ROME, 23 October 2015 – The success in the recent Swiss elections of the UDC-SVP, a xenophobic, anti European Union, right wing party, opens a number of reflections.

Seventy years ago Europe came out from a terrible war, exhausted and destroyed.
That produced a generation of statesman, who went about creating a European integration, in order to avoid the repetition of the internal conflicts that had created the two world wars.
Today a war between France and Germany is unthinkable, and Europe is an island of peace for the first time in its history.
This is the mantra we hear all the time. What is forgotten is that in fact a good part of Europe did not want integration.
In 1960, the United Kingdom led the creation of an alternative institution, dedicated only to commercial exchange: the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), formed by the United Kingdom, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, then later Finland and Iceland.
It was only in 1972 that, bowing to the success of European integration, the UK and Denmark asked to join the EU. Later, Portugal and Austria left EFTA to join the European Union.
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