Sensitive readers may still be reeling from last year’s Hot Screen post excoriating Denmark for its harsh treatment and deranged rhetoric toward immigrants that it had only recently welcomed into the country. It may or may not come as a relief, then, that today we will leave Denmark be, to stew chastened in its nativist juices, and turn our attention to its northern Nordic neighbor, Sweden, which has been pursuing its own version of the same racist story.
The New York Times has begun an investigative series called “The New Nativists,” which seeks to “examine the evolution of hard-line immigration politics,” and the first stop in its world tour is Sweden. In the last election, the Sweden Democrats won 18% of the vote; with roots in a neo-Nazi party, and placing blame on immigrants for all of Sweden’s problems, the ascent of the Sweden Democrats should be shocking to anyone who’s grown accustomed to that country’s reputation as a tolerant social-welfare state. But, as the Times story suggests, the social welfare state has turned out to be the way to amp up anti-immigrant resentment. For the Sweden Democrats,
[n]o longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.
Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.
The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.
Sweden clearly has an economy and society shifted far further in the direction of a social welfare state than the United States, but it is remarkable to see far-right politicians there, as with the Trump-Republican Party in the United States, put the blame for economic problems on immigrants (though, to be fair, the Trump administration also points the finger at foreigners in general for not playing fair in the world of trade).
But it turns out there are plenty of reasons for why the anti-immigrant movement in Sweden has much in common with what’s going on in other countries. Sweden Democrats have extensive connections with other far-right European governments, such as Viktor Orban’s authoritarian regime in Hungary. They’ve also received extensive behind-the-scenes support from Russia; there is ample evidence pointing to a concerted effort by that country to promote right-wing Swedish news sites, which the article details extensively. Chillingly, the Times also documents an incident in which Russians claiming to be journalists attempted to pay immigrants in Stockholm to start a riot so that they could film it; this occurred two days after Donald Trump’s false allegations last year about immigrant-spawned violence in Sweden. It is also beyond disturbing that the Sweden Democrats look to the presidency of Donald Trump, and find solace and inspiration in his misrule.
Sweden has obvious challenges to its culture and to its social welfare state due to the number of immigrants it’s generously let into the country; as an Iranian immigrant notes, “the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them,” allowing the Sweden Democrats to gain a large hold on power when other parties “didn’t have any answers.” But this article raises provocative questions about the nature of the global anti-immigrant and far-right populist movement, including the tension between whether it’s happening organically and democratically based on unavoidable cultural and economic forces, or is quite consciously being made to happen, both by opportunistic politicians and by authoritarian countries like Russia that seek to use the movement to advance their own goals.
It has also gotten me back to wondering whether these far-right movements honestly see immigrants as hurting the economy, or whether this is a cover for basic racism and cultural antipathy. I also wonder about the moral foundations and even sanity of previously ethnically homogenous countries like Sweden and Norway in which significant percentages of the population are inspired not simply to object to, but actively hate and despise, newer arrivals to their country.
Beyond this, it seems clear that immigrants are being scapegoated for economic problems that are due to the dark turns of capitalism over the past several decades: as I’ve read elsewhere, the far-right groups in Sweden started popping up in the 1970’s, around the same time that major industries in Sweden began pushing back against the extent of the social welfare state. To what degree is the anti-immigrant far-right a stalking horse for corporate interests that want to escape blame for the economic changes they’ve managed to implement so far, and which may underlie the actual challenges to the Swedish welfare state? I also wonder about the true goals of the far-right politicians themselves. If they’ve identified the wrong sources of Sweden’s, or Denmark’s, or Germany’s troubles, and they have no real plan for fixing them, what’s the point of being in politics? Is it ultimately about a will to power, about a basic authoritarian desire?