Neutrality in the international context

Prof. Heinz Gärtner, Austria

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Introduction

ABFANG (Action Alliance for Peace, Active Neutrality and Non-Violence) is an Austrian peace coalition that advocates and organises for ‘active neurality’. This concept has a particular meaning in a state which has been neutral, unaligned and outside of any military alliances, since 1955. Austria’s neutral status sits alongside its status as a nuclear-weapon-free zone.

There is undoubtedly tremendous political pressure exerted on Austria, a well as Ireland which maintains a similar status of neutrality, to relinquish this status and to join NATO. Such a development would be a catastrophe not only for Austria itself and Europe more generally but for prospects for peace.

ABFANG convened a conference to coincide with the 1st Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was addressed by an array of activists, experts and participants in the international peace movement. Of special interest was the round-table discussion that included contributions on the importance of Austria’s neutral status, together with analyses of the impact of the TPNW.

END Info has translated one of these contributions and reproduced another with the aim of alerting others to the importance of Austria’s neutrality and in order to encourage a discussion on the legacies of non-aligned states, the role and function of ‘active neutrality’ and the implications of such positions for a very different mode of foreign policy.

We live in a very polarized world, but polarization is not new. We have the polarization already experienced during the Cold War, the East-West conflict. It is important to remember that the neutral states were able to break out during the period of bloc formation to stay out of the military alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact). Some say that neutrality was part of the Cold War, however the opposite is true. May I recall that in 1955 (when Austrian neutrality was proclaimed), the blocs were already nuclear powers and part of "Mutually Assured Destruction". Austria was at that time already a nuclear weapons-free state, since in our State Treaty the possession or acquisition of nuclear weapons was banned. At that time, for example, neutrals had states like Sweden or Switzerland, as well as Germany and Canada.

After the end of the Cold War, i.e. after 1989, there was another attempt at polarization, namely unipolarity. An American political scientist called it "The Unipolar Moment". George W. Bush tried to create US hegemony: there were wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a bad time for neutral states because a unipolar world was incompatible with neutrality. The unipolarity/hegemony never materialized. We currently live in one polarized world, in a world of great power competition between the USA, China and Russia. Russia is the first country to attempt war in this great power competition to survive. I say the first war because more could follow.

Polarization is always associated with alliance building. We have NATO and we have the successor organization to the Warsaw Pact in parts of Eastern Europe and we have those of the US in alliances founded in Asia (AUKUS; Quad) or the “Abraham Accords” in the Middle East against Iran.

What opportunities do smaller states have in a polarized world? You can join one, join an alliance because there is a promise that it will give protection. The “nuclear umbrella" is a form of promise of protection. Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which contains an obligation to provide assistance, is the other form of protection. You get a promise of protection – you don’t know whether it will be kept not, but of course you are also "captive" and must take part in foreign wars. If Article 5 assistance comes, NATO members are obliged within the framework of "solidarity" to stand with those attacked or to stand by a threatened state.

The second option for small states (there are only two options) is to remain neutral. i.e. to remain outside of great power competition, as Austria did during the Cold War.

Now we often hear that neutrality is incompatible with solidarity, because solidarity is exclusively interpreted as military solidarity, i.e. one seems forced to join an alliance, a nuclear alliance, to show solidarity. We hear, as a logical extension of this, that to show solidarity a neutral state would have to give up neutrality and join a nuclear alliance.

The opposite is the case. Austria must, after the historical experiences of the two world wars, be very careful. Military solidarity can also be false solidarity. The opposite is the case and that is why we are in Vienna today, because neutrality is a necessary condition for the Austrian initiative for the realization of the nuclear weapons ban treaty, i.e. first in 2010 for the humanitarian initiative and then in 2017 for the Prohibition Treaty and now the TPNW State Conference in Vienna. No nuclear-armed state, no state in a nuclear alliance would have been able to take this initiative, a neutral state was necessary. That's why it was and is neutrality that is a prerequisite for building solidarity among non-nuclear weapon states. That's what Austria did, but only because it was neutral. So today Austria is the most important state in the European Union that is neutral and that can build a bridge to the non-aligned countries of the Global South. Most TPNW signatories come from the Global South. In Europe there are very few participating countries because we have NATO. Austria should therefore under no circumstances give up its neutrality.

Austria used to be a good example of a nuclear weapons-free zone, but unfortunately wider such zones were not implemented. After Austria became neutral in 1955 and was therefore free of nuclear weapons, the Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki advocated that the whole of Central Europe, i.e. Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Austria, becomes nuclear-weapon-free. But the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer did not want that, saying neutrality was “a poison of the Soviet Union” and the Soviet Union didn't want it either because they did not want to give up their zone of influence in Eastern Europe . Nevertheless, this idea is very good and we should not let it die.