How Mass Migration Destroyed Sweden’s Scandinavian Utopia
Auguste Meyrat Visit on Twitter @MeyratAuguste
Karl-Olov Arnstberg’s The Sweden Syndrome offers a stark warning about how a toxic combination of leftist ideology and mass migration will destroy societal order.
Not so long ago, Sweden used to be leftists’ favorite example of effective government: It had a generous welfare system, boasted a highly educated population, and just seemed a little classier and cleaner than most parts of the United States. True, it then had a small, homogenous population of law-abiding, productive citizens, but most admirers conveniently ignored this key detail.
In more recent years, far fewer people mention Sweden. If anyone mentions the country, it is usually to cite their soaring crime rates and terrorist attacks and the obvious connection with Sweden’s large number of unassimilated migrants from the Third World. Not only does this situation now threaten the livelihood for native Swedes, but also their reputable public entitlement system.
Indeed, as Swedish sociologist and writer Karl-Olov Arnstberg explains in his new book The Sweden Syndrome: How Elites Commit National Self-Destruction, the leadership in his country aggressively flushed away their many advantages by pursuing every bad leftist idea possible. What was once the pride of North European socialist technocracy is now being ruined with incompetent and corrupt politicians, a broken justice system, and a growing contingent of barbaric foreigners burdening their host nation in countless ways.
The book begins with a foreword from the online essayist John Carter, who recalls seeing a group of Arab young men harassing white Swedish girls on a bus in Uppsala. Because of the prevailing social norms of their country, both the girls and white male bystanders simply took the abuse in silence. He follows this by describing the familiar blight and decay that one now sees all around Swedish cities and the quiet exasperation of native Swedes lamenting what has become of their country.
With this context set, Arnstberg explains how his great country has come to this. In his view, the problem is not so much a specific policy position or ideology, but a whole pattern of positions and ideologies that make up what he calls “the Sweden Syndrome.” Evidently, this illness is contagious since it has spread to the rest of the West along with blue-state America, destroying everything in its path.
In Arnstberg’s view, patient zero of the Sweden Syndrome first appeared in the 1970s with Swedish sociologist David Schwarz, who introduced the idea of making Sweden a “multicultural nation.” While Americans may shrug at this notion, for Swedes, this was an exciting new idea that apparently had little downside. As Arnstberg puts it, “the time was simply ripe for [Schwarz’s] ideas.”
Building on this vision of a multicultural Sweden, Social Democrat (not to be confused with the populist Sweden Democrats) politician Jonas Widgren actively pushed for greater levels of migration into Sweden. Along with Schwarz, Widgren imagined most immigrants coming into Sweden would come from the neighboring Christian countries for economic reasons, not from distant Muslim countries escaping poverty and persecution. Thus, when assessing the potential effect of mass immigration on the economy, pro-immigration advocates regularly used data “essentially related to Nordic and European labour migration, which had largely ceased [by 1980].”