I think such regulations should be decreed as a law and not as a constitution norm if at all. But if everybody has a say you get bikeshedding in the constitution.
I mean, currently the UK referendum on EU withdrawal arguments seem to have peaked around "leaving the EU will knock £62000 off the value of your house and please Putin and ISIS" vs "women will be at risk of sex attacks from foreigners if we don't leave"[1]. I'm not familiar with the Swiss situation but doubt the constitutional changes around minarets were fought over the merits of Islamic architecture or nuanced arguments about zoning.
[1] There are slightly subtler arguments being used, but virtually none of them are based on fact either.
It is a misconception to believe that these are the only valid types of arguments against minarets.
There are many that value their own culture and want to keep it that way without necessarily viewing other cultures as inferior.
Frankly I'd have thought enshrining the principle of intolerance of the symbols of a particular religion in the constitution represented a more substantive cultural change, but then I'm not Swiss.
- generally europe is christian. swiss are very traditionalists, and religion is very important here. they are extremely tolerant to other cultures (that's why UN is in Geneva for example), but only to the point where they don't feel their own culture threatened. Obviously, with islam, and islam only, based on plenty of bad experience in their neighbors (ie France, Germany) they decided as they did. Over time, they don't regret their decision. Personally, even as atheist, I tend to agree on this topic. Overall attitude in Europe is same right now and many wish they could have similar vote.
- would you go and build a church in Afghanistan, Iran or Saudi Arabia? (Actually I've visited old churches in Isfahan in Iran, with thriving christian community, humbling experience). Not many would even think about this. Personally I don't find it shocking that dominant religion is preferred somewhere. You can practice anything you want at home, just no official religious places are allowed to build. Bear in mind that those that were already built are still standing, this applies only to new construction. Very Swiss approach.
it's something around being tolerant to others only to the point where your own identity and core principles are not threatened. very mature and clever approach.
No, but being too scared to do something doesn't make it moral - it just makes it enforced. I don't support these countries' overt hostility to and breaches of human rights, but I'm not going to risk my life to fix it either.
But this has nothing to do with xenophobia, it's about the social order and norms that we have and that we will have in the future.
I like the freedoms I have and I don't want to give them up, neither do I want the Muslim living in Europe to give up his. Everyone can practice their religion and have their political views but with time they or their next generation will tend to assimilate, it's only natural.
I believe that allowing immigrants to remodel our society and culture in any way they desire will not have the effect that we'll merge and solve cultural issues. Instead they will build and create according to their own culture (which is also natural), live among themselves concentrated in some parts of the cities which will then turn into ghettos with high unemployment and this would in turn create radicalism on both sides.
There are already districts in some German cities where ethnic Germans are at risk if they enter. To me, this is clearly not the way to go.
When you hire for a company you want your dream team to have a diverse background of ideas and experiences but that doesn't mean you let them work on the goals and products they worked on at their previous employer with whatever processes they want.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not sure the specific minaret law is a downside from my experience, but that is not to say that your overall point on populist reforms is invalid. I was just focusing on the specific law.
Is/Was prohibited anyway in Switzerland, so this vote didn't change anything on that fact. Though this argument has been used during the campaign before the vote.
I do agree however, that things like minarets should better be left to a general building code addressing the problem of architectural shouting contests without explicitly mentioning religion. The stupidity of having the literal phrase (well, in german) "it is forbidden to erect minarets" in the constitution should serve as a warning to anyone who praises direct democracy all too blindly.
I really don't get it why cases like that are solved with a polar vote (change or no change), not with approval voting offering more than two possible results on different levels of compromise. There seems to be a tiny glimse of it (only on the wiki in german: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Ja_mit_Stichfrage ) but that is just three way between no change, proposal and one administrative counter-proposal, which still leaves the door wide open to polarism.
The US population for instance prohibited alcohol and then undid the prohibition, and I think the least that can be said in favor of this process is that since then there's seemingly a consensus in the US wrt prohibition. I'm not sure such consensus is achievable when elected officials enact laws, not to mention when a Supreme Court reinterprets the constitution to de-facto enact a law.
Overall, to me it seems that decisions will be made and reversed no matter what's your process, and it seems that referendums are a great way for the population to "own" the decision - not just affect it but feel responsibility for it.
Also I'd guess that more direct democracy would reduce both stability and corruption (people are more likely to change the status quo, harder to bribe, and not as likely to form 2 or some other small number of groups voting together on every issue as professional politicians.) It seems that we have a lot of both stability (presumably a good thing) and corruption (presumably a bad thing) and it doesn't look like a terrible gamble to attempt to reduce both.
The way I see it, this is down to two factors:
1. Since Switzerland does have multiple parties and all of the bigger ones a represented in the federal council, there is more compromise and decisions made by consensus. This in turn leads to less dramatics shifts after a term is up and some politicians are replaced. In contrast in the US, where you could have a democratic president and parliament coming in after a term of a republican majority and president (or vice versa). It seems likely, that the new powers to be would set about undoing some decisions made by their predecessors. At the very least you'd have a rather dramatic course change at hand.
2. It is very easy to collect enough signatures for a referendum (50000 signatures within 100 days of the law being passed in parlament) and for every change to the constitution there is a mandatory referendum (no signatures needed, it will brought to a public vote). This means that any controversial law can be brought to a public vote. Which more or less prohibits sudden drastic changes and promotes more incremental change, which brings more stability.
On the other hand, there might be something to the Idea, that direct democracy reduces stability. Basically it is the flip side of 2. above: it is also quite easy to gather 100000 votes to establish a popular initiative. The parties have picked up on that and often introduce controversial initiatives to further their election campaigns. There are not many safeguards in place, so unfortunately there was an increase in badly drafted amendments in recent years. Different parties have brought forward initiatives that contradicted other parts of the constitution.
It has nothing to do with the direct democracy thing, but the most surprising is this so-called "magic formula" is only a tradition and there is nothing in the law that prevents a parliamentary coalition from voting an executive branch representing only 50% of the parliament.
It might be not the only reason for the way the executive branch is set up, but IMO it's an important part of the system as it is.
Even the 'Ndrangheta from Italy has a branch. http://www.thelocal.ch/20160317/mafia-suspects-refuse-to-lea...
There was a politician that forwarded state secrets to Kazakhstan and got bribed. The thing is if you apologize and publicly declare that it was a mistake to get caught, no one bats an eye. She's now head of the parliament. The unofficial rule is, just don't overdo it...
Lets be honest here, the 'minaret' issue is extremely minor one. I does not effect large numbers of people and it does not effecte them in a particularly strong way. Based on first principle I voted against it, but was not the most important issue for me or for Switzerland.
Most of the time the results Switzerland gets to usually are really good. Many things that passed in other countries did not pass in Switzerland.
I think that the argument that Swiss democracy is bad because of this minaret example, is extremely weak. If that the best argument you can bring against the Swiss system, then its doing something right. You can't find cases of gross misjudgment or fiscal or social issues or anything like that? I can find stuff like that in most other countries.
The Swiss system can also be used to remove stuff from the constitution. So this minaret stuff need not be there forever.
Edit: One addition I would make to the system is that if a law is rejected by a 'human rights' evaluation group, it needs to pass with 2/3 majority.
Not at all. It violates the very idea of freedom of religion. I doubt a ban on building of churches would be approved and this shows that a more popular group can (and does) trample on fundamental human rights of other smaller groups.
Also, your metaphor is incorrect; this is banning bell towers not banning churches.
Would a ban on bell towers become part of the Constitution? I seriously doubt it. A ban on minarets, one that actually made sense and didn't look like religious intolerance, would belong in construction codes or zoning laws.
If similar vote would be done now in countries around europe, results would be pretty similar.
Hardly surprising. Nobody wants to be awoken at ungodly hours by that howling.
How is this in the USA? Outside certain districts in Boston, NY or the bible belt, I have this feeling there isn't regular church bell ringing going on, is there? Given the many flavors of Christianity in the US and their possibly differing schedule, this could easily turn into an annoyance, I would guess.
However, in contrast, a giant megaphone blaring quite "whiny" or "whingy" (for lack of a better way of describing it) gibberish doesn't evoke anything remotely that normal. The sound itself, without any sort of religious connotation is annoying. I suppose I would find it just as annoying if the sound of church-bells were played over a megaphone, 5 times a day.
My main objection is that if you have religious freedom, then either all churches/mosques/temples get the same freedom to call to prayer or none does. The exclusivity of church bells in Europe and muezzins east of Europe is the basic conflict of fairness here. So, realistically, given that we cannot allow them all, including pagans, satanists (death metal?), the most logical conclusion would be to generally disallow, with exceptions where the population insists on it.
On the other hand, I wish somebody would actually enforce anti-noise laws against my trash-techno neighbor at night ;)
Then I don't think you can characterise yourself as "very sensitive to noise". Perhaps very sensitive to certain kinds of noise, but not noise in general?
I've heard of plenty of people who don't have particular sensitivities to noise but find those two types of noise obtrusive.
Anyway I've personally always found the call to prayer quite musical and beautiful.
On the other hand, when people complain about "populism", they expose another problem with democracy I've long complained about. Opinion gets swayed by all sorts of reasons, actions and emotions.
E.g. In the Brexit vote, the vote-stay side is trying to use fear and no-doubt some will be swayed by that. Does that mean that they actually want it? Would they have voted it if they weren't exposed to that influence? Must we keep the voters in a sterile-bubble until they decide? What about making informed decisions? Who decides what is fear-mongering vs informing the voters?
Next up, you have influential persons. This can be everyone from your local community activist, your overbearing and opinionated family member, to public figures such as actors and artists. You can see it now with Donald Trump's campaign. Every single person that has any wide "reach" to the public is using it to promote their view of Trump, whether good or bad. I call them vote-multipliers; their singular vote means a whole lot more than yours or mine, no matter how valid or factual our arguments are. When opinion and emotion sways voting, the "one-person one-vote" mantra doesn't hold up anymore.
Generally the term seems to be used by people worried about knee-jerk reactionary voting, "it's what I want, therefore force everyone to do it", or "it's good for me, so yes, even if it is bad for others".
> In the Brexit vote, the vote-stay side is trying to use fear
Both sides are using fear almost exclusively. The in side claim the economy will collapse without the EU, the out side claim it's doomed if we stay in, and these are hardly the only examples - the out side shamelessly perpetuates the 'all immigrants are criminal freeloaders who want to take over' that is basically pure racism, the in side will gladly paint anyone who wants to leave as a racist.
It's really terrible, and is hardly surprising - the exact same thing happened in the AV referendum, where the two major parties (who use AV internally) came out with what was essentially 'you are too stupid for AV, stick with nice simple FPtP'.
http://www.alternet.org/story/90161/ignorant_america%3A_just...
It might demonstrate that ~50% of the population currently agrees with the current message of a person or group of people
Allowing any religion to advertise itself in any form should be prohibited as it is intrusive to all.
What if someone invented a religion that told everyone to use airhorns every hour?
Just this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Now as a staunchy Swiss I accept this outcome. I have to. The people have spoken. I just bemoan the construction regulation in the constitution. This goes against my juridicial instincts.
1999 we Swiss cleaned the constitution. It's the third constitution since 1848, and I am not happy to see weird rulings tainting the core regulations. It's like programming: after some time the source code gets messy.
There is such a thing as tyranny by the minority, and tyranny by the majority. The second is in fact much easier to do, since the first requires a modicum of power & ability for someone to keep himself in that position.
The minaret thing is irrelevant, as a minaret thing, but relevant as a right to construct the things you damn like thing upon your private property.
Sure, let's say not being allowed to build minarets because people don't like that is bullshit.
But let's also imagine I buy some land in front of the kindergarden your children go to and build a giant wall showing hardcore porn movies all day. Now probably you and the majority of people living there wouldn't like me to do that, but it's my damn right so gtfo.
It's a slippery slope both ways (minarets, gay people can't kiss in public, porn walls) and I have no idea how to draw the line between what the majority wants and the invasion of personal freedom. More importantly, neither the majority nor any elected officials should be allowed to draw that line (almost by definition), so it seems it's a catch 22 situation.
Also, the idea of private property, here or anywhere else, is highly tenuous. Have you looked into how much you actually own that property? Try not paying your property taxes for a few years and see who really owns your so-called private property.
"Real" in "Real estate" doesn't stand for reality, it stands for royalty. Your private property is granted by royal decree, and can be withdrawn by the same mechanism.
That etymology doesn't sound very "real"?
"Real estate, the exact term, is first recorded 1660s, but in Middle English real was used in law in reference to immovable property, paired with, and distinguished from, personal."
On the whole, most developed countries have broad consensus on core issues. I don't believe gap between left and right is large enough to destroy a country, there is a lot of common ground.
You want to build things you damn like? Better those things not to create noise that enters my private property, and my private ears.
My right not to be disturbed is more important than your right to build whatever you want.
All predators, humans included, have this thing called "territory". When someone comes from outside the country and starts filling the ambient noise with her sounds, they are actually claiming ownership of everything.
A free for all democracy is no different from tyranny by the majority.
Referendum is no panacea. A legislative body can tweak legislation and debate it and compromise. When voting on a referendum there is no such compromise. It's just a binary choice.
Oops, 60% of the populace thinks you're a nuisance who should just shut up and put up (and ideally just go away).
In that case, direct democracy is indeed broken, but the reason is not "discrimination" against those who are actually pretty powerful, but eventual instability from the system's inability to act as a predictive proxy for more direct (less civilized) resolution.
How to Move to Switzerland
Unless you are from 10 new EU countries, then getting work permit isn't automatic but you deal with limited queues per year, per canton. Once depleted (which goes fast), bye. And employer has to prove to officials that there is no one Swiss or with existing permit to do this job, which adds a lot of bureaucracy.
It gets deeper, far from easy simple situation. But it's true that EU citizens have certain advantages.
Because the first referendum that should be called for in a country that has 1:1 voting on issues is to end all political advertisements.
The money is there, it "wants" to get spent, the more openly that happens, the less harm will be done. If you don't give it a channel it will find one.
Something I admire about the Swiss btw.
In a real democracy, they're not supposed to either. If their culture, religion, etc is important to them, it should definitely affect their decisions, and that's the democratic way. Same for their feelings.
Democracy is not about voting what's "right" (who is to say? you?) but about getting what the majority wants. And there's nothing unhonest about letting culture, religion and feelings affecting your vote.
What you describe as your ideal democracy where people only make "rational choices" is rather the old republican idea of sages who know better than the people (like the "founding fathers" in the US) and encode some norms forever.
"Rational" used in this sense, is totally normative -- "what I think is rational" or "what those experts say it rational and good for you", and in the end undemocratic.
Can I turn the question around : do you think this would work in USA, India and Brazil (random countries, nothing specific)?