By deciding to align itself with the unilateral American-European sanctions against Russia in February 2022, when it had always claimed that it only wanted to apply sanctions endorsed by the United Nations and enshrined in international law, the Federal Council has dealt a heavy blow to neutrality and to international Geneva. But no one in Geneva batted an eyelid. And here's why.
In principle, this unfortunate decision, which has greatly worried the ICRC whose reputation for impartiality and independence is largely based on Swiss neutrality, should have provoked a thunder of protests. Beyond the ICRC and the Geneva Conventions of which Switzerland is the depositary, and the humanitarian and human rights concerns that our country claims to champion, it should also have been of concern to all those who hold in high esteem our vocation as a host state for international organisations and as the capital of multilateralism. Nothing of the sort happened.
On the contrary, we saw local and federal elected representatives, particularly on the left, calling for even more sanctions, condemnations, boycotts and confiscations of private assets against those who had so ‘savagely attacked Ukraine’. And yet these same elected representatives found nothing to object to when this same Ukraine massacred 14,000 people, including thousands of innocent civilians and children, in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022.
And they do not flinch or demand sanctions when another state, Israel in this case, immolates tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Palestine and illegally occupies foreign territories.
In early June, NGO activists and trade unionists at the International Labour Organisation protested against the election of a Russian colleague to their board. But when the Wall Street Journal denounced the toxic practices and racism of certain executives of the World Economic Forum in its 29 June edition, these activists, so attentive to good causes, remained silent. Nor did they protest when, in the height of provocation for a city that prides itself on being a city of peace and home to numerous organisations promoting dialogue between warring countries, the Federal Council officially opened an office of NATO, the organisation behind numerous wars of aggression in recent decades, starting with the bombing of Serbia in 1999, in the now much-maligned... House of Peace! (Cf. The head of the Directorate of Public International Law signs an agreement on the legal status of the NATO liaison office in Geneva, 15.07.2024).
They rejoiced when Russia, a founding and permanent member of the Security Council, was excluded from the Human Rights Council. They shrugged and scoffed when the Russian deputy foreign minister declared that there was no longer any question of holding talks on the Caucasus in a Switzerland that had become partisan and hostile, and that we could therefore say goodbye to any new summit with the Russian president, on the lines of those held between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985 and between Biden and Putin in June 2021. They lamented and sighed when CERN refused to exclude Russia from its nuclear research and merely suspended its participation, despite being a pioneer in the East-West thaw by welcoming the first Soviet physicists in 1960, at the height of the Cold War (Cf. Le CERN n'a pas coupé tous ses liens avec la Russie, RTS, 7.07.2024).
The planet's centre of gravity is shifting, the world is fracturing, tensions are accelerating, a new Fire Curtain has replaced the old Iron Curtain a thousand kilometres to the east of the European continent, and an impenetrable Wall of Contempt separates the West from the Global South, which now has a large majority in terms of men and dollars if we take the latest World Bank figures in terms of GDP consolidated at purchasing power parity. But why bother with such trifles!
Blindness? Masochism? Unconscious suicidal inclination? Or, on the contrary, an acute awareness of our own short-term interests? A bit of all of these, no doubt, but with a clear preponderance of the fourth explanation.
To understand the lack of reaction and the silence in the face of what can only be described as the undermining of the foundations that have underpinned international Geneva for 150 years, we need to recall a few basic facts.
International organisations
The latest study on the impact of the international sector on the local economy, published on 5 March 2024 by the Fondation pour Genève, shows that international Geneva in the narrow sense of the term - the activity of the international organisations, diplomatic missions and NGOs based on the lakeshore - generates 33,000 full-time jobs, thousands of conferences every year, and massive fundraising. Then there is the international commercial sector. The 2133 private multinationals registered in the canton, particularly banks and trading companies, provided 153,000 direct jobs and a total of 221,000 jobs in 2019, and generated more than 2.5 billion in tax revenue. The two sectors are linked, each creating a biotope and living in an interdependence that is unique to Geneva.
The sociology of the canton, with 47% foreigners and dual nationals, is a perfect reflection of this economic reality. In fact, the international public and private sector now creates one in every two jobs in Geneva and accounts for 67% of the canton's added value.
It's easy to understand why, in these circumstances, we don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and why we take all sorts of precautions to avoid upsetting the cocks that watch over the henhouse.
International investments
Even more revealing of this dependence is a study published last June by the Geneva Graduate Institute (Paying for Multilateralism: Taking Stock on the Financing of International Organizations in Geneva, 2000-2020, by Livio Silvia-Muller & Remo Gassmann) showed that the Western countries that are members of the G7 and the European Union provided 92% of the 253.7 billion dollars in contributions paid to the sixteen most important international organisations during the first two decades of this century: the United States 26%, the United Kingdom 8%, the EU 7%, Germany 6.6%, with Switzerland in 13th place with 2.2%).
If we look in more detail, we see that 15 donors provided 75% of the contributions, including fourteen governments and one private donor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (3.7% of the total amount, or 9.4 billion dollars over twenty years). Inflows of funds have quintupled in two decades, reaching 23.6 billion for 2020. The health ($11.5 billion in 2020) and humanitarian (refugees, migrants and ICRC, $9 billion) sectors are the main beneficiaries. It is worth noting in passing that an organisation like the WEF, which is entirely private but which received international organisation status (and therefore tax exemption) recognised by Switzerland in 2015, receives between CHF 350 and 400 million a year in revenue from its forums.
For Switzerland, this is very good business. With a net investment in infrastructure and buildings of 3.2% and annual contributions of 350 million per year, it benefits from one hundred per cent of the contributions paid by other countries.
In short: he who pays, commands! It is therefore easy to understand why, when the West decides to impose sanctions on a third country, even one as important as Russia, Berne and Geneva keep a low profile and have nothing to say.
Will this subservient attitude pay off in the long term? Not so sure. The authors of the study also raise the question of dependence on these major donors, and on the largest of them, the United States, in a world in full turmoil and in the midst of a multipolar shift, with the South and the BRICS in full expansion. Without providing any solutions. Diversifying funding in the direction of the private sector is not without danger, as we have seen with the importance assumed by the Gates Foundation in the field of vaccines and its growing influence over the WHO since the Covid crisis.
This dependence on the West is in flagrant contradiction with the principle of multilateralism, of which Geneva claims to be the standard-bearer. And it leads to an impasse with no end in sight.
On the one hand, the West sees no point in loosening its grip on international organisations for the benefit of states that it feels are not paying their fair share. For their part, the countries of the South have no desire to increase their contributions to organisations that are controlled by the countries of the North and over which they have no influence, as can be seen from the stalled reform of the Security Council, which is incapable of making room for India, Brazil or Africa.
By sacrificing its neutrality to align itself with the Western camp, it is not certain that Switzerland has made the right choice in the long term. Not only will it gain little in terms of security by favouring a strategy of bloc against bloc, but it will also lose out in terms of universality. For it will permanently weaken its place on the international stage. It undermines its role as a mediating power between warring states and its role as host of the European headquarters of the United Nations and the world headquarters of the main international organisations.
At the end of the day, we will have paid dearly to please countries that will not even be grateful to us./MPF/
By Guy Mettan
Коментари