La weaponizzazione di SWIFT. Infrastrutture finanziarie e potere strutturale nella politica estera contemporanea

This policy paper examines the transformation of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) from a technical cooperative for interbank messaging - established in 1973 with the explicit mandate of providing a politically neutral service - into one of the most effective coercive instruments of contemporary foreign policy. The reconstruction draws on the analytical framework of weaponized interdependence elaborated by Farrell and Newman, identifying three conditions that have enabled this conversion: the asymmetric concentration of payment flows around a dominant node; the overlap between European governance structures and United States jurisdictional reach, which allows Washington to project coercive pressure onto a Belgian legal entity without altering its formal institutional architecture; and the institutional mediation that translates the structural position of the node into effective coercion. Through an examination of the principal historical activations of this mechanism - from the Terrorist Financing Tracking Program (TFTP) of 2001 to the Iranian disconnections of 2012 and 2018, from the exclusion of Russian banks in 2022 to the sanctions initiatives of May 2026 - the paper demonstrates how the panopticon effect and the chokepoint effect operate in a mutually reinforcing manner, and how their repeated deployment is incentivising the development of alternatives such as the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and the Sistema peredachi finansovykh soobshcheniy (SPFS). The analysis ultimately leads to a reformulation of the question of European strategic autonomy in the financial domain, foregrounding its political dimension alongside its technical one, and identifying in the reluctance of intermediate actors to bear the costs of misalignment from Washington the principal structural obstacle to its construction.