Sara Mohammed and the competence of the Swedish public sector

Andreas Johansson Heinö is replying to an interesting piece by Lorenzi who rightly raises some concerns about the European onslaught against multiculturalism that I've been following on this blog. She concludes that the critique has largely been founded on strawmen - i.e. a false representation of what multiculturalism actually consists of and has consisted of historically. I largely agree. Johansson Heinö apparently does not, and produces Sara Mohammed's piece in the same number of Axess where he, himself participates.

Sara Mohammed is a Kurdish champion of women's rights and have been working hard to raise awareness around so-called honour-related killings. There is no doubt her work has been very important. There is no doubt that her work can ultimately save many lives and should be supported.

Her article, however, is filled with contradíctions. She is heavily critiquing the Swedish public sector for its awkwardness in handling issues gender equality in immigrant communities. But then she's also critiquing the public sector for "downloading" the issue to immigrant communities and let immigrant organizations address the issue in "integration projects", a choice that, according to her, has led to further enclavization and segregation of the issue. The signal it sends, she asserts, is that honour related killings is something that concerns immigrant communities only. Therefore, such funding and such projects should immediately be cancelled.

This makes little sense. As she herself states, the Swedish public sector has proven ultimately incompetent with regards to handling the matter. Unlike Mohammed, I would not attribute this to the "ideology of cultural relativism", but rather to a fundamental lack of competence with regards to how to relate to the "ethnic others". The Swedish public sector has, historically, been an ethnically very homogenous one, and very little has been done to create an intitutionalized awareness of how inter-cultural matters should be handled in everyday life. Indeed, research, by scholars like Kamali, de Los Reyes, Mulinari, Hertzberg, Pripp and Neergaard, has shown that discriminatory stereotyping is rather entrenched in the Swedish public sector.

The question for me then would be: how would stopping immigrant actors from being agents on this arena alleviate the problem? What about Mohammed's own association - Never Forget Pela and Fadime? My own impression of the NGOs website is that the organization is desperately underfunded - it doesn't even have the resources to produce a website in English - so my feeling is that it would rather need more funding, not less. In my opinion, the organization (like several other similar ones, Terrafem comes to mind) should get sufficient funding to operate several centres for the protection of young girls and boys who become threatened in this fashion by their families, precisely because the public agencies do not have sufficient understanding for how to reach out and find these persons and what sort of support they need. It's exactly these kinds of bottom's up-solutions that are needed to address such issues.

But according to Mohammed's own rationale, any funding to her own organization - an immigrant organization - should apparently be stopped immediately, because funding it would lead to enclavization of the issue. That seems very counter-intuitive to me. I have to ask, why is Mohammed so confident that the public sector agencies, which by virtue of being public operate in a top-down manner, will handle this matter better than her own organization?

If multiculturalism was replaced with increased top-down assimilation-policies, the result would likely be the even more complete dominance of the large public sector organizations on the arena, and organizations like Never Forget Pela and Fadime or Terrafem, those very actors that have been most active and effective in raising awareness on these issues precisely because they are rooted in a particular grass-root practice, would be completely marginalized. Ethnic Swedish civil servants would define what gender equality is, and likely do so based on prejudice and stereotypes of the immigrant "others". That would lead to the further disempowerment of immigrant communities and groups, and further entrench an ethnic hierarchy in society with immigrants on the bottom.

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.

Timbro-seminar 1: Who should be able to become a Swedish citizen

Timbro, the Swedish equivalent of the Canadian Frasier Institute (i.e. a right-wing think tank), is holding a series of seminars on integration, presenting reports they have solicitied on the subject. Dr. Johansson Heinö was the first presenter (followers of this blog will recall that he also presented on the Axess seminar).  This was a follow up on his previous report "Integration or Assimilation".

This time, Johansson Heinö presented a proposal to improve integration, through addressing the status of citizenship. Sweden has, by international standards, a very low requirement for citizenship. In practice, all you need to do is to fulfill a certain period of residence. There are no tests, nor any oath of allegiance. This, evidently, has some concerned about the social cohesion of the country, arguing that this devalues the status of citizenship and undermines pride and a sense of belonging. At this point, I can't recall that I've seen any research to support that claim.

Johansson Heinö's remedy is to introduce a language test and make citizenship dependent on the applicant being fluent in Swedish.

While I'm not as opposed to this proposal as some others might be, there are still a number of reservations that should be brought up (note that this is based on watching the webcast seminar, I'll have to read Johansson Heinö's report to make further commentary):

1) The connection to improved integration is not very well established. MIPEX ranks Sweden as very succesful in the field of integrating immigrants (which I take exception to because it only studies formal processes) and does so specifically because citizenship is so easy to access. By this rationale, if citizenship is harder to attain, the integration process will actually become impeded. Since research shows that the level of integration is correlated to processes of naturalization, this is actually quite a convincing argument.

2) The connection between how difficult the citizenship is to attain and the sense of belonging is also not established. From what I recall from other studies, sense of belonging tends to be more correlated to immigrants' experience of how just society is in terms of equal opportunities and protection from discrimination as well as accumulated social capital within immigrant communities, so this suggestion might simply be addressing the wrong dimension of the process.

3) What do to with elderly immigrants? I seem to recall that older people have a harder time learning a new language, and it's quite established that many elderly immigrants never learn the language of the new country at all. This suggestion might very well become a barrier for that category of people.

4) Why addressing language, particularly? I'm asking, because the citizenship test in Canada is based on learning civics and history, which seems more conducive to creating the capacity to orient in the new country, including topics like how to vote and the basics of the democratic system, which are functions a citizen will need to know about to be able to participate fully in civic life. Learning about the common points of reference of the host society just seems, on an intuitive level, more conducive to increasing a sense of belonging than a test of grammar. Note that the Canadian test is written in one of the two official languages, so some level of linguistic ability is implicit, but testing history knowledge is quite different from testing vocabulary.

Late comment on the Axess seminar...

So, I've finally been able to catch up on some work, and got around to see the Axess seminar "Beyond Multiculturalism", an event that was commented widely by the Swedish media. It was a full day seminar, available here.

It had some interesting comments, particularly from dr Johansson Heinö, who correctly pointed out that Sweden has only partly adopted multicultural policies, because while there were some grants to cultural events and so on, the higher echelons of professionals and economic stratas remained rather ethnically clean.

However, for me, it was the absences and silences that were more noteworthy. For instance, looking through the list of presenters (14 in total if I recall correctly), only Sarah Mohammed, representing Glöm aldrig Pela och Fadime, an NGO focusing on protecting people from honour-related persecution, could be said to represent racialized minorities in a wider sense, and Dr Johansson Heinö was the only academic with a clear focus on matters of ethnic relations. Where was SIOS, the largest umbrella organization of ethno-cultural associations in the country? Where was SIMBA, an organization that for more than a decade have excelled in finding entry points in the labour market for African immigrants? And where were all the academics who have studied ethnic relations in Sweden for the past decades? No one representing the Multicultural Centre, or IMER, or any of the research centres actually focusing on these issues was present. Nor was there any representative from frontline workers who try to address segregation on the labour market on a daily basis (Sara Mohammed being the exception).

If this seminar was organized in North America, it would have been unthinkable to exclude NAACP in the US, or the Metropolic Research Centres in Canada, and yet, the equivalent actors were not even on the guest list, from what I could see on the footage.

This lack of experience came across in the discussions, which drifted towards polemics against some left wing form of multiculturalism that, so it was claimed, is the core problem today because it creates ghetto mentality and a fragmented comunity (echoing Neil Bissoondath in Canada). Personally, I've never seen anyone ague that murder is ok when culturally motivated, but it felt like there was an understated sentiment in the seminar that some left-wing figures would have argued this. Please refer me to a text where such a position is taken.

Indeed, the only person present bringing attention to the issue of discrimination was Ardalan Shekarabi, problem that was otherwise largely ignored during the debate.

Taken in the context of the proposals presented from the centre-right wing parties in Sweden (strongly represented through politicians or think tank supporters), I'm afraid the seminar comes reinforced the momentum in public space where blame is laid on immigrants for problems with integration. Sara Mohammed's comments are illustrative of how this came across. She argued most fervently against the conservative elements of immigrant communities who have constantly enforced the oppression that she is working against, and she was very, and understandably, frustrated with Swedish public authorities accomodating and legitimizing those actors at the cost of those who become victimized.

Now, I understand that Ms Mohammed takes part in the seminar - Swedish immigrant actors are generally underfunded, neglected by the media, and will thus will naturally take any chance to advocate their position when given some public space. Still, the tragic irony is that if this trajectory is pursued, there is a great likelyhood that immigrant actors, immigrant associations, at large will become further de-legitimized and branded as suspect "special interests". If that happens, Sara Mohammad might find, one day, that public funders will withdraw their funding from her organization because it's seen as a less-than-trustworthy by those who have power over funding decisions. This would be quite countr-productive, because I'm confident that the clients Ms Mohammed seeks to support would very likely be better served by her NGO than a less than competent public agency. Indeed, I'd argue that she founded the organization precisely because the Swedish public sector lacks the competence to deal with these issues.

The effects of the seminar have already appeared, of course, an one commentator argues that it is time for the multiculturalist pendulim to swing back. The problem with that conclusion, of course, is that swinging back means a return to paternalist assimilitary policies, which will hardly solve the problem of disempowered immigrant communities, but rather aggravate it. And that's not "moving beyond multiculturalism" at all...