Volume 17, Number II. Defensive Humanitarianism: Swiss Internment
Strategic Visions: Volume 17, Number II. Defensive Humanitarianism: Swiss Internment Camps in WWI Holden Zimmerman University of Kansas 2018 Edwin H. Sherman Prize for Undergraduate Scholarship in Force and Diplomacy Abstract During World War I, the Swiss state interned nearly 30,000 foreign soldiers who had previously been held in POW camps in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Austria, and Russia. The internment camp system that Switzerland implemented arose from a Swiss diplomatic platform that this thesis describes as defensive humanitarianism. By offering good offices to the belligerent states of WWI, the Swiss state utilized humanitarian law both to secure Swiss neutrality and to alleviate, to a degree, the immense human suffering of the war. This thesis fills a gap in the historiographical literature as one of the few papers in English on the topic, as well as one of the only to holistically consider the internment camp system as a panacea for the crises that the Swiss state faced during WWI. By mixing domestic concerns with international diplomacy and humanitarianism, a domestic policy platform taken to the international diplomatic level succeeded in building enough trust between the signatory states to create an internment system that reconceptualized the treatment of foreign soldiers from the holding of prisoners to the healing of men. Defensive Humanitarianism: Swiss Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, and Internment Camps in WWI Russia.2 Introduction Three distinct legal factors that shaped and allowed for the creation of the On July 27, 1916, William McGilvray, a internment camp system emerged over sergeant in the London Scottish Regiment, the course of the previous centuries.
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