Switzerland-EU Relations

Lessons for the UK after Brexit?

Paolo Dardanelli, Oscar Mazzoleni, Paolo Dardanelli, Oscar Mazzoleni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367498047
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000337013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers an up-to-date assessment of the state of Switzerland-EU relations with the aim of drawing lessons from the Swiss experience to shed light on the challenges facing the UK post-Brexit and, more broadly, on how non-member states can adapt to "integration without membership".

The book covers the main issues in the Swiss experience of dealing with the EU over the last 30 years. These include the determinants of the 1992 vote, the architecture of the bilateral agreements signed since then, the economic interests at stake, the role played by immigration, the impact on the country's federal system, the political, social, and cultural factors shaping attitudes to integration, and how the "Swiss model" has featured in the discourse about Brexit. The concluding chapter identifies the key lessons Switzerland's experience offers for the British debate on the country's relations with the EU post-Brexit.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European Union politics, European politics, Swiss Politics, British Politics, Brexit, and more broadly to international relations.

1 Introduction

Oscar Mazzoleni and Paolo Dardanelli

Although each national context is to some extent unique, countries can and often do learn from each other. At a crucial time for the Brexit process in the United Kingdom (UK), it is helpful to draw insights from other countries with a history of difficult relations with the European Union (EU).¹ Switzerland stands out as a potentially interesting case in this regard, as a country very open economically but at the same time highly protective of its national identity and sovereignty (e.g. Steinberg 2015; Church 2016). Deep societal cleavages, a polarising party system, delicate trade-offs facing diplomats and governments, and a long period of uncertainty: all of these aspects are also prominently on display in Switzerland. Indeed, no country outside the EU has had to face the challenges of integration more than the Swiss Confederation.² Switzerland has had to continuously and extensively deal with European integration while remaining outside the EU since the early 1990s. Although Swiss citizens have never been asked directly whether or not their country should join the EU, Swiss–EU relations have been high on Switzerland’s political agenda over the last 30 years. This has been facilitated by the existence of instruments of direct democracy that are unparalleled in terms of a range of opportunities and frequency of use elsewhere in Europe, and indeed the wider world. The debate on European integration has been intense and has affected many issues, involving political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions. The European question has shaped the agenda of government and parliament, parties, and public opinion, affecting domestic and foreign policy, diplomatic relations, economic relations, and ideological divides. “Europe”³ has been a salient issue, directly or indirectly, in all federal elections since the 1990s, and has profoundly influenced party competition (e.g. Hutter et al. 2016).

Between independence and integration

The history of Swiss–EU relations over the past 30 years has been punctuated by a series of crucial federal referendums: from a referendum on the European Economic Area (EEA) in December 1992 to a referendum “Against Mass Immigration” in February 2014 through various votes on bilateral agreements between 2000 and 2009. After Germany’s re-unification and the acceleration of European integration at the turn of the 1990s, Switzerland faced a crucial dilemma: continue on a Sonderfall, or special case, path, whereby the country, jealous of its political independence and spared from the destructions of World War II, aligned itself with the Western democracies but without joining NATO or the UN; or take a new path, that of European integration, not least to retain the competitiveness of its economy, which is highly dependent on European and world markets. The 1992 EEA referendum revealed a degree of polarisation unprecedented on a foreign policy issue and produced a shock defeat for the Federal Council – Switzerland’s federal executive – and the wider political establishment, which had almost unanimously supported ratification.

After the people’s decision on the EEA – widely seen as a stepping-stone to joining the EU – a new phase opened and Switzerland sought to conclude a set of wide-ranging agreements with the EU. Marked by challenging negotiations and punctuated by frequent popular votes, this bilateral approach developed from the second half of the 1990s onwards. The last phase in these bilateral relations, ongoing since 2018, concerns the adoption of an Institutional Framework Agreement (IFA), which would bring together the existing agreements and provide an umbrella for all future ones. Like its predecessors, ratification of this agreement is also subject to approval by the Swiss people and the cantons; in Switzerland, popular votes of constitutional significance require a double majority of the electorate as a whole, and of the cantonal electorate in a majority of the cantons. The last in the series of such popular votes concerned a proposal to end the free movement of persons with the EU, which was turned down by a large majority on 27 September 2020.

Even more so than previously, Swiss–EU relations are thus at a crucial juncture in their tortuous evolution, characterised by deep uncertainty. It is thus a propitious moment to review these relations looking for insights Switzerland’s experience of dealing with Europe has to offer to the UK and more widely.

Aims and questions

Over ten years since another edited book covered a similar ground (Church 2007), the present volume offers an up-to-date assessment of the state of Swiss–EU relations with the aim of drawing insights from the Swiss experience that could shed light on the challenges facing the UK post-Brexit and, more broadly, on how non-member states can adapt to “integration without membership” (on this concept, see Vahl and Grolimund 2006). The book covers the main issues in the Swiss experience of dealing with the EU over the last 30 years. These issues include the determinants of the 1992 vote; the architecture of the bilateral agreements signed since then; the economic interests at stake; the role played by immigration; the impact on the country’s federal system; the political, social, and cultural factors shaping attitudes to integration; and how the “Swiss model” has featured in the discourse about Brexit. The concluding chapter identifies the key insights that Switzerland’s experience offers for the British debate on the country’s relations with the EU post-Brexit.

In sum, the main questions addressed are: how did the proposal to join the EEA come about and why was it rejected in the 1992 referendum? What are the economic interests at stake? Why and how has the path of bilateral agreements developed and why is an overarching IFA currently on the table? Why has migration become a central issue in Swiss-EU relations? How has Switzerland’s federal system been affected by “integration without membership”? How have the Swiss parties positioned themselves on Europe and what impact has the integration question had on the party system? What are the factors explaining citizens’ vote on European issues and, in particular, how can we explain regional variations? Finally, to what extent has the “Swiss model” featured in the Brexit debate in the UK and how likely is the latter to be willing to look at Switzerland’s experience to guide its own future relations with the EU?

The chapters

From different disciplinary backgrounds, the contributors to this volume seek to give an answer to these questions in their chapters. In the first part of the book, the authors provide an overview of the context within which Switzerland’s European policy has been formulated, in its historical, economic, social, political, and institutional dimensions. From a historian’s perspective, Georg Kreis takes a look back at the past, revisiting the path that led to the fateful vote of 6 December 1992 on Switzerland’s membership of the EEA. Kreis shows how the roots of the rejection of the EEA are to be found in the legacy left by 50 years of post–World War II isolationist foreign policy inspired by a belief in Switzerland’s Sonderfall. It highlights significant parallels with the UK’s Brexit vote of 2016 and the crucial role played by appeals to history and identity in the respective campaigns. In their chapter, the economists Sergio Rossi and Guillaume Vallet discuss the economic factors underlying the relations between Switzerland and EU. They highlight the role played by a long-term guiding thread of Swiss European policy, namely the desire to benefit from economic integration while at the same time avoiding as much as possible institutional and political constraints, which has led the country towards a path of “integration without membership”. The chapter points out that prominent aspects of the Swiss economy, such as the importance of the financial sector, have clear parallels in the UK. Hence, Switzerland’s experience in handling the trade-off between economic benefits and political costs could have potentially fruitful lessons for the UK. René Schwok outlines the evolution of the architecture of bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the EU concluded since 1992. Schwok assesses the strengths and weaknesses of this bilateral approach and argues that, although it has served Switzerland reasonably well so far, it falls short of offering a stable basis for the future. The impasse in which Switzerland currently finds itself over an IFA, negotiated under pressure from the EU to replace the various sectoral agreements with a single framework agreement, illustrates the fragility of the bilateral approach and the uncertainties surrounding its future. If Switzerland’s bilateral approach is unlikely to offer a ready-made model for the UK, the issues the former has had to deal over the past 30 years are bound to constitute significant obstacles on the future path of the latter as well.

In contemporary Swiss politics, the most controversial agreements are those concerning the free movement of persons, immigration, and asylum. Sabine Jenni studies these in detail, stressing similarities and differences between the Swiss legal framework and European standards, particularly with regard to restrictions on the social rights of migrant workers. She also discusses the effects of these agreements on the Swiss labour market and the unemployment rate, showing that free movement has not had a negative effect overall but its impact has been more significant in certain sectors and regions. Drawing parallels with the role that immigration has played in the Brexit debate, the chapter highlights the importance of the economic and social consequences of how immigration flows are distributed across a country. In the last chapter of this first part, Paolo Dardanelli examines another important aspect: the impact of integration on Switzerland’s federal system, assessing in particular the tensions between fragmentation and centralisation. In addition to being a fundamental institutional feature of the Swiss political system, federalism has also become an important element of Swiss identity and has close links with direct democracy. It is therefore exposed in various ways to the effects of integration and, in turn, has a significant influence on the country’s European policy. Noting that integration primarily has had a centrifugal effect in the UK, the chapter argues that the policy response called for is nonetheless a similar one: the need to strengthen communication channels and co-decision fora between levels of government.

A second set of contributions are devoted to more explicitly political aspects, such as party strategies, citizens’ attitudes, and voting behaviour. Blaise Fontanellaz and Paolo Dardanelli map the positions that the main Swiss political parties have adopted on European issues, how these have changed over time, and the factors that have driven their evolution. Their analysis illustrates the internal tensions parties have faced over Europe and how competition over these issues has been a key factor in the reshaping of the party system over the last 30 years. The chapter highlights several aspects where the experience of the Swiss parties echoes that of their UK counterparts, thus shedding light on some likely future trajectories of the European question in British party politics.

Pascal Sciarini provides an extensive analysis of the factors that determined the results of federal referendums and popular initiatives from 1992 to 2014. Using the so-called VOX surveys, opinion polls conducted after each vote, Sciarini assesses the effects of a range of socio-demographic and attitudinal factors, highlighting the crucial role played by education, language, urban-rural location, and trust in the federal government. These factors broadly mirror those identified by analyses of the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK and indicate that citizens’ attitudes to international co-operation are driven by some deep-seated factors impervious to short-term government action. The other three chapters in this part investigate cultural and territorial drivers of political mobilisation around EU issues. In his chapter, Sean Mueller offers a complementary look at the factors that determine citizens’ votes on EU matters. Based on an analysis of the results at the municipal level of the ten referendum and popular initiatives, Mueller seeks to identify how far these factors are linked to territorial dimensions. In doing so, he stresses variation in terms of regional context, highlighting the interaction between border location and economic situation. His findings closely match the conclusions of research on Brexit drivers in the UK and confirm that policies directed at tackling these forms of territorial and social disadvantage may be the most effective ones in shaping citizens’ attitudes to Europe.

Tobias Theiler addresses the contrast between French-speaking and German-speaking Switzerland, the main linguistic and cultural divide in Switzerland, whereby the former has consistently displayed more pro-EU orientations than the latter. On the basis of a linguistic-cultural analysis, the author argues that the roots of the different attitudes in the two language regions are to be found in their respective cultural-linguistic situation, within Switzerland and in relation to France and Germany, respectively. Theiler highlights the similarities with the way that English cultural identities have featured in the Brexit debate, thus calling for greater scholarly attention to the role played by cultural and identity factors. Oscar Mazzoleni explores another striking territorial pattern in Swiss voting on EU issues, the special case of Ticino, the main Italian-speaking canton, where opposition to European integration has been at its strongest. Discussing both the strategies of political actors and citizens’ voting behaviour, the chapter stresses the crucial role that the conflation of regionalism and Euroscepticism has played in forging Ticino’s divergent path.

Finally, Clive Church argues that although Switzerland’s experience of dealing with the EU is potentially valuable to the UK in charting its own future European policy, the “Swiss model” has only fleetingly featured in the Brexit debate; it has often been poorly understood and is unlikely to have much influence on UK policy. This is primarily because the ideology underpinning Brexit has been inward-looking and narrowly focussed on “getting out”, thereby not predisposing the UK to seeking to learn from other countries. While it is too early to assess its impact, the COVID-19 pandemic may further complicate UK–EU as well as Swiss–EU relations by deepening uncertainty and making economic challenges even more severe. The concluding chapter weaves together the various threads developed in the preceding chapters and distils the key takeaways from the Swiss experience.

Notes

1. We are grateful to Christopher Lord and John Erik Fossum for having read the entire manuscript and offering helpful comments and suggestions.
2. Although Norway has also had close interactions with the EU since the early 1970s, its status in relation to the latter has been highly stable since the foundation of the EEA in 1994. Switzerland’s status, by contrast, has been continously renegotiated throughout the last 30 years.
3. We use “Europe” as shorthand for the EU and its predecessor organisations.

2 Looking back

1992 as a critical juncture

Georg Kreis

In Switzerland, advocates of an arms-length relationship with the EU often look to the United Kingdom for a confirmation of their own position. From this perspective, the Swiss rejection of the EEA in 1992 and the British rejection of EU membership in 2016 can be related. Such a comparison does not imply the two events are equivalent, but may shed new light on each of them.

Switzerland and the United Kingdom: An initial comparison

Some similarities between the two cases are striking: the outcome of the two referendums was very close (50.3% against participation in the EEA in Switzerland and 51.9% for leaving the EU in the UK) and in both countries it created deep divisions in society and sharpened differences. There was also a similar divergence across regions: the French-speaking minority in Switzerland, mirroring Scotland and Northern Ireland in the UK, had a much more positive attitude to Europe than the majority, German speakers in the former and the English in the latter. The urban-rural divide is likewise similar in the two cases, as are the differences in attitudes based on education and income (see chapters by Sciarini and Mueller, this volume). In both countries the majority of the business community favoured moving closer to the European Economic Community (EEC) or remaining in the EU. And if you saw outraged or depressed young people in front of television cameras after the Brexit vote in 2016, you could imagine the young people in Switzerland who were shocked in February 2014 at the acceptance of the mass immigration initiative that threatened their student mobility in the EU – but who had previously taken little interest in the campaign.

On the other hand, several significant differences come to mind: in Switzerland, the decision concerned the question of whether the country should be further integrated into the EEC/EU; in the UK, it was a question of whether the accession that had taken place over 40 years previously should be reversed. The rejection in Switzerland was in line with the course that had been followed for years and could be described – without implying any value judgement – as consistent. The British No vote in 2016, on the other hand, could be described as inconsistent, since the 1975 referendum had given a resounding yes, and EEC membership at that time already implied subscribing to an “ever closer union”. In the UK, the plebiscite was primarily the result of a decision taken by a prime minister wanting to discipline his party by calling on the voters, although a commitment to it had been included in the 2015 Conservative manifesto. In Switzerland, the referendum was a standard procedure under the country’s system of direct democracy. In addition, it could be added that in Switzerland the long practice with referendums brings with it a certain qualit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Looking back: 1992 as a critical juncture
• 3 The economic dimension
• 4 The bilateral approach: Achievements and limitations
• 5 The question of immigration: A challenge to national identity and social cohesion
• 6 European integration and state structures: What connections?
• 7 Political parties and Europe: An enduring dilemma
• 8 Explaining support for European integration in direct democracy votes
• 9 Rooting for Europe: Territorial patterns in voting behaviour
• 10 The cultural roots of Euroscepticism in German-speaking Switzerland and England
• 11 Regionalism and Euroscepticism: The case of Ticino
• 12 Learning from Switzerland after Brexit: More barriers than breakthroughs
• 13 Conclusions: Insights from Switzerland’s experience
• References
• Index