As probably everyone has heard by now, the Swiss sovereign voted by about 57% of the popular vote and the assent of 22 of the 26 full and half-cantons (States) to write into our Constitution that the construction of new minarets is banned, and this despite opposition to this People’s Party-supported initiative from the government, from parliament, from all parties (except the People’s Party and the fringe Protestant Democratic Party), the unions, the churches, industry, banking – pretty much every establishmentarian institution.
I’m not happy about the ban – it was a pointless affront to a section of our population. Swiss zoning laws are arbitrary and byzantine enough to stop virtually anything if the local population put their mind to it, so the ban was not necessary. True, a minaret is not essential for a mosque, but it’s only the conservative fringe like the Wahhabis who are actually opposed to it. The call of the muezzin is banned anyway (not consistent with noise regulations- and it would be drowned out by church bells).
The vote was in some elements misdirected, but in others it spoke to legitimate concerns. Popular votes are a rum thing, and you’re only given the option of voting “yes” or “no”, there is no possibility of a nuanced response. But I certainly don’t think it is any “crisis of democracy”, or “failure” of anything except the failure of the political elites to deal with the issues that led to the “yes” vote.
Smug pundits in European press and politics have pontificated about the sad shift-to-the-right/fascism/intolerance/fear/obscurantism evident in the decision – knowing full well that if the issue came to a popular vote in their country, they’d get the same result. By the same token, there were those who hailed the Swiss vote (not understanding it) as finally standing up to Islam and called for similar stern measures for their countries. French president Nicolas Sarkozy at first jumped on the band-wagon to gain some credibility with potential Front National voters, but is now back-pedalling furiously because he is suddenly realising the he’s done a sorcerer’s apprentice.
There’s been talk about the Swiss government vetting initiatives for compliance with international law (European Human Rights Convention, in this case) and not allowing them to proceed if there’s a danger they do, but I’m against that – the only effect that would have is that we’d get a protest vote on something far more important. Among all the talk of “failure”, I don’t see much mention of the “failure” of moderate Islam to vocally and unequivocally commit to secular democracy – recognising full well that one reason is that immigrants tend to keep a low profile (as is expected of them here), and another is that the integrated Muslims precisely do not identify themselves primarily as Muslims but as Swiss.
Switzerland has a population of about 7m, of which 1.5m – about 21% – are non-nationals (for the US, that would mean about 65m foreigners). Most of them are German, so culturally very foreign, but not racially so. About 4.5% of the population are Muslims. Most Muslims are from the Kosovo, Bosnia-Hercegowina or Turkey, some are immigrants, some refugees (a big difference here – the US does not differentiate). Muslims of whatever nationality or ethnicity generally don’t have greater difficulties obtaining Swiss citizenship than other religions, nationalities or ethnicities (and in Switzerland, naturalisation is generally voted on by the community of residence). The OECD has certified that in the Swiss job market, “secondos” (children of naturalised Swiss) are the least disadvantaged when compared to all other OECD countries.
There are several hundred mosques/prayer rooms in Switzerland, but currently only four with minarets. Mosques here had an “open door” day before the vote, but it backfired – the most often-asked question was “why are men and women separate (and women relegated to the back or upper floor, out of sight)?” The initiative got a “yes” for a whole host of reasons, and the feminist vote – ironically for a male chauvinist party proposal – was one of them.
There has of course been a lot of analysis and soul-searching here about why; certainly it was a protest vote, a general “enough”. Enough of Islam-justified repression of women in arranged/forced marriages, girls pulled out of swimming class because the immodesty of it all mortifies the pasha’s honour, “honour”-killings and so on; enough of bands of refugee ex-Yugoslavia prepotenti roaming the towns and knifing and beating up Swiss youths; enough of stony-faced, head-scarved women not responding to the usual friendly “Grüezi” on the street; enough of Gaddafi running rough-shod over international law and diplomatic niceties (calling for Switzerland to be shared out between Germany, France and Italy), enough of Ahmedinajad’s lying and dissembling, enough of Karzai’s corruption; enough of rich Islamic potentates (like Gaddafi’s son) thinking they can do what they like and beat up their servants when they come here because that’s what they do back home; enough of the whole talk of an Islamic Caliphate and jihad against secular democracy (it did not help the Erdogan, the current Turkish prime minister, in a younger time called minarets the beach-heads of Islam in Europe); enough of foreigners pushing us around on bank secrecy, the Americans attacking UBS [entirely UBS’ own fault, and the Swiss should draw and quarter these idiots for making Switzerland such an easy target], the German finance minister (now sadly out of office) saying the Swiss need the whip taken to them, and the Italian Guardia di Finanza filming Italians crossing the border as part of an anti-tax-avoidance policy.
Several things are clear though – it was not so that voters with close contact to Muslims voted one way, those insulated from Muslims another. The initiative failed both in Geneva with its high proportion of Muslims and at the Zurich Gold Coast where there are virtually none; the initiative succeeded in rural areas without Muslims and those with Muslims. So it was not a vote taken in fear of the unknown; and the fact that the initiative failed in several high-Muslim areas also indicates that closeness to Muslims did not automatically generate support for the initiative.
Swiss have also been watching closely what is going on in France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, with Muslim populations there; unlike France, the UK and the Netherlands, we don’t have a colonial legacy; unlike Germany, we were fairly uncompromising about sending back the “Alien Workers” we imported in the roaring 70s, and while Germany imported Turks, we imported Italians. Switzerland does not have a “Muslim Problem” or “Muslim Question” (To this extent, the issue is a pure manufacture of the Swiss People’s Party, a formerly lack-lustre petit-bourgeois party then revamped along US GOP lines into a fighting force by Christoph Blocher. The People’s Party routinely brings forward anti-immigrant nuisance initiatives, but usually fails. We have a “People’s Party Problem”, not a “Muslim Problem”.) But the issues in our neighbouring countries surrounding head scarf/burqa, huge gated-community monster mosques, sharia, training and certification of imams etc. did resonate here. One of the often-heard slogans was “Wehret den Anfängen” – essentially, don’t let things progress until it’s a serious problem. It was a slogan used prior to WW II against Nazi fifth-column activity in Switzerland.
The reaction in Islamic countries has been highly differentiated – there’s been the grandstanding from Gaddafi and Ahmedinajad, which was to be expected and means nothing. The non-State-controlled press in the Islamic countries point out that Christians are much more discriminated against in their own countries, including restrictions on worship (which the Swiss minaret ban doesn’t do).
Al-Jazeera TV a couple of days ago did a discussion show with Oskar Freysinger, a vocal Austrian-immigrant Swiss member of parliament (lower house) for the People’s Party, and Assam al-Tamimi, and Palestine-born Briton. Tamimi called Freysinger a new Hitler, which Freysinger responded to by pointing out that Hitler did not allow popular ballots and that it had been the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who’d allied himself with Hitler, not the Swiss. I have not found a video of the show, but the commentary in the left-leaning Zürich Tagesanzeiger was that Tamimi did his cause no favours and made Freysinger look reasonable.
In Switzerland, religion has always been considered something so explosive that it warrants state intervention – we actively managed religion since the 14th Century, we kept the post-Reformation internecine strife within bounds and we kept out of the the 30-Years’-War. After the Catholic-inspired civil war of 1847 against the modern secular constitution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonderbund_war), our new constitution then banned Jesuits (lifted in 1973) and no new (Catholic) bishoprics may be established in Switzerland without the consent of the government.
The chairman of the Catholic conservative party caused a rumpus here last week when he said that Jews and Muslims should also be buried in communal cemeteries – Switzerland does not have Catholic and Protestant cemeteries, but secular cemeteries run by the Gemeinde. Jews and Muslims bury their dead in their own cemeteries, which are privately owned and run. The rumpus was that he was heard to say there should not be Jewish or Muslim cemeteries, which is not what he said – but what he did mean is that if, for the sake of peaceful community, Catholics had to get over their hang-ups about risking their eternal peace by being buried along-side Protestants, then why not Jews and Muslims.
This is where the initiative spoke to legitimate concerns – we’re an intensely political society, there’s enormous pressure to participate (something few foreigners who live here realise). One of the Gemeinde I lived in had 200 elected offices in a population of 4,000 and a voting population of 2,000. Most of the offices don’t take much time, but there is a function and responsibility associated with each of them and somebody who won’t screw it up has to agree to do it, and usually for free. We don’t want to, and cannot afford to have, sections of the population who deliberately exclude themselves.
The first successful initiative under the new Constitution of 1871 was the 1898 ban on kosher butchering (the provision has been removed from the Constitution, but the Animal Protection Law still says that it is illegal to butcher animals without first anesthetising them – some fundamentalist Jews find this non-kosher, but Muslims have no problem with accepting the meat as halal). Initiatives then were more difficult then today, the population was half today’s and women did not have the vote, so 100,000 signatures was a much bigger deal than today. The initiative was immensely popular, and directed against the many Eastern Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia and Romania and coming to western Europe – to the discomfort also of the secularised western Jews, who saw little in common with the mostly fundamentalist and exclusionist eastern Jews. Western Jews were at the brink of full integration – the new Constitution had done away with legal restrictions, but there were still informal restrictions aplenty. The last thing western Jews wanted was to be lumped with the medieval looking-living-acting Jews from eastern Europe – and they were happy to donate liberally to allow them to emigrate to Palestine. The rhetoric at the time was clearly anti-Semitic and nothing to be proud of.
There’s a huge difference between tolerance and apathy. I do think the Swiss are tolerant – a grudging and hard-fought-out acceptance of differences based on MUTUAL compromise. Where for Americans, freedom means “no-one tells me what to do”, for Swiss freedom means “I get to tell everyone else what to do”. Our mission is to be our brothers’ keeper. This calls for an awful lot of compromise – both sides need to be seen to be giving something. The anti-initiative side failed to show that.
Eventually, some case is going to go to the European Court of Human Rights, and eventually, Switzerland will lose (the ban is clearly discriminatory, even if it doesn’t impinge on freedom of faith), and eventually (10-15 years), something will have to be done about it – by that time, we’ll either have found a modus vivendi or we’re all in much deeper trouble. The far greater immediate risk I see is that there will be a development akin to what’s going on in the US: Secular-motivated legal action against creches on public ground, church bells ringing, singing Christmas songs in school and all that – things Swiss conservatives feel much more strongly about than Christianity proper. At hearings in parliament last week, school officials from the highly-populated, urbanised Cantons of Zurich and Aargau were asked whether there had been instances of parents wanted their children excused from school activities for concerns related to faith – indeed there had, they testified, but mostly in connection with fundamentalist Christians, rarely with Muslims.