The Politics of Free Movement: What Have We Learned?
On this day, 25 years ago, Switzerland signed a bilateral agreement with the European Union to establish the free movement of persons. It is time to look back on how this issue has shaped Swiss politics thus far.
The idea of the free movement of persons as reciprocal mobility rights and the opening of labor markets is not a particularly new one. Switzerland had signed multiple such agreements already at the end of the 19th century, a period that has been coined as the first wave of globalization. War and increasing nationalism have however ended this period of openness.
In the post-war era, the European Union (EU) introduced step-by-step free movement between its member states starting with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Switzerland, however, showed little interest in joining the fourth freedom of the emerging European Single Market. It was brought on the bilateral agenda by the EU as a condition for Switzerland’s market access.
To protect the integrity of the common market, the EU insists on common rules and conditions meaning that the four freedoms (capital, goods, services, people) are indivisible and third countries cannot cherry-pick from them. As a result, Switzerland finally accepted the demand for free movement as a concession that resulted in the ‘Bilateral Treaties I’ deepening the Swiss integration into the European Single Market. The reintroduction of free movement was thus a reluctant one and resulted from issue-linkage by the EU in negotiating the bilateral relationship.
Hardened Domestic Contestation and a Changing Discourse
An important reason why Switzerland was reluctant to accept free movement was the (feared) domestic opposition to immigration. Already in the 1992 referendum on the Swiss integration into the European Economic Area (EEA), anti-immigration sentiments have motivated some citizens to oppose the ballot proposal.
The Bilateral Treaties that were a response to the failed EEA-integration mobilized opposition from both the far-left and the far-right, whereas the Swiss Peoples Party (SPP) supported it. The broad elite consensus resulted in a comfortable majority approving the new treaties in a referendum vote. What stands out is that the vote campaign highlighted the new mobility-rights for Swiss citizens: Directly after the vote, 71% considered it important that the Swiss can work and study freely in the EU, whereas only 41% were concerned about increasing immigration.
The popular approval of free movement was however not the end of domestic contestation. The SPP changed sides and launched multiple referendums and initiatives against the EU free movement. They failed to find majoritarian support with the exception of the 2014 ‘Initiative against Mass Immigration’ (IMI), which was narrowly approved by 50.2% of voters.
By that time, the discourse had strongly shifted away from the mobility rights that Swiss citizens enjoy in the EU to the immigration into Switzerland causing all kinds of social ills and so-called ‘density stress.’ Survey research has shown that citizens across Europe like their free movement rights, but withdraw support for free movement if they link it with undesired immigration. The discourse shift has thus increased opposition to free movement and the electoral vote share of the SPP , which became in that sense the political beneficiary of the free movement with the EU. Like the Brexit campaign, the opposition to free movement allowed for linking anti-immigration sentiments with Euroscepticism, making it an effective political program.
No Escape from the Immigration Dilemma
The approval of the IMI demanding immigration quota and a preference for Swiss citizens on the labor market created a difficult political dilemma as the new constitutional article violated the principle of a rights-based and non-discriminatory access of EU citizens to the Swiss labor market, as agreed in the free movement agreement.
Should priority be given to the new constitutional article demanding immigration restrictions or to the existing Bilateral Treaties with the EU that the Swiss elites believe to be of utmost importance to the country? The Swiss parliament finally opted for a symbolic implementation of the popular vote without violating the free movement provisions.
How did citizens respond to this strategy of muddling through? Many citizens wanted to have the cake and eat it too, both the beneficial market access and immigration restrictions, and they did not change these preferences also when it became clear that these objectives could not be realized simultaneously. Instead of adjusting preferences, citizens engaged in rationalizing the implementation failure either by believing that their demand had been implemented or that there would be no trade-off if only the Swiss government had negotiated more forcefully.
Consequently, the tension between economic openness and immigration control continues to characterize the domestic political debate in Switzerland. Given that the next anti-immigration initiative is just around the corner, it is not surprising that the Swiss negotiation plan for the new institutional agreement with the EU warmed up the old (but unsuccessful) idea of a safeguard clause in another attempt to square the circle. This shows the continuous dilemma requiring a delicate political balancing act, where sending signals to voters and symbolic measures have an important weight.
Philipp Lutz is a senior researcher at the University of Geneva and an assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is an FNS Ambizione grantee for the project “Connecting countries and dividing people: The politics of burden-sharing in times of contested globalization.”
