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Beyond Exceptionalism? New Security Conceptions in Contemporary Switzerland

Switzerland's traditional, military-centred and isolationist Cold War policies began to be vehemently contested in the 1990s. However, since the early 2000s, debates on security policy and foreign affairs have gradually lost public salience, and recent popular votes suggest increasingly consistent support both for a broader conception of national security and a more internationalist interpretation of neutrality. Have Switzerland's traditional policy frameworks thus been overcome? Investigating elite positions, this article argues that indeed, conventional disputes between military and civilian understandings of security have been transcended recently, as Swiss policy-makers settled for a remarkably broad and non-traditional conception of national security. At the same time, the article also argues, the perception of increasingly global security challenges has started to provide powerful rationales against traditional Swiss isolationism. By showing the processes through which Swiss security conceptions have been reformulated into a new dominant elite agreement, the article points out how Switzerland has slowly come to embrace security in European terms – not least also thanks to its new focus on non-traditional security agendas.