We never had multiculturalism

...is the headline of Johansson Heinö's latest piece in Axess magazine. It's the latest installement in the wave of debates surrounding multiculturalism in Sweden during the past months, and presented as critique of the same. It's quite an interesting text, much more sophisticated than many others I've seen, but one should not be surprised, since a scholar penned it.

In short, the author argues that Sweden needs to come to terms with multicultarlist policies in order to be able to deal with current issues of ethnic diversity. I find this conclusion somewhat surprising, given the different arguments he presents. First, he, correctly in my opinion, asserts that the multiculturalism that came out of the late 1960s and early 1970s was inherently a reaction to the homogenizing nation-state project that had been dominant during the century before.

He then, again correctly, goes on to state that Sweden's commitment to multiculturalism has been somewhat limited historically. While immigrants have been accepted into the country in great numbers, the significant spheres of Swedish society have continued to be very homogenous ethnically Swedish arenas. So, while multicultural rhetoric has been dominant during the past three or four decades, there has been no genuine interest in "the other" on the part of Swedish gatekeepers.

Evidence for this abounds, of course. Political parties speak a lot about how important integration is and how important diversity is, but has made no real efforts to establish any genuine ties with or in immigrant communities. Indeed, immigrant or ethno-cultural organizations in Sweden are quite weak, particularly in comparison with their equivalents in the US or Canada, where these NGOs are entrusted with the delivery of settlement services to newcomers. For all intents and purposes, Sweden retains a strongly hierarchical nation-state.

What comes across as so strange to me is how Johansson Heinö lands in the argument that some form of reckoning with multiculturalism is needed to proceed with better integration. If multiculturalism has only been adopted in a most constrained form, then surely it is difficult to argue that the multiculturalism in a wider sense (i.e. the multiculturalism Sweden apparently never adopted fully) is to blame for current social issues confronting immigrant populations.

Against this background, the energy spent on critiquing multiculturalism also becomes somewhat of a mystery to me. If the goal is to establish a society based on respect between both individuals and groups, and a mutual understanding of different cultures and practices, which Johansson Heinö clearly argues that the goal should be, then it would seem more prudent to me to pay attention to power relations between majority and minority communities in society. This is, of course, because a respectful dialogue between communities can only be achieved when one is not subjected to dominance by the other.

This links directly into issues of empowerment and how to combat ethnic discrimination. Since Sweden has centraliezd social services to powerful paternalistic public agencies, immigrant communities remain disempowered, and the legal framework for combatting ethnic discrimination remains weak, since it is not framed as an issue of human rights, but rather as part of labour market regulation. Instead of addressing these issues of practical legal and organizational matters, the Swedish debate remains focused on what appears to me as a game of shadow boxing against an imaginary enemy - that of a set of policies that were never adopted whole heartedly by the Swedish polity anyway.