ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A great many intellectual debts were accumulated in the process of writing this book. Id like to thank its many commenters, critics, and supporters, among them Mara Loveman, Mustafa Emirbayer, Ivan Ermakoff, Julie Allen, Scott Mellor, Orfeo Fioretos, Myra Marx Ferree, Pam Oliver, Rahul Mahajan, Richard Aviles, Jennifer Holland, Jason Turowetz, Jacob Habinek, and Alex Hanna. The other steady participants at the Politics, Culture and Society and Race and Ethnicity brownbags also deserve a mention. Of particular importance, too, was the research assistance of Phil Creswell. Last in this list, and certainly most important, is Chad Goldberg, whose influence can be seen on every page. In Sweden, where the data were collected and occasionally presented, I owe a debt of gratitude to Klas mark, Ingela Naumann, Vanessa Barker, Jens Rydgren and Elizabeth Thomspon at Stockholm University, Sven Hort of Linneaus University, and the excellent archivists at the Labor Movement Archives, the Royal Library, and the National Archives in Stockholm. At Vanderbilt University, where I overhauled and rewrote the manuscript into its final book form, Id like to thank Katherine Donato, Holly McCammon, and Dan Cornfield.
Research for this book was furthermore supported financially by the University of Wisconsin Sociology Department, a Foreign Language Area Studies Summer Fellowship, a Fulbright IIE Full Grant, Vanderbilt University, and Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis. Without this support, the book would not have been possible.
Finally, I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to my family: to my parents, Nancy and Don Schall, who have always encouraged intellectual curiosity. To my brothers, Casey and Peter Schall, who are both way cooler and more creative than I can even aspire to be and, in that sense, will always be an inspiration. Finally, to my husband, Rich Holden, who has provided both intellectual and emotional support. He has always been both my harshest critic and my most enthusiastic supporter, and my work is better for that. He has also been a true partner and an amazing fatherwithout these things, I could not have completed this book.
INTRODUCTION
From the end of the Second World War until the 1990s, the development of Swedish society was nothing short of a miracle. This small state on the periphery of Europe grew steadily and phenomenally. Yet, Sweden did not simply grow as all Western capitalist countries did. Equality increased along with gross domestic product. Capitalism, in the Swedish case, seemed not to be a zero-sum game where the rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer as economic development proceeded. For Swedes, the mechanism behind this view was obvious: a strong state, coordinating but not steering the economy and working to distribute its fruits. In short, Swedens economic development has been the product of a miraculous welfare machine.
In this book I trace the cultural conditions that enabled the construction of this welfare machine and its transformation into the central feature of Swedish political and social lifethe transformation of social democracy into an important part of Swedish national identity. Key to this story is the process through which the national community was constructed and reconstructed as an ethnic, class, or civic community. Indeed, if the welfare state is the outcome to be explained in these pages, then ethnicity, broadly construed, is what carries the explanatory weight. While not eschewing entirely the traditional explanations for the Swedish welfare statechronicled in this introductionI argue that we cannot possibly understand the Swedish Peoples Home without understanding who the people were and who they now are.
This claim is, perhaps, uncontroversial. After all, many have suggested that Swedens ethnic homogeneity was key in its development of a universalist welfare state, To explain the how (and along the way the whether) of the ethnicitywelfare state nexus, I zero in on processes of national (and, therefore, welfare state) closure. The findings here indicate that there is no unidirectional march toward increased ossification of national boundaries, but rather a process that goes in fits and starts and which is subject to periodic crises of national and welfare community. The focuses of this book are these moments of crisisand the insights that such crises provide.
The questions I address, therefore, are the following: (1) How does ethnic homogeneity matter in the development of the Swedish welfare state? (2) Does ethnic heterogeneity threaten the universalist welfare state, and, if so, in what ways? (3) What do the answers to these questions tell us about processes of national closure? These questions are addressed through an examination of the discourse around the welfare state, immigration, and national belonging during five periods of crisis in the Swedish twentieth century (19281932, 19451951, 19681975, 19911995, and 20062014). The key to these questions is understanding the Social Democratic Partys (Socialdemocratiska Arbetarpartiet, SAP) active and successful promotion of a cultural hegemony that makes Swedishness synonymous with social-democratic values. In the early periods, this strategy involved drawing on and policing an ethnic definition of nation, though SAP infused this definition with civic values. In the later periods, the civic aspects of this definition led SAP to pursue an expansive strategy toward immigrants, though this strategy faltered in the face of severe crisis in the 1990s and fell apart after 2006.
Nationalism, Ethnicity, Immigration, and the Welfare State
The argument many make is simple: homogeneity is good for welfare states, and heterogeneity is bad. Indeed the common sense underlying this is simple as well. People are more likely to contribute to the well-being of someone like them and less willing to do so for someone different. Welfare states, it is argued, rest on a basis of trust and solidarity that is supposed to be more readily found in homogeneous communities. For some scholars, this argument is nearly a self-evident truth. There can be no doubt that migration has been little short of a disaster, writes Gary Freeman, Immigration has tended to erode the more general normative consensus on which the welfare state was built.
In the exceptional case of the United States, arguments about how ethnic division threatens welfare states have been most complete, nuanced, and compelling. Quantitative studies of public opinion have consistently shown that racial division and racial prejudice have a strong negative effect on the welfare state, especially when a particular ethnic group is seen as receiving a disproportionate share of the benefits. In the U.S. case, the effect of heterogeneity is clear: it was a barrier from the very start.
The literature on European states in this regard is less comprehensive and less conclusive. Some studies suggest that a countrys welfare regime (liberal, social-democratic, or corporatist) mediates the effect of immigration on welfare-state support.
On the other end of the spectrum, Markus Crepaz asserts, in his geographically wide sweeping, but temporally limited study of immigration and the welfare state, that scholars have ignored the trust-generating capacities of the welfare state. Indeed, Crepaz uses Sweden as a prime case to indicate the ways in which welfare states do not just draw on solidarities, but create solidarities. At the time of Crepazs writing, Sweden seemed to many observers to be unlikely to develop a powerful far-right xenophobic party like his other cases and to be able to maintain its welfare state intact. That Crepaz failed to foresee the cuts made by recent conservative governments in Sweden does not undermine his basic point: that welfare states may be strengthened by immigration when their social welfare apparatuses work to create trust among both the native population and the immigrant population.
