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[...]Berne had been forced to accept free moment as part of a complex sequence of bilateral agreements that gave the Swiss access to the Single Market for part of its business community if not for all key financial players. In a sense, it did not matter, as UBS and Credit Suisse, and other household Swiss business names are well-installed in London, or other EU capitals, from where they can conduct single market business, albeit not in key financial sectors.
A populist anti-immigrant campaign not dissimilar to the UKIP and Conservative rhetoric against EU immigrants culminated in a referendum in February 2014 writing into the Swiss constitution the obligation to limit free movement.
The response of Brussels and EU capitals was much as it has been to Brexit – the Single Market and Free Movement are twin sides of the same coin. You want one, you have to accept the other.
Bern and Brussels have been locked in a loveless tango ever since. The Swiss have put forward a scheme which would first give jobs to local Swiss citizens and if none were available then a European could be a candidate. Few Swiss want to do the hard immigrant work in construction, or mountain catering, or caring for elderly Swiss, but since 1950, every European Treaty has included a non-discrimination clause, and however neat the Swiss proposal appeared, in the eyes of Brussels, it looked to be full of holes.
Moreover, Brussels is fed up with endless negotiations with the Swiss over every aspect of single market access from energy to electricity and said that in the future, the Swiss would have to accept the supremacy of the European Court of Justice in cases of a difference between Brussels and Berne.
That is a hard sell to a Swiss culture of always being independent of any outside control.
So there is now an impasse. The EU would like the Swiss to organise a new referendum to get support for a final EU-Swiss deal, but Swiss politicians know what the result will be, so cannot accept the EU offer. France and Germany have close frontier ties with Switzerland and will avoid any dramatic confrontation. But the Swiss hopes of getting wider access to the EU Single Market are not getting anywhere and there will be no more bilateral deals.
So if in Britain, the Brexit negotiations haven’t even begun, in Switzerland, there is nothing more to negotiate and Swiss-EU relations go into a deep freeze with Bern having to accept what its neighbours – Germany, France, Italy and Austria – decide across a range of policy areas without any say or influence.
The lesson from Switzerland is that a populist referendum solves very little, and the rhetoric of a public meeting or TV debate cannot change the reality that the EU exists, and that its member states are not going to allow a neighbour big or small to ‘have its gateau and eat it’. Swiss businesses will have to put up with the problem, but the happy days when Switzerland got on well and easily with its neighbours are receding into the past.