Switzerland The Swiss Army Gets Knifed

By Daniel Benjamin

Although it has long been famously neutral, Switzerland, as an English scholar once wrote, "has been in a state of war every weekend since 1945." The gibe has more than a little truth to it. On weekends rifle ranges around the country resound with the din of thousands of Swiss practicing their marksmanship. At the same time, Northrop F-5E Tiger fighter jets skim along mountain faces and blue-gray-uniformed figures clamber down couloirs and across alpine meadows. With a militia of 625,000 men, Switzerland, as the well-worn saying goes, does not have an army, it is an army.

The Swiss military has not engaged foreign troops since 1815, when Napoleon's army withdrew after a 17-year occupation. As a result of Switzerland's extraordinary military preparedness, no aggressor since then has seen fit to challenge its control of the mountain passes. Last week, however, the Swiss army suffered a rare setback -- not in battle, but at the polls.

In a referendum, 35.6% of voters backed a proposal to abolish the military. The results shocked the country's political and military establishment. Few expected the measure to garner more than 25% of the tally. President Jean- Pascal Delamuraz once called the initiative "an idiocy as big as the Matterhorn." Swiss voters, though, viewed the issue with great seriousness: 68.6% of them turned out, more than have shown up for any other of the < country's incessant referendums in the past 15 years. The army will remain, but it has been sharply shaken and irrevocably affected.

Dismantling an army, of course, is an extraordinary step. The only precedent is provided by Costa Rica, which discarded its military in 1949. In Switzerland any such development would change the fabric of the nation, given the unique and even mythic status the army enjoys. For a country that has so many fault lines involving competing religions and languages and a federal government that is weak by design, the army is that rare thing, a truly national institution. The experience of military service is the most common denominator among Swiss men (women are not conscripted), and creates a strong sense of citizenship.

Virtually every man serves -- and serves and serves. Currently, all those who are able-bodied go through a 17-week training course when they are 20 years old and annual refresher courses and deployments of three weeks or more, depending on their rank, until they are 32, when the demands lessen a bit. For those who refuse to join up, the options are grim. Each year several hundred Swiss are convicted of refusing to serve, and many of them spend three to twelve months in jail.

Thus, considerably more was at stake in the referendum than the $3 billion spent each year by the military. One survey by the Lausanne-based research institute MIS showed that only 15% of voters really wanted to get rid of the army. The rest wanted the army reformed and defense spending trimmed, a clear- cut result of lessening East-West tensions.

"Many voters just thought of the opening of the Berlin Wall. They thought, 'O.K., we can get rid of arms because there's no danger,' " suggests Kurt Spillmann, a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. But the willingness of so many Swiss to vote, in effect, against the army indicates a disaffection that would once have been unimaginable.

Resentment against the army's influence over civil society almost certainly played a role. In a recent survey, 73% of those questioned said officers have a better chance of promotion in civilian life, 59% thought their boss was an officer, and 34% added that he continued to treat them like soldiers in the office. The cooler new military mood may also reflect the "feminization" of Switzerland. Women did not receive the vote until 1971, and they have become a more powerful presence in the workplace and in politics. "There's a male network to which women don't belong," says industrial psychologist Anita Calonder-Gerster. And their new prominence has not dissipated their hostility to the old-boy military system.

Individualism in the young is also a large factor. "The majority of young people are having increasing difficulty seeing the army as the school of the nation," says sociologist Karl W. Haltiner of the Military Affairs Department in Zurich. Spillman agrees: "There is a weakening of the nation-state feeling and the need to defend it."

Even before the referendum, the army began a campaign of self- rehabilitation. It announced that some reforms were being considered, including, at last, alternative service for conscientious objectors and an end to reserve service at 42. After the voting, General Heinz Hasler, who will take command of the military on Jan. 1, averred that the army had much to do: "Everything must be done to restore the people's conviction that military defense is needed" -- a clear acknowledgment that even the leadership of a citizens' army cannot long ignore great changes in the citizenry.

With reporting by Otto Gobius/Geneva and Margaret Studer/Zurich