[mike_hearn]

Sure it did. Spain just gave 500,000 "undocumented migrants" a residence permit. They can now freely move throughout the continent. That sort of act was never envisioned when the Swiss agreed to FoM with the EU, which for most of its history was used only by a tiny minority of people all of whom had a similar culture.

The EU/Swiss agreements don't have to be negotiated as a whole. The whole guillotine clause schtick exists only to try and transfer as much power to the EU Commission as possible. Nothing stops European countries being reasonable and looking for ways to work with each other on whatever areas they can agree; it's a deliberate ideological choice to refuse.

[tpm]

What EU-Switzerland agreement was broken by the EU by this action of Spain? And please do be exact which one and how. Otherwise stop telling lies.

> Nothing stops European countries being reasonable and looking for ways to work with each other on whatever areas they can agree; it's a deliberate ideological choice to refuse.

Yes, and it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members') interests against the interests of other countries. Which is why neither the UK nor Switzerland nor other non-members can pick and choose. Makes them understandably unhappy of course, but so what? They are protecting their interests and we are protecting ours.

[mike_hearn]

The treaties don't explicitly say "you may not grant residence en masse to city sized populations of illegal immigrants", because not doing that was considered so obvious it didn't need to be said at the time they were written. Such treaties don't cover a lot of possible but unlikely eventualities, which is why it's bad and wrong to make treat renegotiation artificially difficult.

> it's the fine and reasonable ideology of protecting your own (in this case EU members') interests

It doesn't protect their interests. That's the whole point. If it were about protecting the interests of European countries they could negotiate their each interest individually and independently with each other. The EU construct is deliberately designed to ignore the interests of any specific member state in favour of the interest of a new entity, the European Union, which has an entirely separate set of interests that don't correspond to the interests of the people living in it.

> Which is why neither the UK nor Switzerland nor other non-members can pick and choose

They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully. Hence why the EU/Swiss relations aren't governed by membership and why the EU has agreed to work with the UK on various interests without requiring membership (despite denying they'd ever do this at the time).

[tpm]

So no treaty was broken? Why did you write "Sure it did" when you know it wasn't?

> They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully.

They didn't. What happened was that some parts of some treaty were renegotiated or amended and agreed by both parties. Which is quite common in any such relationship.

[mike_hearn]

You can use that definition of breaking a treaty if you like. But it's not a good idea. It sends the world a message that negotiating with European countries is dangerous because to avoid getting screwed you'd have to write down all known common sense and social conventions in the text of the treaty, and probably include the contents of a specific dictionary as well, and even then they might just do something crazy you never predicted whilst claiming the agreement was being respected.

Note: this argument was actually used by the pro-Leave faction in the UK. They explicitly argued that any deal Cameron reached with the other EU member states would be worthless because European countries can't be trusted to honor their agreements when it becomes ideologically inconvenient. And that argument landed, which is why Cameron returned with a vaguely worded emergency break deal and then never mentioned it again - nobody took it seriously, and he was forced to campaign on the state of the union as it was, and lost. So these tactics do have a cost.

[tpm]

Treaty law just doesn't work with 'common sense and social conventions' any more than compilers that won't compile your 'common sense and social conventions' text. You have to say exactly what you want, nothing more, nothing less. That's the work of lawyers and negotiators. As my lawyer friends say, well-written agreements make good friends (and vice versa).

But also note that you are the only one against Spain creating a path for a group of people that live there to gain legal status. No one mentioned that as a specific issue worth raising at international level. It's a non-issue.

[ericmay]

> But also note that you are the only one against Spain creating a path for a group of people that live there to gain legal status.

Nah I have an issue with it too, conceptually. You're basically rewarding bad actors for breaking rules and laws which is unfair to those who were and are trying to immigrate legally. At a minimum.

Immigration isn't a moral good, it's just a switch we can flip on or off. Too few people? A given society can have more permissive rules. Too many people? Have more restrictive rules. Being an immigrant is just a random status one has by virtue of moving to another country - it's just paperwork.