Carl-Ulrik Schierup

The end of Swedish exceptionalism? Citizenship, neoliberalism and the politics of exclusion

Sweden, where some 20 per cent of the population is either foreign born or second generation, has long been known internationally as the model of a tolerant, egalitarian, multicultural welfare state, which extended substantial citizenship, welfare and labour rights to all within its borders, including immigrants. However, under the twin pressures of neoliberalism and the EU’s commitment to ‘managed migration’, this Swedish exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, substantially eroded. The shortcomings of the earlier multicultural settlement of the 1960s and 1970s, a growing extremist populism, the growth of an unprotected, semi-clandestine sector of the labour market, combined with high levels of youth unemployment and urban segregation, have led to unprecedented rioting and violence in Swedish cities. The voices of minority ethnic youth, many of them Muslim, should be heeded as rejecting the exclusivism of current political trends.

Paradoxes of Multiculturalism : Essays on Swedish society

Sweden is reputed to have the most avant-garde welfare and immigration policies in Europe. But behind this image lies a more complex reality. Recent changes are turning an explicit commitment to mu ...

Reading the Stockholm riots - a moment for social justice?

This article examines the 2013 riots in Stockholm in the context of other urban rebellions across disadvantaged metropolitan neighbourhoods in the North-Atlantic region over the past three decades of neoliberal transformation. The authors discuss the consequences of securitisation and police repression, institutional racism, the corrosion of citizenship and the structuring of inequality in Swedish cities. Beyond the violence of the recent riots, contemporary Sweden reveals the emergence of an autonomous, non-violent and organisationally embedded movement for social justice among young people contesting urban degradation and reclaiming the nation in terms of an inclusive citizenship, social welfare and democracy. The article asks whether the Stockholm uprising could possibly be read as a sobering moment of self-examination in Swedish politics that could open space up for new political voices.

Will they still be dancing? : integration and ethnic transformation among Yugoslav immigrants in Scandinavia

Indulged with sociological self-centeredness we have reduced vampires to mechanisms of social cohesion. Hence,we have questioned a culture, seeing vampires as what they are, the dead ones haunting ...

Migration, Work, and Citizenship in the New World Order

Any consideration of global migration in relation to work and citizenship must necessarily be situated in the context of the Great Recession. A whole historical chapter—that of neoliberalism—has now closed and the future can only be deemed uncertain. Migrant workers were key players during this phase of the global system, supplying cheap and flexible labour inputs when required in the rich countries. Now, with the further sustainability of the neoliberal political and economic world order in question, what will be the role of migration in terms of work patterns and what modalities of political citizenship will develop? While informalization of the relations of production and the precarization of work were once assumed to be the exception, that is no longer the case. As for citizenship we posit a parallel development of precarious citizenship for migrants, made increasingly vulnerable by the global economic crisis. But we are also in an era of profound social transformation, in the context of which social counter-movements emerge, which may halt the disembedding of the market from social control and its corrosive impact. While the global economic situation remains largely in flux there is a broad consensus that the economic model prevailing in the 30 years prior to 2008 has now come to an end. The embedded liberalism of the Keynesian era had ceased to be effective in the mid 1970s and now the efficient market model of neoliberalism is seen to be exhausted as a viable model for sustained capital accumulation. Massive state intervention was needed to stave off the imminent collapse of the banking system. A massive counter-cyclical effort was mounted, and there were even calls for a ‘return to Keynes’. Business as usual was not an option, and there were calls for a financial regime change. The much more integrated global system created by globalization resulted in a truly global crisis even if some zones recovered more quickly. A Latin American style 1990s’ structural adjustment policy which would have simply unloaded the crisis on the population was not viable politically in the affluent North. Thus the present economic contradictions will continue and probably deepen. At best there will be a stable equilibrium established with little sign of a new expansive phase of capitalist accumulation (at least in the affluent North) on the horizon.

Making or unmaking a movement? Challenges for civic activism in the global governance of migration

ABSTRACT This article discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscian perspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonic neoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the Peoples Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space for civic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and Common Space is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may be influenced by its formalized representation within the GFMD. It posits that the PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activist counterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy and being captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated ‘invited space’ for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardizes its impact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theories of transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.

An Introduction to the Special Issue. Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences:

The current special issue examines the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. These take different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain characteristics in terms of conditions and capacity for agency. Contributions to this volume testify that precarity may be a political proposition as much as a sociological category that offers an analytical description of current transformations. The selection of articles has the ‘politics of precarity’ as a frame of reference. It describes the political economy of neoliberal globalization producing institutionally embedded precarization of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, but also resistance against the systemic structuration within which it is embedded.

Under the Rainbow: Migration, Precarity and People Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The article focuses on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. It discusses the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralized management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy, to a post-apartheid state of precarity, driven by ‘flexploitation’. The nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a duality of flexibility linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly flexible. The author connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of hegemony confronting looming labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor. The argument revolves around precarity as representing a rallying point for resistance as well as a social condition.

WHAT CREED IN EUROPE? SOCIAL EXCLUSION, CITIZENSHIP, AND A CHANGING EU POLICY AGENDA

During the last decade of the Twentieth Century the advanced North Atlantic economies performed in a markedly profitable way seen from the perspective of corporate business. This has neither led, however, to the impediment of a deepening social crisis, nor to the arrest of a crisis for liberal political values and norms of citizenship. On the contrary social exclusion was exacerbated, increasingly racialized and associated with immigrants and new visible ethnic minorities. A perhaps more conspicuous, but closely related, manifestation of this crisis of welfare and political values has, within the European Union, been the upturn of new nationalist, racist-populist political movements centered on the “problem of immigration.” This change of the political spectrum, brought about by the new right nationalist-populist upsurge, may eventually jeopardize the whole project of European integration, and the current tightening up of European regimes of both immigration and the societal incorporation of immigrants obviously reflects such worries. Simultaneously, however, influential employers, politicians and public servants have, time after time, cried out for the need for continued and increased large-scale import of low- as well as high-skilled migrant labor, seen as a remedy to Europe’s imminent “demographic crisis.”

The post‐communist enigma: Ethnic mobilisation in Yugoslavia

Abstract Ethnic‐nationalist mobilisation is the dominant political factor of the Yugoslavian crisis. But a general ‘ethnification’ of the political process is a characteristic product of the socialist state system, rather than a perpetuation of past ethnic conflicts. Simultaneously, new ‘post‐communist’ popular movements and political parties are confronted with dilemmas similar to those faced by the dethroned socialist regimes, in a situation where radical economic reforms lead to impoverishment, to industrial closures and to increased unemployment. The article opposes the notion of a stark contrast between a democratic and liberal Yugoslavian ‘north’ and a despotic and still communist ‘south’. Even ruling post‐communist political coalitions in secessionist Slovenia and Croatia face the danger of lapsing into a new type of totalitarianism with incalculable human consequences.