61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

The victorious powers were in agreement that an improved system of collective
security be established after the war. The USA endowed the war – which it had
accepted only reluctantly and whose entry was initially not motivated by ethical
concerns – with a missionary significance as a crusade for a new world order and,
hopefully, the last «war against war», using this chiefly as an argument for
domestic political justification just as it had done in 1917. The USA also
ensured that concrete steps were taken in this direction and created the foundations
for the United Nations in the spring of 1945 by organising various international
conferences. As early as May 1943, the Hotsprings Conference in
Virginia resolved to create the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in
order to implement the «freedom from hunger» provision stipulated in the
Atlantic Charter. In November 1943, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA) was founded in Washington to reconstruct
the regions occupied by the enemy, and in April 1944 the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) was reactivated in Philadelphia. The structure of the UN
was consolidated at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington and there
were parallel preparations for the creation of a new international currency
framework. A new currency system based on gold and the dollar came into
existence at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944. The International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction
and Development (IBRD), were founded in order to ensure free world
trade, freely convertible currencies, and objectives regarding development aid
policy. Switzerland had no part in any of the newly founded organisations.
However, the new international framework was beset by severe tensions as soon
as it had been established. The fact that the UN has been able to survive for so
long despite the opposing objectives of the principal founding powers may be
explained by the aims of both sides to use the international organisation to
secure their own areas of power and influence. In the years following 1945, two
antagonistic camps – or blocs – were formed displaying antagonistic social and
political views. The label of the «Cold War» soon became the accepted term to
describe the hardening confrontation at the end of the 1940s.
Whilst the end of the war represented a complete change for the formerly
occupied countries, Switzerland experienced great continuity in the post-war
years. During the course of the Cold War, after a short phase of internal reckoning
with the pro-German elements, Swiss anti-totalitarianism was soon directed in
a rather totalitarian way against the Communist Movement which had found
fairly broad support in the country for a time between 1944 and 1947. On the
other hand, there was no desire at all to take a self-critical look back at the
positions and activities of the broad middle ground and economic players. In the
West, too, the Cold War strengthened the tendency towards internal political
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