The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  In his view Rosengård’s chief problem was its poor housing: ‘There are twenty people in some apartments, cockroaches . . .’ but also the more recent arrival of non-Western muslims, often from conflict areas or far-away areas of rural poverty. ‘Not the same traditions. They are very slow to integrate – perhaps take twenty years. They have no language, criminality grows.’

  I left the mosque and walked across a rather boggy, desolate park to the cluster of tower blocks that made up Almgården, the white, working-class sub-estate a few hundred metres away. As if a switch had been flicked, I was back in mainstream Sweden again. There were no head scarves, no Arabic signs in the shop windows, no Halal burgers. The occasional tattered Swedish flag fluttered from a balcony. There were lace curtains. Overweight women with orange highlights walked small white dogs. I asked one how it was to live here, mentioning that I had heard about the friction with their immigrant neighbours. ‘What, Herregården?’ She exhaled impatiently, as if to say ‘I have more to worry about than them’, and moved on. Another man I met was more interested in telling me about the broken lift in his building, and how no one was doing anything to help the people who lived around there.

  As I waited by a kebab stand behind the estate for the bus back to central Malmö, it struck me that the people of Almgården probably faced precisely the same problems as their immigrant neighbours in Herregården – poor education, few opportunities, little hope, and no money – yet each was fearful and resentful of the other, their animosity as much a barrier as the city planning which defined and divided their everyday landscape.

  Chapter 5

  Catalonians

  THE AWKWARD TRUTH for Sweden’s multiculturalists is that immigrants and asylum seekers do appear to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in the country, particularly violent crime, and particularly rape. In Fishing in Utopia Andrew Brown writes:

  It is one of the known unspeakables of Swedish life that the crime rate among immigrants and their descendants is at least double that in the native population . . . Immigrants are more than four times as likely as Swedes to commit a murder, and more than five times as likely to commit a rape.

  Even some of the liberal, left-wing muliculturalist Scandinavians I spoke with were occasionally willing to concede, off the record, that newly arrived, uneducated immigrants, particularly those from rural parts of Islamic countries, are simply not equipped to deal, for instance, with the way Western women dress and behave.

  The equally awkward truth for the right-wingers opposed to immigration – by which they usually mean Muslims – is that one major factor in immigrant crime is the very Scandinavian welfare model, which the right-wing parties are often fighting just as hard as the Social Democrats to maintain. The Scandinavian welfare-state model was not designed with non-Western immigrants in mind. Unlike, say, the immigrants who came to the UK in the 1950s, immigrants to the Nordic countries often lack the language skills and qualifications required to make best use of the safety net and, even when they do acquire these things, they face prejudice among potential employers and society in general. By effectively shunting newly arrived immigrants off to places like Rosengård, where they are given just enough money to live on but face often insurmountable obstacles to progressing further in society,1 the system creates convenient ghettoes for their ongoing ‘clientification’ (as the process of making new arrivals wholly dependent on welfare provision is known). This is in stark contrast to the US, for instance, where immigrants generally have to work hard to survive and, in doing so, create lives and businesses with little state support – those employment and earning opportunities, of course, being the very things that draw them to the States in the first place.

  One proposed solution to the problem is to have a two-tier system, with different welfare provision for new arrivals, more stringent rules for applications, and so on. Denmark has taken this path over recent years, but in doing so has provoked outrage from human rights organisations, the EU and others, and suffered irrevocable damage to its international image. Sweden did clamp down on immigration in the wake of its economic problems in the early 1990s, but it has still been running at record levels (roughly 100,000 new arrivals every year), above even 1970s figures. The country has also taken in around 30,000 asylum seekers each year, compared with 3,000–5,000 in Denmark, a figure which is striking enough in absolute terms, but which makes Sweden the third highest destination for asylum seekers in the world in per capita terms (Britain is seventeenth, the US twenty-fourth, Denmark a surprisingly high sixteenth).

  Åke Daun had both positive and negative reflections on the future of Sweden’s immigration experiment. I had asked him my usual question: weren’t the homogenous, isolated, introspective people of Scandinavia inherently unpromising candidates for the large-scale integration of immigrants? He told me about some research conducted twenty-five years ago by the European Values Study. It canvassed around 16,000 people in 16 countries about their points of view on a range of subjects. ‘One of the “agree or disagree” statements they were asked about was “I don’t like to be with people who are different from me in terms of their values, opinions, and so on”,’ Daun explained. ‘And I think it was 43 per cent of Swedes that said “Yes, I don’t like to be together with people who are different from me.” When I first saw that, I thought, well that’s not bad, less than half. But then I saw the responses from the other countries and the difference was immense. In the other Nordic countries it was about 10 per cent, even Spain was only 22 per cent. I thought, this can’t be true, it must be a statistical error, so twenty years later, in 2004, when I was invited to contribute a question to the same survey, I asked for this one again and this time the answer was 41 per cent, so no change really.’

  Despite this, Daun did seem moderately optimistic about his country’s multicultural future, pointing out that, for all the troubled youth of Rosengård, there were many young immigrants who were making great progress through the education system. ‘There is no alternative, whatever we think, the world will be more and more international with mixed populations, also in Scandinavia,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t buy your idea,’ Henrik Berggren, one of Sweden’s leading historians and social commentators told me when I put my hypothesis of the awkward ethnographical fit between Swedes and immigrants to him during a later visit to Stockholm. ‘Obviously you’re right that our history is one of a homogenous country, but if you compare Denmark and Sweden, modernity has been a very, very strong force in Sweden. And in terms of immigration – and you can call it an illusion if you want to – there is this idea that we are a modern society, a modern people, we don’t have prejudices, we are forward-looking. You can say that’s a self-deception, and just ideology, but at some point self-deceptions come true, they matter.’

  In other words, the prevailing Social Democratic doctrine that immigration is a good thing, the right thing, has become a kind of self-fulfilling socio-political prophecy. But what about Daun’s survey? The Swedes did appear to be dramatically less inclined to rub along with people who were different from them, didn’t they? ‘You can do those surveys, but you have no idea if people are telling the truth,’ Berggren said with a dismissive wave of the hand.

  We talked around the subject of immigration for some time in his office in a converted shop in a quiet residential area of Stockholm, but I could sense Berggren, a large, owlish man possessed of a daunting intellect, becoming more and more uncomfortable with the conversation.

  Eventually, he held his palms up and said, ‘Look, I really dislike the idea of being on the defensive and saying we are these wonderful good people, please don’t portray me in that way.’ He laughed. ‘I’m just saying that, honestly, I just don’t think you are right. I really can’t say that Swedes are more inward-looking than, for God’s sake, Catalonians, or, come on, Flemish people! I mean give me a break, seriously, come on. Take a walk around Stockholm, talk to people. I mean, you know. No!’ He took a deep breath. ‘I am
not trying to make you out to be a fascist for asking these questions, but I just don’t see immigration as a problem. I am sorry if I sound pious, but I have heard so many times before that Sweden is heading for problems, that there’s going to be catastrophe, so if I sound preachy or self-righteous . . .’

  Actually, I did feel a bit of a fascist for asking my next question, but did he not think that, with more than a third of Sweden’s population either born overseas or from foreign parents, might it at least be the time to consider stopping further immigration?

  ‘I think you are putting the question in the wrong frame,’ Berggren said, more evenly now. ‘Firstly, they are here, so we are going to have to get on with it. But we are going to need immigrants in this country; what we need is a system for working immigrants. It would help build a greater multicultural society. I agree, not all of the people seeking asylum can come to Sweden, but there are very different types of immigration.

  ‘I am more worried about unemployment. I worry about all these regions which are being depopulated, where people can’t get jobs, there’s not enough energy or businesses, and the infrastructure is not good. It’s not like Norway with all the oil money. That, I think, is really worrying. I worry about the Sweden Democrats, I worry about the people who are resorting to voting for them. Economic inequality, schools, all that is a worry, but the ethnic composition of the population? I don’t think that is the main issue here. What you do with the people you have here, that is much more important.’

  * * *

  1 Not having a name which ends in ‘-sen’, being one such obstacle. In 2006, Svenska Dagbladet reported that people with foreign-sounding surnames were changing them to more Swedish-sounding ones in order to stand a chance of getting at least a job interview.

  Chapter 6

  Somali pizza

  BERGGREN WASN’T THE only one worried about the Sweden Democrats. Prior to the most recent election, Sweden’s far-right party had been judged so far beyond the pale that the major newspapers had refused to run their campaign adverts, and some of the TV political discussion shows had not invited the party’s representatives to participate. The channels defended their position on the grounds that the right-wingers had not won sufficient votes in previous elections to justify their presence, but previously the Green Party had been allowed to participate despite being even less popular. The other political parties also refused to have anything to do with the Sweden Democrats to the extent that, when one of their representatives was finally allowed to go on TV, a left-wing party representative who was booked for the same show refused to have their make-up put on in the same room.

  Berggren did not especially agree with the Swedish media’s censorship of the Sweden Democrats, but pointed to the beneficial effects the Danish People’s Party had enjoyed from their coverage on Danish TV. Thanks in part to the media attention it received in the run-up to Denmark’s 2001 general election, the DPP became the third-party power broker in the Danish coalition government, and went on to use their position to get numerous draconian immigration proposals passed into law.

  ‘In Denmark, it seems to me things are being said in the public realm which aren’t being said in Sweden. You have two choices: isolate that which you do not like, or bring it into power and make them responsible to the voters,’ Berggren said. ‘There’s a lot to be said for the latter, but of course you get these parties where that doesn’t work, and I think in Sweden we have seen [what’s happened] in Denmark. We have seen that inclusiveness doesn’t work, and we have decided not to do that.’

  I find the Nordic Right’s bigotry and falsehoods as distasteful as anyone, but I did find the phrase ‘We have decided not to do that’ a little troubling here. What exactly was it that ‘they’ – presumably Sweden’s media and political elite – had decided not to do? They had decided not to allow the representatives of what, at the last election, turned out to be almost 6 per cent of the population, from participating in the public debate. This has prompted gleeful accusations from the Danes that Sweden is in denial of its problems as well as being guilty of infringing on freedom of speech.

  ‘This Danish point of view on freedom of speech is quite ridiculous,’ Stefan Jonsson, formerly a journalist on Dagens Nyheter and now a professor of ethnic studies, told me when I met him in his office at Stockholm University. ‘They [the Sweden Democrats] think the media has to be a mirror that reflects society, but the media doesn’t work like that. There is always an evaluation of what kind of news to promote.’

  This was a new one on me: journalists ‘promoting’ the news? Weren’t we supposed to report stuff, reflect society, tell people what was happening? Not in Sweden, apparently. In Sweden things were different.

  ‘It is extremely naive to think that all ideas should be given the same space and importance,’ said Jonsson, who has written several books on multiculturalism. ‘The Sweden Democrats are quite a different party from the Dansk Folkeparti [the Danish People’s Party] because it has its roots in the Swedish Nazi party. It’s well documented, everyone knows that. It is clearly a party that has been explicitly racist and represents a viewpoint which is counter to a free society, which has nothing to do with democratic society . . . the more you debate with extreme parties like them, the more legitimate, and larger, they become.’

  Jonsson had recently participated in a discussion with a Danish journalist, Mikael Jalving, in the Danish newspaper Berlingske, on the subject of their two country’s differing approaches to freedom of speech. Jalving had written a book – Absolut Sweden: A Journey in a Wealth of Silence – in which he claimed that, by suppressing discussion about immigration and not allowing the Sweden Democrats their say, the Swedes were making the subject taboo and inadvertently fuelling extremism (something you could argue was borne out by Anders Breivik). Jalving described the Øresund Bridge as a ‘mental Berlin Wall’, with the two nations on either side diametrically opposed on how to approach the issue. ‘When you read what is written about Denmark in the Swedish media,’ he writes,

  it is almost all about one topic – immigration: that we are racist or xenophobic, or how we have been criticised by the EU or UN. Though Swedes think that they are hypermodern, open and rational, they are hiding themselves behind some taboos. Beneath the surface there is masses of conflict and extremists which are not heard about in Swedish society. This includes, for example, the growing gang criminality, nazism, ultra-feminism and problems with Muslim immigration – and no one is talking about this officially.

  The Danish newspaper editor Anne Knudsen agreed with her compatriot: ‘In Sweden you have a surprising level of vindictiveness in the political discourse,’ she told me. ‘Of course, the Sweden Democrats are awful, but the mainstream really hates them; there is this hatred of people who do not share their tolerant opinions. I shouldn’t say totalitarianism, but . . .’

  But Jonsson was adamant, the Swedish way was best: ‘Immigration is perhaps the most important topic in Europe today,’ he told me. ‘And I think that most Swedish intellectuals, journalists and publishers have been very responsible, in contrast to Denmark where, in the name of free speech, they have openly permitted and legitimised the DPP and a certain kind of racist depiction of Islam.

  ‘Since the 1950s, Sweden has been one of the most internationally open countries in terms of its foreign policies and foreign aid. Sweden got this reputation as the conscience of the world, and I think that ideology has a real effect on the ideology of Swedes towards people who are different from them. It created a climate of tolerance and curiosity, and certainly a sense of being in a position of privilege, which brings a kind of responsibility to help. Integration has worked better in Sweden because we have had this powerful idea of internationalism.’

  Jonsson was resolutely upbeat about Sweden’s comparatively large-scale immigration: ‘It has worked. There are a huge number of integrated second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-generation immigrants in this country, and I think in the long run the conditions for integ
ration aren’t terribly unfavourable. It is economic suicide not to integrate immigrants and not to invite people from elsewhere to come and work here. The Swedish economy is booming. People have moved around throughout human history. With some patience, and stable economic circumstances, it works; and if it doesn’t work it has to be made to work, and that is a political task, it is for politicians to make it work.’

  I had a great deal of sympathy with Jonsson’s advocacy of silencing right-wing Scandinavian parties. I would prefer never to have to listen to another self-satisfied snake-oil salesman from the Danish People’s Party scaremongering on television about de mørke mennesker or de sorte (‘those dark people’, ‘the blacks’) again.

  The Danish People’s Party’s rhetoric on Muslims over the last ten years has made Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech sound like a nursery rhyme. Prominent members have, variously, claimed that Islam is not a religion but a ‘terrorist organisation’ and compared Muslims to Nazis; they have received suspended sentences for waving banners depicting Muslims as rapists and gang members; and claimed that Muslims were infiltrating Europe with the ultimate intention of killing us all. Just today, for instance, I read in a Danish newspaper this quote from the party’s integration spokesman, Martin Henriksen: ‘There is a tendency for unpleasant situations to occur when many Muslims are gathered in one place,’ he said (remind me again, Martin, how many people visit Mecca during Ramadan? How many arrests are there? And your job is what, exactly?). Concerned for my blood pressure, my wife used to make me leave the room whenever the party’s founder and former leader, a shrill, elfin woman called Pia Kjærsgaard, appeared on the TV screen. Kjærsgaard’s bon mots have included ‘There is only one civilisation, and it is ours’, and the claim, in a party newsletter in 2001, that Muslims ‘lie, cheat and deceive’.