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Comment by brmgb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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