Week 23: Småstadspojke
Settling into the change of small town Sweden, as Sweden is unsettled by its own changes
This week I’ve been contemplating how I will settle in and approach the next few months living in the town of Kristianstad in southern Sweden. In particular how I will learn more about the town, as well as country as a whole.
Usually I am drawn to big cities. Nowhere do I feel more comfortable than in London or New York. Moving to London as a 20-year old felt like a homecoming, the place where I was meant to be. Running out of visa options two and a half years later was devastating. My plan was to find a way to return permanently, although this never happened.
While I’m far from someone who craves the action, I do like to be in places where big and important things happen. Part of the attraction of New York is that you feel like you’re at the centre of world. And, of course, there’s nothing more enticing that cities with serious metro systems, and for all its faults - or maybe because of them – riding the New York subway is my favourite activity.
Yet I’ve been drawn away from big cities over the past few years. Although half my year is spent in a reasonable substantial city in Melbourne, the other half has been spent either in Iceland or here in Kristianstad. Iceland, being on the edge of the world, has its own unique – and through winter, character-building - appeal. Kristianstad, however, as a town of around 40,000 people – a middling crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for a football game – is on the surface less compelling.
The primary noticeable feature of the southern Swedish region of Skåne around this time of year is how incredibly pleasant it is. It is permanently high-teens to mid-20s, with glorious sunshine that beams to 10pm, and a lush greenery all around that is a stark contrast to the “sunburnt” looks of much of Australia.
Surrounding the town, the wider Kristianstad kommun (municipality) has some of Europe’s most fertile agricultural land. There’s a saying that every Swede eats something from Kristianstad every day, given its productivity. The traditional farmhouses that dot the region are quaint and delightful to Australian eyes.
Kristianstad has also been central to Sweden’s recent foray into ethnic diversity. Since the turn of the century, Sweden has taken around the same number of asylum seekers as Australia – around 400,000 people. But as a percentage of the population this has been a significantly higher rate (Sweden’s population is 10.5 million, compared to Australia’s 26 million). This has been a major change for a previously homogenous society. Around a quarter of the population of Kristianstad are foreign-born or have foreign-born parents. Most of these people originate from Syria.
Given that is is common for women from Syria to wear the hijab, this is a highly noticeable feature of the town’s population. As Friday was the last day of school before the summer break, at an event at my partner’s daughter’s school it was common to see kids with diverse friendship groups, and parents from different backgrounds chatting amongst themselves. The idea promoted by parties like the Sweden Democrats that there is a wholesale failure of integration is fundamentally false.
However, it does have to be acknowledged that there is a small percentage of people from asylum seeker backgrounds who have not successful integrated into Swedish society, which has led to a considerable spike to crime rates – with Sweden now having some of the highest gun-related homicides in Europe. A previously low-crime society is finding this shift to be highly confronting, and it dominates public discourse (although, obviously, violence should be confronting to everyone).
People do have the right to expect safe communities, and either ignoring crime, or claiming that discussing crime is just a dogwhistle, does progressive politics no favours. Yet, often political parties that try to address crime do so in a counter-productive manner. They prey on the fears of majorities, demonise groups rather than address individual behaviour, and further alienate people from mainstream society.
On Tuesday it was Sweden’s national day, and the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, from the Moderate Party, wrote an op-ed in Aftonbladet where he outlined three key pillars of how the Swedish government will approach the integration of migrants – a higher threshold for obtaining Swedish citizenship, a greater focus on common values – including gender equality and the primacy of the rule of law, and a greater focus on learning the Swedish language.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these provisions – although making citizenship harder to gain may affect a sense of belonging – but I suspect it’s more a matter of tone and framing. Whether these provisions are perceived by people to be barriers or opportunities. The odd arrangement that currently governs Sweden – and the rhetoric it produces – may unfortunately lead to these attempts at integration being seen as elements of alienation.
The current Swedish government is a coalition between the Moderate, Christian Democrat and Liberal parties. But together they do not have a majority, so they rely on the Sweden Democrats – a party with neo-Nazi roots – for confidence and supply. But beyond this, the arrangement – known as the Tidö Agreement – has the coalition adopting much of the Sweden Democrats’ platform, as well as allows for representatives from the party to be inside ministries monitoring (and to an extent approving) government actions.
If a government has to ask permission from another party to actually govern then it is this other party that effectively holds power. This actually presents Sweden with greater trouble, and an impediment to solutions, because the Sweden Democrats’ electoral fortunes are in a symbiotic relationship with a high level of violence. For this violence to dissipate would see the party’s raison d’être do likewise. Inflaming social tensions is therefore the primary objective of such a party, and the current government looks like it is playing along – or being played – to their tune.
This Week’s Reading:
Kate Walton
“Solidaritas is a fortnightly newsletter about women’s rights, feminism, and gender in Asia and the Pacific, covering the entirety of this huge region: from Afghanistan and Pakistan in the west to Kiribati and Cook Islands in the east.”
Bringing attention to my friend Kate’s newsletter which is an incredible resource informing oneself not just about women’s rights in Asia and the Pacific, but for acknowledging how these issues are central to understanding the region more broadly.
Why Prabowo Subianto Is Winning Over Young Indonesian Voters In A Three-Way Race
Erin Cook - The Interpreter
“But why Prabowo, and why now? Would-be voters and election watchers point to an Instagram post that appeared on the candidate’s feed in early May demonstrating his shifting brand. Prabowo is unusually casual in a white Gerindra Party-branded hoodie and wearing a facial expression approximating a smile. He stands in front of one of those spectacular views so commonly found in Indonesia that it is not possible to identify. Among the top liked comments that the post has racked up within the month, two stand out from the run-of-the-mill messages in support seen on posts for all candidates.
Prabowo is “ganteng”, or handsome, and “gemes” – an Indonesian word often translated to “cute” but more evocative of the irresistible sensation of squeezing the cheeks of a young child or picking up a puppy and hugging it, for example.
It’s a world away from the hard-talking military general reputation Prabowo has happily cultivated and maintained for decades, to the point he was banned from entry to the United States for a time over allegations of human rights abuses. That’s the image he ran on for president in 2014 and again in 2019 and it is still firmly his default, serving as Defence Minister in the current cabinet. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last weekend, he controversially called for peace “negotiations” between Ukraine and Russia in what he characterised as “disputed territories”. One message to the world and another to domestic audiences is hardly a unique phenomenon, but the marked shift in Prabowo’s domestic image in recent months is compelling and appears to be paying off for him.”
Kimberly Wehle - The Atlantic
“The ubiquitous question posed during the Trump presidency—can he do that?—continues to be the wrong question. The real question is still: If he does that, who will hold him accountable? Until Thursday, the answer was nobody. Which meant that the answer to the first question—can he do that?—was yes. (Both an earlier indictment out of Manhattan and the judgment in a civil lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll were in the main for behavior that preceded Trump’s presidency.) What finally caught up with him is the structure of the Constitution itself, and its foundational premise of a government accountable to the people.
Accountability and the idea of government by the people thus operate as reciprocals: Because the people retain the ultimate power of government, those in power must be accountable to the populace. “To hold otherwise,” the Court has written, “is to overthrow the basis of our constitutional law.” But in the age of Trump, accountability for public officials became frighteningly elusive, for two reasons: The Constitution is sparing in its prose, and it is hydraulic in its structure.”
How Putin’s War Became Russia’s War
Eugene Rumer – Foreign Affair
“When Putin does leave power, it is unlikely that Russia’s elites and the general public will wake up and face the legacy of his rule. There are two twentieth-century precedents in Russian history for a de-Putinisation campaign, and neither is encouraging. First, the Soviet Union attempted a de-Stalinisation process after the dictator’s death, in 1953. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev debunked Stalin’s “personality cult” in a 1956 speech to the leadership of the Communist Party and released millions who were lucky to survive Stalin’s labor camps. But Stalin’s reputation was partially restored as early as the 1960s in official Soviet propaganda, which praised him as the great leader who led the Soviet Union to victory in World War II.
Second, as the Soviet Union was nearing its collapse in 1991, Yeltsin banned the Communist Party. Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign had already exposed the legacy of its misrule—including the brutal collectivisation of Russian peasantry, the millions who died from starvation in Ukraine, the suppression of basic freedoms—and it seemed its reputation could never be restored. Yet the party soon returned as a political force: it reconstituted itself in 1993 as the Communist Party of Russia, formed a powerful opposition faction in the Duma in the 1990s, fielded a candidate who won over 40 percent of the vote running against Yeltsin in the 1996 election, and survives to the present day. The party’s longtime leader, Gennady Zyuganov, endorsed Putin’s war against Ukraine, calling for the “demilitarisation and denazification” of the country.
Putin’s war has become the war of all Russians. His legacy will remain part of their legacy, and it will continue to weigh heavily on their domestic affairs and the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.”
What Lies Behind Russia’s Acts Of Extreme Violence?
Peter Pomerantsev – The Observer
“Few have captured the Russian cycle of self-destruction and the destruction of others as well as the Ukrainian literary critic Tetyana Ogarkova. In her rewording of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic novel Crime and Punishment, a novel about a murderer who kills simply because he can, Ogarkova calls Russia a culture where you have “crime without punishment, and punishment without crime”. The powerful murder with impunity; the victims are punished for no reason.
Where does this drive to annihilation come from? In 1912 the Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein – who was murdered by the Nazis, while her three brothers were killed in Stalin’s terror -first put forward the idea that people were drawn to death as much as to life. She drew on themes from Russian literature and folklore for her theory of a death drive, but the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, first found her ideas too morbid. After the First World War, he came to agree with her. The desire for death was the desire to let go of responsibility, the burden of individuality, choice, freedom – and sink back into inorganic matter. To just give up. In a culture such as Russia’s, where avoiding facing up to the dark past with all its complex webs of guilt and responsibility is commonplace, such oblivion can be especially seductive.
But Russia is also sending out a similar message to Ukrainians and their allies with these acts of ultra-violent biblical destruction: give in to our immensity, surrender your struggle. And for all Russia’s military defeats and actual socio-economic fragility, this propaganda of the deed can still work.”
Kateryna Kibarova – Persuasion
“Everybody talks about stress, all the time. It's a pain we share. We had more or less already adapted to the lack of electricity and such things. We took precautions; we bought generators and some other equipment. We warmed up in each others’ apartments so there was as little space as possible to heat. But now that a more psychological phase of the war has begun, we hardly sleep at night, and we still have to go to work during the day. In these conditions, you come to an emotional dead end. You don’t understand what to do next.
Everyone tries to think about something else. At work, I look at my colleagues, and we have no energy at all. The management suggested that we should all take five days off to go to the mountains somewhere—maybe the Carpathians or Poland, where we won’t hear the explosions every night. We can’t go for a break in the woods closer to home, because they have all been laid with mines.
For many, our nervous system is at its limit. I take sedatives both for sleep problems and psychological problems. The most horrifying thing, it turns out: you can't live without a future. You live and you don't know what awaits you. You don’t know how to organise your daily routines, or how to plan anything. You have no future, and this makes life eerie and terrifying.”
The EU Should Listen to Its Youngest Citizens
Nick Cohen & Ayana Dootalieva - Foreign Policy
“For the first time in history, there is a fully grown generation of Europeans who have only ever known a united Europe. In our recent edited volume, contributing author Floris Rijssenbeek dubbed members of this group the Maastricht Generation because they grew up after the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, which formally created the EU as it exists in its current form. For members of the Maastricht Generation, a united Europe is not just a mechanism for peace and growth. The values that Europe embodies—such as democracy, the rule of law, and humanitarianism—are inherent to their identities in ways they were not for their forebears.
This matters because people fight for what they believe in, as well as for the identities they hold and value. Members of the Maastricht Generation will proactively work to make the European project better rather than waiting for a new crisis to fuel reactive integration.
Members of the Maastricht Generation are eager to support and defend Europe’s democratic values, but rightly express a frustration with the way the system functions today. The slowness of the European Parliament’s and Council of the European Union’s legislative processes, physical and psychological distance between Brussels and its constituents, and the arguably undemocratic system of indirectly appointing members of the European Commission prompt many to turn their backs to traditional politics in favor of protest movements, like those in Hungary, or transnational climate activism, such as Fridays for Future.”
Britain Can Thrive As A Vassal State
Tom McTague - Unherd
“Britain’s negotiations with Washington, then, are best understood not as an attempt to resurrect a lost world, but to build something, piecemeal, that helps it survive in the real one that is emerging today. As one senior British official told me, outside the EU, Britain has little choice but to “internationalise its approach” to reduce its dependencies, strengthening its security partnerships with allies and then to slowly develop them into economic partnerships. Such a world dovetails with America’s plan to create a grand alliance that will block China’s attempts to become the world’s new hegemon. In this vision, economic and security interests are merged — no longer kept separate, as in most EU countries, by outsourcing the latter to Nato. The second core plank of British foreign policy, therefore, must be to nail its colours to the American mast in its competition with China.
Add these together and a strategy emerges. Britain must work with other like-minded powers who are also part of America’s grand alliance. It must think about security and economics as one and turn itself into a “vanguard nation”, moving quickly and forcefully on everything — not in a vain bid to protect the sense of global power it had in the 20th century, but to turn itself into a successful mid-sized power in the 21st: an Atlantic Japan or North Sea Israel. It must align with the US on core questions of national security, turning questions of global trade into wider questions of Western interests. It must place itself in a web of similar countries with similar aspirations, all happy to be independent, junior partners in an American world with no interest in being separate poles of power.”
It’s Not Just Men and Boys Who Are Struggling Right Now
Jessica Grose – New York Times
“An excellent new book by Monica Potts, “The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America,” humanises these bleak statistics. Potts, who grew up in Clinton, Ark., traces the divergent paths of herself and her childhood best friend, Darci. The children of working-class white parents in this small Southern town, they started out together as book-loving, straight-A students.
But by the end of high school, their fates had already split: Potts got scholarships to attend Bryn Mawr and went on to establish a career in journalism, while Darci languished in their hometown, with spotty employment. Darci struggled with domestic abuse and substance abuse, and her mother ended up raising her two children.
When I spoke to Potts earlier this week, she said part of her motivation for writing the book was that the conversation about who is struggling in America had been very focused on men. For all the advances we’ve made for girls and women, Potts said, “There are a lot of communities around the country where women are still really expected to take a back seat for men,” and they’re expected to rely on men. There’s also a permissive attitude toward boys that girls don’t benefit from. “Boys could get by with anything,” one of Potts’s childhood friends tells her, “but girls were held to a higher standard.”