The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe by Andrew Geddes Peter Scholten & Peter Scholten

Author:Andrew Geddes,Peter Scholten & Peter Scholten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Published: 2016-05-05T05:28:43.175711+00:00

The development of Swedish multiculturalism

Before 1945 there was little non-Nordic migration to Sweden and no integration policy. There was, however, a rather sinister aspect of this period. Ideas about the superiority of the Swedish people were prevalent in both social democratic and right-wing thought in the inter-war period. In 1921, the Riksdag created a special institute for Racial Hygiene. A policy of sterilising people seen as unsuitable parents persisted into the 1970s with some estimates of around 60,000 people being subjected to this scheme (The Economist, 1997). Between 1945 and 1964, Swedish responses to immigration rested on an expectation of assimilation.

Between 1964 and 1975 as labour migration increased there was a shift towards ‘mutual adaptation’ with the provision of language training, home language instruction and the creation of local immigrants’ councils. Foreign workers were quickly given the status of denizens as a way of ensuring their welfare state integration. Hammar (1999: 178) describes the measures between 1968 and 1975 as ‘social engineering’ with attempts to extend the principle of equality to all legal residents with the social and political participation of newcomers as an objective coupled with ‘vague ideas’ about ethnic minority rights in a multicultural Sweden (ibid.). These measures were remarkably inclusive, particularly when it’s remembered that other European countries were still struggling to recognise that the ‘guests’ had stayed. Another element of mutual adaptation was that immigration and immigrant policies were dealt with in corporatist structures.

Concerns about numbers of migrants necessarily fed into debates about integration, with housing a key concern. In 1974 the government embarked on the ‘Million Programme’ of house building. In terms of numbers built the programme was relatively successful, but they were often the lowest quality housing stock with a bad physical environment and poor access to services and employment. The high concentration of immigrants in this new housing stock also led to residential segregation. By 2008, 60 per cent of Swedes were living in areas where the population was also predominantly Swedish, 20 per cent lived in areas that were virtually 100 per cent Swedish, while 20 per cent of Sweden’s immigrant population lived in areas where more than 40 per cent of the other residents were also immigrants (Fredlund-Blomst, 2014). An unintended effect of the Million Programme was the creation of betongförorter (concrete suburbs) with large immigrant populations. The footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović (the son of Croatian and Bosnian parents) tells the story in his best-selling book of his upbringing in the Malmö ‘concrete suburb’ of Rosengård and how this distanced him from mainstream Swedish society (Ibrahimović, 2014).

Sweden also made it easy for immigrants to become Swedish. Referring to the 1970s and 1980s, Miller (1989: 131) notes that: ‘Naturalisation in Sweden is relatively quick and easy, and naturalisation rates are high’. Brubaker (1989: 10) links this to a faith in welfare state institutions to level out social inequalities in the same way that French institutions were supposed to level out cultural differences. In both Sweden and France there has been a diminished confidence

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