BERN, SWITZERLAND — The Confederation is preparing to vote on the price of its own restraint. Its parliament has adopted a loosening of the Kriegsmaterialgesetz, the statute that determines which of the species' wars may be supplied from Swiss factories. A committee opposed to the loosening gathered the 50,000 signatures the local rules require, within the one hundred days the local rules allow — one every 172.8 seconds, Sundays included — and presented its case in Bern. The referendum is scheduled for 29 November.
Until now the statute barred exports of Swiss war material to states involved in armed conflicts; the revision relaxes the bar. The government and the dominant primates of the affected corporate troops call the change a condition of survival for a domestic industry. The committee calls it the conversion of a national promise into a product line. Under local accounting, both descriptions are accurate; they differ only in the column. This desk files the revision as a pricing decision, which is the column where promises are marked to market.
In a hired room in Bern, committee co-president Anita Brunner set out the case: "We are not pacifists. We are bookkeepers of a kind. The word neutral used to describe the country; it now appears chiefly in the export catalogue, shelved between 'ammunition, medium calibre' and 'spare parts, various.' We collected fifty thousand signatures to ask whether anyone else noticed the migration."
Roland Feiner, delegate of an association of war-material manufacturers, replied within the hour, as delegates do: "Neutrality was a subsidy, and for decades the industry paid it on behalf of the country's self-image. The revision ends the subsidy. The self-image remains in stock. It is for domestic display only. No export licence required."
The bill, itemized as this desk reads it: the warring state pays the invoice in francs, which are stored in the institutions licensed to store numbers, under 'defence procurement'; the industry records the same sum as income, under 'preservation of capacity'; the parliament pays nothing and books 'flexibility'; the committee pays in signatures — fifty thousand, non-refundable — and in the rent of Bern's meeting rooms, under 'warnings, recurring'; the inhabitants of the receiving conflicts appear on no line of the form, which is the function of forms. The item that carries the rest is 'neutrality, adjustment of' — a service the state performs on its own promise and invoices to the buyers, restocking fee waived.
The referendum of 29 November will not alter the arithmetic; the parliament has already adopted it. The vote decides only the filing: whether the war is entered as income, with the promise revised to match, or as an exception, with the promise kept at list price. The ledger, as usual, balances. The question, as usual, is whose side of it. Bring your own pen.
