It seems Dilsa Demirbag-Sten has decided to make Multiculturalism her target in the debate on integration in Sweden. In her piece in DN she argues that this "-ism" focuses on differences rather than similarities and thus risks segregating society rather than integrating it. This effect, she goes on, comes from the "isms" way of essentializing immigrants as different from Swedes, forcing them to become group represenatives rather than individuals.
This is almost verbatim the same type of argument that Neil Bissoondath launched against Multiculturalism in Canada about 15 years ago, which should allow Demirbag-Sten, and others interested in the tension of identities to look to Canada to see whether these kinds of fears are actually warranted.
My answer would be: no. Canada might also negotiate identities in public space, but the fears of fragmentation that Demirbag-Sten voices are, as far as I can tell, widely overstated. And there are some problems with her arguments: first of all - what is her alternative? Assimilation? In any given contemporary society today, people of a plurality of ethincities coexist in some fashion, and this is constantly evident in public space, not only in terms of languages and religions that people speak, but even in so trivial things as food. Is the Chinese restaurant on the corner, with the storefront sign in Chinese, a threat to Swedish commonality? While this might seem like a banal example, it does underline that there is more than one ethnicity in Sweden.
I think Demirbag-Sten and others who worry about the potential for individuals to reach their full potential in society should rather be concerned with processes of racialization; Why are immigrants treated as a homogenous group in Swedish public space? Why is an individual reduced to a group identity? And more importantly, why does this group identity obfuscate the capacity and competency of the individual (who might very well be proud over this identity, and don't want to deny it, but might also wants to be seen as more than just that identity)? These are all questions that can be answered by studying how identities are constructed in public space, and how the images of those identities becomes guiding for public policy and political action, and manifests as discrimination, potentially on a structural level.
Attacking Multiculturalism will likely draw attention away from these questions and therefore do more harm than good...
