The new face of Sweden

The Islamic Centre was firebombed at midnight. The mosque itself was fearfully damaged; the adjoining school and meeting rooms were destroyed. No one knows who was responsible, but the list of possibles is a long one.

It took two years to rebuild. After it reopened there were another two attacks inside a month. People talked about a climate of fear and a breakdown of society.

Is this Baghdad, or Cairo, or Karachi? Not even close. It’s Malmö, the port on the southern edge of the Scandinavian peninsula, and Sweden’s third-biggest city. Normally, it is docile to the point of tedium: for decades Malmö has been seen as a sanctuary from the troubles of the world. And that has become the problem.

Unnoticed by the rest of the world, Sweden has changed, and Malmö has changed dramatically to become one of the most racially divided cities in Europe. Already, 37 per cent of the population were either born abroad or had both parents born abroad. Among children, that figure rises to almost half.

The numbers have been somewhat inflated by the other big change to Malmö – the opening of the bridge across the narrow Oresund seven years ago, linking the city to Copenhagen. Many Danes have moved to this side of the strait, attracted by lower property prices.

Even so, Malmö (population 278,000) is now one-quarter Muslim. And that proportion is rising rapidly due to continuing immigration and differential birth rates. Officials accept that most of the inhabitants will be of non-Swedish origin within a decade, and that a Muslim majority could follow soon after that. Like more obvious multi-ethnic places such as Birmingham and Rotterdam, Malmö would be a “majority minority” city. And that does not factor in the possibility of a new Middle Eastern cataclysm (war in Iran? The disintegration of Iraq?) producing a new surge of refugees.

Local and national politicians are struggling to adapt and respond to these rapid changes. But there is a growing acceptance that “the Swedish model” – exceptionally generous welfare policies combined with an exceptionally generous approach to immigration – is now unsustainable. That has been the basis of Sweden’s image abroad, and of its own self-image. And, in a very quiet, very Swedish way, its collapse is likely to be traumatic.

At first sight, Malmö is everything you expect of a Scandinavian city: clean, pretty, cycle-haunted, quiet, overpriced, dull. Even the lights at pedestrian crossings click discreetly. I fancied that the police cars didn’t have sirens but a recorded message saying “Excuse me!” But I never heard one. The main threat to a pedestrian comes from irate cyclists guarding their cycle lanes against trespassers. This does not feel like a place with problems.

That’s partly because it is one of the most segregated cities in Europe. The migrants are concentrated in one district, Rosengård, with the newest ones in the sub-district of Herrgarden, where the male unemployment rate is 82 per cent. Other locals mention these names with a shudder.

You don’t need a road sign to show you’re in Rosengård. A satellite dish is attached to the balcony of just about every flat, some looking massive enough to draw in pictures from Alpha Centauri, all of them showing channels from home, wherever that may be. Very occasionally, there is an exception: a balcony with the last, lingering flowers of summer, belonging to a rare Swedish-born family who have not moved away.

But if Rosengård is a slum or ghetto, it is a showpiece slum or ghetto. The blocks of flats – no more than eight stories high – are mostly well-maintained. There is no more litter there than anywhere else in town. There are very few graffiti. And although there are many men and teenagers hanging round even on a weekday afternoon, the atmosphere is entirely unthreatening, indeed welcoming. (Very different, said our Danish photographer, from the equivalent areas in Copenhagen.) Within an hour of arrival, we were having coffee and pastries in a Turkish family kitchen. The seventh-floor flat was not opulent, but nor was it uncomfortable. Instinctive eastern hospitality battled with northern reserve and the migrant’s understandable suspicion of the stranger. But it felt like a refuge against an uncertain world.

Down below on the estate, crime is an issue. “It’s easy to get into problems,” says Lulli, a 16-year-old boy from Kosovo. “Fighting, drugs, stealing. But it’s very hard to get out.” However, these problems might seem very low-grade in other cities. People kept telling us, in shocked tones, about the fires started in the wooden buildings used for burning rubbish. The banlieues of Paris and the gun-ridden estates of south London would be delighted to have such troubles.

In Herrgarden, kids from diverse backgrounds do mix. But at schools composed almost wholly of migrants, they find it hard to feel an attachment with wider society. “My passport says I’m Svensk, but in the apartment, no,” says Lulli’s Turkish pal Nihad. “In Herrgarden, if someone has a problem, we help him. The Swedes, they are very cold. They shake hands. We kiss. Not like gays, like brothers.”

Fuelled by resentment against native Swedes, some go into town on a Friday or Saturday night to indulge in a little light mugging of what they call “the Svens”. The police think only about 150 youths are involved. At least these youngsters speak Swedish. For their parents, it can be much harder. Cushioned by social security but imprisoned by linguistic inadequacy, many of the unemployed hardly go out. The migrants are here physically, but many have not made the mental leap.

“It’s OK here,” says Nihad’s father, Sala, who still works in Turkey. “But it’s cold, and it’s not home. Nihad, though, he has more chance.”

Four years after the big arson attack, the Islamic Centre has responded to its own troubles by becoming ever more open. “Everyone can come here, Muslim, Christian, Jewish,” says the centre’s director Bejzat Becirov (from Macedonia), offering coffee and lunch. And at the centre’s elementary school, the 11-year-olds give their verdict on what Sweden means to them. They, at least, are positive. “We have clean water,” says Rayan, from Somalia. “Candy!” cries Hussein, also from Somalia. Then Omar from Lebanon chimes in: “Nice cars!”

The 260 children learn in Swedish, and the girls do the counting in their skipping games in Swedish. I asked one eight-year-old where she was from. “Iraq,” she replied. Several others shouted her down. “Sweden!” they cried. They all learn Islamic studies, but on the door of the classroom is an Olympic-style motif showing five religions interlocking and overlapping: Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism.

And this positive mood is reflected among the many Swedes who believe that their charitable impulses have brought them rewards. “Twenty years ago Malmö was a very dull city,” says Julia Janiec, an adviser to the city council’s Social Democratic leaders. “We had almost no restaurants, no bars, no theatre, no university, no young people, no nothing. Now we have a dynamic multicultural city.”

This dynamism is not wholly obvious to a visitor. “There is a lot to see and do in Malmö!” says my map. But number three on its list of attractions is the public library. To an outsider, Scandinavian countries seem much the same. That’s not how the Scandinavians see themselves, however, and 20th century history provided a new and sharp division. In the past hundred years, 25 of the 27 members of the European Union have endured either foreign occupation or home-grown dictatorship. The exceptions are Britain and Sweden.

While Norway and Denmark were under Nazi rule, Sweden maintained neutrality by making unheroic compromises and accommodations. It emerged with some guilt – in part survivor’s guilt, but guilt nonetheless. Its reparation was to set itself up as clergyman to the world: “a moral superpower”.

Sweden opened its door, its wallet and its heart to refugees from the planet’s most traumatised places. There is still a substantial cohort of leftist Chileans opposed to the Pinochet regime in the 1970s. And the list of the most common birthplaces for Malmö’s population is like a reprise of global headlines: Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Somalia, Croatia.

Other Scandinavians often find the Swedes rather bleak: humourless, pedantic, rulebound, a bit stingy. (Trying to grasp the linguistic differences, I asked a Dane if he could understand a Swedish film. “Oh yes,” he said, “but I’d never watch one.”) I also met a Norwegian, Agnes Domaas. “These newcomers have made Sweden so much better,” she said. “They are so happy. Sweden needs them.”

The poor Swedes have worked so hard to be welcoming, it seems harsh that they get so much criticism. But higher standards apply here. The Swedes did not ask The Guardian to call their country “the most successful society the world has ever known.” But they, and the world, do expect the country’s policies to work, just like the drainage and the electricity.

Yet there is an increasing sense, even on the left, that the combination of Sweden’s welfare and migration policies was foredoomed. The “Swedish model”, often seen as a middle way between communism and capitalism, dates back to the 1930s. The intellectual roots of the policy lie in the concept of folkhem (“people’s home”); scholars have noticed its similarity to the interwar German idea of Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”). One turned malignant, one did not, but they were grown in similar cultures.

Nick Johnson of Britain’s Institute of Community Cohesion has studied race relations in various multicultural cities. “In both Sweden and Denmark,” he says, “it was very striking that people on the left were saying they hadn’t realised the extent to which their social model was predicated on a strong sense of nationalism. And diversity was starting to open the debate about the kind of society they want.

“Some were thinking that they can only maintain strong support for individuals if they control their borders. They are now facing the problem the UK has wrestled with for years: that of having a permanent ethnic minority underclass.”

If the left is starting to think that way, it is inevitably far more true on the right. Though Malmö is still Social Democrat, the country made one of its rare political shifts in 2006 and elected a centre-right coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt.

But the biggest recent change came from a court, not government policy. In 2006 immigration appeal judges said the situation in Iraq constituted “difficult circumstances” rather than an “internal armed conflict”. The Swedes do like understatement.

Refugees from Iraq now have to jump higher hurdles to gain admission. Yet in 2006 Sweden still took in nearly half the 22,000 Iraqis who made it to the west. One small town near Stockholm, SOdertalje, welcomed 1,000 – more than the US had done in total since it launched the war. (Other Swedish towns are less hospitable – and Malmö officials are especially bitter about their neighbours in Vellinge, who refuse to help at all.)

A new anti-migrant party, the Swedish Democrats, wants to emulate the success of rightwing groups in other countries in northern Europe, including neighbouring Denmark. But even the far right are fairly understated. The Swedish Democrats are expected to pass the 4 per cent threshold for parliamentary representation in 2010, and in Malmö one poll put them over 11 per cent. Yet their local leader, Sten Andersson, insists that he does not want to prevent admission of genuine refugees or families of existing migrants. “You could not say stop,” he says. “But we cannot give jobs to this big number, and we cannot find flats for them.”

There are success stories, of course: Zlatan Ibrahimovic of Inter Milan grew up in Rosengård; the father of another Swedish footballer, Henrik Larsson, came from the Cape Verde Islands. Nyamko Sabuni is an uncompromising Burundi-born woman who is now minister for integration (“The firmest handshake in the government,” a journalist told me). But one senses the journey here has been so wearying that many first-generation migrants have exhausted their sense of adventure just by travelling. None of the newcomers speaks Swedish. The government provides the classes, but that in itself is a traumatic process. Only then can they even contemplate the possibility of finding a job. And that’s not easy.

I was told of a Kosovar electrician – much in demand, theoretically – who took seven years to get work because his qualifications were not accepted and retraining him to Swedish standards was so grindingly bureaucratic. Kent Andersson, Malmö’s Social Democrat deputy mayor (no relation to the Swedish Democrat Sten) accepted that the story was probably true but insisted they were working hard to streamline procedures.

For some, it is too late. Mohammad Jabbar, 52, fled Iraq five years ago. At home he was an architect and engineer; in Malmö he has a little gift shop. “It is better here,” he says. “Not for me, but for my babies.”

Sweden, you could argue, has not really helped the world, its incomers or itself. When I met him, Kent Andersson was just back from the International Metropolis conference in Melbourne, where he had been startled to hear the mayors of both Toronto and Melbourne complain that they weren’t getting enough migrants.

The difference is that Canada and Australia – countries which have been built on immigration – generally make sure they get the newcomers they want. Sweden gets those it gets. The main criterion for admission has simply been the fact of making it to Sweden. Many have endured terrible journeys to get there, but for them travelling hopefully has often been better than arriving. They have found no American-style melting pot, and Swedishness has proved an elusive prize.

This is not the only European country with humane impulses that has got itself into a mess over immigration. For too many years, mainstream politicians regarded discussion of the subject as illegitimate, dangerous and inherently racist. But in Sweden the altruism is more profound, and the sense of failure more acute.

Swedish politicians, as wary as the British of Brussels initiatives, now think the “blue card” system for potential migrants with marketable skills proposed by the European Union may offer them an honourable way out of their dilemma. But taking the best-qualified and most skilled people out of the under-developed world is not an act of kindness: it will severely damage the third world’s chances of improving itself.

At least the debate is now happening in Sweden and elsewhere. I asked Kent Andersson if he thought Sweden had damaged itself by being too liberal towards migrants. “No,” he said. But he admitted that “we can’t give them the life we want to give them.” And there was a very long, very Swedish, pause before the “No.”

‘Interculturalism’ in Leicester

By William MacNamara

At the end of their safari, 50 women from the Leicestershire Women’s Institute gathered for lunch and raised toasts to the marvellous sights they had seen. They had journeyed by bus to the heart of their county seat, Britain’s most ethnically diverse city, and visited a mosque, a Hindu temple and a Jain temple.

“I didn’t know they believed in God,” said one woman after hearing a Leicester imam speak. “I suppose I never thought about it.”

Leading the women was Asaf Hussain, an interfaith leader and scholar at the University of Leicester. He calls his tours “safaris” in recognition of the exotic sights to be seen by mostly white, middle-class audiences. For Hussain, the trips demonstrate the power of “interculturalism”, a philosophy that he has spent 30 years refining and teaching.

“The multicultural state is not an end in itself,” he told students during one of his lectures. The statement is his central critique of Britain’s immigration policies, which he believes foster a culture of suspicious tolerance without meaningful integration. Ultimately, he asserts, the limits of multiculturalism show themselves through terrorism, when British-born Muslims express their alienation by bombing their homeland.

“We live together, we coexist,” he said. “But deeper down there are problems. We want real relationships with each other.”

With charm, connections and boisterous humour, he nudges Leicester toward his vision of interculturalism. One year he organised a Lord Nelson festival that introduced the city’s south Asian population to the “great hero”. The next year he organised a Lord Ganesh festival.

Leicester, he acknowledges, has a record of racial harmony that improves matters. The first wave of immigrants, Asians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, arrived in the 1970s. Since then, the city has taken in Africans, eastern Europeans, Mongolians and many other groups.

While the population fell after a 1960s peak of 290,000, new immigrant groups have pushed the figure past that level in the past three years, according to census projections. By 2011, the Commission for Equality and Human Rights estimates, whites will be a minority, making Leicester Britain’s first “pluralist” city, where no race is in a majority.

The city’s multicultural status quo, Hussain said, hides frictions. As whites have moved further into the suburbs, they understand their city’s racial dynamics less and less. To reach a point where whites welcome an immigrant neighbour, he said, they must understand that neighbour’s religion. That is why he started his “intercultural safaris”.

The visit to the mosque seemed to be the Women’s Institute group’s favourite part of the trip. “I went in to the mosque and came out with a heart full of love at what the imam was saying about tolerance,” said one woman.

Such encounters need to be multiplied, Hussain believes, if the city is to handle its largest immigrant wave to date. In the past four years, an estimated 20,000 Somalis have arrived in Leicester from the Netherlands, where many allege discrimination.

New groups often strain the city’s existing race relations, said Freda Hussain, a head teacher and former High Sheriff of Leicestershire, as well as the other half of Leicester’s race-relations “power couple”. In some cases, she said, children of eastern European immigrants refuse to sit next to black students and disrupt classes by calling them pejorative names.

“This is a totally dynamic, fluid situation,” her husband said. City agencies are doing much of the work of keeping Leicester harmonious.

For now, however, he teaches oversubscribed classes in “intercultural understanding”, and fields more requests for safaris than he can meet.