All one has to do is look at how the European Union (EU) Troika (EC, IMF, ECB) dealt with Greece regarding their debt insolvency to realize that the former trade union has turned immensely political, and has little desire to act equitably with every member in the coalition. And since 2014, calls among many European nations have risen to have their country leave the EU and go back to determining their own economic futures.
This week will be the most current referendum for a nation to leave the Eurozone, with the BREXIT vote scheduled for Thursday. But just last week, one country who functions intrinsically with the EU, but has never been a member, decided to revoke their long-time application to join the union and instead remain neutral within Europe.
The upper house of the Swiss parliament on Wednesday voted to invalidate its 1992 application to join the European Union, backing an earlier decision by the lower house. The vote comes just a week before Britain decides whether to leave the EU in a referendum.
Twenty-seven members of the upper house, the Council of States, voted to cancel Switzerland’s longstanding EU application, versus just 13 senators against. Two abstained.
In the aftermath of the vote, Switzerland will give formal notice to the EU to consider its application withdrawn, the country’s foreign minister, Didier Burkhalter, was quoted as saying by Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
The original motion was introduced by the conservative Swiss People’s Party MP, Lukas Reimann. It had already received overwhelming support from legislators in the lower house of parliament in March, with 126 National Council deputies voting in favor, and 46 against.
Thomas Minder, counsellor for the state of Schaffhausen and an active promoter of the concept of “Swissness,” said he was eager to “close the topic fast and painlessly” as only “a few lunatics” may want to join the EU now, he told the newspaper. - Russia Today
Sadly, the European Union has evolved from a simple European based trade union which sought to standardize trade, labor, and currencies into a political structure with thousands of unelected bureaucrats mandating laws on otherwise sovereign countries. And this can be seen at length in the EU’s mandate for countries within the coalition to take in and pay for millions of refugees from Islamic, Central Asian, and African nations.
If anyone had been paying attention to the massive success of this weekend’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, they would have noticed how many European countries flocked towards Russia’s camp, and were salivating to make trade agreement despite the fact that the Eurasian power is still under Western sanctions. And this shows the potential that real free trade has versus the regulation stifled paradigm that is today’s European Union, and as such it should no longer be a surprise that nations within the EU are ready to disband their affiliations with the coalition, and seek to choose their own economic futures under their own sovereign policies.
Kenneth Schortgen Jr is a writer for Secretsofthefed.com, Examiner.com,Roguemoney.net, and To the Death Media, and hosts the popular web blog, The Daily Economist. Ken can also be heard Wednesday afternoons giving an weekly economic report on the Angel Clark radio show.