal Diet, with their dense records of renewed quarrels, appear as difficult source material rather than picturesque background. This emphasis defends the book’s simplicity. Lloyd has not reduced Swiss history to a pleasing legend; he has drawn from forbidding archives an account of how habits, institutions, and restraints gradually acquired political force.

The central lesson Rappard attributes to Lloyd is that peace is not the absence of antagonism. Switzerland survived because it developed ways to turn antagonism into negotiable political action. Conciliation, mediation, restraint, and common enforcement were practical disciplines, not ornamental ideals. The formulation deliberately avoids passive pacifism: peace must be made, administered, and sometimes defended by communities reluctant to act together but willing to preserve the common bond.

“He has found it in the practice of patient conciliation and mediation as well as in active, albeit ever reluctant collective security.”

Neutrality is similarly lifted above mere self-protection. For Rappard, it gains moral and political weight when it serves the general interest by limiting war and moderating the choices of possible combatants. In the postwar setting, this makes Switzerland relevant beyond Switzerland: durable peace depends on institutions and habits that restrain conflict before it spreads. The preface closes by endorsing Lloyd as a humane outsider who helps Swiss readers see their own history anew. Its final claim is that Switzerland offers neither miracle nor innocence, but a repertoire for waging peace: negotiated settlement, local restraint, reluctant collective action, and neutrality oriented toward the common good.