Swiss Review 4/2021

Swiss Review / August 2021 / No.4 23 Switzerland’s interests. The government also intends to make its outstanding Cohesion Fund payment to Brussels, intended to help poorer EU member states. According to Cassis, this is “the admission fee for access to the singlemar- ket”. It is also meant as an olive branch to the EU. In Sep- tember, parliament will decidewhether to approve the pay- ment worth 1.3 billion Swiss francs. Politicians had already sanctioned the payment in December 2019, albeit on the proviso that the EU refrain fromtaking punitivemeasures against Switzerland. Brussels has already started to tighten the screw. Since the end of May, companies that exportmedical technology have faced significant administrative hurdles to getting their products certified in the EU. This is a direct conse- quence of the collapse of the framework agreement, rais- ing fears that unfettered access to the EU singlemarket will now be eroded further. Trouble also looms regarding ac- cess to the Horizon Europe research programme. If the EU restricts access or goes as far as barring Switzerland from the programme altogether, this would hindermobility par- ticularly among the student and academic community. New bilateral agreements on areas such as electricity trading are completely off the table for now. A blackout is unlikely in Switzerland, evenwithout an electricity treaty. Yet the risk of critical situations occurring on the power grid will increase if the network operators are excluded from the EU’s cooperation platform. Not everyone is pessimistic about the future. Economic historian Tobias Straumann believes that Brussels will set- tle for a pragmatic course sooner or later – as it did during negotiations with the now-departed UK. “The EU and its member states are used to handling variations, granting exceptions and making pragmatic decisions,” he wrote in the “NZZ am Sonntag”. For more information on Swiss-EU relations, see the “Swiss Review” online dossier: http://revue.link/europadossier This dossier also contains relevant position papers prepared by the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (in French and German). Commission that the two parties “begin political dialogue on developing a common agenda”, as Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis put it – the understanding in Berne being that the existing bilateral agreements will “continue to be applied con- sistently and without any difficulty”. Ensuring freedom of movement in this context is a key concern for the Swiss Abroad. The Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA) fears that the breakdown of talks will jeopardise the residency rights of the 434,000 or so Swiss living in EU countries. Brussels tightens the screw Of its own accord, the Federal Council wants to align Swiss legislation with EU law tomaintain the bilateral approach. The idea is that this will prevent a backlash and preserve