The Swiss Go Nativist

(CNN) — Swiss voters on Sunday adopted a referendum banning the construction of minarets, seen by some on the far right as a sign of encroaching Islamism.

“The Federal Council respects this decision,” said a statement from Switzerland’s government. “Consequently the construction of new minarets in Switzerland is no longer permitted. The four existing minarets will remain.

via Swiss vote to ban minaret construction – CNN.com.

In a move that’s shocked Europhiles everywhere, Swiss voters took to the polls this weekend and voted for a referendum that made it onto the ballot thanks to the efforts of the Swiss People’s Party that would ban further construction of minarets in the country.

Yes, you read that right — the Swiss have banned minarets. While it may seem odd to most Americans that a political party would have it out for a piece of architecture often associated with a particular faith (you’d be hard pressed to see a national referendum in the U.S. banning Buddha statues or crosses), it’s more or less the norm for the Swiss People’s Party — whose campaign advertisements here apparently endorse the ejection of black sheep from the all-white sheep Switzerland — an openly racist far-right party that has just scored itself a whopping political victory.

Unfortunately, the Swiss People’s Party isn’t alone as a far-right party flourishing in Europe. Similar parties in Austria and France have risen over the past few years, and the English British National Party even managed to nab a spot on a premiere BBC show in recent months.

The various far-right parties all operate in a similar manner to how the fringes of our far-right political spectrum — the Tom Tancredos of the world —  operate. They seize upon economic calamity and social disorder — which is either natural in the case of integration or due to regressive economic policies in the case of unemployment — and blame the oldest of age-old targets for nativists: those darn immigrants.

And the immigrants which are the major targets in Europe right now are Muslims. Although polling shows that Muslims for the most part see themselves as Europeans and want to integrate, a small minority have found the process very difficult — and that’s understandable, given the fact that these mostly-white European countries are unused to the non-white immigrant influx that we in the States find commonplace. The failure to integrate by a minority of Muslims in Europe unfortunately leads to what Farid Senzai at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding refers to as Muslim populations being “ghettoized,” seperated in a cultural and economic manner from the majority populations.

When you have that situation, you see the sort of riots that shook France years ago, and the occasional extremist that serves the agenda of those who would paint all immigrants with a broad brush. These integration issues are not very different from what we’ve seen here in the States — with the Irish, African Americans, and other groups. It’s just a matter of creating proper opportunities and working to bring immigrants into the social fabric of the society.

Unfortunately, the nativists of the far-right are doing the same thing those who were opposed to integration here in the states are doing — which is using the immigration issues as a battering ram for their racist political agendas. Just as segregationists politicians pointed to the Watts Riots as evidence that blacks couldn’t live with whites, the Swiss People’s Party points to a handful of extremists and has successfully convinced the country to take out their anger on a piece of cultural architecture.

This is all really very unfortunate, because Switzerland is a wonderful place. Every time I’ve visited the country, I’ve been treated very well, and I absolutely have wanted to go back. The country has four official languages, and it is a gigantic tourist hub for people of every color and faith. Yet this country, which I’ve always thought of as sophisticated and tolerant, has fallen prey to the nativist nonsense you’d expect anywhere but in the land of Zurich and the best chocolate you can find.

I guess the one positive thing to takeaway from all this is that this probably would never have happened here in the United States. Sure, we’ve had our problems with immigrants, and there’s still plenty of outright racists in this country. But we sort of have this spirit in our national fabric that says that people are allowed to be who they want to be (as long as they don’t infringe on our right to be who we want to be), and that the freedoms of expression and religion are so inalienable that no government should even think about stepping on them. When it comes to those values that we hold, it isn’t us, the American progressives, that should be envious of the Europeans for once. It’s them that should be learning from us.