Abstract
Official declarations state that Sweden is today a multicultural society. As a result of continuous postwar immigration, Sweden has today one of the largest proportion of immigrants in relation to the total national population in Europe.1 Today, approximately 16 percent of the Swedish population has “immigrant background” from all over the world.2 At the same time, as the Swedish population has become more and more multiethnic, ethnic hierarchies have become increasingly conspicuous, “even in Sweden,” a country long well-known for its ambitious welfare and integration policy.3 The labor and housing markets, the mass media and politics, the educational and justice systems are in various ways clearly stratified along ethnic, religious, and racial lines.4
[I]t’s not the fact that some people are democrats and other people are not that is important. The real problem is which meaning of democracy is actually in play.
Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists”
[A] democracy of consensus is a democracy of neutrality in which undemocratic practices at the level of daily life go depressingly unquestioned and uncha l lenged.
Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium
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Notes
According to Charles Westin, postwar immigration to Sweden can be divided into four main phases. The first phase, 1940–1948, was marked by refugee immigration, mainly from neighbor countries. The second period, 1949–1971, included immigration mainly from Finland and southern Europe, in a situation where the Swedish welfare state was growing rapidly and the economic expansion created a strong demand for workers. The third phase, 1972–1989, was characterized by family reunion and refugee immigration from Third World countries. In the 1970s, immigration was dominated by South American refugees. In the 1980s, most of the asylum seekers came from the Middle East. The fourth phase began in the early 1990s, when immigration mainly consisted of asylum seekers from ex-Yugoslavia. Charles Westin, Immigration to Sweden: An Overview (Stockholm: Ceifo, 1996).
Alan P. Pred, Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Aleksandra Ålund and Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Paradoxes of Multiculturalism: Essays on Swedish Society (Avebury: Aldershot Ashgate, 1991); Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Peo Hansen, and Stephen Castles, Migration, Citizenship and the European Welfare State: A European Dilemma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
SOU 2005: 56, Det blågula glashuset: Strukturell diskriminering i Sverige (final report, The Commission on Structural Discrimination on Ethnic and Religious Grounds, 2005).
Bo Rothstein, Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), 248. See also Stephen Castles, “International Migration and the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century: Global Trends and Issues,” International Social Science Journal 165 (2000): 269–81; Schierup, Hansen, and Castles, Migration, Citizenship and the European Welfare State.
Tomas Hammar, “Sweden” in: European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, ed. Tomas Hammar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Aldershot: Ashgate Avebury, 1990); Yasemine Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Post-National Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Pontus Odmalm, “Civil Society, Migrant Organisations and Political Parties: Theoretical Linkages and Applications to the Swedish Context,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 3 (2004): 471–89. Schierup, Hansen, and Castles, Migration, Citizenship and the European Welfare State.
Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State; The Swedish Board of Integration, Excluded from Democracy? On the Political Participation of Immigrants (Norrköping: The Swedish Board of Integration, 2001); Paula Rodrigo Blomqvist, Närvarons politik och det mångetniska Sverige: Om att ta plats i demokratin (PhD diss., The School of Public Administration, Gothenburg University, 2005).
The Swedish Federation of Local Authorities and County Councils, Kommunpolitikern (Sundbyberg, Ordförrådet, 2000).
Abdul Khakee and Marcus Johansson, “Nominerade men inte valbara,” Invandrare & Minoriteter 29, no. 2 (2002): 29–32.
David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995).
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
See further Elmer Eric Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).
James March and Johan Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1990), 47.
Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State; Bäck and Soininen, “Invandrarna, demokratin och samhället”; Bäck and Soininen, “Immigrants in the Political Process”; The Swedish Board of Integration.
John Solomos and Les Back, Race, Politics and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1996); Schierenbeck and Schütt, “Invandrare som folkvalda.”
Khakee and Johansson, “Nominerade men inte valbara”; Maritta Soininen and Nils Etzler, Partierna nominerar: Exkluderingens mekanismer—etnicitet och representation (SOU 2006: 53, The Commission on Power, Integration and Structural Discrimination, 2006).
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). 34. Ålund and Schierup, Paradoxes of Multiculturalism; Ali Osman, “Folkbildning i ‘integrationens’ tjänst: Folkbildningens dilemman och invandrarföreningars pragmat ism,” in Demokrati på svenska? Om strukturell diskriminering och politiskt deltagande, eds. Magnus Dahlstedt and Fredrik Hertzberg (SOU 2005: 112, The Commission on Power, Integration and Structural Discrimination, 2005).
Dahlstedt and Hertzberg, eds., Demokrati på svenska?; Kugelberg, “Förhandlingar om tillhörighet.”
Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard, “ ‘Black Skull’ Consciousness: The New Swedish Working Class,” Race & Class 46, no. 3 (2004): 55–71; Boréus, Diskriminera med ord; Boréus, Diskrimineringens retorik: En studie av svenska valrörelser 1988–2002 (SOU 2006: 52, The Commission on Power, Integration and Structural Discrimination, 2006); Osman, “Folkbildning i ‘integrationens’ tjänst”; Soininen and Etzler, Partierna nominerar.
See, for instance, Ralph D. Grillo, Ideologies and Institutions in Urban France: The Representation of Immigrants (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Robert Miles, “The Racialization of British Politics,” Political Studies 38 (1990): 277–85; Steven Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (London: Macmillan, 2000); Aldisdair Rogers and Jean Tillie, eds., Multicultural Policies and Modes of Citizenship in European Cities (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Shamit Saggar, Race and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Rodrigo Blomqvist, Närvarons politik. 40. Ålund and Schierup, Paradoxes of Multiculturalism; Stuart Hall, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Books, 2000), 209–41; Mulinari and Neergaard, “ ‘Black Skull’ Consciousness.”
Sören Holmberg and Tommy Möller, eds., Premiär för personal (SOU 1999: 92, The Board of Evaluation of the 1998 Election, 1999).
Tomas Hammar, “Closing the Doors to the Swedish Welfare State,” in Mechanisms of Immigration Control, eds. Grete Brochmann and Tomas Hammar (Berg: Oxford, 1999), 169–201.
In order to be elected to the Swedish parliament, a candidate needs to win at least 8 percent of the party’s votes in a given constituency. If this target is achieved, the candidate is moved to the top of the party list.
Ann Bergman, “Välj själv! Personvalet kan förstöra karriären,” Expressen, August 11, 1998.
Stockholm Office of Research and Statistics, Allmänna val i Stockholm 1994 (City of Stockholm, 1994). For example, in the 1994 election, the percentages of those who voted for the Moderates were as follow: 11.4 percent in Husby, 9.6 percent in Tensta, and 5.9 percent in Rinkeby. Corresponding figures for the Social Democrats in the same areas were 58.9, 60.8, and 67.5 percent, respectively. The figures for the entire city of Stockholm were 28.7 percent for the Moderates and 26.5 percent for the Social Democrats.
Leif-Åke Josefsson, “En kamel ska ta ‘terroristen’ till riksdagen,” Aftonbladet, August 7, 2002.
Jens Kärrman, “Äntligen en fri man på stan,” Aftonbladet, July 15, 2002.
Susan A. Banducci, Todd Donovan, and Jeffrey A. Karp, “Minority Representation, Empowerment, and Participation,” The Journal of Politics 66, no. 2 (2004): 534–56.
Borevi, Välfärdsstaten i det mångkulturella samhället.
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© 2008 Wendy Pojmann
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Dahlstedt, M. (2008). “From Camel-Boy to MP”: The Politics of Agency and Exclusion in Swedish Political Parties. In: Pojmann, W. (eds) Migration and Activism in Europe Since 1945. Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615540_9
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