The obsession with Sweden
Conservatives and right-leaning people around the globe are obsessed with Sweden, its crime statistics and alleged or real immigration troubles. This can be astonishing at first. But it’s understandable: People often develop negative feelings if they see someone succeeding in a very different way than what they think is the correct approach. The group then develops all kinds of strategies to exercise pressure on the nonconformist to adhere to the norms of the group.
This analogy helps me to understand why Donald Trump, despite being completely uninformed on the matter and despite probably not even being able to point out the origin of IKEA, would make high-profile references to Sweden. In many ways, Sweden resembles that nonconformist country in a group of conformists. Despite its small population, its former socialist agenda and its cultural tendency towards understatement, the country has had a significant impact on international business, technological innovation, culture and way of living (“Why Sweden beats other countries at just about everything”). For hard-line capitalists this alone creates cognitive dissonance. Furthermore, Sweden is one of most secular countries in the world, it has arguably the world’s most advanced ambitions in regards to achieving gender equality, and it has had a pretty open immigration policy for at least two decades.
All these attributes, taken together, are unacceptable for sympathizers of more conservative ideologies. Based on their world view, there should be collapse, not prosperity. And so Sweden is being targeted as the nonconformist country that threatens to disrupt the consensus among (Western) conservatives and right-wingers of how things should work: a closed instead of an open mindset, strong faith in Christianity, women subordinate to men, intolerance towards alternative lifestyles or sexual preferences etc.
Essentially, Swedes should be flattered. It’s first when you have enemies that you know that you are achieving something serious.
Now, does this mean that everything is great in Sweden, and that immigration hasn’t caused issues? No of course not. Who are we even kidding?! When a country with less than 10 million inhabitants over a lengthy period of time opens its borders to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and economical misery — many of them coming with nothing but themselves from places with very different cultures — who seriously expects that this wouldn’t internally lead to increased social tension, rising inequality, and criminal activities among a subset of individuals who don’t manage to establish themselves? One must live in a fairy land to believe that.
So in some regards, Sweden is facing serious challenges. The physical segregation is a big problem. That many migrants end up in remote suburbs to the cities creates a breeding ground for all kinds of undesirable mid and long term effects. Then there is the issue of the understaffed Swedish police. It took quite a while until Globalization really hit Sweden, but eventually it did - and the police hasn’t had the chance to fully adjust. On New Years Eve 2016/2017, more than 10.000 police were on duty in Paris, more than 1.700 in Berlin — and 92 in Stockholm (on a regular evening it would only be 22!). Stockholm’s population is more than 1/4 of Berlin and about 1/10 of Paris’. If you consider these figures, it actually creates a completely different narrative: Sweden is surprisingly safe considering how little police there is per capita. Nevertheless, intense recruiting efforts are ongoing, but they for obvious reasons take time.
When it comes to social unrest, Swedish police doesn’t have water cannons and is simply not equipped for large-scale violent riots, unlike police in for example Germany, France or the US — whose officers often resemble more military than police. While that sounds like a Swedish disadvantage, it also has an upside: More tax money can be spend on other things, and it represents a philosophy of minimizing the use of violent force towards civilians, acknowledging that violence often begets violence. For long time, this has worked well. Whether that approach has to change due to new circumstances, I let others make a judgement.
So, as always, there are two sides to the story. Overall, no matter what Donald Trump says, the story of Sweden is a story of success. That success comes with costs though, and these will now have to be managed. Having observed the ingenuity and creativity of Swedes since I moved there in 2006, I am optimistic that solutions to the problems will be found.
