a blog by Peter Leonard
Interesting article from the Times today, " Dane Sees Greed and Politics in the Crisis." Danish PM Rasmussen has a thin line to walk here -- like Berlusconi, he hitched his wagon to George Bush early on, only to watch his own country's skepticism over war in Iraq gradually come to be shared by Americans as well. That the White House was so slow to come to Copenhagen's defense (Rice's recent accusations that Syria and Iran were exploiting the crisis notwithstanding -- Saudi Arabian religious and government officials had as much, if not more, to do with the blossoming of the crisis over the past few months.)
Interesting to note the connection to internal Danish immigration/integration policies -- "[brushing[ aside any suggestion that Denmark's policies requiring immigrants to accommodate themselves to Danish tradition were at fault." I certainly won't defend the more egregious of Danish immigration laws, which confine thousands of Danes who have married foreigners to living in Swedish Malmö and taking the high-speed train to work in Denmark every day. But there is also in the Danish policies a kind of clarity about the nature and importance of the public sphere of the small, European welfare state which seems a bit elided in the mushier, more politically-correct Swedish integration policies. Those who voted in Rasmussen, despite his support for unpopular wars, know exactly what they value about secular, egalitarian and democratic society, even if their small-minded insistence that every one else should, as well, seems a bit unrealistic.
Along the lines of Swedish integration politics, be sure to check out this excellent, very long (but very readable) article in the NYTimes magazine before it expires next week: Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State. It's rare to have such a nuanced look at Swedish society published in English -- or in Swedish for that matter.
Especially valuable is the thoughtful analysis of the housing projects surrounding Stockholm, built when a surplus of capital and optimism over Swedish population increases encouraged city planners to grossly over-build. The resulting suburbs, conceived in the glow of LeCorbusierian futurism, have come to house not the white social-democratic working- and middle-class (who by and large stopped having so many kids), but rather the waves of immigration from the 'third world' from the 1970s to the present. These changes to Swedish demographics have made the country a much more interesting place, and have deepened its connections to other hemispheres in ways probably unseen since the heyday of the Vikings. (The ethnic food in Stockholm is now much, much better, as well.) Nowadays förort (suburb) is shorthand for some of the most interesting music, culture and literature coming from the country, regardless of whether the producers or consumers actually hail from there. Three young writers that stand out for having especially probed the meaning of the concrete suburb in the Swedish imagination are Johannes Anyuru, Alejandro Wenger, and Jonas Khemiri.