William Emmanuel Rappard · 1925
Rappard’s monograph assesses Switzerland’s first five years in the League of Nations through a central tension: how can a neutral state defend international solidarity while refusing important instruments of collective enforcement? Writing as a Geneva professor and member of the Mandates Commission, he addresses citizens whose informed support must sustain and control governmental diplomacy. His account is broadly favourable to Swiss policy but repeatedly exposes the costs of its caution. Switzerland cannot consistently reproach the League for impotence while withholding the material means that might make it effective.
Car la Société des Nations ne sera véritablement une association des peuples que dans la mesure où les peuples eux-mêmes participeront par la pensée et par la volonté à ses travaux, à ses espoirs et à ses triomphes.
English translation: For the League of Nations will truly be an association of peoples only insofar as the peoples themselves participate, through thought and will, in its work, its hopes, and its triumphs.
This democratic premise governs both the book’s purpose and its institutional preferences. An introduction distinguishes official diplomacy from the independent service of Swiss judges, administrators, and experts. The first part examines the League’s structure; the second treats its three principal functions: executing the peace treaties, organizing international cooperation, and maintaining peace. Rappard draws extensively on published proceedings, federal instructions, and governmental reports, making national policy answerable to evidence accessible to public scrutiny.
Institutionally, Switzerland promotes universality, the Assembly’s authority, small-state participation in Council deliberations, and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Admission of Germany, the United States, and Russia would strengthen both impartiality and practical power, freeing the League from identification with the victorious coalition. Yet Swiss support for Assembly oversight encounters a revealing limit: the government wishes neither to assume responsibility for Council policy nor to antagonize powerful neighbours. Rappard similarly recognizes great-power predominance within the Secretariat beneath its formally international character. His institutional analysis therefore measures legal equality against unequal political influence.
Execution of the peace treaties presents the sharpest initial difficulty. Switzerland neither negotiated nor signed settlements that many Swiss considered unjust, but League membership entails obligations that neutrality cannot simply erase. Independent Swiss service offers a partial reconciliation. Max Huber and Felix Calonder help resolve the Aaland dispute; Calonder mediates and supervises arrangements in Upper Silesia; other Swiss undertake responsibilities in Dantzig, the Saar, and the mandates system. Such appointments do not bind the federal government, yet they contribute Swiss experience and impartiality to reconstruction. Rappard defends the League as mitigating harsh settlements, while condemning the Council’s administration of the Saar for subordinating international responsibility to French influence.
La pire faute qu'ils puissent commettre, tant à son égard qu'à celui de leur pays, c'est d'offrir des faveurs aux uns, alors qu'ils doivent l'équité à tous.
English translation: The worst fault they can commit, both toward it and toward their country, is to offer favours to some when they owe equity to all.
The standard is justice rather than national favour-seeking. It also informs Rappard’s treatment of technical cooperation, which can reduce economic antagonisms and cultivate habits of common action. Switzerland gradually abandons its initial suspicion that specialized organizations distract from peacekeeping. Its assistance to Austrian reconstruction combines public advances, private investment, and expert service, although it refuses the collective guarantees underpinning the operation. Cooperation is easier when relieving suffering abroad than when conventions require domestic legislative changes or restrictions on sovereignty.
The narcotics controversy makes this selectivity morally uncomfortable. Constitutional objections and the interests of an export-oriented chemical industry delayed Switzerland’s adherence to international controls. Rappard criticizes the government’s conspicuous association with representatives of a Basel firm repeatedly mentioned in connection with concealed drug shipments. Without declaring governmental guilt, he argues that apparent indulgence jeopardizes the foreign confidence on which Swiss prosperity depends. National reputation is thus an obligation, not merely an inherited asset.
The final chapter distinguishes five instruments of peace: disarmament, publicity, treaty revision, peaceful dispute settlement, and collective sanctions. Swiss policy contributes little to disarmament, but vigorously supports open deliberations, published treaties, and compulsory jurisdiction. Publicity enables democratic restraint; revision acknowledges that peace cannot mean permanently freezing an unjust or obsolete settlement.
Car, sans loi universellement reconnue, pas de justice complète. Et sans justice — on ne le répétera jamais trop — pas de paix assurée.
English translation: For without universally recognized law, there can be no complete justice. And without justice—this can never be repeated too often—there can be no assured peace.
Sanctions reveal the unresolved problem within this legal internationalism. Exempted from military action but committed to economic measures, Switzerland nevertheless helps soften the Covenant’s enforcement obligations. Rappard understands distrust of coercion controlled by political powers, yet acknowledges its weakening effects. The 1924 Geneva Protocol brings the contradiction into focus by linking arbitration, sanctions, security, and disarmament. He proposes salvaging compulsory arbitration rather than sacrificing it to an unacceptable enforcement package.
The book’s lasting relevance lies in this candid account of solidarity constrained by sovereignty. Rappard ultimately endorses Switzerland’s general course as suited to its geography and democratic composition, while insisting that isolation cannot remain its destination. Peace through law is a gradual political construction requiring informed peoples, impartial service, and obligations extending beyond the protection of national independence.
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