Giuseppe Motta

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Giuseppe Motta was born on the 29th of December 1871, and by the time he died in office on the 23rd of January 1940, he had served longer in the Swiss Federal Council than almost anyone before him. Twenty-eight years in the same body. Five separate terms as President of the Swiss Confederation. A seat at the assembly of the League of Nations during some of the most turbulent decades in European history. What drives a man to hold such offices, all at once, for so long? And what does it tell us about Switzerland itself that he was allowed to? The portrait that emerges from Motta's life is not that of a quiet administrator. He was a Catholic-conservative foreign minister who fought against admitting the Soviet Union into the League of Nations, championed Germany's entry into that same body, and in the final years of his life reversed course on Swiss neutrality as another war gathered on the horizon. By the time a Swiss-born American artist named Adolfo Müller-Ury painted his portrait in 1938, Motta was already near the end. The question worth asking is how one man left such a deep mark across so many different institutions.

• 2. Three Decades in Power

  ›

  On the 14th of December 1911, Motta was elected to the Federal Council of Switzerland. He was affiliated with the Catholic Conservative Party, and he never left the Council until his death. His twenty-eight-year tenure was the third-longest in the body's history up to that point. For the first portion of his time in government, from 1912 to 1919, he headed the Department of Finance. From 1920 onward, he shifted to the Political Department, a role that put him at the center of Swiss foreign affairs for the next two decades. He was elected President of the Confederation in 1915, and again in 1920, 1927, 1932, and 1937. Five separate times voters and his fellow councillors returned him to the country's highest office. Each election came roughly five to seven years after the last, spaced across a period that encompassed a world war, an economic collapse, and the slow unraveling of European peace. He died in office, still serving in the Political Department, at the age of sixty-eight.

• 3. The ICRC and a First

  ›

  In 1923, the International Committee of the Red Cross made a quiet but significant change. The ICRC admitted the first two non-Genevans to its Assembly. One was Max Huber, from Zürich. The other was Motta, who carried the additional distinction of being the first Catholic ever admitted to the Assembly. The ICRC had historically been a Genevan and broadly Protestant institution, so both admissions marked a widening of its membership. Motta himself saw no tension between this role and his ongoing political career. He combined membership in the ICRC Assembly with his responsibilities in the Federal Council without, by the source's account, perceiving any conflict of interest. The crossover was unusual enough to be worth noting; most officeholders in one body would have kept their distance from the other. Motta did not.

• 4. League of Nations

  ›

  Motta worked alongside Federal Councillor Felix Calonder to bring Switzerland into the League of Nations on the 16th of May 1920. Getting a famously neutral country to join any international body was not straightforward, and the accession required navigating Switzerland's longstanding commitment to staying out of great-power entanglements. By 1924, Motta had risen to the presidency of the League of Nations Assembly, a position that gave him a platform to shape the debates of an institution meant to prevent another world war. He used that platform in two notable directions. On the question of the Soviet Union's membership, Motta was one of the most vocal opponents; at his suggestion, Switzerland stood among the small number of states that argued against admitting the USSR. On the question of Germany, he pushed the opposite way, becoming one of the most outspoken advocates for allowing Germany in. He also argued, during the interwar years, for a partial relaxation of the Swiss neutrality principle. That position would later reverse: from 1938, as the Second World War grew more probable, he spoke out firmly for strict neutrality once again.

• 5. Portraits and Legacy

  ›

  In the late 1930s, the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury painted Motta's portrait twice. The first sitting began when the artist received a photograph from Motta at the end of 1937. Müller-Ury then travelled to Berne in the summer of 1938 to work from life, producing a large three-quarter portrait dated that year. That painting now hangs in the Archivio Cantonale in Bellinzona. The second portrait, a half-length image of Motta seated at a desk, was completed in 1939 and became part of the Adolfo Müller-Ury Stiftung at the Haus Muller-Lombardi in Hospental, Switzerland. It appeared at the artist's last exhibition, held at French and Co in New York in the spring of 1947, and was returned to Switzerland after Müller-Ury's death in July of that year. Streets carrying Motta's name now run through Lugano, Chiasso, Minusio, Mendrisio, and Massagno; a piazza in Ascona and an avenue in Geneva also bear his name. Since 2004, the Geneva Institute for Democracy and Development has presented the Giuseppe Motta Medal annually to individuals from any country who demonstrate exceptional achievement in promoting peace and democracy, human rights, and sustainable development.