William E. Rappard’s 1950 essay explains for Swiss readers the sudden proliferation of European and Atlantic institutions after 1947. By reading the founding texts of the ECE, Brussels Pact, OEEC, NATO, and Council of Europe, it dispels the illusion that Europe has already become a federation. Its thesis is sober: Switzerland may welcome cooperation, but it should not abandon neutrality or mistake intergovernmental machinery for political union. The appended treaty texts are therefore not ancillary: legal wording becomes the evidence for political judgment.
La Suisse est à bien des égards le plus européen des pays du Vieux-Monde.
English translation: Switzerland is in many respects the most European of the countries of the Old World.
Rappard opens by granting the federalist temptation. Switzerland is central, multilingual, culturally plural, and often treated as “une Europe en miniature.” Yet the analogy warns as much as it inspires: Swiss federalism followed centuries of experience and required real transfers of sovereignty. Postwar Europe, divided by Soviet power and dependent on American support, has not made that conversion. Swiss opinion therefore contains
plus de doutes que d'espoirs, plus de scepticisme que de foi
English translation: more doubts than hopes, more skepticism than faith
Part I is organized by three questions: what is Europe, what is union, and why unite? “Europe,” Rappard shows, is unstable: Marshall’s version included Russia; Churchill’s excluded Britain as a member while asking France and Germany to lead; the ECE remained nearly continental; Brussels, NATO, and Strasbourg increasingly defined Europe as the democratic West against Moscow. A continent becomes a political-civilizational camp.
His answer on “union” is juridical. The ECE cannot act without governmental assent; the OEEC depends on unanimity with abstention; the Council of Europe has a deliberative Assembly, but its conclusions are recommendations. The new institutions provide frameworks for collaboration, not supranational rule:
aucune d'entre elles n'entame la souveraineté nationale de ses membres
English translation: none of them impinges upon the national sovereignty of its members
On purpose, Rappard separates security, prosperity, and culture. Brussels combines them; the ECE and OEEC are economic; NATO is strategic; the Council of Europe is moral-cultural and excludes national defense. He is especially wary of “integration” rhetoric: diplomats speak of common action while states retain the decisive powers. The obstacle is the refusal to climb from
l'étroite vallée de la souveraineté nationale aux régions supérieures de l'intégration européenne
English translation: the narrow valley of national sovereignty to the higher regions of European integration
This distinction between declaration and sacrifice is the essay’s central conceptual move. Rappard’s skepticism is not anti-European. Economically, he prefers restoration of pre-1914 liberties—travel, migration, trade, convertibility, exchange of goods and ideas—to a Western customs bloc narrower than Europe and harmful to Swiss world commerce. Culturally, he rejects bureaucratic harmonization; plural cultures need liberty, not administration:
Ce n'est pas d'institutions dont l'Europe a besoin. C'est de liberté.
English translation: It is not institutions that Europe needs. It is freedom.
Part II asks what Switzerland should do. It fully shares the democratic and spiritual patrimony invoked by Western organizations, yet its “neutralité historique et constitutionnelle” bars alliance politics. Thus Switzerland joins only the ECE and OEEC, because they are economic, open, and non-coercive. Neutrality is not indifference: it has preserved Swiss unity, independence, armed self-defense, and humanitarian usefulness.
The conclusion tests federal alternatives. A federation of all Europe would best prevent war only if all states accepted common sovereignty; in the Cold War it would be impossible or merely Soviet enlargement. A Western European federation is more attractive, but unlikely without Britain and inadequate without America. The only federation not wholly impossible is Atlantic rather than continental:
la fédération occidentale des peuples libres
English translation: the Western federation of free peoples
Even this is not a program for Swiss accession. Rappard ends with prudence under danger: Switzerland must not use tradition for selfish isolation, but neither should it sacrifice institutions that made it democratic, solvent, plural, neutral, and useful. The work remains relevant because it distinguishes Europe from the West, cooperation from federation, liberty from cultural administration, and solidarity from alliance.
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