Abstract
Switzerland was spared direct involvement into the First World War, nevertheless the global conflict had tremendous political and economic impact on the neutral republic. Major antagonisms emerged between the different linguistic groups sympathising with opposing belligerent coalitions as well as between different social strata. Food and fuel shortages and wartime inflation as well as a lack of integration of the labour movement into the political system and its partial shift to the left resulted in a wave of strikes and protest in the second half of the war that continued into the first two post-war years. Its culmination was a national general strike in November 1918 lasting for three days upon the war’s conclusion, and that in bourgeois circles was wrongly considered an attempted revolution. Whilst this is considered the most severe crisis in modern Swiss history, from a transnational perspective, it was no more than a relatively mild variation of the worldwide upheavals going on at the time.
Koller, Christian