Could violent riots in Sweden be sign of grave unemployment problem?
Photo: EPA
The Stockholm fire brigade has tackled fires at least two schools as rioting in suburbs of the Swedish capital continued for a fifth night. Firefighters also dealt with fires in 15 cars, two containers and a fourth building, the brigade said, while police made eight arrests. But the unrest appeared to be less intense than on other nights. The nightly riots began in a deprived, largely immigrant suburb where police shot a man dead last week.
Stockholm is the third European capital to experience such violent riots.
Rioting
of this scale is unprecedented for the Swedish capital and has raised
questions about the success of the country's attempts to integrate
foreign-born residents, who now make up some 15% of the population.
To discuss this, I'm joined on the phone by Bo Malmberg, Professor at the Human Geography Department of Stockholm University.
The
average living standards in Sweden are one of the highest in Europe.
Nevertheless, some claim that the gap between the social classes in the
country is growing rapidly. Could the riots in Stockholm be a sign of a
grave unemployment problem?
There are many people
who say that unemployment is an important part of the picture. We have
made a study of this type of riots in Sweden and in fact we found that
riots are not more common in areas where we have higher unemployment.
Instead, what we found is that higher levels of segregation in areas
where Swedes and non-Swedes live in different areas, there is a higher
risk of this type of riots. And also economic uncertainty is important.
So, we have seen in the last years that the poorest groups in Sweden
have lost incomes and the difference between the poorest and the
middle-income groups have increased. And that certainly could be a risk
factor.
We also know
that the riots took place mainly in neighborhoods with large immigrant
populations, like Husby, where violence started on Sunday. Would you say
that the integration of immigrants in Sweden failed?
Well,
many people say that. But I really don’t agree because what is true is
that it takes a long time, it takes from 7 to 8 years for an immigrant
in Sweden to enter the labour market in full force. So, it takes too
long time. But if you look at people that have been there for 10 years,
they are quite good integrated. So, I would say it is not really about
immigration policy and integration, it is more about the failed social
policy.
Taking Anders
Breivik and the 2011 Norway attacks into account, is it possible that
Scandinavian countries will become a hotbed of inter-ethnic violence in
the future? Or you don’t see any connection?
In
that respect, if you look at xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiments,
certainly unemployment plays there a large role. We can say that in 2010
election when we had a xenophobic party entering the Swedish
Parliament, in areas where we had low unemployment and Swedes happily
mix with non-Swedes they had very few votes. But in other areas where
unemployment was high, there you really did get anti-immigrant feelings
high. So, if you want to reduce xenophobic feelings, you have to do
something about unemployment. And I would say that the Swedish
Government is doing very little.
Will it change its actions following this violence? Do you expect something to happen at the political level after the rioting?
This
rise in income gaps that we are seeing in Sweden, especially the
declining incomes of the poorest group, that has really been an active
conscious policy of the Government. They wanted to increase the income
gaps between people with jobs and people without jobs in order to give
incentives for people to enter the labour market. But the result of this
– we haven’t any decline in unemployment, instead we have seen this
increasing income gaps.
So, I regard this as a kind of
big social experiment that is being done over the last 7 years. And in
my view, I would say that it is a failure because if you increase the
income gap, you will have then to accept increasing tensions in the
society. My hope is that Sweden would reject this kind of policies for
increasing income gaps.
source:voice of Russia
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