Aussenpolitik im Innern: Ägyptische Exilanten, Zensur und Fremdenpolizei in der Schweiz1910–1919

Author(s) : Anna Diem

Source : https://www.sgg-ssh.ch/sites/default/files/szg_pdf/002_diem_szg_1_2024.pdf

Abstract:

Foreign Policy in the Interior. Egyptian Exiles, Censorship, and the Aliens’
Police in Switzerland 1910 –1919

In the decade of the First World War, neutral Switzerland, particularly Geneva, served as
a main stage for Egyptian radical agitation. Leaders of the Egyptian national movement
organized international conferences and student groups and published extensively on the
Egyptian question. This paper looks at how the local and national Swiss authorities dealt
with Egyptian exiles and their nationalist and anti-imperialist politics, and traces how
their attitudes towards them changed in the course of roughly a decade. It argues that
initially, the closeness of the Swiss government to the Central Powers and a commitment
to the liberal tradition left the Egyptians largely undisturbed, with few exceptional inter-
ventions and occasional censorship to appease British complaints or Allied-friendly senti-
ment in Geneva. Only with the red scare towards the end of the war and the establish-
ment of a centralised aliens’ police did the Swiss authorities start cracking down on the
Egyptians, arguably conflating them with the bigger, older, and more prominent group of
exiles from the Russian empire, restricting residence permits and who was allowed into
the country, to the point where the Egyptian group dissolved and left Switzerland.