By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday. September 17, 2020
They want out, and they aren’t even in.
While the United Kingdom flounders through its divorce
from the European Union, Switzerland is holding a national referendum that
would sever key parts of the Swiss-EU relationship. Independent-minded
Switzerland has never become a formal EU member, but it is as a practical
matter economically integrated into the union, and, to an extent, socially
integrated as well.
That integration is the result of Switzerland’s being a
member of the Schengen area, which facilitates the free movement of people
across European borders. Swiss people generally do not need a visa to work or
reside in an EU country, and — more to the point of the upcoming referendum —
most citizens of EU countries do not need a visa to live or work in
Switzerland. Switzerland’s ruling Swiss People’s Party (SVP) opposes deepening
ties with the European Union and strongly desires to reduce immigration to
Switzerland. In 2010, the SVP successfully campaigned for a popular initiative
calling for the mandatory expulsion of foreigners convicted of serious crimes.
In 2014, the SVP successfully campaigned for a referendum to limit immigration
by imposing numerical quotas.
That quota system would have conflicted with
Switzerland’s obligations under its existing relationship with the European
Union, and so the government imposed an alternative (requiring Swiss employers
to favor Swiss applicants in hiring in areas with above-average unemployment)
that opponents criticized, not unfairly, as a refusal to implement a duly
passed popular initiative — and such initiatives are an important feature of
Swiss democracy. The current referendum debate is a continuation of that fight.
The cultural fissures in Swiss politics will be roughly
familiar to Americans. While it is principally concerned with immigration, the
SVP also successfully campaigned for a national ban on the construction of
minarets after a local fight over construction plans at a mosque. People in
Switzerland’s rural areas tend to support the parties of the right, and they
are relatively hostile to the European Union and to immigration, especially
immigration from beyond the European countries on Switzerland’s borders that
share one of its four national languages; people in the big metropolitan areas
tend to align with the parties of the left, to be more open to immigration, and
to support closer relations with the European Union. High-tech and health-care
companies have a disproportionate number of foreign workers on their payrolls,
and immigrants also are overrepresented on the welfare rolls, to the dismay and
vexation of many natives. Like the United States, Switzerland has a federal
system, and initiatives (such as the minaret ban) that require a constitutional
amendment require a “double majority” — a majority of the vote nationally and
a majority of the vote in a majority of the cantons.
Switzerland’s SVP is in many ways a Donald Trump-Nigel
Farage party with a populist rhetoric heavy on anti-elitism and
anti-metropolitanism. Which is, in a way, surprising: Switzerland has no
national language and no national religion, and the mode of life in Zurich and Geneva
is very different from that of the countryside. It lacks the homogeneity that
often is cited as a key ingredient in the Scandinavian welfare states. But its
cultural nationalism is both robust and organic, even among many left-liberal
Swiss people who would shudder to think of themselves as nationalists of any
kind. In spite of their linguistic and cultural diversity, Swiss people have a
very strong sense of Swissness. The Italian-speaking Swiss are a small minority
of the population (less than 9 percent) but it is precisely in the
Italian-speaking region that the SVP’s populist nationalism has found the most
purchase. The head of the SVP comes from Italian Switzerland, where the local
answer to the SVP, the Lega dei Ticinesi, takes an even harder line on the EU
and immigration, and in 2013 passed a ban on face coverings in public — a ban
on burqas in all but name.
Pulling Switzerland out of the Schengen area would do
much more than advertised, because Switzerland has a further complex
relationship with the European Union secured by a series of treaties that would
be nullified by Switzerland’s closing its borders. The current initiative is
unlikely to pass, but the polls suggest that it enjoys the support of about 40
percent of the Swiss public — a sizeable minority in any democratic system, and
one that matters especially in a system that requires a high degree of
consensus for major policy changes. However the vote on the referendum goes,
the issue will not be settled.
And that vote is worth keeping an eye on: Just as the
Brexit vote prefigured the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the Swiss
referendum on September 27 offers not a perfect analogy but an indicator of the
animal spirits loose in the world, passions and energies that are distinct in
their local expressions but at the same time part of a widespread phenomenon in
the wealthy democracies, driven largely by immigration (including the European
refugee crisis) and heightened by the coronavirus epidemic.
Switzerland is a small, compact country with a population
less than that of greater Chicago. The United States is a sprawling continental
superpower home to more people than any other country save China and India. But
the fault line that runs through tiny, orderly Switzerland bears more than a
passing resemblance to the one that divides the Americans in the MAGA hats from
the ones with the NPR tote-bags. Switzerland isn’t having our riots, but they
do not have a rioting style. The pattern is repeated globally: The people of
the developed world are having many of the same fights for many of the same
reasons, and none of us has quite figured out a stable modus vivendi —
and few have even developed a real understanding of the costs and risks of our
instability.
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