Cosmopolitanism at the crossroads: Swedish immigration policy after the 2015 refugee crisis

Introduction: game change?

Sweden’s reputation and self-image as a country of international solidarity and liberal universalism has been cultivated by Swedish governments for more than half a century through peace-building, international cooperation, development, and foreign aid. This trademark has also been influential in Sweden’s comparatively open and liberal approach to migration and refugees. It is reflected in an immigration policy that prioritizes humanitarian needs over national self-interest and profitability', and in a multicultural membership policy that prioritizes voluntary integration and social inclusion over forced assimilation and deservingness. Together, these policies have led to a rapid diversification of Swedish society, from a fairly homogeneous country to one of the most diverse in Europe. Prime ministers from left to right have heralded this Swedish model of immigration as a success story. It serves both the ‘cosmopolitan’ ends of hospitality and refuge, and the national ends of domestic development and prosperity (cf. Schall 2016).

In 2015, the European refugee crisis provided a crucial test of the model. The horrors of the civil war in Syria and affected regions generated the largest displacement of people in Europe since the end of World War II. In the course of one year, roughly one million people migrated to the EU, most of whom were asylum-seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Prime Minister Stefan Lófven’s social democratic-green government, which entered office in 2014, vowed to maintain the strong cosmopolitan commitments of previous governments. The refugee crisis engaged all levels of Swedish society. Questions of numbers and costs were for a long time discarded as irrelevant, and dissenting views were rejected as xenophobic. In September 2015, the Prime Minister declared: ‘My Europe does not build walls’ (Lófven 2015).

With time and growing numbers of asylum-seekers, however, the general opinion began to sway. In 2015, Sweden registered 163,000 asylum applications. In the peak months of September and October, 10,000 new asylumseekers came every week. Reports of over-burdened migration offices and welfare institutions called into question the feasibility of the cosmopolitan model. The collapsing asylum policy of the EU through the bailout of other

Cosmopolitanism at the crossroads 221 member states left the ‘moral super powers’ Sweden and Germany to fend for themselves. In a cruel twist of fate Prime Minister Lofven found himself forced to stop immigration precisely because the numbers of immigrants were so high that the government considered the existing policy unsustainable. The decision was announced in a press conference on November 24 2015 (Lofven and Romson 2015). Torn by moral agony, Lofven and his Vice-Prime Minister Asa Romson (who could not hold back the tears) presented a package of drastic restrictions. In the following months, the government implemented border controls that effectively limited the asylumseekers’ possibility of reaching Swedish shores. It then moved to pass a temporary asylum law (2016) that narrowed the grounds for protection and for family reunification to the EU minimum. It also downgraded most residence permits from permanent to temporary. In May 2019, the Swedish government proposed a two-year extension of the temporary asylum law -with a restored right to family reunification - which is currently pending in parliament.

What do these changes mean? Are we witnessing the break-up of the Swedish model of immigration? This chapter tries to shed some light on this question by examining Swedish immigration policy pre- and post-2015. While it is too early to either confirm or discard a paradigmatic shift of immigration policy, 1 will bring out and discuss tendencies that may indicate long-term change towards a more nation-centered politics of immigration. The argument unfolds in the following way. In the first of the following three sections, I describe the Swedish model and explain in what ways it was/ is cosmopolitan. In the second, I examine indications of change from cosmopolitan to national values and priorities, relatively speaking. In the third and last section, 1 briefly discuss whether this shift constitutes a crisis of values or realities.

Swedish cosmopolitanism

The term ‘cosmopolitan’ derives from the Greek words ‘cosmos’ for ‘world’ and ‘polites’ for ‘citizen.’ Cosmopolitans are world citizens and cosmopolitanism, by inference, is the ideology/theory that seeks to create and strengthen the bonds of fellow citizenship throughout humanity. While the content and thickness of this bond may vary, its universal relevance may not. It denies moral legitimacy to the division of humanity into separate communities, creeds, and tribes. Cosmopolitanism relies both on the principle of individualism, in as much as the ultimate unit of concern is the person (not the group or collective), and the principles of universalism and generality, in as much as all persons are viewed as equals regardless of nationality, gender, skin color, socioeconomic class and, so on (Pogge 1992).

It goes without saying that ‘pure’ cosmopolitanism is a utopian ideal that has never been realized. Cosmopolitanism is commonly invoked to criticize and question, and to propose more humane policies and practices. More often than not, the goal is to attenuate and transform national loyalties, so that governments and people will be more tolerant of strangers and diversity. It is best thought of as an ideal that can be approximated but never reached, especially in a system of sovereign nation-states where solidarity with strangers tends to be secondary to that of co-nationals. Moral cosmopolitans seek to strengthen the horizontal bond between fellow human beings through education and tolerance (cf. Nussbaum 1997), while political cosmopolitans try to strengthen the vertical bond between world citizens and a global regime of individual rights that governments have to protect (cf. Benhabib 2004). States may impose such cosmopolitan obligations on themselves, or through treaties with other states. The cosmopolitan law may also, of course, be imposed upon states by a supranational sovereign or world government, but cosmopolitans have traditionally been skeptical of such concentration of power, regarding it as conducive to new forms of imperialism.

Mobility and migration matter to moral cosmopolitanism because they open the mind and make people more tolerant. They matter to political cosmopolitans partly for the same reason, but also for the sake of global equality and because they create obligations for states, especially with respect to people in need. The most well-known of these is Immanuel Kant’s idea of hospitality, or the right to sojourn (Kant 1991). Let us start there and see how it applies to Sweden.