Featured Scholar: Liliane Stadler

Tell us a bit about where you’re from and your background

I recently started my Ax:son Johnson postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Kissinger Center, and my research revolves around the relationship between neutral states and NATO. I’m originally from Switzerland, but I'm also part Dutch. I've spent the last two years at Utrecht in the Netherlands lecturing on history of international relations. Prior to that, I completed my doctorate at the University of Oxford, at the History Faculty.

What drew you to your chosen topic?

I originally picked international relations because I was intrigued by the fact that there have been so many technological and medical advances over the past 50 to 100 years that made it seem like humankind is making progress of some sorts, and yet there are the most basic forms of conflict that we still can’t resolve. We seem to be able to put a man on the moon, but we can’t seem to be able to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the very least, I think that discrepancy requires an explanation.

And how do you explain the connection to the history of your own native, neutral Switzerland?

I ended up actually coming to the study of neutral states and how they behave in international relations because my master’s thesis topic. I originally wanted to apply mixed methods – that is using both quantitative and qualitative methods – to state-non-state hostage negotiations. However, the publicly available data is patchy, which doesn't allow you to actually draw generalizable conclusions. Once I accepted that, the professor who ended up becoming my doctoral supervisor, Anne Deighton, she said to me, “You’re Swiss. You're interested in history. Why don’t you pick a case study that relates to a crisis over the course of the twentieth century where the Swiss had to react in some way, shape, or form.” We tend to assume that neutral states remain aloof from international crises, but in practice, they actually don’t. International crises and tensions put neutral states in a difficult position, because acting neutral in practice involves a very delicate balancing act that not only makes sure that you don’t start a war in the first place. In an ongoing conflict, it requires that you don't take sides. And that’s actually more difficult than you would commonly assume. That problematique, so to speak, is why I became interested in neutrality and the Swiss case in particular. I ended up focusing on Switzerland's response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan after 1979, because at the time I started my doctorate, those documents began to be newly released.

What do you think about the changing role of neutral states? In just the past few years, we've seen states with long traditions of neutrality, in some cases, going back centuries, deciding to leave their neutral position and to join the NATO alliance. Sweden and Finland are recent examples. Do you think that we're in an era when neutrality is increasingly fraught or increasingly hard to preserve?

This decision actually didn't come as a surprise. Sweden has a fairly long history of approaching the NATO alliance. Interoperability between NATO between Swedish forces and NATO forces, has been an ongoing conversation. For instance, most Swedish air bases have landing strips that have been adapted to NATO aircraft since the Cold War. And after the end of the Cold War, the question actually, for most neutral states became: “why are you still remaining neutral?” Most neutral states only either became neutral in the case of Finland and Austria, or reinforced officially their commitment to neutrality during the Cold War.

So when the Cold War ended, the question became, why are they staying neutral? Most of them joined the NATO Partnership for Peace from 1994 onwards. Most of them, with the exception of Switzerland also joined the European Union, and essentially that meant that they were engaging in practices that were not strictly speaking neutral. They were engaging in peacetime practices that, in the event of an upcoming conflict, would affect their ability to remain neutral. So that question has been with us for quite some time. I'm not sure I have a conclusive answer to it, but it goes back to what you asked me originally, why did I become interested in neutral states. It’s because it’s so difficult to actually be neutral. De facto, for those states that have remained neutral, it’s going to be a perpetual problem.

What are your goals that you would like to achieve during your Ax:son Johnson Fellowship?

Having done two years of teaching and now I’m excited to turn to two years of research. In that time, I would like to produce four journal articles. The first one will be on the relationship between neutral states and NATO during the early 1990s when many neutral states, as we discussed, joined the Partnership for Peace, but not with a view to becoming NATO members—why? What's the significance and the meaning of that?

The second one is an article that I've been schlepping around with me for a really long time: about Switzerland sanctioning Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990 when he invaded Kuwait. At the time, Switzerland was the only neutral state that was a non-member of the United Nations at the time. And this the first instance in which Switzerland unilaterally adopted UN sanctions. That has been a huge point of contention where I am from. It forms part of a current politically charged debate surrounding the question of whether or not neutrality should go into the Swiss Constitution.

The third article would revolve around the Charter of Paris, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the origins of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The neutrals played a prominent role in the Helsinki Process during 1970s. For those neutral states: What were their hopes? What were their fears? I know from conversations with individuals who've been involved in negotiating the Charter of Paris that actually the Swiss were among the few who were pushing for provisions to be put in place in the event of an armed conflict in Europe at the time, and they were ridiculed for that. They were actually being made fun of for thinking that there could be conflict in Europe during the 1990s but in fact, if we look at the Balkans, they were not wrong to think so.

And the fourth: there's been a lot of research into the process of European integration over the course of the Cold War, and especially since both in history and in international relations, but there's been much less attention paid to those states that did not join the European Union. Switzerland, of course, was one of them, but there are a bunch of others that also didn't join. What were their motivations behind not joining? And what does that tell us about the changing nature of European order, not just the European security architecture, but the European political architecture?

Any other hopes for the fellowship?

I’m really looking forward to meeting the other Fellows, some of whom I know already—Ronan Mainprize who I met at IPSCON (International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network), and also Giulia Garbagni at Kings College London, and to meet others and hear about their research topics and potential collaboration.

I also really look forward to going back to the Swedish archives to look more at some of the Partnership for Peace documents as well as the NATO Archives in Brussels.

Apart from that, the fellowship lets me be in Washington at an important moment in time.