Helvexit?

T hey want out, and they aren’t even in.

While the United Kingdom flounders through its divorce from the European Union, Switzerland is holding a national referendum that would sever key parts of the Swiss-EU relationship. Independent-minded Switzerland has never become a formal EU member, but it is as a practical matter economically integrated into the union, and, to an extent, socially integrated as well.

That integration is the result of Switzerland’s being a member of the Schengen area, which facilitates the free movement of people across European borders. Swiss people generally do not need a visa to work or reside in an EU country, and — more to the point of the upcoming referendum — most citizens of EU countries do not need a visa to live or work in Switzerland. Switzerland’s ruling Swiss People’s Party (SVP) opposes deepening ties with the European Union and strongly desires to reduce immigration to Switzerland. In 2010, the SVP successfully campaigned for a popular initiative calling for the mandatory expulsion of foreigners convicted of serious crimes. In 2014, the SVP successfully campaigned for a referendum to limit immigration by imposing numerical quotas.

That quota system would have conflicted with Switzerland’s obligations under its existing relationship with the European Union, and so the government imposed an alternative (requiring Swiss employers to favor Swiss applicants in hiring in areas with above-average unemployment) that opponents criticized, not unfairly, as a refusal to implement a duly passed popular initiative — and such initiatives are an important feature of Swiss democracy. The current referendum debate is a continuation of that fight.

The cultural fissures in Swiss politics will be roughly familiar to Americans. While it is principally concerned with immigration, the SVP also successfully campaigned for a national ban on the construction of minarets after a local fight over construction plans at a mosque. People in Switzerland’s rural areas tend to support the parties of the right, and they are relatively hostile to the European Union and to immigration, especially immigration from beyond the European countries on Switzerland’s borders that share one of its four national languages; people in the big metropolitan areas tend to align with the parties of the left, to be more open to immigration, and to support closer relations with the European Union. High-tech and health-care companies have a disproportionate number of foreign workers on their payrolls, and immigrants also are overrepresented on the welfare rolls, to the dismay and vexation of many natives. Like the United States, Switzerland has a federal system, and initiatives (such as the minaret ban) that require a constitutional amendment require a “double majority” — a majority of the vote nationally and a majority of the vote in a majority of the cantons.

Switzerland’s SVP is in many ways a Donald Trump-Nigel Farage party with a populist rhetoric heavy on anti-elitism and anti-metropolitanism. Which is, in a way, surprising: Switzerland has no national language and no national religion, and the mode of life in Zurich and Geneva is very different from that of the countryside. It lacks the homogeneity that often is cited as a key ingredient in the Scandinavian welfare states. But its cultural nationalism is both robust and organic, even among many left-liberal Swiss people who would shudder to think of themselves as nationalists of any kind. In spite of their linguistic and cultural diversity, Swiss people have a very strong sense of Swissness. The Italian-speaking Swiss are a small minority of the population (less than 9 percent) but it is precisely in the Italian-speaking region that the SVP’s populist nationalism has found the most purchase. The head of the SVP comes from Italian Switzerland, where the local answer to the SVP, the Lega dei Ticinesi, takes an even harder line on the EU and immigration, and in 2013 passed a ban on face coverings in public — a ban on burqas in all but name.

Pulling Switzerland out of the Schengen area would do much more than advertised, because Switzerland has a further complex relationship with the European Union secured by a series of treaties that would be nullified by Switzerland’s closing its borders. The current initiative is unlikely to pass, but the polls suggest that it enjoys the support of about 40 percent of the Swiss public — a sizeable minority in any democratic system, and one that matters especially in a system that requires a high degree of consensus for major policy changes. However the vote on the referendum goes, the issue will not be settled.

And that vote is worth keeping an eye on: Just as the Brexit vote prefigured the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the Swiss referendum on September 27 offers not a perfect analogy but an indicator of the animal spirits loose in the world, passions and energies that are distinct in their local expressions but at the same time part of a widespread phenomenon in the wealthy democracies, driven largely by immigration (including the European refugee crisis) and heightened by the coronavirus epidemic.

Switzerland is a small, compact country with a population less than that of greater Chicago. The United States is a sprawling continental superpower home to more people than any other country save China and India. But the fault line that runs through tiny, orderly Switzerland bears more than a passing resemblance to the one that divides the Americans in the MAGA hats from the ones with the NPR tote-bags. Switzerland isn’t having our riots, but they do not have a rioting style. The pattern is repeated globally: The people of the developed world are having many of the same fights for many of the same reasons, and none of us has quite figured out a stable modus vivendi — and few have even developed a real understanding of the costs and risks of our instability.