I'll start with how I'm fully aware of my own Christian bias, and I do speak as someone who fell in love with Switzerland some time ago.
But honestly, this anti-Swiss pathetic drivel is getting on my nerves.
First, it is bad, baaad, baaaaaad manners to criticise democracy. And dangerous too. If you start talking of "the people" in that high-handed, butter won't melt in my mouth, poseur-intellectual way, and yes, I'm thinking of you, Quatremer, you had better have the blond hair and impeccable physique that goes with it. Otherwise we'll just have to conclude you're playing right in the hands of the populists you so affect to despise. Sovereignty of the people means that idiots vote too. Get over it. Or do you believe it makes me a demagogue to point out that you share this distaste for our political system with a good many bludge marks on our history books.
You know, I wish we had direct democracy everywhere. I know, not practical, not in a large circumscription, not in places where it is not in our political culture to do so. But there is something so inherently beautiful in this shared communion with fellow-citizens of varied creeds, backgrounds, educational levels, and more recently, genders, that even voicing your objections makes me froth in the mouth with bilious anger. If thinking that one ballot per person, one vote per issue, is not the Right way to decide how a community should manage itself, there is really nothing more I can say or do.
Now, minarets in specific. Calling to prayer is already forbidden in Switzerland, so forbidding minarets is something else - coming from an ideological POV rather than from a practical one. It means that islam shouldn't be allowed into public space. It is not an attempt against freedom of religion - no one banned the belonging to, nor the practising of, islam. It means, if you're muslim, keep it outside of the public sphere.
Now that is anathema to our liberal little multicultural minds. Surely different communities should be allowed equal space in the public arena, don't we all think.
Sure, xenophobes (westerners or otherwise) think the exact opposite - that the public sphere should be reserved to their own more or less mainstream culture and that expressions of difference, especially when foreign, should be limited or banned. I have no doubt the Swiss vote was in good part UDC-led too.
But just because your enemy thinks something, you shouldn't automatically adopt the opposite stance. Blocher was not alone on this either. Not so long ago, Europe was under a strict moral codex imposed by various Christian religious authorities. Even now there are victims of the Catholic church's various abuses who are struggling to obtain justice as secular authorities do not yet possess the strength to oppose it fully when it errs. The current semi-secularist status quo is not sufficiently well-established into our culture that we can let it get threatened by a religion no better than Christianity when it comes to imposing itself into the public sphere to the detriment of laicity. The difference between the two being that Christianity is thought to be saying its last prayers while Islam is perceived (rightly or not) to be gaining followers - while the threat posed by the former is therefore known and limited, the perceived threat from the latter is higher.
Now the Swiss also don't think like us, in that, as a result of our watered-down, indirect democracy, we're very much stop and go. An issue is brought up by spin doctors when elections come along, thoroughly muddled with a great many other issues at hand, and then promptly forgotten post-elections. If we were to discuss minarets, at the favour of, perhaps, a slow news day during election time, all parties would pledge Something. The elected party would then implement it, and we would all move on swiftly - another issue would then dominate the next election, something as important as, perhaps, should bad dogs be put down, or should old people really be ignored when they get cancer, or, why do pregnant teenagers get free houses when they should really be sectioneed?
The Swiss, on the other hand, debate things all the time. They don't have electoral agendas or deadlines, because each issue gets its own vote. Don't give a damn? Don't vote. Feel strongly about something? Gather all your friends, and if there are enough of you, there will be a vote. And equally, you strongly disagree about something (like, no doubt, the Muslim community currently does)? Well, it won't do any good to get all excited, because those people who just voted against your pet idea? Well, they might well be your allies in the next vote, or perhaps the one after that. You don't have political enemies in Switzerland, you have discussion partners you debate with all the fucking time. Swiss children aren't taught to go back home do their homework. They're taught to stay at school in a study group and do group homework assignments. The first thing about being Swiss is that you don't get hot in the head, you don't disrespect you fellow citizens, and you argue and argue and argue your case until everyone agrees.
Because in a nation that is so strongly decentralised, with long-standing mistrust between the four different language communities, between Catholics and Protestants, between people from your canton and people from all the other cantons, between people of Swiss descent and people whose Swiss-ness was more recently acquired*, the one value that holds everything else together is consensus. There are no moves forward until everything has been discussed to the point where saliva gets scarce, until everyone agrees to change. That's why women didn't get to vote until as late as 1975 is some cantons. That's why it's taken them bloody ages to join the UN. That's why they're still not in the EU despite being a perfect miniature, Alpine replica of the Union. That's why minarets aren't allowed in their public sphere. Because those ideas are not (yet) part of the consensus.
And you know what? If we EU citizens had stopped for a minute and learned from the Swiss, we might not have landed ourselves in the mess we're currently in.
(BTW - Welcome to the world, Lisbon. May the birthing pains have been worth it.)
* oh yeah, Switzerland has one of the highest proportion (20%) of non-national residents in the world. So if you're thinking insular, narrow-minded and xenophobic... think again.