The July 1947 landslide vote in favor of the AHV ended decades of missed opportunities for social insurance. The introduction of federal pensions is often depicted as a major innovation that symbolized the solidarity of the people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) forged during the course of World War II. The popular enthusiasm that welcomed the introduction of the AHV was the polar opposite of the social and political tensions that culminated in the 1918 general strike. The AHV also constituted a key aspect of a postwar settlement designed to maintain political and social stability during the difficult transition from war to peace. A century after the establishment of the modern Swiss Confederation in 1848, the introduction of the AHV had an epochal dimension, and public opinion surveys several decades after the vote still registered that the introduction of federal pensions was widely seen as “the most significant political event of the twentieth century” in Switzerland.

This chapter spans a decade that spills over the boundaries usually set for World War II. The decade 1938–1948 encompassed the early organization of the war economy in the late 1930s, intense manufacturing and financial activities in a western European political economy dominated by Nazi Germany, and finally Switzerland's reorientation in a postwar international order dominated by the Allies.