Not to bang on about it, but if you are interested in the upcoming referendum on Switzerland’s EU freedom of movement agreement, please note the following event:

Personenfreizügigkeit mit der EU: Veranstaltung mit Micheline Calmy-Rey

Event info:
Host:
SP6

Time and Place
Date:
22 January 2009
Time:
19:00 - 23:00
Location:
Kirchgemeindesaal Paulus
Street:
Scheuchzerstrasse 180
Town/City:
Zürich, Switzerland

Description
Referat von Bundesrätin Micheline Calmy-Rey. Im Anschluss Gespräch mit Markus Spillmann (Chefredaktor NZZ)

Miss Calmy-Rey is currently serving on the Swiss Federal Council and is head of the department of Foreign Affairs. She is a member of the Social Democratic party.

More info on the Facebook event page. I’m assuming it’ll be in Schwyzerdütsch.

Since being back in Zürich after a winter break, I’ve noticed that the political parties have stepped up their campaigning on both sides on the upcoming Swiss-EU freedom of movement bilateral treaty referendum. I discussed the issues surrounding the vote in a prior post.

I didn’t expect the SVP, Switzerland’s resident crazy right-wing party, to go at it with such gusto, but they have. In fact, they’re making the same mistake as they made a couple of years ago with the “Sicherheit schaffen” black sheep poster, using out-and-out racism and xenophobia to attempt to sway the tide in their favour.

Here’s the poster they’ve been sticking up around the place:

© 2008 Bunch of assholes. Caption reads "Free identity cards/passports for all? No."

Nice and friendly, eh? The racism is especially barbed since the vote arose specifically because of the SVP’s rejection of the policy of extending the same privileges they currently give to other EU citizens to Bulgarians and Romanians.

On the other hand, here is the totally awesome Liberal poster (sorry the photo’s a bit crap - I was in a hurry):

Liberal Party poster for the Switzerland-EU freedom of movement agreement referendum. Caption reads "Don't destroy our bilateral route! YES to jobs! YES to the bilateral agreement"

I like the general Wile-E-Coyote vibe of it, with the dastardly and suicidal SVP nutters with hammers. The nutter on the left bears a reasonable resemblance to Christoph Blocher, SVP leader.

But what I particularly like is that it invokes just about every Swiss stereotype with glee: the mountains, the railway, fact that the train is painted red and has a huge cross on the front. That the train’s cargo is a bar of chocolate, a slice of cheese and a watch is total genius, and I just know that it was done almost without the slightest hint of irony.

Brilliant.

Christian Democrat (CVP) poster on the Freizügigkeit referendum. Photo taken by me.

On the 8th February 2009 Switzerland will vote on a referendum which will determine whether the state continues or re-negotiates its freedom of movement agreement with the European Union, of which it is not currently a member.

I point out the latter, rather obvious fact of its non-membership because in the past year, the relationship between the EU and Switzerland has progressed from something best described as blissful ignorance punctuated by the occasional bust-up, to more of a on-and-off relationship with equally common instances of shouting matches and group-hugging.

Switzerland has now agreed to cooperate with the EU (partly thanks to various scandals involving smuggling diamonds in toothpaste, corrupt principality banks, and common-or-garden tax evasion [PDF link]) in reform of its corporate tax system, which is currently home to thousands of Briefkastenfirmen (letterbox firms) who legally reside in Switzerland for tax purposes.

It also currently implementing the final parts of the Schengen open-borders agreement: something quite important given that it is, save from Leichtenstein, geographically surrounded on all sides by the Schengen zone. And out of character too: Switzerland is the first non-EU state to join Schengen.

The 8th February referendum is particularly interesting because of the unity that the EU is showing against the position of some parts of the Swiss government. It was brought about by the youth wing of the SVP, (the Swiss People’s Party yes, that SVP), somewhat against the relatively better judgement of older members. And its purpose is very clearly to deny to Bulgarians and Romanians the same freedoms that Switzerland grants to members of the EU-25, including Schengen open borders.

The Commission has so far held relatively firm against the idea that Switzerland should be allowed to discriminate, knowing that Berne has a lot more to lose in the cessation of freedom of movement than the EU has to lose from Switzerland’s digging itself into a hole. This is one EU dispute where the intransigence isn’t caused by internal disagreements. The Commission has indicated that should the Swiss referendum return a ‘no’, Switzerland would be thrown out of Schengen.

Switzerland is highly dependent on EU markets and labour. Out of a population of just under seven million, a full million live in Switzerland under freedom of movement agreements - originally conducted under a combination of various bilateral agreements and EFTA, and from 2007 onwards with the EU itself under the freedom of movement treaty.

So everybody with any sense knows that ending the freedom of movement agreement is a non-option. The economy wouldn’t quite implode, but a situation in which about a quarter of your labour force is suddenly placed into legal limbo, and nobody knows what the hell is supposed to happen when crossing the border, cannot be good. At the same time, few expect voters to actually cease the agreement. The referendum is seen, presumably, by its proponents as a bargaining chip aimed at re-negotiation.

The trouble is, Switzerland is in a very poor bargaining position. The agreement is already in place, for one thing. For another, it isn’t a member state, and Bulgaria and Romania are.  It seems that the two eastern states enjoy so much support on this issue that they haven’t had to kick up a stink about it yet, but they can and will if things look dire by late January.

And therein lies the problem: the vote could go either way. All the sensible parties are reminding Swiss people off all the Siemens and Alstom trains, BMW and Opel cars, IKEA kitchens and fine French wines that roll across the border into Switzerland every year, and of the world’s largest consumer market, to which Swiss firms get nearly unrestricted access. The SVP are currently too busy associating with Holocaust deniers to show a coherent front. Their website says they’re “against the expansion of the freedom of movement agreement“, which is a nice euphemism for “we want to re-write something we agreed to a few years ago to allow us to discriminate”. I wonder if their hearts are really in it. But then I remember what they can do, and what support they have. And that’s a bit scary.

The results for the canton of Zürich will be posted here. I wait with bated breath, and the slight sense of satisfaction that my own state is not the only complete crackpot when it comes to European integration

Interesting times ahead in civil liberties in the post-Lisbon treaty era? An interesting analysis from the Centre for European Reform:

The new politics of EU internal security:

This is area of international co-operation that has long been the exclusive domain of national governments. For over 20 years, interior ministries – meeting in the EU, UN and Council of Europe – have quietly agreed and implemented inter-governmental agreements on internal security and judicial co-operation between themselves. There was little need to accommodate outside views and concerns. Now officials look nervously to 2009 when euro-parliamentarians should begin to use their new authority.

The ministries are right to be anxious. The European Parliament’s civil liberties and justice and home affairs (JHA) body – known as the LIBE committee – has made no secret of its intention to exercise the new powers to the full. The committee wants to reverse a trend in EU decision-making on terrorism, crime and immigration that many parliamentarians feel is wrongly skewed towards state security at the expense of civil liberties. For example, MEPs have been wary of the member-states’ eagerness to create databases and new information-sharing arrangements for terrorism and other cross-border crimes. They complain that the member-states are conspicuously less interested in reaching an agreement on data protection legislation needed to ensure such data is not mis-used.

That is, of course, after Ireland is coaxed into a ‘yes’ vote on the Lisbon treaty itself.

There has not been much debate on the costs of intergovernmentalism, and Council dominance in these areas of European integration. In Britain particularly, justice and home affairs is the area where national governments have been most keen to be seen to preserve national vetoes.

Perhaps as Lisbon rolls out, the parameters of the debate will change as the benefits of European Parliament involvement become clear.

This is probably a complete brain-fart, but I thought I should post it anyway. I’m studying for an exam on the subject of European integration, and I came across this paragraph by Brigid Laffan. It’s the most eloquent description of the problem of the national political environment within a transnational/supranational body like the E.U.

Political players within the member states have so far not communicated the realities of power in contemporary Europe to their electorates. They persist with an old language of national interest when in reality, janus-like, they serve both the national governments and collective European government.

Laffan, B (1999) ‘Democracy in the European Union’ in Cram, L.,
Dinan, D. and N. Nugent (eds.) Developments in the European
Union, London: Palgrave.
WorldCat reference

Things like the 2004 and 2007 accessions make me nervous about dealing with these things in Britain. They were presented consistently and positively by the media as being in Britain’s national interest, or ’supported by Britain’. The accessions were positive, but for different reasons: historical imperative, for one, and expanding and improving the single market by extending the same freedoms of movement, work and consumer protections as exist here to eastern Europe. But we must do a better job of discussing these things in the UK.

The European Union is not a series of treaty negotiations every few years, where the coffee is brewed strong, tempers get frayed, and we either ‘win’ or ‘lose’. It’s much more important than that. It reaches into almost every aspect of our political lives despite the disingenuous effort, or perhaps unconscious ignorance, of political actors and (sadly) the media to present it as if it is something which the national political space can exist alongside, but separate from.

Sovereignty is dead. Long live the new sovereignty.