Sweden's dark soul: the unravelling of a utopia
2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ia/iiz013
ISSN1468-2346
Autores ResumoOn the eve of the general election in 2014 Prime Minister Fridrik Reinfeldt boldly declared: ‘Sweden, my friends, is a humanitarian superpower’: this, arguably, paved the way for an enduring national crisis. A decision taken earlier in his premiership may have triggered the ensuing difficulties. Immigration procedures were liberalized, making it hard for the authorities to bar entry to refugees who had arrived from conflict zones. In her new book, journalist Kajsa Norman, who has served with the Swedish Army in various trouble spots, argues that virtue-signalling (a policy of open borders) has produced a rupture in national life. Ill-prepared elites have been unable to reconcile Sweden's high tax model of welfare, based on nearly everyone holding down a job, with the growth of a large multi-ethnic underclass. Norman charts the country's slow descent into political paralysis and social unrest in an unconventional way. She describes how Sweden came to be seen by two outsiders. One of them, Samvel Atabekyan, is an Armenian who settled there because of his fascination with the films of Ingmar Bergman. He integrated and started to enjoy professional success until he was abruptly deported by the inefficient and capricious immigration authorities. The other, Chang Frick, is the son of a Polish Jew who, after a rough childhood, became a journalist and set out to expose the shortcomings of a false ‘utopia’. The kernel of the book centres on efforts by him and the father of one of the victims to expose the mass sexual assaults on teenage girls at a 2015 music festival. The inertia of the police and the hostility of a major Swedish daily newspaper to covering the issue are intensively researched by Norman.
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