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 follows the debates over European unification with unmistakable interest, yet Rappard insists that this interest is shot through with far more doubt than hope:
En effet, l'opinion helvétique suit ces discussions avec un intérêt certain.
English translation: Indeed, Swiss opinion follows these discussions with a definite interest.
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:
Nous avons vu ensuite qu'aucune d'entre elles n'entame la souveraineté nationale de ses membres, mais qu'elles se bornent toutes à leur offrir le cadre d'une collaboration plus étroite.
English translation: We then observed that not one of them impinges upon the national sovereignty of its members, but that they all confine themselves to offering them the framework of a closer collaboration.
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 gap between profession and achievement, he insists, is no failure of American prompting or of the organization’s own officials:
Ce qui est certain, c'est que si les réalisations sont terriblement en retard sur les bonnes intentions professées, ce n'est faute ni d'exhortations américaines, ni d'efforts des fonctionnaires de l'O. E. C. E.
English translation: What is certain is that if the achievements lag terribly behind the good intentions professed, it is for lack neither of American exhortations nor of the efforts of the officials of the O.E.C.E.
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:
Mais il me paraît probable que de toutes celles dont la constitution pourrait être envisagée après les bouleversements cosmiques qui nous attendent peut-être et qui seraient probablement nécessaires pour la réaliser, ce serait la fédération occidentale des peuples libres qui présenterait, aux yeux des Suisses, le moins de menaces et le plus d'attraits et de vertus pacificatrices.
English translation: But it seems probable to me that of all those whose constitution might be contemplated after the cosmic upheavals that perhaps await us and that would probably be necessary to bring it about, it would be the Western federation of free peoples that would present, in the eyes of the Swiss, the fewest threats and the most attractions and pacifying virtues.
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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