The archive.

Swiss parties cooperate nationally without ceasing to be rooted in their cantons. In this signed encyclopedia contribution, republished in 1937, William Emmanuel Rappard explains that tension through concrete institutional arrangements: canton-bound constituencies, an indirectly elected federal executive, and referendums that cut across party loyalties. His revealing exception is the Socialist party, whose internationally oriented policies coexist with unusually unified national organization. Rather than treating parliamentary strength as a simple measure of nationwide allegiance, Rappard distinguishes parties’ local constituencies from their federal functions. His compact account shows how religious, constitutional, and economic divisions overlap—and how Radical Democratic predominance gave way to coalition government without dissolving the cantonal foundations of Swiss politics.

Rappard defines the small state not by population, territory, wealth, or neutrality but by a single constitutional fact: exclusion from the League of Nations Council's permanent seats. That negative definition — Max Huber's 'Nichtgrosstaaten' — lets him read the League as both a rupture with old diplomacy and its continuation, since the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe had already married nominal equality to rule by the principal Powers. Article 4 of the Covenant, he argues, did not merely manage this hierarchy but legalized it, turning long-standing political inequality into open constitutional fact. Tracing the Paris negotiations, where Cecil defended Great-Power control and Wilson supplied democratic language, he shows why intermediate and aspiring states — Spain, Poland, Argentina, Brazil — made resentment inevitable, and why the weak came to prize law as both moral preference and practical necessity.

It is not unnatural, although it may give rise to cynical comment: the nations whose only material bond is a common lack of might are spiritually linked together by a common love of right.

Three movements organize a century and a half of Swiss constitutional history in Rappard's telling: the emancipation of the individual, the triumph of democracy, and the rise of the state. He begins with the great paradox — that the Helvetic Constitution imposed by French bayonets in 1798, with its liberty, equality, and unitary citizenship, came to shape modern Switzerland more than the old Confederation ever did — and traces the sequence through the Act of Mediation, the reactionary Pact of 1815, the liberal cantonal revolutions of 1830, the federal Constitution of 1848, and the centralizing revisions after 1874. The individual who freed himself from the aristocratic state, and then mastered it through referendum and initiative, ends by surrendering to a federal statism of tariffs, railways, insurance, and subsidies whose swelling debt Rappard reads as the measure of lost independence.

Pour triompher définitivement en Suisse, le libéralisme avait donc dû faire appel au moins libéral des arguments.

English translation: “To triumph definitively in Switzerland, liberalism had thus been obliged to resort to the least liberal of arguments.”

Written for American students in the Governments of Modern Europe series, this account treats Switzerland as a mirror in which the United States might study its own federal habits. Rappard traces the confederation from the 1291 forest-canton alliance through the Sonderbund War to the Constitution of 1848, which consciously borrowed American bicameralism even as Switzerland exported the initiative and referendum back across the Atlantic. He anatomizes the collegial seven-member Federal Council, the supremacy of the legislature, the tenacity of cantonal and communal loyalty, and the slow drift toward etatisme. Neutrality, guaranteed since 1815, he defends as a necessity rather than a virtue, and Switzerland's guarded entry into the League of Nations emerges as the cautious conduct of a small state reluctant to surrender its ultimate safeguard.

For Switzerland, to resort to a more modern metaphor, neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.

Every government that gathered at Geneva professed the Cobdenite creed that commerce breeds peace; every government, called to concrete concessions, reached instead for the tariff, the quota, and the bargaining duty. Delivered as the Cobden Lectures at the London School of Economics in February 1938, these three lectures reconstruct two decades of League conferences—Brussels, Genoa, the bold 1927 resolution to halt and reverse the rise of tariffs, the wrecked London gathering of 1933—and ask why they failed. Rappard sorts the protectionist arguments by purpose rather than chronology, weighing infant-industry claims and agrarian defenses, and locates the deepest cause not in ignorance or private greed but in the fear of war, which drove nations toward autarky. From Geneva, he warns, no honest message of optimism can come.

Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.

Confident opinion at the turn of the century assumed democracy's advance was as irreversible as the tide; by 1938 Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism had made that assumption look naive. Across six lectures given on the Harris Foundation at Chicago, Rappard defines democracy not by its etymology but by the paired ideals of liberty and equality, then traces its uneven rise from Athens through Britain, France, and his native Switzerland. He reads the three great dictatorships as offspring of the World War—Lenin's from defeat, Mussolini's from disappointed victory, Hitler's from Versailles and slump—and diagnoses the strain within surviving democracies as a crisis of parliamentarism rather than of democracy itself. The remedy he presses is unfashionable: a retreat of the state from economic life, without which self-government becomes an illusion.

Democracy thrives on peace, and dictatorships on war.

Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.

Why did Swiss officers who proposed a stronger federal government in 1830 later fall silent about their initiative? William Emmanuel Rappard follows scattered testimony, newly located correspondence, and a petition reprinted in the Journal de Genève to recover two distinct reform proposals. Their American inspiration lay chiefly in central authority and military coordination, not the representative institutions later favoured by radicals. Rappard suggests that the officers retreated when their programme attracted political opponents while alienating conservative allies; suspicions of French influence further weakened its credibility. This historical investigation offers a concrete distinction between competing uses of the American constitutional example—and shows how letters and hostile newspaper commentary can recover an abandoned project without resolving every uncertainty about its design or disappearance.

Sismondi abandoned confidence in unrestricted competition without abandoning his conviction that political economy should serve human happiness. In this historical article, William Emmanuel Rappard explains that reversal by distinguishing a lasting social ideal from a changed diagnosis of industrial society. He tests Sismondi’s account of his own conversion against uncertain sources of information about British workers and explores Robert Owen’s probable, though conjectural, influence. Rappard’s critical sympathy sharpens the portrait: he finds Sismondi’s theory of overproduction unconvincing while taking seriously his proposal to make employers responsible for workers’ sickness, old age, and unemployment. The result exposes both the force and the tensions of this interventionism—its effort to prevent private enterprise from shifting costs onto society, and its uneasy coexistence with individual liberty.

Periodically, in the open air and by collective oath, the Swiss cantons swore their federal pacts anew—an institution Rappard studies under its German name, Beschwörung und Erneuerung der Bünde, from Rudolf Brun's Zurich charter of 1351 to its extinction in 1798. Born of one magistrate's fear of his enemies, the periodic public oath spread through the perpetual alliances and the Covenant of Stans until it formed part of Swiss public law. Then the Reformation turned a rite of unity into a confessional battlefield: Catholics would swear before God and the saints, the Reformed before God alone, and no formula could reconcile the two. The ceremony returned for a single day at Aarau, on the eve of the old Confederation's collapse—the oath, Rappard argues, being the very cement of the Eidgenossenschaft.

Une fois de plus les saints se dressèrent donc entre les Confédérés, non pour les bénir, mais bien pour les empêcher de renouveler leurs promesses de fidélité mutuelle !

English translation: “Once again the saints thus stood between the Confederates—not to bless them, but rather to prevent them from renewing their pledges of mutual fidelity!”

Six and a half centuries of Swiss survival amount, in Rappard's reading, to one sustained experiment in mutual defense—and thus to a rehearsal of the problem the League of Nations and the United Nations inherited: how sovereign units, unequal in wealth and divided by creed, can shield one another without a common command. Prepared in English at Lionel Curtis's urging as an abridgment of his French Cinq siècles de sécurité collective, the book separates the law of the Swiss alliances—from the 1291 pact of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden through the Covenant of Stans and the Defensional of Wyl—from the messier facts of Morat, the Musso War, and the Catholic secession of 1680. Federalism, he concludes, reconciles unity with diversity, and stands as the alternative to anarchy.

It might delight the patriot to believe, but it would discredit the historian to assert, that the present Swiss federal state was born of the love of the Swiss cantons for each other.

The United Nations promised sovereign equality while granting its strongest members privileges unavailable to the rest. In this 1946 published address, William Emmanuel Rappard examines that contradiction from Geneva: a former centre of international organization, in a neutral country excluded from the new wartime coalition. He distinguishes the practical necessity of unequal influence from the more troubling exemption of great powers from obligations binding smaller states. Yet his criticism does not lead to rejection. American participation, he argues, is indispensable, and the UN’s conduct may exceed the standards of its Charter. The address offers a sharply situated account of what smaller states surrender—and what protection they can realistically expect—when a military alliance becomes an institution for peace.