When Sweden shut its doors it killed the dream of European sanctuary, by Andrew Brown, 11/27/15. (this was ignored in US media)
Tuesday’s decision by the Swedish
government to shut the doors to
almost all refugee settlement brought the deputy prime
minister to the verge of tears as
she announced it. This wasn’t cheap emotion: it represents a
massive and irreversible climb-down from the belief that Sweden alone in
Europe, almost alone in the world, could offer refuge to anyone who truly
deserved it.
Swedish politicians, whether left or
right, have a frightening capacity to focus on the map while they ignore the
ground beneath their feet. The Green’s leader, Åsa Romsom, the same person who nearly wept as she announced the end
of the generous asylum policy, tweeted as her immediate reaction to the Paris
bombs last week that the atrocity “would make the work of the environment
conference more difficult”, which is undoubtedly true so far as it goes, but at
the same time deserves a Little Red Book award for criminal irrelevance.
The unprecedented scale and speed of
the autumn’s refugee crisis has forced even the Swedish political class to
acknowledge that the ground beneath its feet has shifted forever. There is
simply no more money, and no more housing, for everyone who wants to come, and
for everyone who was entitled to do so under the old rules.
The refugees have been spread all
over the country, except in Stockholm, which has contributed to the backlash. A
friend of mine lives in a small town in the centre of Sweden, with a population of 10,000 – which now has 1,000
additional refugees to feed and house. Their children must be educated. Jobs
must be found for them. It’s really not easy to see how this will happen.
The scale of immigration to Sweden
in the last decades has been huge. What was 30 years ago one of the most
homogeneous nations in Europe now has a population in which nearly one in five is of
immigrant descent, and most of those are visibly different.
Almost all of this growth came as a
result of refugee immigration, first from the Iran-Iraq war, then from the
Bosnian wars, and subsequently from Somalia as well. It has gone better than
anyone might have expected, but not without friction. Poor areas have become ghettoised.
Some have become homes to gang violence: there have been 40 unsolved gang
murders in Sweden in the last four years. That figure would have been
unthinkable in the high noon of social democracy. It was horribly shocking
earlier this year when three young people of Middle Eastern extraction were
shot dead in a car park about 500m from the council flat where I once lived
with my family. There has also been violence from ethnic Swedes: three racist
mass murderers have gone on sprees since 1990, most recently in the hideous
murders in Trollhättan in September.
While this went on, the nationalist
and reactionary Sweden
Democrat party has grown from a tiny groupuscule
with clear neo-Nazi roots first to get into parliament, and then to hold the
balance of power as a result of all this. But all the other parties have united
in their refusal to bend to the Sweden Democrats’ demands, or even to
acknowledge their existence. Not only was the political class in Stockholm in
complete denial about the Sweden Democrats for decades but the present
government is in power only because all parties in the centre-right opposition
have refused to acknowledge that, arithmetically, the
Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power
and could topple any government of either left or right if the others would
only vote with them. The measures that have been
announced will not in themselves be enough to stem the flow of refugees.
Passport
controls at the border, and
time-limited visas will not be brought in until next year. Until then the
attractions of Sweden will be even greater. But they do mark a historic change
in Swedish political sentiment, such as only happens every 20 or 30 years. In
six months’ time it will be impossible to find any prominent Swedish politician
who ever believed in last week’s policy. The dream of Europe as a sanctuary is
dead.
Related
When asylum seekers sew up their mouths, Europe must start talking by Patrick Kingsleym Closing borders, like Macedonia has, is an
arbitrary way of dealing with the refugee crisis. People need individual
assessment and countries need a constructive dialogue
The tragic school attack in Sweden fits an American pattern by Andrew Brown, The murderer seems to have been more of a
loner rather than ideologically driven – racism is not the only factor here
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