Paolo Dardanelli and Oscar Mazzoleni, "Dealing with Europe: Lessons from Switzerland's Experience" (Routledge, 2021)

Between voting to leave the European Union in 2016 and doing it four years later, the British political and media classes debated what kind of relationship they should have with the EU after withdrawal. Should it be Norwegian, Canadian or even - said government spinners - Australian?

Now the UK is outside both the EU and the wider 30-nation European Economic Area (EEA), Routledge has launched a four-book Dealing with Europe series edited by John Erik Fossum and Christopher Lord (University of Oslo) to explore the options. The series opens with Switzerland-EU Relations: Lessons for the UK after Brexit? (Routledge, 2021) edited by Paolo Dardanelli and Oscar Mazzoleni.

Next year, it will be 30 years since the Swiss voted against joining the EEA, thereby launching three decades of bilateral negotiations to create a patchwork version of something close to the same thing.

In this book, Professors Dardanelli, Mazzoleni and 10 other Swiss-EU specialists examine the background to the 1992 vote, the bilateral agreements, the impact on domestic Swiss politics and society, and the lessons for the UK post-Brexit.

Paolo Dardanelli is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Kent and has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Cologne, Berne, and Madrid. He was educated at the universities of Turin and Durham and at the London School of Economics.

*The author's own book recommendations are How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Viking, 2018) and Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies (Penguin, 2012).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.

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