In the beginning of this cold December month, the Swedish Minister of Migration, Maria Malmer Stenergard, gave an interview in which she repeated one of the new government’s and its supporting party’s intention: forcing public functionaries to report any undocumented persons we might meet in our professions. If we fail to do so, there should be consequences. The minister described this as part of the government’s determination to “exterminate” (utrota) what in Swedish public debate is called “shadow society” (skuggsamhället). In recent years this term, “shadow society”, has become established as a metaphor in Swedish political debate to describe the informal sector largely populated by undocumented non-citizens. With the current right-wing government, the word is given an increasingly oppressive content, but it is used along a much broader political spectrum. As a metaphor it mystifies, making certain lives appear as unreal or less real than others; that is, the lives of those who despite living side by side with the majority of us, are deprived of rights.
With the disturbing implications of the discourse of “shadow society” in mind, I wish to make a few reflections on Malmer Stenergard’s statements:
1. With this new government, heavily dependent on the support of a radical nationalist party founded by Nazis (the Sweden Democrats), we have a minister of migration who talks about undocumented people in terms of “extermination”. This must not pass without notice. That the minister does not talk about exterminating people but rather about exterminating “shadow society”, is not what is important here. What is important, is that the term that comes to her mind and out of her mouth when speaking of a group of people that the government does not want in Sweden, is this: extermination.
2. If there was any serious intention at all behind the frequent assurances that the fight against “shadow society” is a fight against poverty and marginalization, the government would start by looking into how to regularize the situation for those denied asylum that can yet not be sent back. This includes people who no state is willing to receive, people who cannot get the required documents for travelling, or children with rejected asylum applications but no one to receive them back where they fled from. Start right here, start with these. Why are they not allowed residence on the basis of practical obstacles – outside of their own control – to them being sent back? They are not isolated cases, and researchers in Sweden have tried to lift the situation of this group. These researchers have received no response, neither by the former government nor by the current one. And most journalists do not ask the necessary follow-up questions. It is more than obvious that the fight against “shadow society” is not a fight against marginalization, but an attack on some of the most exposed people in our society.
3. The current government wishes to create what has long been the dream of the Sweden Democrats: an oppressive informant society. I expect that everyone who, like I am, is a public functionary, refuses to obey. When we signed up as public functionaries, we did so within the framework of a democratic project we were expected to represent, all according to the specific sectors in which we worked. Democracy can never be reduced to its mere form, it can never be separated from its content. Therefore, referring to voter majority, believing that will be the end of our responsibility, will not do. If the content moves too far away from democratic principles, the forms will very soon be corrupted too; of this we have plenty of examples in history and around the world. When the state moves farther and farther away from the democratic project, we as public functionaries should pay our loyalties to democracy, not to the state.
from Calais Migrant Solidarity
Swedish government discourse, eventually to be realized into government bills, has gone full Kurtzian – exterminate all the brutes! Only, in this case it is not even contained to the footnotes. We must persistently refuse to obey, even when refusal comes with a price. As Jonatan Lionheart quite drastically says in Astrid Lindgren’s beautiful children’s novel The Brothers Lionheart: “There are things you have to do even if they are dangerous. If not, you are not human, you are nothing but a little turd.”