GUWonder

Given the Swiss popular referendum which seems to have just passed with a slight majority, is Switzerland going to once again be a non-Schengen country? How soon could that take place?

SteelCityBoy

I don't see how else they can maintain their new immigration policies other than withdrawing from Schengen... as for the details I imagine if they did withdraw it would cause logistical headaches for operations teams in GVA, ZRH etc...

edoa

To my knowledge, the Federal Council has three years to work out a solution.
Don't expect anything before 2017...

GUWonder

It wouldn't work to sort of just go back to the way it was several years ago? Old money wasted and new money being spent for a change wouldn't be a surprise, regardless of how answered.

Will Fly Småland

The referendum was about quotas on the number of new residents, not on the number of people visiting, so in the short run there is no connection. But there is speculation that there might be a chain reaction of cancellations of the bilateral agreements (including Schengen participation), possibly even initiated by the EU rather than by the Swiss.

florin

Short answer: no.

The Schengen agreement covers more than free movement. For example, this agreement allows countries to share some law enforcement information with other each other (e.g. wanted/dangerous people)

The result of this last referendum still allows some free movement: as a citizen of a Schengen state you can still enter Switzerland, you just might not be allowed to work there, which is a different matter.

As far as I know, this decision does not invalidate the Switzerland's participation in the Schengen.

GUWonder

My sense from talking to people who work Brussels is that the Commission and the most powerful member states want to play sort of nicely with Switzerland, especially given the Swiss government was an opponent of the referendum's suggested changes and wants to slow-go changes that the referendum is meant to institute.

I really wouldn't be surprised if the EU players and the Swiss government sort of play a coordinated game behind closed doors so that the publicly-played moves may help shift sentiment and come with another referendum.

This referendum's vote result hits at the core of Schengen treaty & mobility rights for EU/EEA citizens and it risks undermining the ability of companies to compete from Switzerland. For visitors, not sure it will make much of a difference, other than it will once again allow for ("non-European") visitors to spend more time in Europe without a visa -- the irony of that given the xenophobic elements which pushed for this referendum.

Even before Switzerland's full implementation of Schengen just a handful of years ago, visiting wasn't a hassle for OECD country nationals from Europe or beyond -- it was even pretty easy for say Brazilians, a country full of lots of poor people and that is far removed from being an OECD country.

Alsacienne

Wouldn't it be possible for them to gently backpedal and rejoin the EEA (European Economic Area)?

Christopher

I don't think anything will change immediately.

As to the Schengen area, that concerns the movement of people from one country to another without the need for formal passport checks. This is not the same thing as the free movement of people for employment purposes etc; e.g. the UK and Ireland are not in the Schengen area but EU, EEA and (at the moment) Swiss citizens are able to come to the UK or Ireland tp take and seek employment, though there are passport checks between these countries and other countries in Europe. The Schengen treaties cover much more than passport-free travel, though, including cross-border policing and sharing of information.

What the Swiss vote does affect, in principle, is the free movement of people for employment and immigration purposes. How that will be tied in with passport-free travel from other European countries is a separate issue. It may well be that ultimately Switzerland will again have border controls with its neighbours, but I don't think that is necessarily so as a result of just this vote.

LupineChemist

Not to get overly political, but...

Basically any flexibility from Brussels will mean empowering a rather sizable skeptic faction in the UK, one of the core member countries. Switzerland was able to negotiate themselves into a basically de-facto EU status but has a take it or leave it position legally. It also seems very likely that they will not negotiate new bilateral treaties, but rather say that they need to become either full members or agree with the original treaties, no half measures.

Especially coming from a non-member, they can't pick and chose the core freedoms they want to have. Of course the Swiss like freedom of capital, but the freedom of movement is less appealing. There has to be a way to enforce them going hand-in-hand

Christopher

This is true, but we need to remember that (a) the Swiss government has considerable flexibility, under the terms of the recent referendum, as to how it enacts the requirements for an immigration quota; (b) it has three years in which to act, which is also three years for bilateral discussions between Switzerland and the EU; and (c) both sides want the thing to work.

I suppose also that we ought to remember that, ultimately, in a western-style democracy governments derive their authority from the people. This even applies to the EU, although in the case of the EU it is well disguised and many in the EU bureaucracy don't seem to recognise it. If people decide that they don't want free movement of people then, in the end, there won't be free movement of people, although there would be an awful lot of talk and also unpleasantness before that would happen.