Plausibility of a non-neutral Switzerland?

As we know, Switzerland has gained a reputation for being neutral in the major conflicts of the modern era. How would we make it so that it doesn't go neutral?
 
Hitler suffers a stroke and orders the invasion of Switzerland. Neutrality terminated.

Oh wait, this is before 1900. Have Switzerland become a fundamentalist Zwinglist Protestant nation that regularly gets into wars against the Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Since Neutrality came about from the Napoleonic wars, you'd need to have a) nobody accepts to recognize Swiss neutrality between 1800 and 1815 and b) people stop treating Switzerland as the carpet of the Alps because given everyone and their grandmother routinely kicked their ass, if swiss is not recognized as neutral OTL, its chances of survival at Vienna drop to 0: Vaud, Genève and Valais becomes Sardinian, Neuchatel is Prussian, the rest either becomes a rump Helvetic grand duchy or kingdom or is mostly annexed by Austria (Thurgovia, Grisons, Ticino, Appenzell and Saint-Gall are, no if; some of the northern cantons might go to Baden or stick in the rump state).

Basically either the Netherlands (with reminiscences of Saxony, it was, after all, solidly on the french side) or the Italian-Republican treatment.
 
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Hitler suffers a stroke and orders the invasion of Switzerland. Neutrality terminated.

Oh wait, this is before 1900. Have Switzerland become a fundamentalist Zwinglist Protestant nation that regularly gets into wars against the Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists.

Heh, I'm imagining the Huguenots and French Catholics putting aside their differences just to shut those Swiss up.

Since Neutrality came about from the Napoleonic wars, you'd need to have a) nobody accepts to recognize Swiss neutrality between 1800 and 1815 and b) people stop treating Switzerland as the carpet of the Alps because given everyone and their grandmother routinely kicked their ass, if swiss is not recognized as neutral OTL, its chances of survival at Vienna drop to 0: Vaud, Genève and Valais becomes Sardinian, Neuchatel is Prussian, the rest either becomes a rump Helvetic grand duchy or kingdom or is mostly annexed by Austria (Thurgovia, Grisons, Ticino, Appenzell and Saint-Gall are, no if; some of the northern cantons might go to Baden or stick in the rump state).

Basically either the Netherlands (with reminiscences of Saxony, it was, after all, solidly on the french side) or the Italian-Republican treatment.

Interesting; a balkanized Switzerland isn't something you see everyday.
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Heh, I'm imagining the Huguenots and French Catholics putting aside their differences just to shut those Swiss up.



Interesting; a balkanized Switzerland isn't something you see everyday.

I'm not quite sure how people would have gone at it since OTL swiss neutrality was more or less a given in 1815 (not because it was particularly wealthy; swiss banking mostly came about as a result of the advantage of neutrality, it was still a poor agrarian/pastoralist country :p), but it's also one of the listed peeves in the AH convergences pet peeves: people always seem to assume the 1815 borders of Switzerland were annointed by god or something since they either never get to keep the lands chipped away by other parties or they never end up being limited to just "Switzerland proper" minus the alliled states (which in 1804 Valais, Genève, Neuchâtel, Sankt-Gallen, the Grisons, Engelberg (now a commune of Unterwald) and Gersau (now a commune of Schwyz) were; prior to the death of the last count of Gruyères (in the mid 16th century), parts of Vaud, the Gruyères district of Freiburg canton and the Saanen district of Berne were also the county of Gruyères, which was also an allied state, as were Toggenburg and Sargans before a succession war in the 15th century (the old Zürich war).

The Fricktal was grabbed from Habsburg Breisgau during the Napoleonic wars and was the last bit of the family's ancestral lands in the area. The various bailwicks forming Northern Aargau, Thurgau and Ticino were late conquests, while parts of Vaud and Valais were grabbed during a second war with Savoy that initially landed the entirety of Chablais to the confederacy but it was lost again later. Similarly, the Gex region was a small part of Vaud which was not conquered by the swiss, while the southern half of the county of Geneva was not conquered from Savoy but could have been in all these cases.
 
The Swiss somewhat sat back and let themselves rest on their laurels, largely becoming a farm for mercenaries, after they achieved their early successes - the war with Burgundy in the 1460s (ish?) is the last time I can think of them really mobilising as a country on a large scale. If you can go back to the war with the Hapsburgs, which was after all their raison d'etre, and make them less successful - i.e. have lands which the Swiss think of as "theirs" remain in Hapsburg hands - you could potentially set your ATL up for a running series of Swiss involvement in larger wars against Austria when other combatants have turned up to distract them. You'd have to be careful that your ATL didn't see Austria become successful in one war enough, though, that it could strip a load of land off the Swiss and make them too weak to continue existing. After all, after their initial successes as a devastating pike-wielding force, they never quite retained their primacy in arms and so eventually you have to consider that they are likely to lose a war.
 
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