Switzerland and the European integration process: Engagement without marriage

Who Europeanises parliamentary attention, on which issues and how? A policy agenda perspective

“…Direct Europeanization represents the most obvious mechanism of EU influence, as it results from an international negotiation between Switzerland and the EU, and related domestic legislative changes. During the last two decades, Switzerland and the EU have concluded more than fifteen bilateral agreements in various policy fields, such as immigration, education and research, energy, transportation, agriculture and taxation (Afonso and Maggetti 2007, Dupont and Sciarini 2001. Indirect Europeanization, by contrast, occurs without formal negotiations with the EU.…”

Switzerland's Regulatory European Integration: Between Tacit Consensus and Noisy Dissensus

“…Tobias Jaag (2010) andDaniel Th€ urer et al (2007) assume that the negotiations of the Bilaterals I and II agreement packages were considerably simplified, because Switzerland had already adapted a significant part of the relevant domestic legislation to EU law. In areas where Swiss law was not compatible with EU standards, Switzerland was sometimes forced to adapt its legislation during negotiations (e.g., road transport during Bilaterals I negotiations; Dupont and Sciarini 2007). In a similar vein, Jaag (2010) assumed that domestic adaptations become less important, the more sectoral agreements Switzerland concluded with the EU.…”

“…The literature on Switzerland's European policies provides several explanations for the sectoral agreements and the policy of making domestic legislation EU compatible. In the case of the sectoral agreements, these explanations rely on analyses of the most famous agreement packages, Bilaterals I and II Maggetti 2007, Dupont andSciarini 2007). These explanations deal with Swiss and EU interests and with the dynamics of domestic as well as international negotiations.…”

“…At the international level, scholars showed that issue linkages were crucial for the success of negotiations with the EU on the Bilaterals I and II (Dupont and Sciarini 2007;Afonso and Maggetti 2007). This explains why Switzerland agreed to negotiate politically sensitive issues like the free movement of persons (Bilaterals I) and the taxation of savings and fight against fraud (Bilaterals II).…”

Spatial misfits in multilevel governance - impacts on the small island state of Malta

“…The study cannot make use of a control group, an EU member state where the EU policy is absent. Even in candidate EU countries, the EU influence starts before accession (Borg & Inguanez, 1993;Dupont & Sciarini, 2001;Marthe Narud & Strøm, 2000). One solution to this problem is to investigate a policy sector with weak EU influence (as in Case 5) although this does not mean that the EU policy is absent.…”