CBC continues its coverage of these types of crimes. This feature discusses how a Muslim community centre acts to prevent such violence. It's not a large organization, its website showing that it only has about six employees, and yet, I would not be surprised if it was quite succesful. The difference between this community group and a public agency is that precisely because it's a group developed from the community, of the community, it has a different understanding, different cultural capital and legitimacy for the community. In contrast, a public agency has the problem of its exercise of power. By virtue of being a public authority, it has a barrier to building trust within the community, and I believe that trust is key in the prevention of these crimes. That includes not only helping the people who would become victims, but also, effectively, reaching out to those who might become potential perpetrators and influencing them so that they don't.
I also found it interesting that the group is cooperating with an American group that seems completely unrelated - because how would, at face, honour killings have to do with gang violence among African American communities, be related. Well, judging from what is said in the feature, it is linked through the destructive status mechanisms that drives violence in both cases. Also, they both have in common that they are solutions that come from within the community. That gives the group itself power over the issue and a voice in public space.
I think that is imperative if such efforts are to succeed.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Honour related killings in Canada and Sweden
This topic is currently receiving some attention in both Canada and Sweden. In Canada, this is due to two cases currently in the legal system, the Shafia trial , where members of the Shafia family (orginally from Afghanistan) stand accused of killing four sisters, and the extradiction procedure of the mother and uncle of young woman accused of being involved in her murder in India. In Sweden, the attention stems largely from the rememberance of it being 10 years since the murder of Fadime Sahindal, of Kurdish decent.
This is a very complex issue and one disclaimer needs to be made right away: I haven't studied these types of events or the processes behind as part of my work. I merely take part of what the ongoing public debate in public space and make reflections based on my experience stuyding ethnic relations.
Sometimes (and in my impression this is more explicitly so in Europe), the public debate is said to consist of two camps, one (predominantly to the left) arguing that honour killings are just another form of patriarchy, and one (arguably on the right) saying that it's an issue of culture, where some cultures condone and encourage such killings in the name of honour. What is particularly problematic is that both sides tend to mirepresent the other side's argument in an almost hyperbolic fashion. So the "culture as a cause" side argues that the other side are "cultural relativists" who would look away and even allow murder for the sake of "multiculturalism" or "respecting other people's culture" (and I've never actually heard anyone make any such arguments). Meanwhile, the "it's patriarchy side" wants to paint the other side as just another group of racists.
The reason I find it complex is that I don't think that either form of explanation is succifiently nuanced, but also that both sides seem to simplify the processes that might underly these phenomena to the point of misrepresenting them, which would also obstruct preventative work rather than facilitate it.
For those who want to explain this with culture, several questions immediately rise: how are the Kurdish, Afghan and Indian cultures similar? It's not the religion of Islam, clearly, since the Indians in question, it seems to me, are not Muslim, but Hindu (indeed, it was a marriage across caste-lines that was alledgedly the motive of the killing). Moreover, there are many, many people within each of these communities who are activists trying to combat these practices, including Sara Mohammed herself, the founder of the Swedish network above. Indeed, if I recall correctly, the Kurdish community organized a manifestation against these practices in connection to the murder, so it's fairly clear that it's difficult to assign this type of value to a culture in a wider, ethnic sense (unless someone wants to try and make the argument that Kurds who take exception to such practices are "less Kurdish" than those who condone them, which is an argument I would find absurd).
Yet, at the same time, there does seem to me some form of status mechanism involved - the perpetrators seem to share the "protection of the family honour" motive. Thus, there is some form of cultural capital that drives these processes. Exactly how that takes place, and what common denominators can be found, I could not say (since I have not studied these properly)*.
However, I am concerned with the public debate, because reductionism is not going to prevent more murders, and that goes both ways. Engaging in a rhetoric that paints an entire community of "others" as "potential honour murderers" is only going to exacerbate racialization and stigmatization. Likewise, denying that there are young men and women who, at the end of the day, risk their lives if they do not conform to a wider family's demands with regards to their love lives, is not going to help these victims.
Finally, the ways of addressing the issue seem to differ between the two countries. In Canada, it seems to be the immigrant communities themselves who address the issue. Many advocates I have heard speaking on the subject express their concern that these murders will increase prejudice against the own community, and also argue that these practices are not inherent in the culture and therefore police should be so concern with "respecting the culture" that they do not take firm action against such crimes. In Sweden, immigrant organizations are quite underfunded and hardly agents to speak of. Instead, it is the government agencies that own the issue, as described by Björling, a former member of a women's centre. The problem with that is that the predominantly ethnic Swedish civil servants have very limited insight into the communities and also lack competence in dealing with the issue. Indeed, the grassroot organizations seems to have been continuously sidelined by Swedish government officials, in a most destructive manner, according to Björling. It's a pattern I recognize.
My experience tells me that the Canadian model probably can be more succesful: it gives ownership to the issue to those closest concerned with it, including the advocates of victims, who are likely to be more knowledgeable about this. It would also avoid stereotyping and racialization. That said, I'm not aware of any study that has actually compared the two models.
*If I were to speculate, I would probably make a Bourdieusian analysis, thinking about cultural capital in fairly closed social network (Habitus) as one important driver. In that sense, the practice can be related to both culture and patriarchy, and distinct from some other patriarchal practices, but not cultural in an ethnic sense, since it seems like a phenomenon that exists within subsets of larger communities.
This is a very complex issue and one disclaimer needs to be made right away: I haven't studied these types of events or the processes behind as part of my work. I merely take part of what the ongoing public debate in public space and make reflections based on my experience stuyding ethnic relations.
Sometimes (and in my impression this is more explicitly so in Europe), the public debate is said to consist of two camps, one (predominantly to the left) arguing that honour killings are just another form of patriarchy, and one (arguably on the right) saying that it's an issue of culture, where some cultures condone and encourage such killings in the name of honour. What is particularly problematic is that both sides tend to mirepresent the other side's argument in an almost hyperbolic fashion. So the "culture as a cause" side argues that the other side are "cultural relativists" who would look away and even allow murder for the sake of "multiculturalism" or "respecting other people's culture" (and I've never actually heard anyone make any such arguments). Meanwhile, the "it's patriarchy side" wants to paint the other side as just another group of racists.
The reason I find it complex is that I don't think that either form of explanation is succifiently nuanced, but also that both sides seem to simplify the processes that might underly these phenomena to the point of misrepresenting them, which would also obstruct preventative work rather than facilitate it.
For those who want to explain this with culture, several questions immediately rise: how are the Kurdish, Afghan and Indian cultures similar? It's not the religion of Islam, clearly, since the Indians in question, it seems to me, are not Muslim, but Hindu (indeed, it was a marriage across caste-lines that was alledgedly the motive of the killing). Moreover, there are many, many people within each of these communities who are activists trying to combat these practices, including Sara Mohammed herself, the founder of the Swedish network above. Indeed, if I recall correctly, the Kurdish community organized a manifestation against these practices in connection to the murder, so it's fairly clear that it's difficult to assign this type of value to a culture in a wider, ethnic sense (unless someone wants to try and make the argument that Kurds who take exception to such practices are "less Kurdish" than those who condone them, which is an argument I would find absurd).
Yet, at the same time, there does seem to me some form of status mechanism involved - the perpetrators seem to share the "protection of the family honour" motive. Thus, there is some form of cultural capital that drives these processes. Exactly how that takes place, and what common denominators can be found, I could not say (since I have not studied these properly)*.
However, I am concerned with the public debate, because reductionism is not going to prevent more murders, and that goes both ways. Engaging in a rhetoric that paints an entire community of "others" as "potential honour murderers" is only going to exacerbate racialization and stigmatization. Likewise, denying that there are young men and women who, at the end of the day, risk their lives if they do not conform to a wider family's demands with regards to their love lives, is not going to help these victims.
Finally, the ways of addressing the issue seem to differ between the two countries. In Canada, it seems to be the immigrant communities themselves who address the issue. Many advocates I have heard speaking on the subject express their concern that these murders will increase prejudice against the own community, and also argue that these practices are not inherent in the culture and therefore police should be so concern with "respecting the culture" that they do not take firm action against such crimes. In Sweden, immigrant organizations are quite underfunded and hardly agents to speak of. Instead, it is the government agencies that own the issue, as described by Björling, a former member of a women's centre. The problem with that is that the predominantly ethnic Swedish civil servants have very limited insight into the communities and also lack competence in dealing with the issue. Indeed, the grassroot organizations seems to have been continuously sidelined by Swedish government officials, in a most destructive manner, according to Björling. It's a pattern I recognize.
My experience tells me that the Canadian model probably can be more succesful: it gives ownership to the issue to those closest concerned with it, including the advocates of victims, who are likely to be more knowledgeable about this. It would also avoid stereotyping and racialization. That said, I'm not aware of any study that has actually compared the two models.
*If I were to speculate, I would probably make a Bourdieusian analysis, thinking about cultural capital in fairly closed social network (Habitus) as one important driver. In that sense, the practice can be related to both culture and patriarchy, and distinct from some other patriarchal practices, but not cultural in an ethnic sense, since it seems like a phenomenon that exists within subsets of larger communities.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Swedish News comments Canadian immigration policy
It turns out that the Aktuellt, a Swedish equivalent of CBC's The National, visited my hometown of Edmonton recently, to do a feature on Canadian immigration policy (ironically, nobody had informed the journalists that I live here).
There is one trait that stands out to me from the piece: It repeats something that is turning into a truism in the Swedish debate: Canadian immigration is so selective, and does not accept many refugees (implication: so no wonder it works better than in Sweden).
That's certainly comforting for Swedish commentators, but it is also, alas, far too simplistic and ignores some important facts that need consideration:
First, while it is true that it is harder for refugees in Canada to find jobs than it is for those who come through the work force immigration stream (in Canada called the Highly skilled stream), it is still quite possible for refugees in Canada to find entry level jobs. In other words, the difficult for Swedish immigrants is to find jobs, period. For a Canadian refugee, entry to the labour market is more challenging than for those who immigrate through other streams, but entry-level jobs are still quite achieveable.
Secondly, this is reflected in the single-minded focus of the Swedish debate, where the issue of whether immigrants there can ever work in their own level of competence (for instance, can an immigrant with a BA find academic level work?) is rarely, if ever addressed. Swedish commentators seem to be content that integration on the labour market works if immigrants just find some kind of job at all, which is indicative of very low levels of ambitions, indeed. The debate in Canada is, instead: how can immigrants reach the same income levels as the native born population, and find jobs in their own competence level. The debate is thus qualitatively different in that regard.
Thirdly, one should not lose sight of the fact that a substantial number of immigrants to both Canada and Sweden come through family class immigration, even though these numbers have dropped somewhat in Canada during the past few years, (a fact which, by the way, have created a lot of frustration in immigrant communities).
There is, thus, no reason for Swedish commentators to feel look at Canada and become complacent about integration in Sweden because of the work force stream employed by this country. It is an incomplete comparison, at best.
There is one trait that stands out to me from the piece: It repeats something that is turning into a truism in the Swedish debate: Canadian immigration is so selective, and does not accept many refugees (implication: so no wonder it works better than in Sweden).
That's certainly comforting for Swedish commentators, but it is also, alas, far too simplistic and ignores some important facts that need consideration:
First, while it is true that it is harder for refugees in Canada to find jobs than it is for those who come through the work force immigration stream (in Canada called the Highly skilled stream), it is still quite possible for refugees in Canada to find entry level jobs. In other words, the difficult for Swedish immigrants is to find jobs, period. For a Canadian refugee, entry to the labour market is more challenging than for those who immigrate through other streams, but entry-level jobs are still quite achieveable.
Secondly, this is reflected in the single-minded focus of the Swedish debate, where the issue of whether immigrants there can ever work in their own level of competence (for instance, can an immigrant with a BA find academic level work?) is rarely, if ever addressed. Swedish commentators seem to be content that integration on the labour market works if immigrants just find some kind of job at all, which is indicative of very low levels of ambitions, indeed. The debate in Canada is, instead: how can immigrants reach the same income levels as the native born population, and find jobs in their own competence level. The debate is thus qualitatively different in that regard.
Thirdly, one should not lose sight of the fact that a substantial number of immigrants to both Canada and Sweden come through family class immigration, even though these numbers have dropped somewhat in Canada during the past few years, (a fact which, by the way, have created a lot of frustration in immigrant communities).
There is, thus, no reason for Swedish commentators to feel look at Canada and become complacent about integration in Sweden because of the work force stream employed by this country. It is an incomplete comparison, at best.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Ethnic discrimination and representation
After seemingly long absence from the public debate in Sweden, discrimination has once again been given some attention. Recently, the think tank FORES released a new study does indeed constitute a barrier to labor market integration for immigrants in Sweden. Meanwhile, there've been some comments concerning the case of quotas within the police department, where an ethnic Swedish man experienced discrimination because he was not considered as a recruit because of these quotas. At the same time, another study shows that most Swedish private employers have not even considered ethnic diversity in the workplace, or have to achieve it.
I'm pleased to see the issue re-appearing again. For too long, the public debate has been focused on how to demand more from immigrants, as if the root cause of social exclusion is to be found within the "flawed" immigrants.
What is concerning, though, is that even a decade after this was acknowledged as a problem, employers, both public and private, seem to lack the capacity to deal with the matter. Madon makes a convincing case that the Police seems to have been using quotas in a most blunt manner. Reducing the matter of minority representation within the staff to simply a matter of counting heads of different colours is never a good idea. What is needed is an understanding of substantive representation, that is to say, how a plural work force manages to capture the experience from many different social spaces or environments, allowing the organization to navigate competently in these spaces. That is to say, these experiences, although they maybe not formally recognized with diplomas, can still be considered skills, in the sense that the person who has them has the capacity to view the world from different perspectives, and also gives the organization a greater legimacy across different communities.
Here in Canada, the news recently noted such an example within the armed forces, Lieutenant Colonel Harjit Singh Sajjan, Canada's first Sikh commanding officer. After tours in Afghanistan, he bore witness to how his different cultural capital, his different outlook and capacity to understand more than one perspective, made him invaluable to both the Canadian and American forces on the ground. As he says: "It's not political correctness. For the Canadian forces, it's an operational necessity...".
Employers everywhere need to learn about these very concrete ways of conceptualizing competence if discrimination is to become a thing of the past.
I'm pleased to see the issue re-appearing again. For too long, the public debate has been focused on how to demand more from immigrants, as if the root cause of social exclusion is to be found within the "flawed" immigrants.
What is concerning, though, is that even a decade after this was acknowledged as a problem, employers, both public and private, seem to lack the capacity to deal with the matter. Madon makes a convincing case that the Police seems to have been using quotas in a most blunt manner. Reducing the matter of minority representation within the staff to simply a matter of counting heads of different colours is never a good idea. What is needed is an understanding of substantive representation, that is to say, how a plural work force manages to capture the experience from many different social spaces or environments, allowing the organization to navigate competently in these spaces. That is to say, these experiences, although they maybe not formally recognized with diplomas, can still be considered skills, in the sense that the person who has them has the capacity to view the world from different perspectives, and also gives the organization a greater legimacy across different communities.
Here in Canada, the news recently noted such an example within the armed forces, Lieutenant Colonel Harjit Singh Sajjan, Canada's first Sikh commanding officer. After tours in Afghanistan, he bore witness to how his different cultural capital, his different outlook and capacity to understand more than one perspective, made him invaluable to both the Canadian and American forces on the ground. As he says: "It's not political correctness. For the Canadian forces, it's an operational necessity...".
Employers everywhere need to learn about these very concrete ways of conceptualizing competence if discrimination is to become a thing of the past.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Metropolis Conference Day
I spent most of the day yesterday at the Prairie Metropolis Centre Regional conference here in Edmonton. I was given the honour of presenting a poster of my upcoming paper/dissertation chapter, anchoring the literature on immigrant and ethnic organizations in Bourdieu's theoretical framework. It was a fascinating day in many ways, even for me who is fairly knowledgeable about the subject matter at hand. The keynote address made by Howard Duncan, executive head of the Metropolis Secretariat, was particularly interesting.
He described the profound impact that Metropolis has had in bringing together researchers and practicioners from the field, allowing for very direct communications between governments, NGOs and the academia that is now, in many respects, institutionalized.
Indeed, this was reflected during the conference itself. Community organizations have an active role to play here in Canada and are represented among both the speakers and the guests, and the level of sophistication of the conversation is quite remarkable, focus on how to solve very practical issues of communication between different communites. One example was a presentation about how health care can be delivered effectively to minority communities as well, by raising the cultural competence of health care workers in direct cooperation with the community.
This environment is such a contrast from the practices I remember from Sweden. Over there, the room was habitually filled with civil servants from the local or national governments, with community representatives largely absent, and certainly absent from the list of presenters, sending a strong signal about who was regarded as an authority in the field and who was not.
It is possible that the conference practices have changed in the past six years, but I wouldn't expect any radical change of the situation, since these actors are hardly recognized as legitimate actors in the social service delivery role.
He described the profound impact that Metropolis has had in bringing together researchers and practicioners from the field, allowing for very direct communications between governments, NGOs and the academia that is now, in many respects, institutionalized.
Indeed, this was reflected during the conference itself. Community organizations have an active role to play here in Canada and are represented among both the speakers and the guests, and the level of sophistication of the conversation is quite remarkable, focus on how to solve very practical issues of communication between different communites. One example was a presentation about how health care can be delivered effectively to minority communities as well, by raising the cultural competence of health care workers in direct cooperation with the community.
This environment is such a contrast from the practices I remember from Sweden. Over there, the room was habitually filled with civil servants from the local or national governments, with community representatives largely absent, and certainly absent from the list of presenters, sending a strong signal about who was regarded as an authority in the field and who was not.
It is possible that the conference practices have changed in the past six years, but I wouldn't expect any radical change of the situation, since these actors are hardly recognized as legitimate actors in the social service delivery role.
Monday, August 15, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, July 8, 2011
The discursive shift in the Swedish right wing....
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.
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.
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