Sustaining Neutrality in Polarized Conflict - A Generative Relational Account of the Swiss Case

Abstract

A neutral party in a polarized conflict withholds the alignment that each side
requests, and each side reads that withholding as a favour to the other.
Ordinary accounts answer this difficulty by describing neutrality as a position
between the parties, as equidistance, or as the suspension of judgment. This
paper proposes a different object. Neutrality is treated as the governance of a
field of relational conditions: the set of arrangements under which the parties
retain the capacity to form, revise, and resume relations with one another and
with the neutral party. A viability formulation states the maintenance
requirement, namely that the set of arrangements from which some continuation
remains available stays non-empty for each party. A reduction makes that
requirement decidable without enumerating the field, by replacing the field with
the structure of possible contacts that the standing conditions support; the
reduction is a lower bound, detecting total foreclosure rather than narrowing. Two results follow from that formulation. A
modality constraint separates the influence a neutral party may exercise from
the instruments through which it may exercise it: judgment, testimony, and
public argument remain available, while control over access, hosting,
procedure, and channel may not be used to secure a substantive outcome. An
accumulation asymmetry separates a declared position, whose abandonment costs
other parties nothing, from relational infrastructure, whose accumulation
places a stake in the hands of others and thereby raises the cost of reversal.
The asymmetry is stated as one source of durability among others rather than as
a prediction of which neutralities survive, and the Austrian case is the reason
for the weaker form. The Swiss
case supplies the illustration. International recognition in 1815, the
separation of the law of neutrality from the policy of neutrality, the
concentration of institutional hosting in Geneva, armed neutrality, and the
sanctions and re-export decisions of 2022 through 2024 are read as operations
on a field of conditions rather than as adjustments of a position. Failure
receives a two-part treatment. Mechanism failure describes the loss of the
capacity itself through capture, unpredictability, or loss of relational
utility. Normative defeat describes the separate case in which the capacity
survives and its maintenance becomes the instrument through which a party loses
the standing to be a party. The wartime record of Switzerland and the
International Committee of the Red Cross tests both. The account is a revisable
conceptual proposal. Its empirical use requires comparative cases, independent
measures of relational infrastructure, and the separate evaluation of accuracy,
distribution, contestability, and accountability.

Keywords: neutrality; mediation; relational conditions;

Discussion Paper Note

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Status.
This working draft records an evolving stage of the author’s position and is
circulated for discussion. Definitions, section structure, statements, and
numbering remain subject to revision. A systematic review of the political
philosophy of neutrality, an expanded comparative case dossier, archival
verification of the wartime record, specialist review of the viability
formulation, and an originality audit remain future research stages.

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Statement on the use of language models.
The exploratory discussions and preparation of this paper involved Anthropic’s
Claude. The model supported exploratory dialogue, source discovery followed by
verification against publisher, journal, governmental, and institutional pages,
argumentative criticism, and drafting in . The author selected the
research question, directed and approved the theoretical commitments and the
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Related research programme.
This paper is project P001 and the first paper in a series on trust,
neutrality, and the transmission of shared experience. Later projects in the
series take responsibility for individual credible commitment and
self-legislation, for the institutional analysis of recommendation, for the
jurisprudence of co-experience, and for the governance of conversion between
heterogeneous value systems. The present paper takes responsibility for the
relational-conditions account of neutrality, the modality constraint, the
accumulation asymmetry, and the two-part failure analysis.

Suggested citation.
Huang, Wanhong. “Sustaining Neutrality in Polarized Conflict: A Generative
Relational Account of the Swiss Case.” Working discussion paper, 2026.

1. Introduction

A party that declines to align with either side of a conflict is rarely
received as having declined anything. Each side reads the refusal as a
concession to the other, and both extend the invitation again. The difficulty
compounds under polarization, where the space of recognized positions narrows
until abstention itself becomes legible as a position within the dispute. The
neutral party then faces a demand that renews with every development, and each
answer it gives is scored on a single axis it did not choose.

The difficulty is ordinarily addressed by giving neutrality a location. On this
reading a neutral party stands between the sides, distributes its conduct
evenly, and declines to judge the merits. The reading is intuitive and it fails
under pressure in three ways. Even conduct across unequal parties reproduces
the inequality, so that evenness delivers a substantive result while claiming
to deliver none. A refusal to judge removes the neutral party from the moral
community whose recognition it requires. And a location between two poles is
defined by the poles, so that a neutral party becomes a function of the
conflict it proposed to stand outside.

This paper proposes a different object of neutrality. What a neutral party
maintains is neither a location nor an even distribution of conduct but a set
of conditions: the arrangements under which the parties retain the capacity to
form, revise, suspend, and resume relations with one another and with the
neutral party itself. The object is a field of relational possibility rather
than any relation within it. On this account a neutral party may hold a view, may treat
unequally placed parties differently, and occupies no midpoint. What it must do
is refrain from using the
instruments that constitute the field in order to determine what happens inside
it.

Two consequences organize the paper. The first is a constraint on the modality
of influence. A neutral party may judge, testify, publish, argue, and persuade,
and may do so asymmetrically, because these operate inside the field and are
answerable within it. What the neutral party may not do is condition access to
the field on alignment: the powers that constitute the field, including access,
hosting, procedure, channel, and agenda, are withheld from the pursuit of
substantive outcomes. The constraint separates the account from equidistance
without collapsing it into partisanship, and it classifies rather than excuses
the difficult passages of the historical record.

The second consequence concerns time. A declared position can be adopted and
abandoned at low cost, and it accumulates nothing. Relational infrastructure –
hosting capacity, standing mandates, institutional residency, an operating
record that other parties have reason to preserve – accumulates, and its
accumulation is what supplies the reinforcement that sustains neutral capacity
across successive conflicts. The distinction predicts that non-alignment
maintained as a stance is reversible under changed security conditions, while
neutrality carried by infrastructure is costly for others as well as for its
holder to dismantle.

Switzerland supplies the illustration. The choice is not a claim that Swiss
neutrality is exemplary or that its record is defensible throughout. It is
chosen because the case exhibits the mechanism at unusual length and because
its most damaging passages are documented by the responsible institutions
themselves. The paper reads the international recognition of 1815, the
separation of the law of neutrality from the policy of neutrality, the
concentration of institutional hosting in Geneva, armed neutrality, and the
sanctions and re-export decisions of 2022 through 2024 as operations on a field
of conditions. It then treats failure in two parts. Mechanism failure describes
the loss of the capacity through capture, unpredictability, or loss of
relational utility. Normative defeat describes the separate case in which the
capacity survives and its maintenance becomes the instrument through which a
party loses the standing to be a party at all. The wartime record of
Switzerland and of the International Committee of the Red Cross tests both, and
the account is written so that the test can fail.

Section 5 supplies the legal, historical, and conceptual
material the argument presupposes. Section 6 locates the
account among existing treatments of neutrality in mediation research,
political philosophy, mechanism design, relational ontology, and the sociology
of the third party, and states what each of them already establishes.
Section 7 states the method, the grounds for case selection, and
the conditions under which the account would be disconfirmed.
Section 8 develops the account itself. Section 9
gives the mechanism by which neutral capacity is sustained.
Section 10 applies both to the Swiss case.
Section 11 develops the two-part failure analysis.
Section 12 states what the case returns to the wider generative
relational framework. Section 13 records the limits of the
account and Section 14 consolidates the position.

2. Background and Preliminaries

This section supplies the material the argument presupposes. It states what the
law of neutrality requires and where it stops, outlines the Swiss institution
at the level of established fact, and defines the terms of the generative
relational vocabulary used in the sections that follow. Analytic claims about
these materials are reserved for Section 10 and
Section 11.

2.1 Neutrality in International Law and State Practice

The law of neutrality in armed conflict rests principally on two instruments
adopted at The Hague in 1907 and in force from 1910. Convention V governs the
rights and duties of neutral powers and persons in war on land
(Anon, 1907); Convention XIII governs the corresponding rights and duties
in naval war (Anon, 1907). The obligations they impose on a neutral
state are narrow and largely negative in form: the territory of a neutral power
is inviolable, belligerents may not move troops or convoys of war materiel
across it, and a neutral government may not itself supply warships, munitions,
or war materiel to a belligerent. Two features of this framework matter for
what follows.

The first is the extent of what the law leaves unregulated. Convention V
provides that a neutral power is not bound to prevent the export or transit, on
behalf of belligerents, of arms or of anything that can be of use to an army or
fleet (Anon, 1907). The prohibition falls on the neutral state as an
actor, not on private commerce within its jurisdiction. Conduct that many
readers would treat as the substance of neutrality therefore lies outside the
law of neutrality and inside the discretion of the neutral state.

The second is the status of the instruments themselves. The treaty record
indicates that several states did not ratify the two neutrality conventions,
which are nonetheless understood to have been to a large extent declaratory of
existing international law (Anon, 1907). The law of neutrality is thus
better read as a floor of prohibitions with contested formal reach than as a
complete specification of what a neutral state does.

A third feature belongs here rather than in the analysis, because it is a
statement of the law rather than a claim of this paper. Authoritative
commentary on the law of neutrality holds that a state may be neutral, in the
sense of not participating in hostilities, without being impartial in its
attitude toward the belligerents; the essential condition of neutral status is
non-participation, and whether a position of non-participation can be sustained
in the absence of impartiality depends on the reaction of the aggrieved
belligerent (Studies, n.d.). The same commentary records that a
neutral’s use of force to resist attempts to violate its neutrality does not
constitute participation in the hostilities (Studies, n.d.; Anon, 1907).
Both points are used in Section 10.

The Swiss administration draws the corresponding distinction explicitly. The
law of neutrality (Neutralitätsrecht) comprises the obligations
described above; the policy of neutrality (Neutralitätspolitik)
comprises the discretionary measures a neutral state adopts to render its
neutrality credible and effective, and it is adjustable as circumstances change
(Affairs, 2026). Sanctions, arms-export rules, good offices, and
institutional hosting belong to the second category rather than the first. The
distinction is doctrine rather than discovery, and Section 10
treats it as an object of analysis rather than as an authority.

2.2 Formation, Instruments, and Recent Decisions of Swiss Neutrality

Swiss neutrality is frequently dated to the battle of Marignano in 1515 and to
the Peace of Westphalia, and Swiss official material reproduces this
genealogy while noting that formal international recognition followed only at
the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (Affairs, 2026). The earlier dating is
contested. Historians have noted that the cantons were not uniformly
represented at Marignano and that neutrality was in significant part imposed by
stronger neighbouring powers rather than adopted as a deliberate choice
(ch, n.d.); the convention of dating neutrality to 1515 is itself a
product of twentieth-century historiography (Relations, 2024).
This paper accordingly treats 1515 as a founding narrative and 1815 as the date
from which permanent neutrality carried international recognition.

Four features of the institution recur in the argument. Armed neutrality
couples the refusal of alignment to an independent defensive capacity, so that
the refusal is enforceable rather than merely declared. Good offices and
protecting-power mandates place Switzerland in the position of representing one
state’s interests in another with which it has no diplomatic relations. The
concentration of international institutions in Geneva supplies a standing
hosting capacity that other states use and therefore have reason to preserve.
And a federal structure that spans Catholic and Protestant cantons and German,
French, Italian, and Romansh linguistic communities makes external alignment a
question with internal consequences.

The contemporary record supplies the material for
Section 10.5. In February 2022 Switzerland adopted the European
Union’s sanctions package against Russia (Euronews, 2022). In the
same period it declined requests from Germany and other states to permit the
re-export of Swiss-manufactured war materiel to Ukraine, on the stated ground
of equal treatment under the law of neutrality
(Euronews, 2022). In August 2022 Russia declined Switzerland’s
offer to represent Ukrainian interests in Moscow, stating that Switzerland had
lost its status as a neutral state by joining Western sanctions
(Jazeera, 2022). Domestic opinion during this period
supported neutrality in principle at a high level while a majority
simultaneously favoured closer cooperation with NATO and regarded the sanctions
as compatible with neutrality (Studies, 2023); a smaller majority
favoured permitting other states to transfer Swiss-manufactured weapons to
Ukraine (ch, 2023). A Swiss expert commission
subsequently recommended revisions to neutrality policy, including re-export
permissions for a defined set of partner states and closer cooperation with
NATO and the European Union (Relations, 2024), and the government has
continued to distinguish measures compatible with the law of neutrality from
those it regards as excluded (ch, 2024).

2.3 Vocabulary of Relations, Conditions, and Fields

The account uses a small vocabulary, stated here and applied thereafter.

A relation is treated as an ongoing process between parties rather than
as a state that obtains or fails to obtain at a moment. A relation is described
by what it produces: shared undertakings, revisable understandings, and the
capacity of each party to raise a claim the other must answer.

The generativity of a relation is its capacity to continue producing
such outcomes, including outcomes that no party can specify in advance.
Generativity is a capacity of the relation rather than a property of either
party, and it can be reduced by conditions external to both.

A relational condition is an arrangement whose presence or absence
changes what relations can be formed or continued, without determining which
ones are. Communication channels, meeting venues, procedural rules, standing
mandates, and the availability of an intermediary are conditions in this sense.

The field of a set of parties is the set of arrangements consistent with
those conditions. Condition governance is action on the field rather
than on the arrangements within it.

Foreclosure is the removal of an arrangement from the field. Foreclosure
is irreversible when no available sequence of actions restores it.
Irreversibility is a property of the field under a stated horizon and not an
absolute one, and the horizon is stated wherever the term is used.

The terms above belong to a wider framework of generative relational analysis
developed by the author across a connected series of papers. The present paper
uses only the definitions above and leaves the remainder of that framework aside. Its relation to social-constructionist relational ontology,
and in particular to Gergen’s account of relational being (Gergen, 2009), is
addressed in Section 6.6.

3. Literature Review

This section locates the account among existing treatments of neutrality and
states what each of them already establishes. Its purpose is to fix the
boundary of the present contribution before the account is developed. Three of
the traditions surveyed here anticipate parts of the argument closely enough
that the paper proceeds by concession rather than by dispute.

3.1 Equidistance and the Arithmetic Conception of Neutrality

The most widely held conception treats a neutral party as one that divides its
conduct evenly between the sides. On this reading neutrality is an arithmetic
property: equal contact, equal concession, equal criticism, and a resulting
position at the midpoint of the dispute. The conception is not the product of a
particular scholarly tradition; it is the ordinary understanding against which
specialist accounts define themselves, and this paper reconstructs it in that
role rather than attributing it to a source.

Two difficulties are decisive. Even conduct toward unequally placed parties
transmits the inequality rather than neutralising it, so that arithmetic
evenness produces a substantive result while presenting itself as producing
none. And a midpoint is defined by its endpoints, so that a party which locates
itself between two poles has allowed the conflict to determine its position.
Under polarization, where the recognized positions narrow, the second
difficulty becomes acute: abstention is absorbed into the axis it declines to
enter.

3.2 Indifference and Suspended Judgment in Humanitarian Doctrine

A second conception treats neutrality as the withholding of judgment about the
merits. Humanitarian doctrine supplies the most developed rejection of this
reading. The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
separate impartiality, which requires that assistance be governed by need
without discrimination, from neutrality, which requires abstention from taking
sides in hostilities and from engaging in controversies of a political, racial,
religious, or ideological character (Pictet, 1979). The two principles are
distinct, and the Movement’s own account treats neutrality and independence as
practical instruments for making humanity and impartiality operative rather
than as ends in themselves (Cross, 2024).

That framing matters for what follows in two ways. It establishes that
neutrality can be defended on operational rather than positional grounds: the
justification is access, not equivalence. And the Movement itself has rejected
what it describes as the binary of silence against denunciation
(Cross, 2024), which is the position the present account requires
and which Section 8.5 states as a general constraint.
The critical literature on humanitarian neutrality presses the opposite
concern, that operational neutrality shades into acquiescence and that
principled abstention can serve the party already advantaged
(Slim, 1997; Slim, 2015). Section 11.2 treats that concern
as the substance of normative defeat rather than as an objection to be
deflected.

3.3 Impartiality and Effectiveness in the Mediation Literature

Research on international mediation has established that impartiality is
neither necessary nor sufficient for effective third-party intervention, and
this paper concedes the point in full. Touval and Zartman treat the mediator as
an actor with interests of its own rather than as a disinterested facilitator,
and hold that mediators are seldom indifferent to the terms under negotiation
(Touval, 1985; Zartman, 1996). Kydd supplies the formal result:
where the mediator’s role is to transmit credible information, a mediator
aligned with the party being counselled is more believable than an unaligned
one, because an unaligned mediator has an incentive to counsel restraint
irrespective of the facts (Kydd, 2003). Svensson’s empirical work extends
the finding to outcomes, reporting that biased mediation is associated with
stronger institutional guarantees in negotiated settlements
(Svensson, 2007; Svensson, 2009; Svensson, 2015). Zartman’s account of ripeness
locates the decisive variable in the parties’ own situation rather than in the
mediator’s characteristics (Zartman, 1985).

These results are not an obstacle to the present account; they are the reason
the account abandons equidistance. What they establish concerns the mediator’s
function as a transmitter of information and a supplier of leverage within a
negotiation. The present paper concerns a different function, the maintenance
over time of the conditions under which a negotiation can be convened at all,
and it accepts the burden of showing that the two functions are distinct.
Adaptive mediation, which emphasises the facilitation of process and the
emergence of outcomes over predetermined templates (Coning & Muto, 2022), stands
closer to the present concern, and Section 12 states the division of
labour between them.

3.4 Neutrality of Aim and Neutrality of Effect in Political Liberalism

The closest philosophical precedent lies in liberal political theory. Rawls
distinguishes neutrality of aim, under which the state does not intend to
favour any particular comprehensive doctrine, from neutrality of effect or
influence, which he regards as impracticable and does not endorse; he also
records that the term neutrality carries misleading connotations
(Rawls, 1993). The distinction anticipates the present account’s separation
of what a custodian intends from what its conduct produces, and the paper
concedes the priority.

Raz supplies the principal critique, arguing that comprehensive neutrality is
unattainable, that neutrality and fairness are distinct ideals which can
diverge, and that neutrality admits of degrees (Raz, 1986). Larmore defends
a procedural conception grounded in a norm of rational dialogue
(Larmore, 1987); Dworkin grounds neutrality in equal concern and respect
(Dworkin, 1985); Waldron examines the neutrality of legislation
(Waldron, 1993); and Wall develops a restricted state neutrality compatible
with perfectionist commitments (Wall, 2010).

The difference the present paper claims is in the object governed. Liberal
neutrality restricts the justifications a state may offer for its
arrangements. The account developed here restricts the instruments a
custodian may employ, and it applies to actors that offer no public
justification at all. Whether that difference survives Raz’s argument is
addressed in Section 8.5.

3.5 Credible Neutrality in Mechanism Design

The nearest existing formulation of neutrality as a property of a field rather
than of a position comes from mechanism design in distributed systems. Buterin
proposes that a mechanism is credibly neutral when its design can be inspected
and seen not to discriminate for or against specific people, and derives from
this a set of construction rules of which the first excludes writing specific
people or specific outcomes into the mechanism (Buterin, 2020). The
formulation is not developed within academic political theory, and its uptake
has been concentrated in network governance rather than in the study of
conflict; it nonetheless states the core intuition of the present account and
is conceded as an antecedent.

Two differences are claimed. Credible neutrality is a property of a designed
artefact, assessed by inspection at a point in time, whereas the present
account concerns a capacity maintained by an actor across successive conflicts
under changing conditions. And credible neutrality secures non-discrimination
among participants already inside the mechanism, whereas the present account
concerns whether the parties retain the capacity to enter into relation at all.
The second difference is the substantive one, and
Section 8.1 states it.

3.6 Relational Ontologies, Third-Party Position, and Condition Governance

Three further traditions supply the account’s conceptual furniture.

Relational ontology in the social sciences treats relationships as prior to the
parties they connect. Gergen’s account describes the self as the intersecting
point at which many relations meet, and develops the consequences of that
priority for identity, morality, and practice (Gergen, 2009). The present
framework shares the priority claim and takes a different object: Gergen
theorises selfhood and its social constitution, whereas this paper theorises
the governance of the conditions under which relations among parties in
conflict continue to be generated. The vocabularies are adjacent and the
questions are distinct, and the paper states the difference rather than
allowing the resemblance of terms to imply derivation.

The sociology of the third party supplies the structural analysis. Simmel
distinguishes three positions available to a third element in a triad: the
non-partisan who mediates, the tertius gaudens who profits from the
separation of the other two, and the party that divides in order to rule
(Simmel, 1950). Burt’s account of structural holes gives the modern
formalisation, in which brokerage across disconnected contacts confers
informational and control advantages (Burt, 1992); subsequent work in the
same tradition separates brokerage that sustains open connection between the
other parties from brokerage that maintains conflict between them
(Anon, 2016). That separation is precisely the distinction the present
account requires, and Section 9.1 uses it to distinguish a
custodian whose advantage depends on the parties’ capacity to connect from a
broker whose advantage depends on their remaining apart.

Condition governance has its clearest precedent in Ostrom’s analysis of
common-pool resources, which locates durable arrangements in institutions that
sustain the conditions of continued use rather than in rules that prescribe
particular outcomes (Ostrom, 1990). The present account claims Ostrom as a
forerunner and transposes the object from a physical resource to a field of
relational conditions.

The literature on trust between adversaries is treated in
Section 9, where it bears on the mechanism rather than on the
concept.

3.7 Boundary of the Present Contribution

Table 1 records the role licensed by each tradition and the
boundary of the present contribution.

| @P0.24YY@

Tradition	Licensed role	P001 boundary
Mediation research	Mediator interest, bias, credibility, leverage, and ripeness
(Touval, 1985; Kydd, 2003; Svensson, 2009; Zartman, 1985)	Concerns intervention within a convened negotiation; the maintenance of the
conditions of convening is treated separately here.
Liberal neutrality	Neutrality of aim against neutrality of effect, and its critique
(Rawls, 1993; Raz, 1986; Larmore, 1987)	Restricts justifications; the present constraint restricts instruments and
applies to actors offering no public justification.
Humanitarian doctrine	The separation of neutrality from impartiality and the operational defence of
both (Pictet, 1979; Cross, 2024; Slim, 1997)	Supplies the operational framing; the general constraint and the failure
analysis are present-paper constructions.
Credible neutrality	Neutrality as an inspectable property of a mechanism (Buterin, 2020)	Static non-discrimination among participants; the present account concerns
capacity maintained across successive conflicts.
Relational ontology	Priority of relationship over the parties related (Gergen, 2009)	Theorises selfhood; the present object is the governance of relational
conditions under conflict.
Third-party sociology	Positions available to a third element and the advantages of brokerage
(Simmel, 1950; Burt, 1992; Anon, 2016)	Supplies the connect-against-divide distinction; the custodial position is
developed here.
Commons governance	Institutions that sustain conditions rather than prescribe outcomes
(Ostrom, 1990)	Claimed as forerunner; transposition to a relational field is the present
contribution.

Table. Antecedent traditions and contribution boundaries

What the surveyed traditions leave unoccupied is a single position. No
treatment located here specifies the object of neutrality as a field of
relational conditions, states a constraint distinguishing the instruments a
custodian may use from the influence it may exercise, or separates the
resources that make neutral capacity self-reinforcing from those that do not
accumulate. The claim is that this combination is unoccupied, not that any of
its components is unprecedented; the components are conceded above.

Two terminological cautions follow from a search for the terms used here. The
phrase relational infrastructure is already in use in adjacent
literatures, where it denotes the arrangements through which heterogeneous
resources and communities are produced, organised, and connected
(Anon, 2022). The present paper uses it in a narrower and
different sense, for the accumulated stake that other parties hold in a
custodian’s standing arrangements, and no continuity with that literature is
claimed. And the search returned no scholarly use of generative
neutrality, neutral custodianship, or a field of relational
possibility in a sense related to the present one; that is a negative result
of a bounded search rather than an established absence, and a systematic
originality audit remains outstanding and is recorded in
Section 13.

4. Method and Case Selection

This section states what kind of work the case is asked to do, why Switzerland
was selected, and what observations would count against the account.

4.1 Theory-Building Case Study

The paper develops a conceptual account and uses a single case to exhibit it.
The case is therefore illustrative and theory-building rather than
confirmatory. A single case can show that a mechanism is instantiated, can
supply the vocabulary in which its parts are described, and can expose
passages where the account fits badly. It cannot establish frequency, cannot
identify causal effect, and cannot rule out rival mechanisms that would produce
the same observable record.

Three consequences follow for how the case is written. Established fact is
separated from analysis: Section 5.2 records what
happened and Section 10 records what the account makes of it.
Contested matters are marked as contested rather than resolved in the
account’s favour, and the dating of Swiss neutrality and the explanation of
non-invasion during the Second World War are treated in this way. And the
passages that fit the account badly are given more space than those that fit
it well, which is the purpose of Section 11.

4.2 Selection of the Swiss Case

Switzerland was selected on four grounds, none of which is that its record is
admirable.

The case runs long. International recognition dates from 1815
(Affairs, 2026), which supplies a span across changing security
environments rather than a single episode, and the accumulation argument of
Section 9.3 requires such a span.

The case is documented by the institutions responsible for it. The wartime
record was examined by a commission established by the Swiss parliament
(War, 2002) and by a governmental study in another jurisdiction
(Eizenstat, 1998), and the humanitarian institution most closely associated
with the case has published its own critical assessment of its wartime conduct
(Cross, 2024). Self-documentation of this kind is unusual and it
permits the difficult passages to be treated from sources the case’s defenders
cannot dismiss.

The case is live. The decisions of 2022 through 2024 concerning sanctions, the
re-export of war materiel, and a protecting-power mandate
(Euronews, 2022; Euronews, 2022; Jazeera, 2022)
occurred within a polarized conflict and are recent enough that their
consequences remain visible.

The case contains its own counter-evidence. The wartime record supplies a
documented instance in which the maintenance of the position coincided with
conduct the responsible institutions have since repudiated, and
Section 11.3 treats that instance as the account’s
principal test.

The selection is nonetheless subject to survivorship. Switzerland is the
neutrality that persisted, and an account built on it risks describing the
characteristics of survival rather than the mechanism of neutrality.
Section 11.4 accordingly examines cases in which
neutrality was violated or abandoned, and the account is disconfirmed if the
surviving and non-surviving cases do not differ along the dimension it
identifies.

4.3 Conditions of Disconfirmation

The account should be narrowed or withdrawn under any of the following
conditions.

First, if the field of relational conditions cannot be specified independently
of the outcomes it is supposed to leave open, the central object collapses into
a restatement of the outcomes and the account has no content.

Second, if the modality constraint of Section 8.5
cannot classify contested historical conduct without amendment introduced for
each case, the constraint is a label rather than a criterion.

Third, if surviving and abandoned neutralities do not differ in accumulated
relational infrastructure, the accumulation asymmetry of
Section 9.3 is false.

Fourth, if the viability formulation of Section 8.3
supports no inference beyond a restatement of the maintenance requirement, it
should be removed rather than retained for its formal appearance.

Fifth, if the record is better explained by a rival mechanism, and in
particular by the material usefulness of a neutral party to the stronger
belligerent, then that mechanism rather than the present one accounts for the
case. Section 11.3 takes this rival seriously because the
wartime evidence supports it in part.

5. A Generative Relational Account of Neutrality

This section develops the account. It specifies the object a neutral party
maintains, states the maintenance requirement, distinguishes the symmetry the
account requires from the symmetry it rejects, and derives the constraint that
separates the influence a neutral party may exercise from the instruments
through which it may exercise it.

5.1 The Field of Relational Possibility

Let a set of parties be given, together with the arrangements those parties
might occupy with respect to one another: channels through which they
communicate, venues in which they meet, procedures under which they raise and
answer claims, undertakings they have made, and intermediaries through which
they act when they do not act directly. Some of these arrangements obtain and
others remain merely available. The set of those that could obtain, given the conditions
currently in place, is the object with which this paper is concerned.

Fix a set of parties, a set of relational conditions, and a horizon. The
relational field is the set of arrangements among those parties that
remain available under those conditions within that horizon.

The field is neither a relation nor a set of relations that obtain. It is the
set of relations that could be formed, revised, suspended, or resumed. Two
parties in open hostility may occupy a field that is wide, if the channels,
venues, and intermediaries through which they might later deal with one another
remain in place; two parties at peace may occupy a field that is narrow, if
those conditions have been dismantled. The distinction between the state of a
relation and the field within which relations can be generated is the
distinction on which the account rests.

A party is a neutral custodian with respect to a conflict when it
maintains conditions constituting the relational field of the conflicting
parties, and its maintenance of those conditions is not directed at securing
any particular arrangement within the field.

Definition ? makes neutrality a relation between a party and
a field rather than a position between parties. It requires no claim about the
custodian’s beliefs, no equal distribution of its conduct, and no midpoint.
What it requires is a separation between the conditions the custodian
maintains and the outcomes those conditions make possible.

5.2 Registers of Custodial Action on Relational Conditions

Acting on conditions differs from acting on arrangements in what it determines.
An action on an arrangement selects among the members of the field: it brings
one about, prevents another, or alters its terms. An action on a condition
alters the field itself: it adds members, removes members, or changes the cost
of reaching them, without selecting among those that remain.

Three registers of custodial action follow. The custodian may enable,
adding conditions and thereby widening the field, as when it establishes a
channel that did not exist. It may sustain, holding existing conditions
in place against pressure to remove them, as when it maintains a venue that one
party would prefer closed. And it may refrain, declining to remove a
condition that it has the power to remove and that removing would serve its own
interest. The third register is the one that carries the account’s normative
weight, because a custodian’s power over the field is exercised as much by
what it declines to do as by what it does.

Ostrom’s analysis of durable common-pool arrangements locates their success in
institutions that sustain the conditions of continued use rather than in rules
prescribing particular allocations (Ostrom, 1990). The transposition here
replaces a physical resource with a relational field and replaces users with
parties in conflict; the structure of the claim is inherited rather than
independently discovered, and the paper claims Ostrom as forerunner in
Section 6.6.

5.3 A Viability Formulation of Field Maintenance

The maintenance requirement can be stated more precisely than
Definition ? states it. What a custodian owes is that the field
be kept from emptying, rather than that it remain unchanged, which no actor
can guarantee.

Viability theory studies systems constrained to remain within a specified set,
and defines the viability kernel of that set as the collection of states from
which at least one evolution of the system remains inside the set indefinitely
(Aubin, 1991; Aubin & Bayen, 2011). The apparatus was developed for controlled
dynamical systems and has been applied to problems in ecology, economics, and
resource management (Aubin & Bayen, 2011). Its transposition to relational
conditions is the present paper’s construction and is not attributable to that
literature.

A relational field satisfies the maintenance requirement over a horizon when,
for each party, the set of arrangements from which some continuation remains
available within the horizon is non-empty.

The requirement is weaker than it may appear and this weakness is deliberate.
It does not require that any particular relation be preserved, that the parties
reconcile, or that the conflict end. It requires only that no party be placed
in a position from which every route to future relation has been removed. The
custodian’s obligation is correspondingly bounded: it maintains the conditions
under which some continuation is available, and takes no responsibility for
which continuation the parties choose.

Two consequences are worth stating. The requirement is indexed to a horizon,
so that a field that empties within a decade and refills within a century
satisfies it under one horizon and fails it under another; the horizon must
therefore be stated wherever the requirement is invoked. And the requirement
concerns each party separately, so that a field that remains wide for one party
and empties for the other fails the requirement rather than satisfying it on
average. The second consequence is what prevents the account from licensing
arrangements that preserve access for the stronger party alone.

Specification without enumeration.
Definition ? defines a field as a set of arrangements, and no
procedure for enumerating such a set is available. The requirement proceeds without one. What Definition ? asks is whether the set is
non-empty for each party, and that question can be settled from the conditions
rather than from the arrangements they permit.

Let a set of parties and a finite inventory of relational conditions be given.
Each condition supports a set of ordered pairs of parties, the first able to
initiate through it and the second able to receive. The contact
structure at a time is the union of these sets over the conditions then in
place.

At a given time, the field is non-empty for a party if and only if the contact
structure contains at least one ordered pair with that party as initiator and
some other party as recipient. Given the condition inventory, the instantaneous
maintenance requirement is therefore decidable.

An arrangement between two parties presupposes some condition through which one
can address the other and the other can receive the address; where no condition
supports such a pair, no arrangement between them is available, and the field is
empty for that party. Where one exists, the arrangement consisting in the use of
that condition is available, and the field is non-empty. The conditions are
finite by hypothesis and each is an institutional fact, so the test is a finite
inspection.

The horizon-indexed form of the requirement follows by applying the same test to
the evolution of the inventory: the states of the inventory from which some
evolution keeps every party’s contact set non-empty throughout the horizon are
the viability kernel of the constraint set, in the sense of the literature cited
above (Aubin, 1991; Aubin & Bayen, 2011). The state space is finite and discrete, so the
kernel is computable for inventories of the size a real case presents.

Three limits of the reduction should be stated. It replaces a field of
arrangements with a graph of possible contacts, and it therefore registers only
whether relation is possible, not on what terms; a field reduced to a single
grudging channel and a field of many is indistinguishable under the test. It
detects total foreclosure and is insensitive to narrowing, which is the more
common harm. And the inventory must be drawn up by someone, so the test moves
the discretion from the measurement to the specification rather than removing
it. The reduction is accordingly offered as a lower bound on the field: what it
reports as empty is empty, and what it reports as non-empty may be very
nearly so.

5.4 Symmetry of Refusal and Asymmetry of Possibility

The account rejects equidistance and nonetheless requires a symmetry. The two
are distinguished by the space in which the symmetry holds.

A neutral custodian refuses symmetrically in the space of field-constitutive
action: no party is granted the power to determine, through the custodian, what
the field contains. Judgment, responsibility, and outcome remain asymmetric.

The symmetry is a symmetry of denial rather than of provision. Neither party
receives a veto over the conditions, neither receives privileged access, and
neither receives the use of the custodian’s constitutive powers for its own
ends. What the parties may receive unequally is everything else: the
custodian’s assessment of the merits, its public statements, its testimony, its
allocation of assistance according to need, and its judgment about
responsibility.

Claim ? identifies what is right in the ordinary conception
and what is wrong with it. The ordinary conception observes correctly that
neutrality involves an evenhandedness and then locates that evenhandedness in
conduct and in judgment, where it produces the difficulties recorded in
Section 6.1. Locating it instead in
field-constitutive action preserves the intuition while removing its
consequences.

5.5 The Modality Constraint on Field-Constitutive Powers

A custodian holds powers of a distinctive kind. Control over access to a venue,
over the hosting of a process, over a procedure, over a communication channel,
and over an agenda are powers whose exercise determines what the field
contains. They are the powers by which the field exists, and they are held by
the custodian precisely because the parties have accepted that it holds them.

A power is field-constitutive with respect to a set of parties when its
exercise changes the set of arrangements available to them, rather than
changing which available arrangement they select.

If a custodian uses a field-constitutive power in order to bring about a
particular arrangement, then the field is restricted to those arrangements
consistent with that outcome, and the determination of the outcome passes from
the parties to the custodian. Under Definition ? the
maintenance requirement is then satisfied only as a by-product of the
custodian’s aim rather than as a constraint on it.

By Definition ? the exercise of a field-constitutive power
changes the set of available arrangements. Directing that exercise at an
outcome means selecting the change by whether the outcome follows, which is to
restrict the available set to arrangements compatible with the outcome. The
parties then choose within a set already selected for the result, so that the
custodian rather than the parties determines what is chosen among. The
maintenance requirement constrains the resulting set only where the custodian’s
aim happens to leave it non-empty for each party, which is the condition
Definition ? was intended to impose rather than to inherit.

The constraint follows.

Neutrality restricts the modality of influence rather than its content. A
neutral custodian may judge, testify, publish, and persuade, and may do so
asymmetrically. It may not condition access to the field on alignment, and it
may not employ field-constitutive powers to secure a substantive outcome.

Claim ? is a constraint on instruments rather than on aims or
on effects, and this is what distinguishes it from the liberal conception
recorded in Section 6.4. Raz’s argument that
comprehensive neutrality is unattainable is directed at neutrality of effect
and at the impossibility of arrangements whose consequences favour no
conception (Raz, 1986). That argument leaves the present constraint intact,
because the constraint makes no claim about effects. A custodian whose conduct
predictably advantages one party has not violated Claim ?
unless it employed a field-constitutive power to produce that advantage. The
constraint is attainable in the way a rule of recusal is attainable, and it
fails in the way such rules fail, through concealment and through disputes
about what counts as an exercise of the power.

The constraint also supplies a test. Given a contested action by a custodian,
the questions are whether the power exercised was field-constitutive under
Definition ?, and whether its exercise was selected by the
outcome it produced. Where both hold, the action violates the constraint
regardless of the merits of the outcome. Where the first fails, the action is
influence within the field and is answerable on its merits rather than under
the constraint. Section 11.3 applies the test to the
passages of the case that the account finds hardest, and the test earns its
place only if it classifies them without amendment.

6. The Sustainment of Neutral Capacity

Section 8 specified what a neutral custodian maintains and what
constrains its instruments. This section asks how the capacity to do so is
sustained across time, and identifies the limits of the mechanism that sustains
it.

6.1 Relational Utility and the Reinforcement Loop

A custodian is either used by the parties or left aside. Where it is used, its
maintenance of the field produces something the parties value: a channel that
functions when direct channels have closed, a venue whose availability neither
side controls, a representative through which one state’s interests are handled
in another with which it has no relations. Call this the custodian’s
relational utility. Utility of this kind generates a reinforcement
sequence. The custodian’s restraint under the modality constraint makes its
conduct predictable; predictability makes it usable by parties that trust one
another very little; use accumulates a record; the record makes the custodian
more usable still; and parties that have come to rely on the arrangement
acquire an interest in its continuation that is independent of the custodian’s
own preferences.

Three features of the trust literature bear on this sequence. Luhmann’s
distinction between trust, which involves a decision taken in awareness of
alternatives, and confidence, which is a routine expectation held without
considering them, identifies what a custodian’s record produces: parties come
to rely on the arrangement without re-deciding it, and system trust of this
kind attaches to the institution rather than to persons (Luhmann, 1979; Luhmann, 1988). Kydd’s account of reassurance shows that adversaries can
establish trust through signals costly enough to distinguish the trustworthy
from the untrustworthy (Kydd, 2005), which is what a record of restraint
under pressure supplies. And Larson’s analysis of missed opportunities in
Cold War relations identifies the situation a custodian addresses: agreements
in both parties’ interest that fail because neither can credit the other
(Larson, 1997). Work on trust between leaders and on the institutional
design of trust-building extends the same concern
(Wheeler, 2018; Hoffman, 2006).

The sequence must be distinguished from a superficially similar one. Simmel’s
analysis of the triad identifies a third position, the tertius gaudens,
whose advantage arises precisely from the separation of the other two
(Simmel, 1950), and Burt’s account of brokerage across structural holes
gives the modern formulation, in which the broker’s informational and control
advantages depend on the disconnection it spans (Burt, 1992). Work in the
same tradition separates brokerage that sustains open connection among the
other parties from brokerage that maintains their conflict
(Anon, 2016). The custodian described here occupies the first
position. Its utility depends on the parties being able to reach one another
through it, and it therefore has no interest in their continued separation.
The distinction is not a moral one: it is a difference in where the advantage
comes from, and it generates opposite incentives with respect to resolution.

6.2 Saturation, Non-Monotonicity, and Capture Risk

A reinforcement sequence with no limiting term describes unbounded growth and
therefore describes nothing. Three limits operate on the sequence above, and
stating them is necessary for the account to be a mechanism rather than a
narrative.

The first is that relational utility is not monotone in detachment. A party
with no relations has no channels to offer, no venue anyone recognises, and no
record. Custodial capacity requires embeddedness: standing relations with both
sides, participation in the institutions through which the parties act, and
sufficient material and diplomatic weight for its offers to be worth accepting.
Detachment beyond the point at which these are maintained reduces utility
rather than increasing it, so the relation between distance and usefulness has
an interior maximum rather than an increasing one.

The second is that the embeddedness which produces utility is also the
condition of capture. A custodian with dense relations to both sides is a
custodian with interests exposed to both, and the exposure is what a party
seeking to convert the field to its own use will address. Capture does not
require the custodian to abandon its position; it requires only that
field-constitutive decisions begin to track one party’s preferences, which is a
violation of Claim ? that may be invisible from outside.
Centrality therefore raises capacity and raises exposure together, and the two
cannot be separated by choosing a level of one.

The third is that the value of the field to the parties can exceed the level at
which they are content to leave it in the custodian’s hands. A custodian that
becomes indispensable becomes worth controlling. This limit is the reason the
account treats capacity as something to be maintained within bounds rather than
maximised, and it is the mechanism-level counterpart of the normative limit
developed in Section 11.2.

6.3 Positional Non-Alignment and Relational Infrastructure

Two things are commonly described as neutrality and they behave differently
over time.

A position is a declared non-alignment. It can be adopted by
announcement, it costs little to hold in the absence of pressure, and it can be
abandoned by a further announcement. Nothing about holding it in one decade
makes it easier to hold in the next, and its abandonment destroys no asset that
anyone else values.

Relational infrastructure is the accumulated apparatus through which a
custodian maintains a field: hosting capacity that other parties use, standing
mandates that other parties have entrusted to it, institutional residency,
procedural competence, and an operating record that would have to be rebuilt
from the beginning if it were dismantled. Infrastructure of this kind is costly
to build, is used by parties other than its holder, and cannot be abandoned
without destroying value that those other parties hold.

The abandonment of a declared position costs other parties nothing. The
dismantling of relational infrastructure destroys value that other parties
hold, because its accumulation has placed a stake in their hands. Accumulated
relational infrastructure therefore raises the cost of reversal, and supplies
the reinforcement described in Section 9.1. It is one source
of durability among others: it neither guarantees that a neutrality carrying it
will persist, nor implies that a neutrality without it will be abandoned.

The claim was initially formulated in a stronger form, predicting that
neutralities carried by position would be abandoned under changed security
conditions and those carried by infrastructure would persist.
Section 11.4 records the case that defeats the
stronger form. Austrian neutrality is positional on the account’s own criteria,
having been adopted in 1955 as the political precondition of restored
sovereignty and remaining unilaterally terminable
(Anon, 1955; Information, n.d.), and Austria has not
abandoned it under the conditions in which Finland and Sweden abandoned theirs.
A counterexample of this kind leaves untouched the mechanism the claim
describes, which concerns the cost imposed on third parties; it defeats the
categorical prediction, and the claim is stated accordingly.

The recent record nonetheless bears on the weaker form. Finland
and Sweden ended long-standing non-alignment following the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, acceding to NATO in 2023 and 2024 respectively
(Library, 2024); analysis of those accessions traces how their non-alignment
had been institutionally and politically constituted and how the reversal
became available (Isaksson, 2024). Switzerland in the same period revised
elements of its neutrality policy under comparable pressure
(Relations, 2024) and retained the institution itself
(Studies, 2023).

Three cautions apply and all are recorded rather than resolved. The comparison
requires an independent measure of accumulated relational infrastructure, which
this paper does not supply and which Section 13 records as an
outstanding requirement. The Finnish and Swedish decisions have explanations in
terms of proximity, threat perception, and alliance politics that do not depend
on the present account at all. And durability plainly has sources besides
third-party stake: domestic attachment to the status is an evident candidate,
it would operate internally rather than relationally, and identifying it would
require evidence this paper has not gathered.

6.4 The Temporal Condition of Neutral Capacity

A consequence of Claim ? concerns when custodial capacity
can be built. Infrastructure accumulates over spans longer than a crisis, is
built through use rather than through declaration, and requires that other
parties have had occasion to rely on it. A party that announces custodial
availability at the onset of a polarized conflict therefore offers a position
and not an infrastructure, and its offer carries the reliability of a position.
Capacity is built in the interval between conflicts, and it must therefore be in place before the occasion for its use arises.

The economic literature on decision under irreversibility supplies the shape of
the corresponding value. Where a decision forecloses options and where
information is expected to arrive, there is a value attaching to preserving the
capacity to act later rather than committing now; this quasi-option value was
introduced by Arrow and Fisher and by Henry
(Arrow, 1974; Henry, 1974) and given its formal statement by Hanemann
(Hanemann, 1989). It should be distinguished from the option value
developed in the real-options literature on irreversible investment
(Dixit, 1994): the two are not equivalent, and the difference
concerns the value of learning under preservation as against the value of
postponement (Mensink, 2005).

The quantity relevant here is the first. What a custodian preserves is the
capacity of the parties to act on information they do not yet have, and the
cost of that preservation is the return foregone by declining alignment. The
transposition of the concept from environmental preservation to relational
conditions is the present paper’s construction and is not attributable to the
cited literature. Its use in this paper is to state a structure and not to
compute a value: no measurement of the relevant quantities is attempted, and
Section 13 records that as a limitation rather than an
oversight.

6.5 Two-Scale Structure of Internal Heterogeneity and External Neutrality

A rival explanation of the Swiss case does not treat neutrality as an
achievement at all. On that explanation, a confederation spanning Catholic and
Protestant cantons and German, French, Italian, and Romansh communities cannot
align externally without reproducing the alignment internally, so that
neutrality is a requirement of domestic cohesion rather than a governance
capacity directed outward.

The literature on consociational and concordance democracy supplies the
mechanism such an explanation needs. Lijphart’s account identifies deliberate
elite accommodation as the means by which fragmented societies remain stable,
and treats Switzerland as a principal instance
(Lijphart, 1969; Lijphart, 1977); Lehmbruch developed the parallel account of
concordance democracy for Switzerland and Austria (Lehmbruch, 1967); Steiner
documented the practice of amicable agreement in Swiss decision-making
(Steiner, 1974); and Vatter examines whether the pattern is being displaced
(Vatter, 2016). None of these works advances the claim that Swiss neutrality
is explained by internal heterogeneity. The mechanism is theirs; the
application is the present paper’s, and it is offered as a candidate
explanation rather than as an established finding.

The account absorbs this rival rather than disputing it. If a polity maintains
its own cohesion by sustaining conditions under which its constituent
communities can continue to deal with one another without any of them
determining the terms, then it is already performing custodianship in the sense
of Definition ?, at an internal scale. External neutrality is
then the same operation performed on a wider field, and the two are
instances of one principle rather than competing explanations of one outcome.

The absorption carries a risk that must be stated. An account that can
accommodate its own principal rival at both scales is at risk of accommodating
anything, and Section 7.3 accordingly requires
that the field be specifiable independently of the outcomes it leaves open. The
two-scale reading is testable to the extent that it predicts a relationship
between the internal and external practices of a polity: a state that governs
its internal heterogeneity by majority determination rather than by
accommodation should not sustain external custodianship well, and a state that
abandons internal accommodation should be expected to lose external custodial
capacity thereafter. Neither prediction is examined here.

7. Case Study: Switzerland

This section reads the Swiss record through the account. The material was set
out in Section 5.2; what follows is the analysis, and
each subsection states what the account makes of the material and where the
material resists it.

7.1 Formation and International Recognition, 1815

The account predicts that a custodial neutrality is constituted before the
conflicts in which it is used, because infrastructure accumulates and positions
do not. The Swiss record is consistent with the prediction and falls short of establishing it.

Permanent neutrality received international recognition at the Congress of
Vienna in 1815 (Affairs, 2026), in a settlement rather than in a crisis,
and the conflicts in which Swiss custodial capacity was later exercised
followed that settlement by decades. The earlier dating to 1515 is treated here
as a founding narrative rather than as a date of constitution, for the reasons
given in Section 5.2. Two features of the 1815
settlement bear on the account. Recognition was extended by the powers
surrounding Switzerland rather than claimed unilaterally, so that from the
outset the arrangement was one in which other parties held an interest.
And the historical assessment that neutrality was in substantial part imposed
by stronger neighbours rather than chosen (ch, n.d.) cuts against
any reading of the case as an achievement of policy.

The second point is worth retaining rather than minimising. If neutrality was
imposed, then its origin lies outside the mechanism this paper describes, and
the account applies to its maintenance rather than to its creation. That is a
narrower claim and it is the claim the evidence supports.

7.2 The Law–Policy Distinction and the Maintenance of the Field

The Swiss separation of the law of neutrality from the policy of neutrality
(Affairs, 2026) is read here as an instrument of field maintenance
rather than as a taxonomy of permissions.

The law fixes a small number of prohibitions on the state as an actor
(Anon, 1907; Anon, 1907). What it fixes is precisely the class of
conduct by which a neutral state could place its own weight behind a
belligerent, and it is therefore the legal residue of
Claim ?: the constraint on instruments, given a narrow
codification, for the single instrument of military support. The policy layer
holds everything else, and its discretionary character is what allows the
custodian to adjust the conditions it maintains as circumstances change.

The division does work that a single undifferentiated commitment could not. A
neutrality specified entirely in law would be unable to respond to conditions
its drafters did not anticipate, and a neutrality specified entirely in policy
would offer no fixed point against which a party could check the custodian’s
conduct. The pairing supplies a stable floor together with an adjustable
apparatus above it, which is the structure a custodian requires if
predictability and responsiveness are both conditions of its capacity.

The account should not present the distinction as its own discovery. It is
Swiss governmental doctrine, developed for the purpose it serves, and the
present contribution is the reading of that doctrine as field maintenance
rather than the doctrine itself.

7.3 Geneva and the Accumulation of Relational Infrastructure

Geneva is the clearest instance in the case of what
Section 9.3 calls relational infrastructure.

The concentration is a matter of record. The League of Nations was
headquartered in Geneva from 1920, initially in the Palais Wilson and from 1936
in the purpose-built Palais des Nations, whose assets passed to the United
Nations on the League’s dissolution in 1946 (Geneva, n.d.). The city
now houses approximately forty international organisations, one hundred and
eighty permanent missions, and more than four hundred non-governmental
organisations; the United Nations Office at Geneva is one of only three major
administrative offices of the organisation outside New York; and entities
headquartered there include the World Health Organization, the International
Labour Organization, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Intellectual Property
Organization, the World Meteorological Organization, and the World Trade
Organization (Geneva, n.d.). The same source records that
International Geneva grew through the presence of the League and also through
the Red Cross and through organisations such as the International
Telecommunication Union, founded in Berne in 1865 and moved to Geneva in 1948
(Geneva, n.d.).

Three features of this concentration correspond to the properties
Section 9.3 attributes to infrastructure. It was
built over more than a century rather than adopted. It is used by parties other
than its holder, and those parties bear the cost of its loss. And it cannot be
abandoned by declaration, because what would be abandoned is a set of
arrangements that other states have built their own conduct around.

The protecting-power practice exhibits the same properties in a more direct
form. Swiss good offices comprise protecting-power mandates, host-state
provision, and mediation (Affairs, n.d.). Under a protecting-power
mandate Switzerland assumes consular or diplomatic functions for one state in
another with which it has broken relations, which permits the two states to
retain a minimum of communication (Affairs, n.d.). The volume
fluctuates with the state of the world’s conflicts: Switzerland undertook more
than two hundred such mandates during the Second World War
(Council, n.d.) and currently holds a small number, reported as
six in a Federal Council report (Council, n.d.) and as eight in
the department’s current statement, the latter including representation of
Iranian interests in Egypt since 1979, United States interests in Iran since
1980, Russian interests in Georgia and Georgian interests in Russia since 2009,
and Iranian interests in Canada since 2019 (Affairs, n.d.).

A protecting-power mandate is a relational condition in the sense of
Definition ? and is close to the paradigm case. It creates no
relation between the parties and settles nothing between them. What it supplies
is the arrangement under which a relation remains formable after direct
relations have been severed. That the durations are measured in decades is the
accumulation claim in its most concrete form.

7.4 Armed Neutrality and the Boundary Condition of Openness

Armed neutrality appears paradoxical on a positional reading, since a party
that maintains substantial military capacity appears to do rather more than
stand aside.
On the account developed here the pairing is expected rather than anomalous.

A custodian maintains conditions it does not own. Those conditions are useful
to the parties precisely because no party controls them, and a condition that
can be seized by whichever party finds it inconvenient supplies nothing. The
defensive capacity is therefore not a departure from custodianship but the
requirement that the field be beyond unilateral capture. The boundary is what
makes the openness inside it dependable.

The same reasoning identifies where the pairing becomes unstable. A capacity
sufficient to prevent seizure is a condition of custodianship; a capacity
sufficient to make the custodian a factor in the parties’ own calculations
begins to place its weight inside the field, which
Claim ? excludes. The account therefore predicts a bounded
rather than a maximised capacity, and the recent Swiss debate about defence
expenditure and cooperation with neighbouring security structures
(Relations, 2024) is a debate about where that bound lies. This paper
takes no position on the answer and records only that the account makes the
question intelligible.

7.5 Sanctions, Re-Export, and the Protecting-Power Mandate, 2022–2024

The recent record supplies the account’s most informative passage, because the
decisions ran in opposite directions and the consequences are visible.

In February 2022 Switzerland adopted the European Union’s sanctions package
against Russia (Euronews, 2022). Under
Claim ? the decision is permissible. Sanctions are an exercise
of economic and political weight directed at a party’s conduct; they are not an
exercise of a field-constitutive power, since they neither close a channel that
the parties use to reach one another nor condition access to Swiss hosting on
alignment. On the account, a custodian may judge and may act on its judgment in
this register.

In the same period Switzerland declined requests to permit the re-export of
Swiss-manufactured war materiel to Ukraine, citing equal treatment under the
law of neutrality (Euronews, 2022). This decision is also
permissible under the account, and for a different reason: it is the
observance of the legal floor described in
Section 10.2. It is nonetheless costly, and the cost fell
where the account predicts. Domestic majorities favoured relaxation
(ch, 2023), an expert commission subsequently
recommended re-export permissions for defined partner states
(Relations, 2024), and the government continued to distinguish
measures compatible with the law of neutrality from those it regards as
excluded (ch, 2024).

The consequence appeared in the custodial register. In August 2022 Russia
declined Switzerland’s offer to represent Ukrainian interests in Moscow,
stating that Switzerland had lost its status as a neutral state by joining
Western sanctions (Jazeera, 2022). The same period saw
other Swiss offers declined: an attempt to convene Russian–Ukrainian talks in
March 2022 did not proceed, and negotiations in which Switzerland held standing
mandates were conducted elsewhere (ch, n.d.).

Three readings of this sequence are available and the account takes the third.
On the first, the sanctions decision violated neutrality and the loss of the
mandate is its correct consequence. On the second, the sanctions decision was
compatible with the law of neutrality and the Russian response was a
pretext. On the third, which the account supports, both parts are true at
once and the case exhibits a structural feature rather than an error:
a decision permissible under the modality constraint can nonetheless
reduce relational utility, because utility depends on the other parties’
willingness to use the custodian, and that willingness is not governed by the
constraint. Permissibility is a property of the custodian’s conduct;
usability is a property of the relation, and the parties determine it.

The consequence for the account is a qualification worth stating plainly.
Claim ? constrains what a custodian may do; it does not
guarantee that a custodian which observes it will remain usable. The two come
apart under polarization, when the parties themselves cease to recognise
distinctions between conduct inside the field and conduct upon it. The
account therefore predicts that the maintenance of custodial capacity becomes
harder exactly where it is most needed, which is a cost of the position rather
than a defect of the analysis, and Section 11 takes it up.

8. Mechanism Failure and Normative Defeat of Neutrality

Neutrality fails in two ways that require separate treatment. In the first the
capacity itself is lost, and the custodian ceases to be able to maintain the
field. In the second the capacity survives, functions, and should not be
exercised. The two have different diagnostics, different remedies, and
different relations to the account, and running them together is what allows a
defence of neutrality to answer a moral objection with an operational reply.

8.1 Capture, Unpredictability, and the Loss of Relational Utility

Mechanism failure has three forms, corresponding to the three limits identified
in Section 9.2.

Capture is the conversion of field-constitutive decisions into
instruments of one party’s purposes. It does not require the custodian to
announce an alignment, and it may be invisible from outside, since the
observable conduct of a captured custodian and an uncaptured one can coincide
for long periods. Capture is a violation of Claim ? and it is
also the failure the constraint is least able to detect, because the constraint
governs the selection of an exercise by its outcome and selection is a matter
of reasons rather than of conduct.

Unpredictability is the loss of the property that makes a custodian
usable by parties that trust one another very little. A custodian whose
responses cannot be anticipated supplies no reduction in the parties’
uncertainty, which is the service they were purchasing. This failure can arise
from good motives: a custodian that adjusts its conduct case by case according
to the merits will be more responsive and less usable.

Loss of relational utility is the condition in which the parties cease
to use the custodian, whatever the custodian does. Section 10.5
recorded an instance and drew the consequence that matters here: utility is not
within the custodian’s control, because it depends on the parties’ willingness,
and that willingness is not governed by the constraint. A custodian can
therefore observe every requirement of the account and lose the capacity
notwithstanding. The account should be understood as stating what a custodian
must do, not as promising what it will thereby retain.

8.2 Normative Defeat and Irreversible Foreclosure

Normative defeat is a different matter. Here the custodian retains its independence, is
predictable, and is used. The question is whether it should continue.

The obvious answer weighs the good of the preserved field against the harm its
preservation permits. This paper declines that answer, because a weighing of
this kind licenses whatever produces the larger sum and supplies no principled
stopping point; it is also unavailable to an account whose central claim is
that the value at stake is a capacity rather than an outcome. The criterion
offered instead operates inside the account’s own vocabulary.

Custodianship is normatively defeated when the maintenance of the field is
itself the mechanism through which the relational possibility of some persons
is irreversibly foreclosed.

Claim ? does not ask how much harm the arrangement permits. It
asks whether the arrangement is the instrument of the harm. A custodian that
maintains conditions under which one party proceeds to destroy another has not,
by that fact alone, been defeated; a custodian whose maintenance of those
conditions is what makes the destruction possible has been. The criterion is
therefore causal in form and it is demanding to apply, which is a cost recorded
rather than concealed.

Two features require comment. First, the claim is stated in terms of persons
rather than parties. An earlier formulation in terms of the parties to the
conflict was too narrow, and Section 11.3 explains why the
case requires the wider form: the gravest failures associated with neutrality
have fallen on persons who were not parties to the conflict and who had no
standing in the field at all. Second, irreversibility is indexed to a horizon,
as Section 5.3 requires. The annihilation of a person is
the limiting case, in which the horizon does not matter because no horizon
restores the possibility.

8.3 Wartime Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross

This section is the account’s principal test. It is written to be capable of
failing, and it records two respects in which it does.

The documented record.
The Independent Commission of Experts established by the Swiss parliament found
that the Swiss National Bank received substantial quantities of gold from
German sources during the war, a large part of it looted and a portion taken
from individual victims, and documented the depth of Swiss economic relations
with the Reich and the restrictive character of Swiss refugee policy
(War, 2002); a governmental study in another jurisdiction reached
corroborating conclusions on the gold transactions (Eizenstat, 1998). On the
question why Switzerland was not invaded, the archival evidence establishes
that German operational planning against Switzerland was serious preparatory
work rather than staff speculation (Urner, 2001), and the scholarly
literature weighs armed deterrence against economic and structural
considerations without resolving to either alone
(Steinberg, 1996; Weinberg, 1999; Vagts, 1997). The deterrence account has its
principal advocates outside the professional historiography of the period
(Halbrook, 1998; Codevilla, 2000), and this paper accordingly treats
non-invasion as jointly explained rather than attributing it to deterrence.

The humanitarian record is documented by the institution itself. Scholarship
establishes that the International Committee of the Red Cross possessed
knowledge of the extermination programme and issued no public condemnation
(Steinacher, 2017). The Committee’s president stated in 1995 that the
organisation had suffered a moral failure in relation to the Holocaust, having
failed to move beyond the limited legal framework the states had established
(Anon, 1995). At a commemoration in Geneva in 2015 a later
president stated that the organisation had failed to protect civilians and in
particular the Jews persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime, and that it had
failed as a humanitarian organisation because it had lost its moral compass
(Euronews, 2023). The institution has since stated that it rejects the
binary of silence against denunciation (Cross, 2024).

Conduct classified by the modality constraint.
Applying the test of Section 8.5: hosting, good offices,
and the protecting-power mandates undertaken in large numbers during the war
(Council, n.d.) are exercises of field-constitutive power that
were not selected by the outcomes they produced, and they pass. Had
Switzerland closed its hosting or its mandates to one belligerent while keeping
them open to the other, the exercise would have been selected by the outcome
and would have failed. That is the classification the account promised, and on
this material it delivers it.

Conduct beyond the reach of the constraint.
It does not follow that the constraint classifies the record. Two of the
gravest elements fall outside it.

The gold transactions were commercial and financial dealings. They are an
exercise of economic weight rather than of a power constituting the
belligerents’ field, and Definition ? therefore does not
capture them. Whatever their character under the law of neutrality or under
ordinary morality, Claim ? is silent about them.

The refugee policy is the harder case and the more important one. Control of a
border is unmistakably a power over access. But the access it governed was
access by persons who were not parties to the conflict and who held no place in
the belligerents’ field. The constraint, as stated, governs a custodian’s
powers over the field of the parties, and on its own terms it does not reach
conduct toward those who are not parties to it.

This is a limit of the constraint and the paper states it rather than repairing
it by amendment. Section 7.3 required that the
constraint classify contested conduct without case-by-case amendment, and the
requirement is met in the sense that the constraint gives a determinate answer
here: it does not apply. What the case establishes is that the constraint is a
constraint on custodianship and not a complete ethics of a custodian’s conduct.
A custodian can satisfy it entirely and act monstrously in a register it does
not govern.

Conduct classified by normative defeat.
Claim ? was stated in terms of persons for this reason. The
ICRC’s position during the war is the case the criterion was built to reach:
the maintenance of access to belligerent authorities, and the silence that
maintenance was understood to require, coincided with the irreversible
foreclosure of relational possibility for the persons about whom the
institution remained silent. Whether the maintenance of access was the
mechanism of that foreclosure, in the causal sense
Claim ? requires, is a historical question this paper does not
settle; the institution’s own successive statements
(Anon, 1995; Euronews, 2023) indicate a judgment closer to the
affirmative than the operational defence of neutrality permits.

Two conclusions follow, and the second is the more uncomfortable. The
Committee’s rejection of the binary of silence against denunciation
(Cross, 2024) is the correct institutional lesson and it is the
lesson Claim ? states in general form: public judgment and the
maintenance of access are different registers, and a custodian that treats
speech as a field-constitutive act has conceded to the parties a power the
account denies them. But the account did not need to be developed for the
Committee to have seen this, and it was not seen. An account that identifies,
after the fact, a distinction whose observance would have required a courage
the institution lacked has explained less than it appears to have explained.
The failure was not principally conceptual, and the paper should not present a
conceptual remedy for it.

8.4 Violated Guarantees and Abandoned Non-Alignment

Section 7.2 recorded that an account built on the
neutrality that survived risks describing survival. Two classes of
non-surviving case bear on the account, and the evidence available here is
partial.

Guarantee without capacity.
Belgian neutrality was not merely declared: it was guaranteed by the European
powers under the Treaty of London of 1839, which required Belgium to remain
perpetually neutral and forbade it alliances with the surrounding powers. The
consequence was a state exposed on three borders between two long-standing
opponents, whose political parties resisted defence expenditure, whose few
fortifications were outdated, and which adopted conscription only in 1909
(Shelby, 2014). The guarantee did not prevent the invasion of 1914.

The case bears on Section 10.4 rather than contradicting it.
The account holds that a field must be beyond unilateral capture if it is to be
useful, and that the defensive boundary is what secures this. Belgium had the
guarantee and lacked the boundary, and the guarantee proved to be a commitment
by others rather than a capacity of its own. This supports the reading of armed
neutrality offered above and it should be stated with the caution its evidential
basis requires: one case, drawn from a source concerned with a different
subject, does not establish a general relation between defensive capacity and
neutral survival.

Neutrality invoked by the party violating it.
The German operation against Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940 was presented
to both governments as a measure for the protection of their neutrality against
Allied aggression, and was described in German terms as the military measures
for the protection of the neutrality of Denmark and Norway
(Museums, 2021). The claim was made in the act of violating the status it
invoked.

This is a distinct failure mode and the account should name it. A custodian’s
position depends on other parties recognising that a set of conditions is not
theirs to determine. A belligerent that appropriates the vocabulary of
protection does not merely violate the conditions; it asserts standing to
determine what protecting them requires. The account’s constraint governs the
custodian and supplies no defence against this, because the party making the
claim is not the custodian and is not bound by a constraint on custodial
conduct. Where the language of neutrality can be seized by a belligerent, the
custodian’s own observance of the constraint becomes invisible, which is a
further respect in which permissibility and usability come apart.

Position without infrastructure.
Finland and Sweden ended long-standing non-alignment and acceded to NATO in
2023 and 2024 (Library, 2024), under conditions in which Switzerland revised
its neutrality policy (Relations, 2024) and retained the institution
(Studies, 2023). Claim ? predicts the
divergence: a position can be exchanged, and an infrastructure that other
parties use cannot be exchanged without destroying value those parties hold.

The prediction is not established by these cases and
Section 9.3 recorded why. The comparison requires an
independent measure of accumulated relational infrastructure, and the Finnish
and Swedish decisions admit explanations in terms of proximity and threat that
do not involve the account. Analysis of how their non-alignment had been
constituted (Isaksson, 2024) is the material from which such a comparison
could be built, and building it is left to further work.

Neutrality enacted at the restoration of sovereignty.
Austria supplies a third form and the one that bears most directly on
Claim ?. On 26 October 1955 the Austrian parliament
enacted a constitutional law by which Austria, of her own free will, declared
her permanent neutrality, undertook to maintain and defend it with all the
means at her disposal, and provided that she would never accede to military
alliances nor permit foreign military bases on her territory
(Anon, 1955; Europe, 1955). The declaration followed the Austrian
State Treaty of 15 May 1955 and the withdrawal of the occupying forces, and it
had been promised in the Moscow Memorandum of April 1955, in which Austria
undertook a neutrality of the same type as that maintained by Switzerland
(Information, n.d.).

Three features distinguish the Austrian case from the Swiss one on the
account’s own terms. The status was adopted as the political precondition of
restored sovereignty rather than accumulated through use. It was adopted
voluntarily as a matter of law, with the consequence that Austria may, if it
chooses, terminate the status unilaterally (Information, n.d.)
– which is the defining property of a position in the sense of
Section 9.3. And Austria’s own interpretation
diverged from the Swiss almost immediately, treating permanent neutrality as
compatible with membership of the United Nations, which Switzerland did not
(Information, n.d.).

The comparison is instructive precisely because the two states adopted the same
legal status. A promise to maintain neutrality of the Swiss type produced, in
the Austrian case, a constitutional commitment; it did not produce Geneva.

The case also constrains the account. Austria is positional on the criteria
just given, and Austria did not abandon its neutrality under the conditions in
which Finland and Sweden abandoned theirs. An earlier formulation of
Claim ? predicted that it would, and
Section 9.3 accordingly states the claim in the
weaker form: accumulated infrastructure raises the cost of reversal and is one
source of durability among several. Austrian durability appears to rest on
something other than third-party stake, and identifying what would require
evidence this paper has not gathered. The comparison remains the most tractable
available test of the weaker claim, because legal status is held constant
across the two cases, and the present paper does not carry it out.

Cases left outside this comparison.
The invasions of the Netherlands and Luxembourg in May 1940 are not examined
here, because the sources required were not returned by the verification passes
underlying this draft. Their absence narrows the class of violated neutralities
considered and is recorded in Section 13.

9. Implications for the Generative Relational Framework

The preceding sections used a small vocabulary drawn from a wider programme of
generative relational analysis. This section states what the case returns to
that programme. It is a discussion section rather than a second exposition, and
it records four results, two of which are corrections.

9.1 Neutrality within Generative Condition Governance

The account treated neutrality as a species of a wider genus: governance that
acts on the conditions under which relations can be generated rather than on
the relations themselves. Section 8.2 distinguished
three registers of such action, enabling, sustaining, and refraining, and the
case indicates that the third carries most of the weight. A custodian’s
characteristic act is declining to remove a condition that it has the power to
remove and that removing would serve its interest.

The consequence for the wider programme is that condition governance requires a
theory of restraint and not only a theory of provision. What distinguishes a
custodian from a provider is not what it supplies but what it declines to
withdraw, and an analysis that describes only the enabling register will
misdescribe the position.

9.2 Generality of the Modality Constraint beyond Neutrality

Claim ? was derived from the maintenance requirement and not
from anything specific to conflict. Its form is general: an actor holding
powers that constitute the field within which others act is constrained in the
use of those powers, and is not constrained in the influence it exercises
inside the field. The constraint therefore states a condition on any actor
occupying a constitutive position with respect to others, whether that position
is diplomatic, institutional, professional, or editorial.

Two instances outside diplomacy indicate that the form is recognised
independently. In telecommunications, a neutral host owns and maintains network
infrastructure that it leases to competing operators, and its governing rule is
parity of service among tenants combined with the absence of control by any one
of them (Project, 2024): an actor holding constitutive powers over a
field, constrained in their use and disinterested in which tenant prospers. In
psychoanalysis, the concept of neutrality has been placed under pressure by the
turn toward relational models of the analytic situation, which have unsettled
belief in the analyst’s neutrality and in its desirability as an aim
(Anon, 2022). The first is an independent instance of the
constraint’s structure; the second is the same difficulty this paper addresses,
arising in a discipline with a different vocabulary, and neither is developed
here.

Section 11.3 established the corresponding limit and it
generalises with the claim. The constraint governs an actor’s conduct toward
those whose field it constitutes, and it is silent about that actor’s conduct
in every other register. Any transposition of the constraint to another domain
inherits this silence, and the transposition should carry the limit with it
rather than presenting the constraint as a sufficient ethic of the position.

9.3 Foreclosure, Revisability, and the Generative Criterion

Claim ? identified the point at which the maintenance of a field
becomes the mechanism of foreclosure. Its statement in terms of persons rather
than parties was required by the case, and the requirement is worth carrying
back into the wider framework: a field is populated by those who could enter
into relation, and an analysis restricted to those already recognised as
parties will exclude precisely the persons whose exclusion is the gravest
outcome available.

A second result concerns revisability. The account treated irreversibility as
indexed to a horizon and identified the limiting case in which no horizon
restores what was foreclosed. That limiting case is what makes foreclosure a
distinct category rather than a severe instance of loss, and it supplies the
generative criterion with a lower bound: an arrangement that removes the
capacity for any future relation is not evaluated by its consequences within a
horizon, because the horizon has been eliminated for those it affects.

9.4 Neutral Capacity at Organizational and Individual Scale

Section 9.5 treated internal and external custodianship as
one principle at two scales. A further scale lies below both. An individual
occupying a position between parties in conflict maintains conditions in the
same sense, is subject to the same constraint, and is exposed to the same
mechanism failures. Two differences are visible from the present case and
neither is developed here.

The first is that the resources identified in
Section 9.3 are unequally available across scales. A
state accumulates hosting capacity, standing mandates, and institutional
residency; an individual can accumulate a record and very little else, and a
record is more easily destroyed than an institution.

The second is that a state’s custodianship is exercised through an office,
whereas an individual’s is exercised through a person. Demands for alignment
made on an office are answered by the office’s rules; demands made on a person
are answered by the person, one demand at a time. The cost structure differs
accordingly, and the consequence for the sustainability of individual
custodianship is the subject of the next paper in this series.

10. Limits of the Account

This section records where the account stops. The list is longer
than the customary limitations paragraph because several of the limits were
discovered in the course of drafting rather than anticipated.

10.1 Conditions of Falsification

Section 7.3 stated five conditions under which the
account should be narrowed or withdrawn. Their status after the analysis is as
follows.

The requirement that the field be specifiable independently of outcomes is
partly met. Proposition ? supplies a decidable test that
does not require enumerating a field and does not refer to outcomes, and
Definition ? states the observables it needs. The test is a
lower bound: it detects total foreclosure and not narrowing, it reports
possibility and not terms, and the drawing up of the inventory remains a
discretionary act. An account whose central object can be measured only at its
extreme is measurable in a thin sense, and the reader should weigh the
construction accordingly.

The requirement that the modality constraint classify contested conduct without
amendment is met, in the strict sense that
Section 11.3 obtained determinate answers without
amending the constraint. It is met at a price: two of the gravest elements of
the record fall outside the constraint’s scope, and the constraint is
correspondingly less powerful than its statement suggests.

The requirement that surviving and abandoned neutralities differ in accumulated
infrastructure defeated the original form of Claim ?,
which is why the claim now states a cost-raising mechanism rather than a
prediction of survival. In its weaker form the claim is untested.
Section 11.4 identifies four classes of case,
including the Austrian comparison in which legal status is held constant, and
performs none of them; no measure of accumulated relational infrastructure has
been proposed. The weaker claim is also weaker in what it forbids, and a reader
may reasonably ask what would now count against it. The answer is evidence that
dismantling accumulated infrastructure imposes no cost on the parties that used
it, which is the mechanism the claim asserts and the only thing it asserts.

The requirement that the viability formulation support an inference is met more
fully than the first draft of this account managed.
Definition ? supplies the per-party and horizon-indexed
structure on which Proposition ? depends, and
Proposition ? gives the constraint set a finite discrete
state space over which a kernel can in principle be computed rather than
invoked. The formulation nonetheless remains modest beside the use it receives
in the literature from which it is drawn (Aubin, 1991; Aubin & Bayen, 2011): no kernel
is computed here, and the reduction that makes computation possible is the
lower bound just described.

The rival explanation in terms of material usefulness to the stronger
belligerent remains open.

A sixth limit belongs here although Section 7.3
did not anticipate it. The originality of the combined construction rests on a
bounded search, reported in Section 6.7, which returned no
prior use of the paper’s central terms in a related sense. A bounded search
establishes that a term was not found and not that it does not exist, and the
components of the construction are in any case conceded to the traditions
recorded in Table 1. Readers who know an established
framework carrying this combination under other terminology are invited to say
so. Section 11.3 treats
non-invasion as jointly explained and the evidence does not permit more.

10.2 Extensions Left to Further Work

Three extensions would materially strengthen the account and each is
identified rather than attempted.

A comparative study of violated and abandoned neutralities, including the
invasions of the Netherlands and Luxembourg absent from
Section 11.4, would test
Claim ? against the class of cases the present selection
excludes. The Austrian comparison identified in
Section 11.4 is the most tractable of these, because
the two states adopted the same legal status and differ in the dimension the
claim identifies.

An operationalisation of relational infrastructure would convert
Claim ? into a measurable proposition. The construct to be
measured is the aggregate cost that other parties would bear in rebuilding
elsewhere the arrangements they currently hold through the custodian; hosting
volume, mandate duration, and institutional residency are proxies for that
quantity rather than components of it, and mandate duration is the more
informative of them, since a mandate held for decades represents an accumulated
stake that a recently opened one does not. Two design requirements follow. The
outcome variable must separate adjustment of a neutrality policy from
abandonment of the status, under a coding rule fixed before the cases are
examined. And infrastructure must be measured before the outcome it is used to
explain, since durable neutrality generates institutions and the reverse
inference would be circular. With four or five cases available, the result
would be a structured comparison rather than a statistical test.

A measure of field width, as against the emptiness test that
Proposition ? supplies, would reach the harm that matters
most often. Narrowing rather than total foreclosure is the ordinary form of
damage to a relational field, and the reduction offered here is blind to it. A
candidate direction is to weight contacts by their cost of use and by the
number of parties able to use them, which would replace a binary test with a
graded one at the price of the discretion that weighting introduces.

An extension of the constraint to conduct toward persons outside the field
would address the gap Section 11.3 exposed. This paper
does not attempt it, because an extension constructed to cover a case the
original failed to reach is the kind of amendment
Section 7.3 was written to forbid. The gap should
be closed by an argument with its own grounds or left open.

11. Conclusion

Neutrality is difficult in polarized conflict because a refusal to align is
read as an alignment, and the reading has force so long as the refusal
is understood as a position between the parties. This paper proposed that what
a neutral party maintains is not a position but a field: the set of
arrangements under which the parties retain the capacity to form, revise,
suspend, and resume relations. The maintenance requirement is that this set
not be allowed to empty for any party within a stated horizon.

Two constructions followed. The modality constraint separates the influence a
custodian may exercise from the instruments through which it may exercise it:
judgment, testimony, and public argument remain available, and the powers that
constitute the field are withheld from the pursuit of substantive outcomes. The
constraint was derived from the maintenance requirement rather than stipulated,
and it answers the objection that neutrality of effect is unattainable, because
it makes no claim about effects. The accumulation asymmetry separates a
declared position, whose abandonment costs other parties nothing, from
relational infrastructure, whose dismantling destroys value that other parties
hold and whose accumulation therefore raises the cost of reversal. The
asymmetry was initially stated as a prediction about which neutralities
survive; the Austrian case defeated that form, and the claim is now confined to
the mechanism it can support.

The Swiss case exhibits both. The separation of the law of neutrality from the
policy of neutrality supplies a fixed floor beneath an adjustable apparatus;
Geneva and the protecting-power mandates are relational infrastructure in the
strict sense, built over decades and used by parties other than their holder;
and armed neutrality is the boundary that keeps the field beyond unilateral
capture. The decisions of 2022 to 2024 exhibit something the account did not
anticipate and now states: a decision permissible under the constraint can
still cost a custodian its usability, because usability depends on the parties’
willingness and the constraint does not govern that.

The failure analysis divides mechanism failure from normative defeat, and the
wartime record tests both. The constraint classifies the custodial conduct and
does not reach the gold transactions or the refugee policy, which establishes
that it constrains custodianship without constituting an ethics of a
custodian’s conduct. Normative defeat was accordingly stated in terms of
persons rather than parties, because the gravest failures associated with
neutrality have fallen on those who were never parties at all. And the
International Committee of the Red Cross had the distinction available to it
without this account, and did not act on it, which indicates that the failure
was not principally one of concepts.

The account is a revisable proposal. It supplies a definition, a decidable test
of the maintenance requirement, a derived constraint, a cost-raising mechanism,
and a two-part failure analysis; it supplies no measure of how wide a field is
rather than whether it is empty, no comparative test of the mechanism, and no
treatment of conduct toward those outside the field. Those are the next
requirements, and the account should be judged by whether they can be met.

Acknowledgments

The present definitions, constructions, arguments, conclusions, and errors
remain the author’s responsibility.

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