Sweden: a cautionary tale

The failure of multiculturalism in Europe has been a disaster for liberal values.

It’s not often I get invited to a palace. True, the ornate seventeenth-century van der Nootska palatset in Stockholm is relatively small, but as a venue for a book launch it certainly beats a conference room in a Premier Inn. The event took place in October 2023, and I had been invited to dinner and drinks to mark the translation of three of my books into Swedish by Nopolar Publishing, a new company that specialises in heterodox writing.

After the dinner, I was able to mingle with some of the attendees and discuss local politics. These were mostly middle-class liberals, and so it was mildly surprising that many of them seemed keen to discuss the immigration question. I don’t recall every aspect of every conversation that night, but one remark from a soft-spoken local woman has stayed with me. She expressed the view that Swedish people tended to take liberalism for granted, and that they had assumed newcomers would be eager to adopt the values of the nation that had welcomed them. Now many feared that this was warm-hearted naivety, and that the government had not done enough to ensure widespread integration. She closed by muttering in a plaintive tone: “we got it wrong”.

Sweden now serves as a cautionary tale for other countries. Citizens without a shred of racial prejudice are now alarmed by gang violence and grenade attacks in the suburbs, enclaves of immigrants living in isolation from Swedish culture and traditions, and the spread of Islamic extremism. I remember being astonished when a left-wing friend of mine expressed his exasperation in a private message in September 2022. He wrote:

“We have had daily shootings for years now. People who are horrified now have done nothing about shootings, honour killings, kids getting robbed, we’ve had big middle eastern clan-fighting in the streets (50-70 people kicking each other in the head) and stuff like this... and the progressive woke people just pretend that it’s business as usual. Of course I hate populism and right wing parties but no one else dares to tackle reality…”

Matters have only worsened since then, and the election of a right-leaning coalition government suggests that the public patience is wearing thin. Nima Gholam Ali Pour, an Iranian-born politician for the Swedish Democrats, has said that “Sweden has had very difficult problems with immigration in recent years”, with “areas that are 90 per cent immigrants who don’t accept Swedish values and where ethnic Swedes have had to move out”. In spite of once boasting a crime rate significantly lower than most of its European neighbours, Sweden is now known as the gun-crime capital of the continent. With the exception of Mexico, Sweden is the country with the highest incidence of grenade and bomb attacks in any nation not at war. What was once the epitome of a high-trust society is now on life support, and it is clear that this extraordinary experiment in multiculturalism has been a failure.