The bloc has overplayed its hand and now risks a disorderly breakdown in relations - another pyrrhic victory for EU statecraft
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the Telegraph
27 May 2021
The EU has ‘lost’ another country. It has overplayed its hand against Switzerland. It now risks a disorderly breakdown in a crucial diplomatic relationship with its fourth biggest trade partner.
While the US sustains a mostly amicable modus vivendi with a fully sovereign Canada, the EU is chronically at odds with its near abroad, forever seeking to extend its regulatory and judicial reach, and to impose its ideology.
Switzerland’s rejection of its Framework Agreement with the EU after seven years of negotiating agony is a brave act of defiance. Brussels long thought it would never come to this because the economic price for the Swiss would be too high, and because it assumed that pro-EU elites in Bern would succeed in slipping through the terms against the expressed wishes of their own voters.
Prof Carl Baudenbacher, the veteran president of the EFTA court until 2017, said the framework deal was essentially an attempt to hustle Switzerland into the European Economic Area by the back door, under the implicit jurisdiction of the European Court, and subject to ‘dynamic alignment’ with future EU laws.
For the full article, please click here:
Here is another article from the Telegraph by Ross Clark dated 27th May entitled:
In its dealings with Switzerland, the EU is proving us right for leaving
Brussels is threatening free trade by demanding concessions no country would deem acceptable. For the full article, please clicke here:
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