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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

> they are in Schengen and the free trade area so basically in the EU for the most part

That’s a large leap. It’s not in the EEA but is in the EFTA, so even fewer EU regulations apply than in Norway, for instance. Furthermore, the EU is a much larger political entity with its own parliament and other institutions, as I’m sure you’re aware, and these don’t have direct jurisdiction over most aspects of Swiss law as they would for EU member nations. It’s a more straightforward process for Switzerland to nullify its bilateral agreements (as is threatened seemingly every few years) than for something like Brexit.

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You are of course correct that they could at any point in time decide to cancel the contracts and it's part of the political game to threaten to do so every few years.

In practice they have few alternatives given their location as a land locked nation without the ability to feed their population without imports. All trade flows through or over territory of EU member states.

Tight CH-EU cooperation has been very beneficial for both sides and most of what we see is the usual political bickering.

> even fewer EU regulations apply than in Norway, for instance

Automatically, but many if not most commercial regulations get incorporated, in this case the warranty legislation also dictates 2 years

> than for something like Brexit I would say the difference lies more in the renegotiation than in the cutting. EU membership doesn't get renegotiated often, while treaties between EU/CH are expected to be renegotiated (although that has a whole host of challenges and doesn't happen nearly as often as you'd expect)

But nullification is a similar impact and a similar process as brexit because most of these negotiations had a guillotine clause which tied them toghether

Brexit was a remarkably straightforward process, you send a letter and at the latest two years later you're out if you don't ask for exception

It was the headless chicken phase when the UK was trying to negotiate without having an internal consensus on what they wanted that was convoluted

Switzerland has this weird relationship with the EEA where they want to be able to export easily so they align their laws but don't want to be a member so they have no say on what is done.

> Brexit was a remarkably straightforward process, you send a letter and at the latest two years later you're out if you don't ask for exception

Straightforward is a bit of a stretch.

Brexit was convoluted because the UK is in a weird position where it had a ton of agreements regarding its border with France which had not been negotiated for a long time as they didn't matter when they were part of the EU and they wanted things which were not compatible with the Good Friday agreement. As far as I know, this part is still not settled.

Yeah, but that's not the "exit" part, that's life as a third country part

By the way, it was the border with Ireland that created issues, not the one with France

It was an admittedly "um actually"-adjacent comment, but I think still justified because Switzerland would have the exact same issues if they just renounced their treaties with the EU so they'd need to undergo as complex a negotiation as the UK had to

I think the absence of an Ireland situation for Switzerland is meaningful, here. There isn't a preexisting open border agreement that Switzerland is obligated to uphold by both the EU and the US, which the Good Friday Agreement is for the UK. That open border agreement also seems to go further than the Schengen agreement in practice considering Switzerland already has regular (but not universal) customs checks due to its ex-EEA status, not to mention other Schengen member nations such as Denmark which have at times maintained consistent immigration checks.

> By the way, it was the border with Ireland that created issues, not the one with France

As a French, let me tell you there were and still are plenty of issues with France too notably regarding fishing rights and border control. France didn't threaten to turn off electricity to some of the Channel islands because everything was fine.

There were issues with France due to them leaving and the way they chose to, but the issues with the Irish border were constraining the way they could leave (to some level)

The UK could choose to leave and cut off all agreements concerning fishing rights, the tunnel, the border checks with france and it'd have been perfectly legal, if diplomatically damaging

With the Irish border there was/is the complication of the GFA, which prevented the same kind of approach

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