There is one thing about the Crans-Montana disaster that is beyond revolting to me. Let us go through a summary of the events :

  • 2001 — The European Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) was initiated in October. This mechanism enabled countries to coordinate when responding to large emergencies (read it up on Wikipedia). By default, every EU member state is part of it.
  • 2014 — Two EFTA countries join the UCPM : Norway and Iceland. That leaves Switzerland and Liechtenstein as the only EFTA countries that are not part of the mechanism.
  • 2015-2024 — Eight additional non-EU, non-EFTA states join the UCPM :
    • Montenegro (2015)
    • North Macedonia (2015)
    • Serbia (2015)
    • Türkiye (2016)
    • Bosnia and Herzegovina (2022)
    • Albania (2023)
    • Ukraine (2023, while under full-scale invasion by a foreign army for crying out loud)
    • Moldova (2024)
  • 2022 — National Councillor Michel Matter of Geneva files motion 22.3904 to request our adhesion to the UCPM. Both the Federal Council and Parliament approve the motion.
  • 2025 — The Federal Council claims the legal situation of non-EU states such as Switzerland prevents our accession to the mechanism and delays the application of the motion.
  • 2026 — The Crans-Montana fire prompts our government to immediately activate the UCPM, a request that is instantly granted. Maximal aid is provided to us and many of our patients are flown all over the continent for immediate treatment.

I understand international politics are complicated, but it is very hard to look at the current situation and act as if we do not look like massively unserious clowns right now. We had 25 years to find a way to adhere to a very obviously important international mutual-aid system that all of our neighbours are part of, and we ended up having to activate it without even being part of it. We claim we cannot join it because our legal status prevents us, yet it seems to have worked when activated. In addition, the two other major members of EFTA managed to do it almost 16 years ago, and eight other non-EU members somehow found it to not be a problem either during the past decade, yet somehow for us it is.

It cannot be overstated how hypocritical it is of us to claim the legal framework does not allow us to join such a critical mechanism, all the while being the stage of a disaster that is beyond obviously the collision of insufficient safety standards, negligent government inspections in the face of overwhelming evidence of misconduct, failure to bar people with known foreign criminal history from owning a business (I have yet to hear from SVP/UDC about that one, but I guess that's just for brown people), and probably corruption at the communal level at the very least (absolutely nobody was expecting to see this in Valais of all places…). Are other countries perfect? Far from it, but right now we have absolutely no excuse for this mess. It should be on us to figure out a way to make this work, for the good of everyone. In this case, the UCPM makes it clear that non-membership isn't a barrier to anything, but this is basic emergency service interoperability between neighbouring nations, not an intergalactic space program. There is simply no excuse. The optics are terrible.

The next thing I want to hear from our government is how we are going to fast-track our application to the UCPM with utmost priority and make all the necessary arrangements for it, with a nice apology letter and a pristine box of chocolates for this unfathomably idiotic blunder. If this mechanism was not about saving lives, other countries would be well within their rights to tell us how we can shove our "legal framework" and solve our problems alone. I agree the EU is not perfect, and I have my own reservations about it, but the present situation looks 100% like a Swiss problem and 0% like an EU one. I might be Swiss and proud of it, but this is textbook Helvetic Hypocrisy, TM & AOP.

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GarlicThread

1 comment

  1. I agree! Also why does Switzerland always want to pander to the US over the EU, when the EU is our biggest trading partner and our closest neighbours?

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