March 23, 2024 - 8:30am
In the run-up to Sweden’s 2022 election, the centre-left Social Democrats released a campaign film in which party leader and then prime minister Magdalena Andersson seemed to reminisce about the homogenous and close-knit Swedish society of the Eighties. This week, the party took a further step along the same path when Kurdish-born MP Lawen Redar, head of a newly formed policy group on “cohesion”, gave a major interview to Sweden’s leading newspaper.
Building explicitly on the work of Pascal Bruckner, a French critic of multiculturalism, Redar remarked that belonging is contingent on more than a formal citizenship. “It is not enough to be Swedish on paper,” she said. “You have to be Swedish in your heart.”
Sweden’s political Left and Right seem almost to have switched places on matters of national identity and globalism. Responding to the country’s Nato entry last month, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who heads the ruling centre-right coalition, has spoken of Sweden having finally “come home, geographically, emotionally and in terms of values” into the Atlantic grouping. Even prominent figures within the nationalist and anti-establishment Right-wing Sweden Democrats party have now fully embraced the Atlanticist creed.
The Social Democrats, meanwhile, seem to be rediscovering the concept of home in a more nationalist context. In a public address earlier this month about Sweden’s Nato accession, Andersson explained that her government launched the candidacy to the international alliance two years ago to protect “the country we love”.
On immigration and integration, having identified with a radical open-borders policy in recent years, the Social Democrats are moving fast. Swedish liberals and mainstream conservatives alike used to believe that immigrants could, and indeed should, retain their cultural identity as long as they were active in the labour market. The weakness of this argument was already revealed over twenty years ago when, in 2002, an economically well-integrated Kurdish immigrant murdered his daughter in one of Sweden’s first honour killings. Yet now the message from Lawen Redar is one of cultural and moral assimilation, and an expectation on ethnic-based loyalties to “fade away” in favour of national sentiments.
The Social Democrats are thus reconnecting with the party’s early traditions. When Redar says, “We are going home, to our people’s home,” she is echoing the nationally-oriented social democracy of the Twenties and Thirties, which co-opted the concept of a cohesive and egalitarian “people’s home” from conservative thinkers of the day, proclaiming: “Sweden for the Swedes — Swedes for Sweden!”
The party is currently ideally positioned to do just this, since its main competitor for male working-class voters, the Sweden Democrats, has become gradually more aligned with its government partners. The Right-wing party shares the centre-right’s inclination to refer to Sweden not as a country, but instead as a “social contract”.
What Redar, lamenting her lack of a family grave plot on Swedish soil, professes to love is not a technocratic agreement between individuals but rather, to paraphrase the socialist patriot George Orwell, her country, Right or Left.
Translated to a British context, the Social Democrats are embracing the politics of “Blue Labour”, a programme described by its chief architect, Maurice Glasman, as infused with “sadness and loss” for the national community. As Britain’s Conservative government sheds support in “red wall” Brexit-voting areas, Keir Starmer may find himself joining his Swedish colleagues in singing a bluer note.
Johan Wennström is a Research Fellow at the Swedish Defence University, currently writing a book about Sweden’s stay-behind network during the Cold War.
johanwennstrom
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SubscribeGood article. Thanks!
“Building explicitly on the work of Pascal Bruckner, a French critic of multiculturalism”
Pascal Bruckner has written some great books. ‘The tyranny of guilt ‘ about Western masochism and ‘Perpetual Euphoria’ about the modern duty to be happy are two of the best, most intellectually stimulating things I’ve read in the last 10 years.
You’ve set the hook. I’ll order it straightaway.
So the Socialdemokraterna are starting to make anti-multiculti noises. Is that just a cynical ploy to win back white working class votes? Or are they going to copy their Danish social democrat counterparts in having a more restricted policy concerning immigration?
The violent crime is perpetrated by gangs operating in virtual no-go areas. How do Socialdemokraterna think they can transform the gang members into patriotic Swedes? After one lot of riots a few years ago, the then social democrat government responded by giving kids in the ghettoes free iPads. So they have tried kindness.
Fraser Nelson likes to point out that the UK and Sweden have opposite approaches to immigration. The UK makes a lot of fuss about trying to sstop them getting in, but lets them in anyway. The Swedish ellite has traditionally been very welcoming to immigrants, but once they are in Sweden, the immigrants realise just how little ordinary Swedes want them there. So they end up in high-welfare ghettoes on the outskirts of cities.
Not mentioned in the article is the Social Democrates and Lawen Redars’ plans of how to achieve these newfound goals of becoming swedish ”heart and soul”. According to Redar it will call for a not yet revealed major social engineering programme.
Stand by for your child being bussed to one of the many disadvantaged areas in Sweden to ”integrate” whether you (or they) like it or not. That’s a no-brainer. What other devillish plans there are to cover up for thirty years of uncontrolled immigration one can only dream of.
The same thing is happening in the Netherlands. At one school I taught, I officially reported cases of rampant sexism and bullying coming from a certain demographic of students, but only to discover that my reporting of it was seen as the greater problem.
Surely not victim blaming ? The Left’s been whining about that for years. But, just like the grooming gangs, looses all interest when the perpetrators aren’t from the ‘right demographic ‘ . See Khan’s ridiculous ‘Maaate ‘ anti-sexism campaign.
Indeed, there is a willful blindness to confront these issues head on or just even to at least acknowledge them.
Here in the US we are experts at integrating immigrants into the community.
Best strategy so far: fight a World War and draft all the male immigrants so that a whole generation of young men ends up as buddies.