The ever more violent clashes between far right and far left political groups in Europe erupted in a most unexpected place on the weekend, Bern, the capital of Switzerland, which would probably win a popularity poll searching out the most peaceful place in Europe. But for anyone paying attention to the growing animosity between those in favour of a multicultural/multiethnic Europe reflecting the concept of free movement and settlement of people across borders, and those defending the idea that a piece of land occupied for millennia by a specific linguistic (and often ethnic) group should remain the domain of that group, this should not have been such a surprise. Switzerland has always had a strong nationalistic wing determined to keep Switzerland as Swiss as Wilhelm Tell would have liked it, and it is not only in recent years that there has been a strong far right party, which now however forms the largest party in the Swiss parliament.
The latest clashes took place when masked far left left wing demonstrators stopped a political march by 10,000 members of the arch-conservative Swiss Peoples Party under its leader, Switzerland’s finance minister Christoph Blocher. In the ensuing riots, 17 policeman were injured, some of them seriously, store windows were smashed, cars set on fire and dozens of protesters arrested. My brother and I have come up with a theory about the rise of big right wing parties in western Europe that are opposed to much immigration, namely that they are growing by leaps and bounds in small countries, where many citizens are afraid that their old national qualities will be threatened by immigrant groups preaching new religions, speaking exotic languages and demanding different social codes. Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria are all western European societies with long histories and short borders and they have all spawned far right parties with broad popular support drawing on the fears of large-scale immigration. It’s true that some larger countries, France comes quickly to mind, have had serious flirtations with such groups as well, but they seem to be able to swallow them up much more easily into moderately conservative parties than can those small nations who consider themselves under immediate threat.