I saw the headline of this essay by Anne Applebaum:”In Switzerland, Towers of Fear” and assumed it would be another soppy plea for tolerance and understanding of the mad bombers and their progeny. It is not. It’s more tolerant than I’d be, but the issue and the problem presented by Muslims in Europe is presented well.
There are many explanations for this phenomenon (the best is found in Christopher Caldwell’s recent book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”), but, to put it very crudely, they boil down to one thing: Because of mistakes made by Europeans and by the Muslim immigrants who live beside them, the two groups have, over the past several decades, failed to integrate. Two or even three generations after their arrival, some European Muslims still live in separate communities. They often go to separate schools. And a small but vocal minority openly refuses to respect the laws and customs of their adopted countries.
No European government has found a way to deal with this phenomenon. Those that have tried often find themselves running up against their own civil rights and legal traditions. The Danes, determined to limit the number of foreign spouses entering Denmark through arranged marriages, decided that they had no choice but to make it more difficult for all Danes to marry foreigners. The French, realizing that the headscarf had become a symbol of political affiliation in some French schools, found themselves limiting the rights of all students to wear religious clothing, including yarmulkes, to school.
There is, therefore, nothing especially Swiss, or especially isolationist, about the recent referendum result. A similar question, put in a similar way, might well have led to a similar result anywhere in Europe. In fact, fear of Islamist extremism shapes all European politics far more than anyone ever acknowledges. The growth of the “far right” parties in the recent past is almost always connected to fear of Islamist extremism. The opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union — which would mean that Turks could eventually work freely in any member state — stems from the same set of fears, though almost no one ever says this.
The referendum on the construction of minarets is no different. No one quite says what the real issue is, but everybody knows: As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don’t have much Islamic extremism — and they don’t want any.
