Access Investments-European Union- ROMANIA

In Madrid last Thursday, European Commissioner Michel Barnier was waiting for his flight back to Brussels. The Frenchman is responsible for the EU's internal market and for banking regulation. In many ways, he is a typical Eurocrat: hardly anyone knows who he is but almost all are affected by the decisions he takes. He has ambitions of becoming European Commission President once Barroso's term expires this autumn and had just had a meeting with the Spanish prime minister in an effort to gain his support.

Barnier says that he respects the Swiss referendum, but he is of course unhappy with the result. Immigration quotas for EU citizens, he says, are simply "unacceptable."

He is a convinced European. In the early 1990s, he was one of the few from his party -- the conservative Union for a Popular Movement -- to vote for the Maastricht Treaty, the agreement that paved the way for the common currency. Now, he is seeing many UMP members showing sympathy for the xenophobic slogans being bandied about by the right-wing Front National. Even French Interior Minister Arnaud Montebourg, a member of President François Hollande's Socialist Party, has criticized EU competition rules. France's relationship to the EU is at a low point.

Barnier is trying not to let it bother him. "The crisis is to blame," he says, adding that once the economy gets going again, normality will return. But no one can really say when, or even whether, the EU will once again see substantial growth. As such, Barnier is interested in calming the debate by appeasing the British: One should look into what issues could be better regulated on a national basis, he recently said.

As a parliamentarian and regional president, Barnier served the Savoyen region for more than 20 years. He says: "175,000 people there drive to work across the Swiss border each day." These engineers, researchers and doctors, he said, contribute to Switzerland's prosperity -- a situation which is beneficial to all. On the other side of the border, in the canton of Geneva, the majority agrees. Voters there rejected the referendum.

But proximity to the border does not necessarily result in a pro-European attitude. A couple hundred kilometers to the southeast, another border canton overwhelmingly supported the initiative: Tessin. Some 60,000 people from the Italian region of Lombardy work in Tessin; well before dawn, the traffic jam in Viggiù, an Italian border town of 5,000, begins. Brake lights line up for kilometers as commuters slowly make their way from the EU into Switzerland.