by Srdja Trifkovic
The Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP), the largest in the Federal Parliament in Berne and a member of the country’s ruling coalition, has launched a campaign to collect the 100,000 signatures necessary for a referendum to reintroduce into the penal code a measure that would allow judges to deport foreign felons once they have served their jail sentence. In addition, the party intends to table a law allowing the entire family of a criminal under the age of 18 to be deported as soon as his sentence is passed.
“We believe that parents are responsible for bringing up their children,” says Ueli Maurer, the Party’s president. “If they cannot do it properly, they will have to bear the consequences.” The SVP campaign resonates with many Swiss voters, since foreigners are five times more likely to commit crimes than Swiss nationals. In addition, to the shrieks of shock and horror from European bien-pensants, the Party’s current campaign poster shows three white and one black sheep on a Swiss flag—with the latter being discretely kicked out by one of the former.
In 2004, the SVP successfully campaigned for tighter immigration laws using the poster showing dark hands reaching into a pot filled with Swiss passports. It further drove the multiculturalists wild with a poster featuring Osama bin Laden on a Swiss identity card and the caption, “Don’t let yourself be bullied.” As it happens the warning was based on a sound precedent: one of the al-Qa’ida leader’s half-brothers, Yeslam, lives in Switzerland—and holds a Swiss passport! Another advertisement that appeared in newspapers across the country had the banner headline “Will Muslims soon be in the majority?” It warned that “the birth rate in Islamic families is substantially higher than in other families,” that at present rates of growth Muslims would outnumber Christians within 20 years, and that “Muslims place their religion above our laws.” All three claims were true, but nevertheless they were termed “racist” and “xenophobic” by the press all over Europe. Had Switzerland joined the EU in 2002 such ads would have been illegal.
The party also has put forward a proposal to ban the building of minaret towers alongside mosques. One of the SVP leaders, Justice Minister Christoph Blocher, is an outspoken opponent of the country’s Orwellian anti-racism laws, which he rightly sees as a major violation of the freedom of speech.
A person with the title of the “United Nations Special Rapporteur on Racism” and with the befitting name of Doudou Diene declared earlier this year that a “racist and xenophobic dynamic” that used to be the province of the far right was becoming a regular part of the democratic system in Switzerland. The SVP is unimpressed. “He’s from Senegal where they have a lot of problems of their own which need to be solved,” says Dr. Ulrich Schlüer, a senior Party official who is one of the authors of its current proposals.
He has already succeeded in his campaign to ban the minaret: “We are not against mosques but the minaret is not mentioned in the Koran or other important Islamic texts. It just symbolizes a place where Islamic law is established,” he says—and Islamic law “is incompatible with Switzerland’s legal system.” There are but two mosques in the country with minarets and planners are turning down applications for more, after opinion polls showed that half the population favors a ban.
Switzerland already has the strictest naturalization rules in Europe. If you want to become Swiss you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years—and pay taxes, and have no criminal record—before you can apply for citizenship. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, however, and the fact that you were born in Lausanne or Lugano does not make any difference. There are no “amnesties” and illegals are deported. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview the applicant and hold a public vote before naturalization is approved. If rejected he can apply again, but only after ten years.
All this is intolerable to the country’s enlightened Europhiles who run the federal government in Berne. They want citizenship applications to be processed centrally, “along national guidelines,” taking the decision out of the hands of local communities. They insist that resident aliens, a fifth of the country’s 7.5 million people, need to be “fully integrated” and that the natives must accept the “reality” of multiculturalism. For the second time in a decade such proposals were defeated in a nation-wide referendum two years ago. Swiss voters rejected a government initiative to grant automatic citizenship to third-generation Swiss-born aliens and to simplify naturalization for the second generation. Most French-speakers (18 percent) supported the proposals, but they were heavily outvoted by the country’s German-speaking cantons which account for two-thirds of the population, and by the Italian-speaking Ticino (6 percent).
The successful “no” campaign was orchestrated—you’ve guessed it—by the SVP. Its leader, maverick millionaire Christoph Blocher, first achieved prominence twenty years ago when he founded a lobby group, the Campaign for an Independent and Neutral Switzerland (CINS). Blocher (66) is a strong opponent of the European Union who successfully fought a proposal to take Switzerland into the European Economic Area in 1992. He has also successfully campaigned against the abolition of the Swiss army (1989), against involving Swiss troops in UN peacekeeping operations (1994), and against the country’s EU membership (2001). He also campaigned against UN membership in 2002, but in what appears to have been an untypical fit of absent-mindedness the Swiss decided otherwise.
Swiss local democratic institutions of very long standing are still managing to survive in spite of the tendency of state bureaucracy to centralize all power. Except for a few years of centralized government of the “Helvetic Republic” during Napoleon’s occupation, Switzerland has been a confederation of local communities as established in the Pact of 1291, with most responsibility for public affairs in the hands of the local authorities and its 20 cantons and 6 half-cantons. In other words, Switzerland is still today what the United States had been before 1861.
At least one civilized country in the world continues to uphold the right of local communities to decide who will qualify for naturalization. Unique in today’s Western world, this healthy sense of Swiss citizenship reminds us of the Greek polis. It reflects an underlying assumption of kinship among citizens that cannot be fulfilled by mere residence and observance of the rules. Naturalization in Athens was possible but difficult; it was a rare privilege and anything but a right. Likewise in today’s Switzerland if you want to belong, but do not belong by blood, you have to prove a high degree of cultural and civilizational kinship with the host-society. Like in Athens, in today’s Switzerland citizenship includes the right and duty to fulfill certain functions, among which military service is very important. It is remarkable that to this day every Swiss male over 18 must be prepared to serve in the country’s citizen-army; after completing their basic training they keep their weapons at home, and refusal to perform military service is a criminal offence. The thought must have crossed the mind of a few Swiss reservists that all too many aspiring foreigners could never be trusted with those weapons. The Swiss understand, even when they do not know, that the collective striving embodied in “We the People” makes no sense unless there is a definable “people” to support it. They sense that many immigrants have no kinship with the striving and no connection to the “people,” except for the unsurprising desire to partake in its wealth.
This sense is light years away from the “multicultural” understanding of citizenship promoted in the European Union and in North America. A widely reported sob story from the time of the last referendum on citizenship illustrates the gap. The Swiss are not “quite ready to accept the reality of a multi-cultural society,” complained Radio Netherlands International. It bewailed the fate of one Fatma Karademir, 23, who was born in Switzerland and has never lived anywhere else but under Swiss law she is Turkish just like her parents. The Independent was equally indignant that Fatma’s application for citizenship was rejected by her village and she’ll be able to reapply in ten years:
And when she finally does come before the citizenship committee, Fatma knows the fact that she has lived all her life in Switzerland will count less than the answers she gives to the committee’s questions. “They ask if I can imagine marrying a Swiss boy, or do you know the Swiss national anthem, or which team I would support if the Swiss have a soccer game with Turkey. They ask such stupid questions.”
The fact that Fatma calls such questions “stupid” illustrates (1) that she was quite properly denied naturalization; and (2) that the village (town, commune), and not some enlightened bureaucrat in Berne, should continue to have the final say in the matter.
And talking of soccer, let us recall that match in Los Angeles between Mexico and the United States in February 1998. The stands were full of Mexican flags. The fans booed The Star-Spangled Banner, and a few brave souls who dared wave American flags were pelted with beer cans and food debris—as were the American soccer players. No doubt many of the offenders were U.S. citizens. One can only wish that they, and people like them, were subjected to the test of a Swiss village naturalization board.
Topic: Preventing Half a Billion - The Swiss Example (Read 2893 times)