John Solomos is professor of sociology at South Bank University, London. He has recently co-edited Theories of Race and Racism (Routledge, 2000) and co-written The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game (Berg, 2001).
Even in Sweden: Racism, Racialized Spaces,
and the Popular Geographical Imagination
by allan pred
Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000. 338 pages
Hardback: UK £33.50, US $48.00. Paperback: UK £12.50, US $18.95
Allan Pred’s Even in Sweden is a welcome addition to contemporary scholarly and political debate about racism in the last decade of the twentieth century and its likely impact in the future. Pred focuses on the growth of local and national forms of racism in Sweden, though he argues forcefully that much of his analysis is relevant to the Europe of the 1990s in general. The book should be of interest to all those concerned with questions about the role of racism in contemporary societies and the need to develop effective political and social strategies to tackle racist movements and ideologies.
Drawing extensively on print media sources and other discourses about immigration, race and refugees, Pred seeks to give voice to the disparate views that frame public debate on these issues in Sweden and elsewhere. His analysis of these debates is challenging and innovative, providing a fresh perspective on current theoretical and empirical research about racism and its manifestations in Sweden and other European societies. He is particularly successful in showing the importance of situating racism in specific social and economic environments at both the national and local levels, and of the need to place the appeal of racist movements within the wider environment of social change that has transformed the make-up of urban communities.
Extensive use of quotations from the press, migrant communities, racist activists and anti-racist groups seeks to supply an insight into the everyday experiences that shape popular images in Swedish society of immigration and race. Part of the value of Pred’s analysis, and this is most evident in chapters three and four of the book, is that it furnishes suggestive accounts of how such images are made and remade largely on the basis of beliefs and ideas about the “other” that gain currency through processes of collective remembering and forgetting. Pred provides strong justification for talking not about racism as a singular phenomenon, but about racisms as a complex set of ideas and values that attract support through constructions about both the past and the present.
Pred shows a keen awareness of the political realities that confront us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We see around us a proliferation of movements and political organisations that espouse racist, anti-immigrant and neo-fascist politics. The role and impact of such mobilisations became a particular source of concern throughout the 1990s, particularly in the aftermath of public manifestations of racial violence and expressions of hatred against groups such as migrants and refugees. These developments raise important dilemmas for those concerned with how to respond to the political and social threats that they pose.
It is against this background that Pred’s analysis of the changing dynamics of the situation in Sweden is an important contribution to current debates about racism. Drawing on conceptual and empirical research in Europe and the United States, he examines both the background to contemporary expressions of racism and the connections between specific political cultures and racist violence. His account is particularly interesting in its exploration of the processes through which various types of racist violence came to the fore, and the impact of such processes on minorities in everyday life and politics. He also helps to show that racist movements are by no means uniform; it is clear from the experience of Sweden that they can assume a wide range of ideological identities and be aimed at a wide range of target groups. Ethnocentric forms of cultural racism seem to target particular minority groups depending on the specific national context and the country’s specific history of migration and nationalism.
Less satisfactory, perhaps, is Pred’s account of what can be done to counter racism and extreme nationalist mobilisations. Relatively little attention is paid to the utilisation of anti-racist ideas and values in everyday situations. Thus, we learn much about the mechanisms that are being used to express racial bigotry and to attract support for racist movements in a variety of national and cross-national contexts, but the discussion of anti-racist resources and strategies is more limited and partial. This imbalance and relative weakness is not unique to Pred’s study, being reflected in the history of public responses to racism and racist violence over the past two decades. Research in a number of countries has highlighted both the failure to prioritise anti-racism as a key issue for state action and the inadequacies of ideas as to what “anti-racism” means. Initiatives to tackle racism have been limited and largely a matter of responding to specific events or crises.
What Pred’s account does pinpoint, however, is the need to be aware of the growth of new types of racism and of the resurgence of cultural forms associated with racist movements. The situation regarding the expression of racial hatred is highly complex. Racist activists and movements have become adept at circumventing attempts by nation states to control their propaganda. Their use of the Internet and related technologies to establish transnational networks and spread their ideas highlights the difficulties of legislating against “hate speech” and the dissemination of “hate material”.
Even in Sweden provides a useful insight into trends and developments in one particular national setting and helps to raise questions that need to be addressed if we are to develop a rounded analysis of the appeal and impact of racist ideas and movements across Europe.
