A neutral life
Some weeks ago, a friend provocatively asked me: “When are you going to abandon neutrality?” He was referring to the country where I’ve lived for ten years. After chocolate and cheese, Switzerland is known to everyone as the country that, since its constitution was born in 1848, has never taken part in any armed conflict, despite being right in the middle of two World Wars.
Switzerland’s state of neutrality is a permanent choice. I don’t have enough background in international law to get into the details, but I think nothing would stop it from reviewing that position or changing it on a case-by-case basis. There is no bilateral agreement that would prevent it, but it would be a next-to-impossible outcome to achieve: it would require an amendment to the federal constitution. This would mean calling a rather complicated vote involving the entire population, which deeply identifies with the condition of total and permanent neutrality.
All this preamble to say something obvious to many: being neutral—that is, choosing not to take sides—is itself a choice, a very well-defined one. And as such, it has its consequences.
This friend’s message made me reflect on some choices of neutrality I’ve made during my years living in Switzerland:
- I’ve lived in two very different cantons, learning just enough of the local language to ease the frictions of daily life. Learning French was quite easy, while German proved to be much more difficult, as well as boring—I don’t like the language, how it sounds, or speaking it, although I do recognize a certain elegance in its grammar.
- I’ve never been interested in becoming a citizen. I’ve never really identified with this country’s culture, in any sense. I recognize its uniqueness and appreciate many of the advantages of a nation that just works (most of the time), in many of the aspects that impact more or less everyone’s daily life. But the idea of taking on the duties of a citizen has never interested me.
The fact that the country where I chose to live never really forced me to take a side, allowing me to live more or less as I saw fit—even though I had to adapt—perfectly represents the freedom of not being a citizen, a characteristic trait of the expat life. It’s an invigorating freedom at first; the experience of living abroad almost feels like a vacation. Despite having obligations, you are only responsible for yourself, and not at all for the city or the slice of society you’ve landed in.
However, after ten years, I still can’t see myself growing old in this country. This awareness has slowly but irreversibly flipped my perspective. That freedom has become a burden; that vacation has shown what it really is: it’s like being suspended in some kind of void, where nothing can truly take root—or perhaps I just wasn’t capable of it. Feeling I don’t belong to the place I chose to live has made this state of neutrality annoyingly persistent—no longer something I can ignore or offset with the advantages this life has offered me all these years.
I don’t regret the choice to leave my country a decade ago. I did it because my priorities, my goals, and my desires had pushed me in that direction. I didn’t end up exactly where I thought I wanted to be, but that journey inevitably taught me a lot. Now, however, my priorities have changed again: I started to sense it several months ago, and now they are quite clear to me. And they are pushing me in a completely different direction: deciding to change paths while continuing to “choose not to choose” is no longer possible for me. Or I should say: it’s no longer a choice I’m willing to make. This doesn’t mean that the choice I’ve decided to make—to return to my country—will be permanent. Yet, it’s the one I feel the need to make right now.