Frank A. Meyer – Category: Holiday Greetings

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Ignazio Cassis’s holiday card invites interpretation: if you remove the insert, the picture of the world becomes clear, and an Indian proverb sheds light on the sender’s philosophical message: “If you see everything gray, move the elephant.”

Who is the elephant in the Foreign Secretary’s daily life?

Of course, a framework agreement with the EU, which should be finally negotiated in 2024 – if the sunny and cheerful man from Ticino manages to dispel the gray gloom of a difficult issue by moving the elephant.

But why should the Foreign Secretary achieve tomorrow what he failed to achieve yesterday? No political intentions are in doubt, since beating blackcurrants is considered good manners throughout the country. The key sentence can be read in the Zurich Tages-Anzeiger: “…Mr. Cassis, who gives the impression that even after six years he has not yet arrived at his office.”

“Mr. Cassis” – it could not have been more impudent and contemptuous.

There is no shortage of judges about Switzerland’s damaged relations with the EU. There are complaints about wage protection, cost regulation, receiving social assistance, the Union Citizens’ Directive, the European Court of Justice, the Arbitration Court and again and again against “foreign judges” – a symbolic term for all the horrors that the Swiss-EU Agreement can bring sorrow to the Swiss Confederation regarding negotiations with them about the evil power of Brussels in principle.

But which Gordian knot will actually need to be cut?

This may be due to the name of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs – the name that the ministry bore until 1979: “Federal Political Department”, EPD.

Political department.

Politics Department!

Politics was removed and replaced with “foreign affairs”.

The European Union, the most economically powerful territory in the world, which influences the fortunes and sorrows of Switzerland, is a “foreign affair”? The paradoxical avoidance of the term “politics” is part of the tradition of Swiss politics. According to the motto: “Please do not politicize, we want to remain objective.” Dry objectivity should appear modest in contrast to the lush politicization that the world around us practices.

But what will the policy be like as a foreign policy – no matter how paradoxical it may sound?

State Council member Daniel Jozic explains it this way: “In recent years, the Federal Council has lacked the will to lead and the desire to shape the situation. For example, in the EU dossier, as well as in other major projects. The desire to create has something to do with the willingness to take risks. Not everyone has the courage to propose a project for which they do not yet have a majority and for which they do not know whether it will even work.”

This is where politics begins: from the project to the struggle for the project – for the consent of citizens. The canceled framework agreement with the EU would be “politicized” in exactly this way: in the fight for a majority at the ballot box. But the government decided to abandon the policy: it’s better not to fight, you might lose.

According to philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), politics is synonymous with freedom—and vice versa. Anyone who gives up politics gives up freedom – his freedom as a federal councilor, like Ignazio Cassis. Another thoughtful play on words from the great democratic thinker speaks of the “freedom to be free.” In fact, freedom of thought and action requires the awareness that one is free, free to think and free to act.

Ignazio Cassis must move the elephant on his festival map, then he will see what Hannah Arendt means: the light of politics as the light of freedom.

Switzerland’s “foreign affairs” must become political. Because nothing needs politics more urgently than Switzerland’s relationship with the European Union.

As a recent poll shows, citizens seem to have already realized this: the vast majority, including SVP voters, are in favor of a political solution with the EU.

The saddest thing about this good news is that the government again does not need to be brave to engage in politics – the people have overtaken it.

Happy Holidays!

Source: Blick