Democracy can be so inconvenient. Take Switzerland, the closest thing the world has to a perfect democracy.
Switzerland’s eight million citizens vote by referendum on all major issues. The Swiss cantons have made key decisions this way for over 800 years.
Swiss voters on Feb 9 decided by a razor-thin 50.3% to begin limiting immigration from the European Union within three years, perhaps much sooner. The vote in non-EU member Switzerland sent shock waves across Europe and brought a storm of abuse down on the Swiss.
In recent years, the Swiss have signed a number of agreements with the EU harmonizing Swiss law with Europe that allowed unfettered Swiss commercial access to the European Union. Now, 56% of Swiss exports go to the EU.
The Swiss grudgingly agreed to adhere to the EU’s basic tenet of free movement of citizens across the EU’s member states. As a one-time Swiss resident, I found it surprising that Switzerland let commercial concerns outweigh the nation’s intense devotion to independence and, often, isolation.
During the Renaissance, the Swiss battled ferociously against the Holy Roman Empire (Austria) and Burgundy to secure their independence. But, then again, we just saw Swiss banks betray their clients by revealing their secret accounts to the US government.
Since then, armed neutrality guaranteed Swiss independence. Threatened in 1939-40 by invasion from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the Swiss mobilized 700,000 citizens, honeycombed the high Alps with hidden fortifications, and ordered its soldiers to leave their families behind and fight to the death from the mountains.
The Germans and Italians wisely decided to leave the Swiss alone. Faced by possible Soviet invasion during the Cold War, the Swiss further expanded their top secret fortress system, much of which I was allowed to see a decade ago.
The result, unsurprisingly, was a flood of workers and executives, primarily from France, Italy and Portugal.
Switzerland has always had a labour shortage, particularly so for menial work and services. During the 1960’s, the Swiss maintained a rigid quota system for foreign workers that often denied them the right to bring their families.
Today, 23-25% of Swiss residents are non-Swiss. They have filled many vacant jobs and the upper ranks of finance and technology, but they are also straining housing, schools, transport and public services. A quarter of the population foreign-born is simply too much for this small, already crowded nation.
Worse, a flood of Bulgarians and Romanians now threatens to descend on Switzerland. For hundreds of thousands of East European gypsies (Roma), rich Switzerland offers generous welfare and myriad opportunities for criminals.
France, plagued by street crime and robberies by Roma, offered a frightening example to the ultra law-abiding Swiss.
So Swiss voters, led by the xenophobic, right-wing People’s Party with roots in German-speaking rural Switzerland, opted to limit immigration to those truly needed by the Swiss economy. Details have yet to be revealed.
But the rest of the EU is crying bloody murder, accusing the unloved Swiss of some sinister neo-fascist plot to undermine the Union. Behind all the uproar is the fear in Brussels that the Swiss clampdown will embolden increasingly influential rightwing, anti-EU parties in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Greece, and Spain who have brewed a weird ideology combining hatred of Islam with hatred of the European Union and calls for secession.
Dutch neo-fascists are of particular concern (the largest numbers of non-German Waffen SS volunteers came from Holland and Belgium). So far, only the Swiss have had the courage to stand up and say “no more uncontrolled immigration.”
There is nothing sinister about this: the US and Canada do the same. Swiss voters were right. There’s no more room in their Alpine paradise. More immigration threatens Switzerland’s democracy and admirable traditions.
Still, it’s likely some sort of compromise on this issue will be worked out. Europe made a huge mistake opening its doors to the street people of Eastern Europe. Many Europeans envy the Swiss.
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. Comments: firstname.lastname@example.org
This article first appeared in The Sun Daily, a leading daily of Malaysia.
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