Umstrittene Schweizer Sicherheitspolitik ... - ETH Zürich

The Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies
www.graduateinstitute.ch
Transkription der Stellungnahme vom 27. März 2009
Krause Keith: Thank you for the invitation to meet with you today to
discuss some of the future challenges facing Swiss security policy. It is a
privilege and an honour to be involved in this process and to contribute to
what I consider a big public debate about security policy in this country.
I appreciate particularly to be involved in this process since I have called
this country “home” for the past fourteen years.
In my allotted time, I would like to discuss four general issues and
some of their implications for Swiss policy. In the question period we
can of course go into more specific details. I should add at the outset that
although I am a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies I am not speaking on behalf of the Institute – my
comments today are my responsibility.
The first question probably most of the speakers you have been listening
to have addressed is the following: what is the nature of the security
threats, risks and challenges that Switzerland faces, and how have these
evolved over the past decade? Virtually every Western country – and this
holds particularly true for most of the European states – has produced a
similar list of contemporary security threats in the past four or five years,
and they almost all have a similar mission statement that goes with their
security policy. It says something like: the goal of security policy is to
protect society and citizens against internal and external threats to wellbeing
and core values. That is the central mission of any security policy.
When we look a bit more closely, we see that in the national security
strategy of the Netherlands, for example, the principal threats are listed
as: failing states, terrorism, rogue states, proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, and intra-state or internal conflicts. Ireland – a country you
heard about this morning – lists terrorism, weapons of mass destruc-
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