Switzerland’s Differentiated European Integration

The Last Gallic Village?

Sabine Jenni

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319336831
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319336848
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses Switzerland's European policies using the concept of differentiated European integration, providing a new and original perspective on the country. This analytical approach focuses on the similarities between Switzerland's EU policies and the integration of EU member states. The latter have often been the focus of research as Switzerland is the last Western European country not to have become a member of the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Area (EEA). The book claims that Switzerland's position on the European integration map is different in terms of degree from many EU member states, but not different in kind. The cornerstone of the book is new empirical data quantitatively measuring Switzerland's differentiated integration during the period 1990 – 2010. The data rely on the sectoral agreements Switzerland concluded with the EU and the voluntary incorporation of EU law into domestic legislation. The book shows, among other findings, that over time Swiss European policies have begun to resemble integration policies and that the more they did so, the more dynamically they evolved.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Sabine JenniSwitzerland’s Differentiated European Integration 10.1007/978-3-319-33684-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sabine Jenni¹

(1)

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

End Abstract

Switzerland lies in the geographical centre of Europe and three out of its four official languages are also official languages of the European Union (EU). Switzerland is one of the wealthiest economies in Western Europe, and not only in relative terms. The country is small in terms of geographical area and population but is by no means a small player in terms of export volume or foreign direct investment. On the European political landscape, Switzerland acts as the host country for many international conventions and European headquarters of international organisations. It has also developed many ties with its neighbouring countries and their regional integration project, the European Union. Switzerland has, however, a peculiar relationship with the EU. It has remained the only unequivocally Western European country that did not become a member of the EU, and it is not even a member of the less ambitious European Economic Area (EEA). ¹ Thus, is Switzerland the last Gallic village in Europe? The country participates selectively in some European regimes via the conclusion of sectoral agreements and occasionally adapts its domestic policies to those of the EU. While its neighbours institutionalised their cooperation in intergovernmental settings and even supranational institutions, which provide an unprecedented level of regional integration, Switzerland still regulates the relations with its neighbours by means of traditional international treaties.

This way of dealing with the European challenge is puzzling, because in several regards Switzerland is theoretically a likely case for European integration. Switzerland is a small and open economy, a liberal democracy, and culturally and economically strongly tied to the member states of the EU. When the agreement on the EEA was on the table in the early 1990s, the country had even experienced five years of lower economic growth than the average of the then members of the European Community (EC), a factor that theoretically makes regional integration more attractive (Mattli 1999). Swiss voters, however, rejected the EEA agreement in 1992. Ever since, the question of European integration has been a political “hot potato” in Switzerland. The main reason is that the vote on the EEA revealed dissent between the pro-European political elite and the Eurosceptic voters as well as a linguistic and an urban–rural cleavage in the electorate (Sciarini and Listhaug 1997). These cleavages were also present in later votes on European issues and were successfully mobilised by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which rose from a marginal player to become the largest parliamentary party in the ten years following the rejection of the EEA (Kriesi 2007). Despite the divisive potential of European integration and the widespread use of popular referenda, the rejection of the EEA was by no means the end point of Switzerland’s European integration. Since then, it has concluded 16 major sectoral agreements with the EU, which were approved at the polls, and contributed its share to the cohesion fund for the new central European member states. It has also allegedly continuously adapted its domestic policies to developments in the EU. The puzzle of Switzerland’s peculiar form of European integration is thus even more intriguing than it was 20 years ago. This book focuses on the years between 1990 and the present. It measures Switzerland’s peculiar integration empirically and explains its evolution over time.

Since 1992, when Switzerland embarked on its special path into Europe, and the EU completed its Single Market program, European integration has developed in an impressive way. The EU grew to 28 member states, substantially revised its founding treaties four times, became active in a wide array of new issue areas, and added to economic cooperation more political issues, such as common border control. This impressive “widening and deepening” has been accompanied by increasing differentiation in the degrees to which EU member states are integrated in EU policies (Stubb 1996). Today, not all EU members participate in all EU policies, and some EU policies have been extended to non-member states. An example is the Schengen agreement, from which several EU member states opted out, and to which several non-members, among them Switzerland, opted in. Switzerland thus is one of the non-member states participating in European integration, but it is a special case even among non-member states because it has not concluded any bilateral or multilateral agreements defining its relationship with the EU formally. The Swiss puzzle of European integration is thus not only politically salient and divisive, it is also promising for research because Switzerland’s sectoral integration resembles instances of sectorally differentiated integration that have developed in recent years among EU member states. By conceptualising Switzerland as a case of external differentiated integration, this book puts the similarities to rather than the differences of Swiss European policies from ideal-type European integration in the foreground and thus focuses on previously often neglected processes.

There exists a rich body of literature on Switzerland and its European policy, but crucial questions about the nature and reasons for Switzerland’s approach to European integration are still unresolved. Scholars today widely agree that Switzerland’s characterisation as a non-member state downplays the degree of its European integration. Since the 1990s, the EU has had such a large impact on Swiss policies and politics that some researchers state that Switzerland is “economically more integrated within the European Union than many of the EU’s own member states” (Goetschel 2003: 313, see also Goetschel 2007; Weder 2007). Scholars use labels like “customized quasi-membership” or just “quasi-member” to characterise this situation (Lavenex 2011; Maiani 2008; Haverland 2014; Kriesi and Trechsel 2008). This judgement was challenged by Sieglinde Gstöhl (2007), who argued that Switzerland should not be called a quasi-member because the sectoral agreements lack any general institutional framework like common decision-making or implementing and supervising institutions, elements that are central to European integration. Existing research offers reasons for the qualification of Switzerland as a quasi-member but also support for Gstöhl’s viewpoint. What we lack is a systematic assessment of the functioning of the heterogeneous institutions and policies which regulate Switzerland’s relationship with the EU. This book provides such a systematic empirical measurement and analyses the driving forces of Switzerland’s European policies over time.

Besides the nature of Switzerland’s relationship with the EU, the reasons for the relationship’s development are also not entirely clear. There exists a consensus that the Swiss approach to European integration is characterised by “cherry-picking,” but there are also various viewpoints on the reasons why certain cherries are picked and others are not. A widespread assumption is that cooperation with the EU follows mainly an economic motivation. Sectoral agreements provide selective access to the internal market, and the domestic EU-compatibility policy to some extent allows the removal of technical barriers to trade (Epiney 2009). In this logic, cherry-picking is motivated by the aim to keep certain regulatory advantages compared to EU member states (Baudenbacher 2012). At the same time, the policy of making domestic legislation compatible with EU law is allegedly used by certain interest groups, and especially by the export-oriented economic sector, to push their own legislative agenda (Linder 2011, 2013). Another group of scholars do not relate Swiss European policies to interests. Some explain cherry-picking with the observation that the EU-compatibility policy is not pursued systematically (Maiani 2013). In contrast, others observe that EU compatibility has become the fundamental principle of domestic lawmaking and an end in itself (Oesch 2012; Wyss 2007). Scholars focusing on politics rather than policies emphasise the important role of power constellations and domestic compromises for the explanation of Switzerland’s European policy (Afonso et al. 2014; Fontana 2009, 2011; Fischer et al. 2002; Fischer and Sciarini 2013). The existing literature does not provide a systematic exploration of the relationship of interests and the actor constellation with Swiss European policies as a whole.

Some of the findings in the literature regarding the nature of Switzerland’s relationship with the EU diverge, and the same is true of the reasons for Switzerland’s European policies. At least partially, this must be related to the fact that those findings were the result of studies researching different issues, time periods, and questions. To my knowledge, no studies exist combining the exploration of reasons for Switzerland’s European policies with a broad empirical basis, including the various elements of these policies. In the rich vein of literature on Switzerland and the EU, scholars either combined comparative case studies with detailed description and the identification of the mechanisms that led to certain policies, or they engaged in broad quantitative analyses, providing large amounts of data. So far, such quantitative studies only perfunctorily made use of the rich knowledge about explanatory factors to explain their observations (Lehmkuhl 2014). This book builds on both strands of previous research and contributes in several regards to the existing literature. It provides new empirical data encompassing both sectoral agreements and domestic policies. In addition to earlier quantitative studies, it allows distinctions to be made to different integration qualities. The analyses linking insights from the legal literature and case studies to this broad empirical basis show that the integration qualities of European policy instruments matter. Instruments which are closer to ideal-type European integration evolve more dynamically, and political factors matter most for sectoral agreements, which have to be approved by parliament.

The conceptualisation of Switzerland as a case of differentiated integration might sound a bit provocative to some readers. The conceptualisation is not motivated by a normative stance about what approach Switzerland should follow in its relations with the EU, but it is justified by the observation that many of Switzerland’s policies towards the EU show characteristics typical of regional integration policies. Although Switzerland is not a member, its ties to the EU to some extent play the role of functional equivalents to formal European integration and may thus be explicable by similar factors (cf. Fontana et al. 2008). The sectoral agreements cover an impressive range of issues, which is very unusual for relations of the EU with a third state. They are based on informal principles with a strong relation to the EU’s supranational authorities and supranational legislation, and they are complemented by the practice of incorporating EU rules into domestic legislation. Newer agreements even contain provisions delegating authority to supranational organisations. Swiss European policies, however, also show considerable differences compared to ideal-type European integration. The sectoral agreements have remained selective even in regard to access to the Single Market, and Swiss-EU relations lack general formal rules or even supranational institutions. Therefore, the nature, functioning, and development of the Swiss form of European integration can only be properly described and explained based on a detailed examination of the integration quality of its elements.

This chapter introduces the reader to the concept of differentiated integration and the development of Switzerland’s relationship with the European integration process. The first section describes the historical development of the different elements of Switzerland’s European policy. This section shows that neither sectoral agreements nor domestic policy adaptations are a Swiss invention. Both were elements of the policies of European countries that were more reluctant towards European integration from the beginning of its history. This fact and a comparison of more recent Swiss European policies with ideal-type European integration justify the conception of Swiss European policies as functional equivalents to European integration. The second section discusses how the concept of differentiated integration helps to address open questions in the literature about Switzerland and the EU. The third section gives an overview of the book’s structure and summarises the findings of each chapter. The fourth section discusses important issues the proposed research approach will not be able to solve as well as the political relevance of the presented research.

1.1 Switzerland as a Case of Differentiated Integration

A conceptualisation of Swiss European policies as differentiated integration has to withstand a comparison with ideal-type European integration. One of the earliest definitions of regional integration stems from Ernst B. Haas. According to Haas (1961: 366), integration is “the process whereby political actors (…) shift their loyalties, expectations, and political activities toward a new and larger centre, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states.” Walter Mattli (1999) added to this definition that the shift ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Measuring Switzerland’s Differentiated Integration
• 3. Institutional Dynamics of Switzerland’s Differentiated Integration
• 4. Political Dynamics of Switzerland’s Differentiated Integration
• 5. Conclusion
• Backmatter