Felix Somary, Die Gegenwartsprobleme der Schweiz: Zehn Thesen (1937)

Felix Somary’s 1937 text is a printed public lecture delivered to the student body of the University of Zurich and dedicated to Swiss youth. Its ten theses diagnose Switzerland as a small liberal democracy whose prosperity depends on conditions—peace, open exchange, sound money, treaty morality—that the World War and the dictatorships have gravely weakened. Somary frames his intervention as an independent “scientific diagnosis,” not a party program, and builds the argument from Switzerland’s material paradox:

Die Schweiz ist ihrer natürlichen Ertragsfähigkeit nach das ärmste Land Europas, nach ihrem Kapitalbesitz auf den Kopf das reichste Land unseres Kontinents.

English translation: In terms of its natural productive capacity Switzerland is the poorest country in Europe; in terms of capital wealth per head it is the richest country on our continent.

This paradox is the foundation of the whole lecture. Switzerland’s high living standard is not explained by national superiority, but by institutions and history: long peace and liberal international order allowed a resource-poor country to become capital-rich.

Zwei Momente haben diesem von Natur bettelarmen Land zu erstaunlichem Wohlstand verholfen: eine nur selten und kurz unterbrochene vierhundertjährige Friedensära und eine lange Periode des Liberalismus, der im internationalen Verkehr das Machtprinzip von Staat zu Staat durch das Leistungsprinzip zwischen Individuum und Individuum ersetzt hatte.

English translation: Two factors have helped this country, by nature wretchedly poor, to astonishing prosperity: a four-hundred-year era of peace, interrupted only rarely and briefly, and a long period of liberalism, which in international relations replaced the power principle between state and state with the principle of achievement between individual and individual.

The central conceptual move is Somary’s refusal to treat the age’s decisive conflict as socialism versus liberalism. For him, the deeper break is between civilian, consumer-oriented peace economy and militarized scarcity economy.

Der entscheidende Gegensatz liegt nicht zwischen Liberalismus und Sozialismus, sondern zwischen Friedens- und Kriegswirtschaft.

English translation: The decisive antithesis lies not between liberalism and socialism, but between a peace economy and a war economy.

From this perspective, planning, monopoly, exchange control, and “managed” foreign trade are not simply socialist measures; they are wartime derivatives. War economy reverses the moral order of liberal democracy: the citizen and consumer cease to be the end of economic life and become burdens or instruments of state purpose.

War der Konsument vorher Herr, so wurde er jetzt Last der Wirtschaft; anstelle des Höchstmaßes der Bedürfnisbefriedigung wurde ihm das Lebensminimum — und oft nicht einmal dieses — zugeteilt.

English translation: Whereas the consumer had previously been master, he now became a burden on the economy; instead of the maximum satisfaction of his needs, he was allotted the bare minimum for subsistence—and often not even that.

Somary then turns to finance, where he sees the same wartime legacy in inflation, moratoria, blocked claims, devaluation, and creditor passivity. His treatment of Swiss claims in Germany is especially severe: Switzerland’s losses prove its strength, but also its danger if creditors surrender initiative to debtor states.

Der Gläubiger muß dieses Handicap durch höhere konstruktive Fähigkeit ausgleichen — er gibt entscheidend viel aus der Hand, wenn er hier die Initiative seinen Schuldnern überläßt.

English translation: The creditor must offset this handicap by superior constructive capacity—he gives up something decisively important if he leaves the initiative here to his debtors.

The seventh thesis attacks the post-1931 culture of devaluation. Somary regards currency depreciation not as modern wisdom but as a dangerous exhaustion of the last reserve of war finance. His warning to Switzerland is stark:

Auf das dringendste muß gefordert werden, daß die Pandorabüchse der Abwertung endgültig versiegelt und künftig nie anders als bei Kriegsgefahr geöffnet werde.

English translation: It must be demanded in the most urgent terms that the Pandora's box of devaluation be sealed once and for all, and henceforth never opened except in the event of the danger of war.

The later theses widen the diagnosis from money to armaments, public economy, and political mentality. Total mobilization makes private wealth inadequate even for preparation, while investment decisions are increasingly governed by military rather than economic logic.

Die europäischen Großstaaten scheinen zu vergessen, daß, wenn man hundert Prozent des Sparkapitals für Schutz verwendet, nichts mehr zu schützen übrig bleibt.

English translation: The great European states seem to forget that if one uses one hundred percent of savings capital for defense, there is nothing left to defend.

Somary’s political argument culminates in a defense of Swiss democracy that is not merely anti-communist or anti-nationalist. He claims Switzerland must answer dictatorship with a renewed public spirit, not only with slogans about freedom. Liberal and socialist parties, he argues, are closer to each other than either is to the total state, because both still begin from human welfare rather than sacrifice to a remote militarized goal.

The conclusion defines Switzerland’s relevance as exemplary: an old democracy without tyrannical degeneration, and a multilingual state joining Europe’s major cultures in equality. Its deepest defense lies in rights that make civic life worth preserving.

In der Schweiz ist Leben, Freiheit, Ehre und Eigentum der Willkür der jeweils Regierenden entzogen, die selbst dem Gesetz unterstehen — das unterscheidet den Freien vom Sklaven.

English translation: In Switzerland, life, liberty, honor, and property are removed from the arbitrary will of those who happen to govern, who themselves are subject to the law—that is what distinguishes the free man from the slave.

Somary’s lecture is thus both warning and program: Switzerland must preserve peace-economy institutions, fiscal seriousness, legal trust, and civic freedom while recognizing that it lives among war economies. Its relevance lies in this small-state analysis of how liberal democracy survives when the international order that sustained it is collapsing.