The Swedish magazine Axess had a seminar recently with the above title. It featured liberal commentators Paulina Neuding, Adam Cwejman and Tino Sanandaji. The frame of the seminar was criticizing multiculturalism, which is the popular activity of the centre-right of the past six months. The speakers, not very surprisingly, spent a great amount of time assigning blame for the failure of integration policies on multiculturalism along now-familiar lines of argumentation.
What particularly gave me pause in this presentation was the number of logical inconsistency in the argumentation by each speaker. Neuding argued that one cannot assume that people coming from authoritarian countries (and she was really refering to dictatorships in the Middle East and Magreb region - i.e. warning people about supposed the danger of Middle Eastern Muslim immigration) are fleeing to the West because they want to enjoy freedom...and then goes on to make the opposite assumption that these refugees should be assumed to be carriers of authoritarian values, which she identifies as the greatest integration problem of the day. This assumption, of course, is at least as unfounded as the one she is arguing against. Indeed, her entire speechs was informed by a highly essentialist conceptualization of immigrant and immigrant cultures, particularly directed against Middle Eastern groups.
Cwejman argued that the problem is that Sweden lacks a patriotic citizenship ideal (a strange argument, seeing as it is hardly a lack of patriotism that leads to high unemployment levels and poverty rates). Generally speaking, he seemed take the same position as others who fear that social cohesion will be undermined by people coming in from the outside bringing other cultures or at least lacking loyalty to the new community. He then said that France and the US are the ideals that should be embraced because these countries do have this strong patriotic citizenship that he longs for.
The problem with this argument is that France has had huge issues with the troubles in the banlieues, which he seemed to have forgotten entirely. I.e. France has hardly been very succesful at managing integration and ethnic relations, something that the Front National is doing its level best to leverage into political mobilization against immigration. The US, on the other hand, actually does permit multiple loyalties, as evidenced by Little Italies, Chinatowns and hyphenated belonging (e.g. Italian-American).
Sanandaji starts his speech by saying that multiculturalism "is dead", citing the speeches by Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy, as well as the terror attack in Spain as examples of this. The problem with that is, of course, that neither France, Germany or Spain were ever countries that embraced Multiculturalism as an official policy. He then talks about the importance of increased Swedish "cultural self-confidence" (whatever that is) and says that Swedes have been too kind towards immigrants. He then states that it's not a matter of immigrants erasing their pasts or not loving their countries of origin anymore...except it is, because they can't expect to keep their norms when entering Sweden. Like Cwejman, he refers to the US as a good example, and like Cwejman, he seems to forget that multiple identities are quite common in that country.
Between the three of these speakers, it is evident that the nationalist populist discourse of a party like the Sweden Democrats have really taken hold among the Swedish centre right intellectuals. It's evident in the following reasoning (the speakers didn't use these precise words, but this was the gist of their arguments):
+ Immigrants bring strange cultures that constitute a threat to social cohesion.
+ Immigrants do not assimilate sufficiently into Swedish norms and culture.
+ More patriotism is needed to rectify this.
+ Sweden is currently confronted by the threat of mass immigration, or an invasion of immigrants.
+ Multiculturalism is an elite project imposed on the Swedish people from above.
This is pretty much the very same series of speaking points that nationalist populists are employing all over Europe, and it's disquieting to see people who call themselves liberals buy in to the same agenda in such a whole-sale fashion. In this radio debate, Anders Lindberg does a decent job of exposing this discursive shift within the Swedish right.
As Isobel Hadley-Kamptz states, once upon a time, liberals used to discuss freedom.
