Pauline Stoltz

Nationalism vs. Nationalism: The Challenge of the Sweden Democrats in the Swedish Public Debate

In the 2010 Swedish general elections the nationalist party Sverigedemokraterna (SD) crossed the threshold and entered parliament. The other parties in parliament reacted with strong antagonism; the mainstreaming of the ‘radical right’ had finally come to Sweden. This article analyses the media coverage of the SD following the 2006 elections, when it emerged as a high-profile party in the public arena. The presence of the SD in Swedish politics encourages both SD allies and opponents to emphasize their views on what constitutes social cohesion in Sweden. We see the public debate surrounding the SD as a rhetorical struggle between different nationalist claims.

Nationalism vs. Nationalism: The challenge of the Sweden Democrats

In the 2010 Swedish general elections the nationalist party Sverigedemokraterna (SD) crossed the threshold and entered parliament. The other parties in parliament reacted with strong antagonism; the mainstreaming of the ‘radical right’ had finally come to Sweden. This article analyses the media coverage of the SD following the 2006 elections, when it emerged as a high-profile party in the public arena. The presence of the SD in Swedish politics encourages both SD allies and opponents to emphasize their views on what constitutes social cohesion in Sweden. We see the public debate surrounding the SD as a rhetorical struggle between different nationalist claims.

Single Mothers and the Dilemmas of Universal Social Policies

Danish social policies have a gender neutral approach, combined with an aim of autonomy for individuals and a system of universal social policies. This approach has moved Denmark away from the use of moral regulation of single mothers and a strong male income earner model in social policy. It has highlighted mens roles as fathers, as well as womens roles as workers and has therefore a lot of advantages. Problems do occur though when the obligation to work or to be a parent in reality differs for men and for women; this becomes clear when we focus on single parents.

Canons and communities: children and social cohesion in Sweden and the Netherlands

In this article I compare the lines of argumentation that are used in two public debates about the introduction of national canons in Sweden and the Netherlands. These arguments illustrate how different political actors understand the balance they think should be struck between the interests of individual children and society in obtaining social cohesion. Theoretically, this means that the debates can be understood against the background of the distinction between cosmopolitan and communitarian theories. Communitarian arguments are very much in vogue in political practice, despite the classical critique against this position. Unfortunately, alternative cosmopolitan accounts of citizenship also have their problems. I argue that these two cases pose different challenges to cosmopolitan ideas on the use of education to obtain necessary common values with a qualified acceptance of plurality within unity and on the expansion and deepening of children’s citizen rights.

Editorial: NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

The concept of “state feminism” is often used in relation to the Nordic states. Usually it means that feminists and feminist movements use state-based policy-making mechanisms and target the state in promoting gender equality. Recently it has been claimed that this notion is out of date, not only in the Nordic countries, but more generally. Johanna Kantola and Judith Squires (2012) suggest that feminist engagements with new forms of governance can be better captured in the concept of “market feminism”. They argue that the context in which state feminism is situated (the state) and the form that it takes (feminism) have changed under the impact of neoliberalism. Nowadays, according to Kantola and Squires, feminists embrace the logic of the market, as can be seen in changes in practices (New Public Management; welfare state retrenchment) and, for example, the policy priorities of women’s policy agencies (diversity policies; gender mainstreaming). Nancy Fraser, in an article in the UK-based newspaper The Guardian, stated in a similar vein that “In a cruel twist of fate, I fear that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society . . . A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised ‘care’ and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy . . . ” (Fraser 2013a). In her book Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Fraser 2013b), she develops this argument and wonders why political elites today fail to come up with regulatory projects aimed at saving the capitalist economic system, society, and nature from out-of-control markets and asks: why do social movements not unite around a counter-hegemonic project (Fraser 2013b, p. 121)? Her hope is that the current crisis will put the notion of solidarity back on the feminist agenda (Fraser 2013a, 2013b). Agneta Hugemark and Christina Roman, in “Putting Gender and Ethnic Discrimination on the Political Agenda”, take the neoliberal development of the Swedish state further back in time than is suggested by these contemporary debates over feminism and neoliberalism. Indeed they argue that the—controversial— creation of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman and the Ombudsman against Ethnic Discrimination in the 1980s marks the transformation of the Swedish universal welfare state model into a more liberal one. Based on this, one might ask whether state feminism in its heyday can be associated with the inception of the neoliberal morass we are in today. In their article, Hugemark and Roman follow the (different) politicization processes that led to the establishment of these state agencies. How, they ask, have “the women’s question” and “the ethnic minority question” been articulated in Swedish politics? By what processes were gender and ethnicity politicized, and how did this politicizing result in state initiatives to establish the two ombudsman offices?

NORA 20th Anniversary (1993–2013) Special issue on “Feminist Resistance -Resistance to Feminism”

NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research has turned 20 years of age. Congratulations to us all!!! We are happy to present this special anniversary issue of NORA on the theme of Feminist Resistance—Resistance to Feminism. In 1993, in the first article of the first issue ofNORA, Drude Dahlerup wrote the following: “The newWomen’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s took a negative attitude towards the state, seeing it as capitalist and patriarchal. Today, this attitude has changed, with many former activists now supporting the ‘state feminism’ that has developed in all the Nordic countries” (Dahlerup 1993). Much has happened during the 20 years that have passed since then; the dispute within as well as outside feminist circles over the state as a prime or privileged actor in the struggle for equality is ongoing, as is apparent in the contributions to this special issue of NORA. The political landscapes of the Nordic states have changed, which has had consequences for the public debates about gender equality, and for the diverse expressions of state feminism. At the same time, feminism has been scrutinized from the inside, targeting the presumed universal character of a feminist subjectivity existing outside power relations. Both of these changes influence the conditions under which feminist activism and resistance take place. One common trend in the Nordic countries during recent years has been the loud voices claiming that feminism has won the struggle and is now either outdated or “hysterical”. In addition, the equality agendas of feminisms are projected onto the Nordic nation states as if these are inherently gender-equal in their character. Feminists are hence faced with a complicated situation of both co-option and resistance, which raises questions about what we, as feminists, are resisting as well as whom we resist and in what ways. That there is a vibrant debate over these issues amongst feminist researchers is attested to by the submissions we received in response to the call for papers for this special issue. The majority of these submissions were from Swedish researchers and were about policy measures and feminist debates, specifically public debates about feminism in Sweden. This is in all probability not a coincidence. In Sweden, gender research has been academically institutionalized to a degree that far exceeds the situation in any other Nordic country; in addition (and not completely unrelated), the

Book Review: The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations

and politically – as indeed Haritaworn’s grasping analysis shows us, again and again, with each chapter and each argument of their book. Revisiting her earlier, seminal work on haunting (Gordon, 1997), Avery Gordon reminds us that ghosts are there to call for accountability, not merely by keeping the past alive, but also by ‘jamming up’ the seamless transformation of the present into the future (Gordon, 2001). The Biopolitics of Mixing is an excellent example of such jamming up, an intellectual-political intervention at its finest. As the multiracialised figures that populate Haritaworn’s book – the beautiful Eurasian, the happy mixed-race child, the Thai prostitute, the dysfunctional migrant youth, the Londoner, the Berliner, the ugly or the disabled ‘bad’ mixed raced offspring – enter (and exit) our ‘sociological imagination’ (Gordon, 1997) and our political horizons, we begin to reshape our thinking away from the ‘moulds already prepared for us before we can even think of the question’ (p. 22), towards embracement of ‘unassimilable differences’ (p. 158), towards unimagined possibilities, and towards justice that does not rely on abandonment and death.

Book Review: The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional ContestationsYuval-DavisNira, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, Sage: London, 2011; 252 + xi pp.: 9781412921299 (hbk), 9781412921305 (pbk)

and politically – as indeed Haritaworn’s grasping analysis shows us, again and again, with each chapter and each argument of their book. Revisiting her earlier, seminal work on haunting (Gordon, 1997), Avery Gordon reminds us that ghosts are there to call for accountability, not merely by keeping the past alive, but also by ‘jamming up’ the seamless transformation of the present into the future (Gordon, 2001). The Biopolitics of Mixing is an excellent example of such jamming up, an intellectual-political intervention at its finest. As the multiracialised figures that populate Haritaworn’s book – the beautiful Eurasian, the happy mixed-race child, the Thai prostitute, the dysfunctional migrant youth, the Londoner, the Berliner, the ugly or the disabled ‘bad’ mixed raced offspring – enter (and exit) our ‘sociological imagination’ (Gordon, 1997) and our political horizons, we begin to reshape our thinking away from the ‘moulds already prepared for us before we can even think of the question’ (p. 22), towards embracement of ‘unassimilable differences’ (p. 158), towards unimagined possibilities, and towards justice that does not rely on abandonment and death.

'The Politics of Belonging. Intersectional contestations' by Nira Yuval-Davis

and politically – as indeed Haritaworn’s grasping analysis shows us, again and again, with each chapter and each argument of their book. Revisiting her earlier, seminal work on haunting (Gordon, 1997), Avery Gordon reminds us that ghosts are there to call for accountability, not merely by keeping the past alive, but also by ‘jamming up’ the seamless transformation of the present into the future (Gordon, 2001). The Biopolitics of Mixing is an excellent example of such jamming up, an intellectual-political intervention at its finest. As the multiracialised figures that populate Haritaworn’s book – the beautiful Eurasian, the happy mixed-race child, the Thai prostitute, the dysfunctional migrant youth, the Londoner, the Berliner, the ugly or the disabled ‘bad’ mixed raced offspring – enter (and exit) our ‘sociological imagination’ (Gordon, 1997) and our political horizons, we begin to reshape our thinking away from the ‘moulds already prepared for us before we can even think of the question’ (p. 22), towards embracement of ‘unassimilable differences’ (p. 158), towards unimagined possibilities, and towards justice that does not rely on abandonment and death.

MEDIA IN MOTION: CULTURAL COMPLEXITY AND MIGRATION IN THE NORDIC REGION

Israeli school. Kalir proposes here a concept of general utility, which is valuable for the analysis of the specific case that he investigates. I think of the concept of ‘practical belonging’. He means by this that individuals may adopt ways of life and norms of behavior which they draw from the prevailing culture, reacting to the practical problems of daily life in the manner which they perceive as the rule for the main stream. In other words, they behave in public as if they belonged to the society, even though they are not citizens and, in many cases, even not officially recognized as residents. To be sure, this model is not unique to Latin Americans in Israel. We remember, for instance, Israelis’ diasporas in the United States, England, or France, or Eastern Europeans’ in Western Europe, Canada, or Australia. There also, one finds people who have not yet gained the right of permanent residence in the country, let alone citizenship, but who tend to behave like the people who belong to the main stream and who are perceived by them as ‘the’ American, ‘the’ British, ‘the’ French, or ‘the’ Australian. This strategy may work to some extent, as far as the opposition to the influx of ‘foreigners’ into society is not determined on the side of politicians or some segments of the population. The merit of this conceptualization is to break away with the dichotomy exclusion inclusion that is often used in the study of migrant collectives; it shows that in-between possibilities may come up and request new paradigms. Although, I still see one important weakness in Kalir’s analysis. This weakness concerns, in my view, the confusion between acculturation and assimilation. When, indeed, one speaks of assimilation to the Jewish majority without considering the issue of religious allegiance, one misses a major aspect of the Israeli reality. Jews in Israel see themselves as the only society in the world where Jewishness is a national identity that is linked in a variety of possible ways to religious and cultural principles. Most Jews in Israel are secular but rare are those who rebuke that to become a Jew for a non-Jew requests going through religious conversion of one kind or another. As far as Latinos, instead, create Christian churches to emphasize their moral virtues, they do gain respect on the side of the Jewish population but, still, can only hope to achieve acculturation to the main stream but not assimilation. Readers of this book who keep this distinction in mind would be able to get aware of a most interesting example of migrant population in this era of globalization when every case teaches about all others but still remains peculiar.