Scandinavian Politics latest

Hej to everyone on the Scandinavian politics list,

Many apologies for the long period of silence from me, which can only partly be explained by the tradition, in Sweden at least, of the country more or less closing down during the summer. I've also had (happy) distractions on the family front, which I won't bore you with.

I have two brief notices and some short comments about political developments in Scandinavia.


1. I'm told by the PSA that "The editors of the PSA News are planning to make the September edition of the News a special ‘specialist group’ issue and would appreciate and welcome all reports from all on specialist group activities. Copy deadline is 14th August so can you please get your items by e-mail to the editorial team".

We've had plans to do stuff other than simply use this mailing list as a forum for communication, but time pressure always seems to frustrate these plans, so nothing much has happened since our London seminar a few years ago. We do have some cash (a few hundred pounds) in the kitty, however, which is available for anyone to use in ways that are (a) academic and (b) related somehow to Nordic politics. This could involve hosting a small conference or workshop, which would ideally be open to everyone but need not necessarily be so. I'm completely open to other ideas, too.

Meanwhile, do send me absolutely anything that you think might be appropriate for the mailing list – book news and reviews, articles, events, comments on current politics, whatever.


2. This will probably be my last message from my current institutional address. Again, I won't bore you with details. But, after nearly five tremendous years in Umeå, I'm moving next term to Södertörn University College, outside Stockholm.


3. The possible reorientation of the Danish party system seems – possibly – to be continuing.

At least some Social Liberals, long in bed with the Social Democrats, seem to be becoming increasingly open to a deal with the Liberal-Conservative government. The attraction for the Social Liberals is not only to get closer to where power lies. It's also to pull the government away from its relationship with the increasingly truculent Danish People's Party - one of whose leading lights made, even by his party's standards, some extraordinarily apocalyptic comments about Muslims recently in the newish Swedish news magazine, Fokus (fokus.se). Current Social Liberal leader Marianne Jelved is still cool on the idea of a shift, but others – most loudly, MP Nasar Khader – are keener.

My colleague Jacob Christensen will no doubt give this more attention on his excellent blog (blog.jacobchristensen.name) when he gets back from holiday.


4. Earlier in Denmark, broad cross-party agreement was reached on a major long-term package of welfare reforms. For brief details in English, see the June editions of the not-bad-at-all newspaper, the Copenhagen News, available online (www.cphpost.dk).


5. The Swedish election campaign is finally getting underway this week. With the two blocs neck and neck in the polls, one underlying issue is whether the four parties in the centre-right "Alliance for Sweden" can resist the temptation to turn their fire on each other in their desperation for votes, which they usually end up doing. It promises to be an exciting time for a political scientist. The election is on September 17th.


6. Meanwhile, a major topic of Swedish domestic political discussion in the last few weeks (admittedly, there's been little competition) has been the impending final report in an official "Inquiry into Power, Integration and Structural Discrimination" – that is, on ethnic relations in Sweden. Chief investigator has been a professor of "social work" ("applied sociology" might be better translation), Masoud Kamali, who has attracted massive criticism from all quarters of the media. The story of his inquiry is a long and rather bizarre one, but I'll keep this summary brief.

Basically, Kamali has a big idea, which he applies in pretty much all his very frequent appearances in the printed media. It is that Swedish society and Swedish culture, like others in Europe, are fundamentally racist; that their very essence rests on an identification of "the other", that is, non-European peoples; and that this explains the disadvantages suffered by ethnic minorities in the country today. Few academics would argue that there is obviously nothing in this argument. But not many, even those of a post-modern persuasion, would push it in such a rigid, encompassing and downright provocative form – especially in an official report. "Sweden needs a new [social integration] policy," he wrote recently. "The era of creating an integrated society based on the concept of ein Volk, ein Reich [sic] is past" (DN July 13th).

These eyebrow-raising allusions aren't the only reason why Kamali is controversial. He has been accused of offering little or no empirical evidence for his sweeping arguments. (I can't say I've read the official reports, but I have read the accompanying summaries published in the newspaper, DN. The one on political parties, on Dec 22nd 2005, was of particular interest to me, of course. I must say that it read like a sentence that had been painfully stretched to 1,500 words.) He also tends to respond to critics by attacking their sincerity or motives. Public figures of non-European extraction are said to have sold out to the dominant Swedish culture; apparently, he once referred in print to some of them as "Uncle Toms". On Sunday he told DN that the criticism he'd suffered while leading the inquiry had been worse than the physical torture he'd endured in his native Iran.

The saga has also been rather embarrassing for the Social Democratic government. This is because the original inquiry was led by someone else, a political scientist from Uppsala. In 2003 Kamali, a member of the inquiry, in effect staged a coup, by persuading the responsible minister to downgrade the original investigation and to appoint him as leader of a new one. Numerous political scientists in Sweden were furious at what they saw as the ideological manipulation of these official reports, which are supposed to be politically impartial. The relevant minister was Mona Sahlin, who must be quite relieved that she now has another portfolio.


Best,

Nick Aylott.
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Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) | Department of Political Science, Umeå University | SE-901 87, Sweden | www.pol.umu.se

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be interested. To join the Scandinavian Politics mailing list, send a message to me, the convenor (nicholas.aylott@pol.umu.se). If you want to send something to the list, or if you don't want to receive these occasional messages, just let me know. See also www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/scandinavia/