Olivier Mader 🇨🇭🇫🇷🇮🇹 retweetledi
Switzerland sits in the geographic center of Europe and has spent the last 700 years refusing to join anyone's empire. The EU sits around it like water around a rock. And the rock keeps winning.
Consider the numbers. Swiss GDP per capita ran near $100,000 in 2023. Germany, the supposed engine of the EU, sat under $55,000. The Swiss franc has gained against the euro almost every year since the single currency launched in 1999, to the point where the Swiss National Bank spent years fighting its own currency's strength. Think about that. The Swiss problem was that the world wanted their money too much. Greece, Italy, and Portugal would have killed for that problem while the European Central Bank printed their savings into the ground.
Neutrality is an economic stance. When you refuse to subordinate your monetary system to Brussels, you keep the discipline that a small open economy needs to survive. Switzerland never handed its interest rates to Frankfurt. It never signed up for the regulatory machine that produces the EU's 30,000-plus legal acts, the directives on the curvature of cucumbers and the vacuum cleaner wattage limits and the cookie banners you click through forty times a day. The Swiss looked at all of it through bilateral treaties, picking what served them and declining the rest. Voters rejected EEA membership in 1992. They have never regretted it.
Brussels calls this "cherry picking" and means it as an insult. Choosing is what free market economists call it. The entire EU project runs on the premise that harmonized regulation across 27 states produces prosperity, when the evidence sits right there in the Alps: the country that stayed out, kept its own money, and let cantons compete on tax rates outperforms the bloc that swallowed every rule.
The EU offers you a seat at the table and a bill for the meal. Switzerland kept its kitchen.
So the next time someone tells you small nations cannot survive outside the bloc, point at the eight million people who run banks, drugs, and watches from a country that never asked permission.
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