It's my pleasure to welcome Vanessa Barker here today to give the first of the Hillary term also criminology seminars. Vanessa is a docent and associate professor of sociology at Stockholm University and associate director of Border Criminology. She's well known here at the centre because she spent a year visiting as a visiting fellow and also works with a number of us on various different projects.
Vanessa's research has always focussed around different themes, issues to do with questions of democracy, penal order and more recently on the welfare state and border control and the criminalisation and penalise nation of migrants. And today, she's going to be talking to us about her new book, Nordic Nationalism People Penal Order as well. And so this is more or less hot off the press. I think it came out at the end of last year, this November 11th.
All right. There you go. So we're very lucky to have Vanessa here with us today to talk about her new work. And I will hand it over to you. Harry, there was a little chat once in the front and thank you, Mary, and the Centre for Criminology for the invitation. It's really my pleasure to be back here because while I was visiting I was working on a proposal and then to return with the actual product is actually satisfying for myself and also Tom Sutton is here from Routledge.
So I would also like to thank Routledge for really supporting the development of the book and the production process. So Thomas here, I'm really excited about the book and having the chance to talk to you about some, some of the ideas that we've been in conversation about, but also some developments that occurred since then. So I want to in this talk, give the the big picture of the book and the arguments and then open up for some discussions.
And I think I've been giving some talks already about the book and received some pushback, some some some more or less aggressive than others. So I'm very curious to hear see here with this if this crowd or different people in this crowd, I might have to say so. The book is about about Sweden and the the migration of the refugee crisis that occurred in 2015. But it's the migration, the refugee crisis that was going on in 2015.
It's really an occasion to look deeper into the society and the changing nature of welfare states in this period of globalisation and global mobility. I framed the book about that around this fall of opens up in the fall of 2015 and this already seems we're in 2018. The fall of 2015 seems a long time ago.
I feel like the world has really been transformed really quickly. But in the summer of 2015 and in the fall, this was this period, in some ways a hopeful period when Europe was opening its walls to people fleeing Syria, also Afghanistan. And there was refugees welcoming civil society movements that were spontaneously emerging in large cities across Germany and Sweden as well. And there was this period where, yes, Europe was was open to opening its doors and opening its borders.
And in Sweden, this was a a speech made in September by our prime minister by then. And it was a very he is he he come from he was the president of one of the most famous labour unions in Sweden. He's not well known for being a kind of charismatic speaker. This speech was the best speech of his life. I mean, it really moved people and, you know, brought people to tears. It was a very moving speech about the end of the Cold War and tearing down walls.
And what kind of Europe are we going to be? We're a Europe. We're going to open our borders. We're going to bring in. Yes, anyone coming from Syria is welcome in Sweden. And he said, why Europe doesn't build walls. That's not my Europe. And it was very, again, very powerful speech from again, someone who's not wasn't well known for being a charismatic speaker. This is in midway in the system, which means the citizens square.
So it was also very symbolically resonant that he gave a speech there with pro refugee supporters, both in the government, civil society and refugees and migrants, asylum seekers themselves. And then there was a march walking hand in hand. This is in September, over the summer and then through the fall there was a large increase in the number of asylum seekers who came into Sweden.
The summer was again very dramatic with increases in the Sweden is a population of 10 million so small scale country and the number started. Increasing dramatically over the summer. And then it reached its peak in the fall, about 10,000 people entering the country to seek asylum in one week. And this was for the Sweden Migration Board and the government agencies. A very high number and a very high peak. This graph, the blue line, is the year I'm referring to in 2015.
So it is 2017. Is that the blue taxi, blue or green? Blue. I did okay. Yeah. So the dark blue, right. That this is the that the this wave right. That comes in, this was 2016 that's coming and the need for a year previous. So you can see I mean just graphically very quickly that this was an unusual pattern, even though Sweden had been relatively open right prior to this to asylum seekers coming in. But this increase was was important.
So by the fall, you have these increases, this peak in November and then by mid-November, end of this is just an image of reflection, large numbers, again coming in the police migration agents there to meet people and this large scale prophecy by mid-November this speech by the Prime Minister's to takes a 180.
He basically says in another speech the Government now considers that the current situation with a large number of people entering into the country in a relatively short time poses a serious threat to public order and national security. So this is within months of his prior speech, which he invites refugees and asylum seekers to come in. And now he's basically saying they pose a threat to public order and national security.
And this is the motivation to close the border with Denmark, which had not been closed since World War Two. So Denmark and Sweden on the on the the border, they are close neighbours beyond the European Union. But the sharing and the Nordic cooperation, the border had never had not been closed since World War Two. They closed the border and install I.D. checks within the Schengen area, passport controls which had been been in operation, restrictions on permits becoming temporary permits.
So if you were entering to seek asylum, you received a temporary permit which would be subject to evaluation within a year. So they I mean, just create a lot of paperwork for themselves as well. It so they created temporary permits and restrictions on family reunifications. And they were going to and the prediction was it would increase deportations or expulsions for people who no longer had a legal right to remain in. This is, in fact, what they did. The estimate was.
So I think the end the peak figure, the number that had come in to seek asylum in this period was 163,000 people. And then when they closed the border, they basically said, okay, in order to get our numbers down, we're going to deport 80,000, which is kind of convenient number of what was what had come in. The number was not as high as that, but this was what was estimated in order to get get the numbers.
But basically what the government instituted through legal restrictions and practices at the border, blocking access and increasing removals. Right. To get what they said, get the system under control. The question is, this is definitive from the from Castro. If anyone has flown in through Copenhagen, this this is a it's in Denmark, but it isn't. These are the trains that go across the bridge and whether they go across the bridge into Sweden.
And this is a fence. And I also think just graphically this is important to show as well. Come back to this fence. This is not a wall. Right. So this wasn't a concrete Berlin Wall, but this was a fence that had not existed between these countries inside a sharing and inside Nordic cooperation in order to prevent people from seeking asylum,
from claiming claiming their rights. So why did this happen, this very dramatic shift from I mean, it's one thing to say we really don't want asylum seekers here and then install restrictions. I think it's a really different ballgame to say come on in and then close the border and increase basically the violence against these people. So why is this happening? The government's explanation in the immediate period of time in November and has since carried on, was that this was a a system overload.
The system's going to collapse. There were too many people. The Migration Board was unprepared, lack of coordination across agencies. So there was a lot of concern about the security and reception with with people coming in with. You had Red Cross there, volunteers, you had other excuse me, civil society organisations there. You had government officials there, you had the police. But this was not very well coordinated in terms of authority, in terms of jurisdiction, in terms of procedure.
And these changes occurred very quickly where you actually had volunteers who the day one day were legally transporting asylum seekers into a reception centre. The next day they were being charged with a crime for trafficking or for smuggling people into the border. So it was a very it was a very chaotic situation which contributed to the sense of disorder. And in Sweden itself, it's a highly ordered society.
And so this system collapse was very real impact to the people working in reception, the people's asylum seekers themselves. Right. And in terms of how order, how orderly the system was assigning housing, assigning workers to their case. It went beyond the reception. This idea about system collapse right inside the government. Government elites were very concerned with the impact on society, all society institutions.
So if you have this large increase in the population, there were concerns about the police services, the emergency rooms, the schools, the hospitals, the doggies, the pre-school, health care. And these are in these documents about from from the political elites in this discussion. All of these are social core and social institutions were under threat by this this increase of the population in such a short period of time.
The the system overload system collapse. When I first heard it in the in the in the. In his public statements. I didn't take it too seriously. But I have to say, in doing the research and going back through the records, this was a real impact on how people perceive their jobs and what they thought the society was capable of doing. It's not a sociological explanation. Right. And this is the task for for us as social analysts.
Right. The government. It's it was a real technical explanation about system collapse. But the question is, the sociological question is what are the social conditions that allowed for this? That brought this about? You know, what what are why was the government so underprepared? Why wasn't there a coordination strategy? This is not it was it was not a mystery that there is, you know, conflict around the world and people are fleeing.
And it's not a mystery that hundreds of people are dying in the Mediterranean, crossing borders, trying to get in to Europe. Sweden had also experienced a previous refugee crisis during the former Yugoslav war, where they also feared a system collapse and had temporarily closed. Think close the border. So the question is really, you know, what are the social conditions which allow for them to be? So maybe some would say naive, but also just underprepared that the scale of this is large.
We're really dealing with large movements of people and governments at this day and age. Why aren't they prepared for this? Why are we thinking like the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration, which put thousands, tens of thousands of unemployed people to work on government projects? Like why weren't these things sort of in order? What's really going on? There are other arguments coming from different different literatures, different pieces of this who had who basically say Sweden.
It's unlike it's just like every other country. This is an argument about the global north closing itself off to the global south, which is, you know, rich white people. We just don't really want to have poor black people and people coming from the global south in Sweden that this is part of a larger trend. I'm going to take issue with some of that, those critiques.
There are other very common arguments about why we have restrictive border control, why we see a crackdown against migration across Europe, North America, Australia. This has to do with neoliberalism that this is all about and of global economic imperatives, which which are driving states to increase restrictions on migration.
I'm also going to take some issue with these types of arguments as well in the Nordic context, because in the Nordic context, welfare states are strong and it's the exact opposite, I would argue, about what's going on, that it's not about neoliberalism, but rather it's about the preservation of the welfare state itself, the welfare state, sustainability, the solvency of the welfare state.
So in the Nordic countries where these economies are strong, the benefit in benefits, resources, the distribution, these are very highly functioning societies in terms of their affluence, in terms of the welfare state. So we also can get into some argument about this. But there has been increased inequality in the welfare state.
But the overall purpose of the government, the overall purpose of the rationale of the government has maintained for well over 100 years, well over a hundred years, practically this governing strategy about taking care of the population protection and prevention against Ills. So let's discuss that a little bit more. So what?
My argument for it is setting up that rather than thinking about these external or global forces, that there's a need to understand what's going on inside the welfare state itself. We haven't really understood this very well. What are the social conditions that that brought it about? And it also like to highlight this point, which I was really inspired by, are motivated by Eric Klinenberg, who's a sociologist who's written a book about the heat wave in the 1990s in the United States.
And he analysed the heat wave to say, well, the heat wave, the common explanation why people died. Mortality rates were high because it was a climate and natural disaster. But he says people died in the dead bodies. These were reflective of social faultlines in the society that they just don't die because of natural disaster. Who's most vulnerable? It tends to reflect where we are divided in that society.
And I read rereading that book for Methods and Methods, cause it made me think about the border closing as well. And yes, I think that's true in Sweden. I mean, the fault lines are there, but who what are the fault lines in Sweden and how does the border closing and the harm that's imposed? How does this reflect the social fault lines in the society? A couple of other methodological notes on this on this theme. So I want to understand the border closing in this broad context.
And Sweden becomes an obvious case to do it because they actually close the border. It's part of a continuum of restrictive migration policies. But it. Very dramatic. So it's intrinsically interesting. Why would a country that was once so open, so egalitarian has this history of being open to migration? Why would it do this? We know. Or if you studied comparative welfare state. Sweden is also a very generous welfare state.
So there's something interesting and different about Sweden than some of the other countries we've know about. And most of you, if you're coming from criminology or punishment, it's well known that in the Nordic countries, they tend to have more mild, inhumane penal sanction. Well, when we start to look at this intersection of migration and border controls with the penal system, that entire image starts to come undone.
So Sweden becomes a very a critical case for it to analyse these processes because it should conform right to expectations, should have been kept open, but it doesn't. They put up this fence and I argue because it doesn't conform to what we might expect, we actually need to generate some new theories. Right? The ones that we have don't really fit very well in that people, I think, contort themselves to make what we have already fit fit the case.
And it's often with kit, with with cases where the dynamics that are there, we need to take them in inductively or objectively what's going on inside them that we can understand rather than apply. Right, some pre-existing theory. So this is how methodologically approach the the study. The other note of methods, which I think is important, is they're bringing in the temporal temporality or time horizons.
So. When you think about social conditions that bring something about are the core social causes that bring an event about in popular understandings or journalistic accounts. We tend to focus on the immediate present. What happened right in this right now? Right in proximate. Those are short term causes. And this chart comes from Paul Pearson, who who was bringing in kind of a much, I think, sophisticated view about time.
You can look at short term causes that lead to short term outcomes or you can have short term causes that have long term outcomes. But he's really pushing as a sociologist or social theorist to look at long term causes, the societal structures, right social organisation that can have either short term outcomes and long term outcomes. So just to put this concretely, the the system collapse argument that I gave you, that is a kind of short term cause and a short term outcome is system overload.
Something happens as a crisis and then boom that the borders close again. I don't find that to be sufficient because we need to dig deeper into why weren't they prepared? And so I'm focusing on the long term. So what that meant for my analysis was that in order to understand the social dynamics that are going on, it wasn't enough to look at the immediate politics, although I did or the immediate structure.
It wasn't enough to look at ten years ago, but actually to look at this foundations of the welfare state, to kind of get the long dry if you study history, right. These long term social processes that occur over time that tend to repeat themselves and create certain patterns of action. And this is very much, I think, operating in the Swedish the Swedish case. I hope I thought that was my last point. But Eric Kleinberg, very much an inspiration.
But another methodological point, which I think is I find interesting and fascinating, is this complex causality coming from from mills. So again, in the Swedish case, we have tended to look or maybe we don't want to speak about researchers studying Britain, but we've tended to look at institutions in isolation. So we want to study the prison. We want to study punishment, we want to study the police.
We want to study this or this institution. We tend to study it in all the dynamics that are going on inside. Fascinating and complex, but those are sitting in relation to other institutions or fields, if you prefer.
Field theory. And what I argue and write about in the book is that in Sweden, when we start to look at the welfare state in the entire interaction or this field with penal order, the criminal justice system and membership, which includes migration but also ethnic minorities, and also it includes ideas about worthiness that have nothing to do with ethnicity or migration. This has to do with being a good worker, a worthy a worthy citizen.
So the membership category fraud. But when we bring these fields together or look at these interactions, this also changes our understanding. So the Nordic exceptionalism has tended to view look at the penal order and then see the welfare state and put them together. But they've actually looked at them separately. But when we start to see how they intersect with these combinations, that if you can see the kind of darkened, intersecting areas, these change the view of the whole.
So this is also a way, in an analytical way into this problem to get a sense how these institutions work and what is basically going back 100 years to the development of the welfare state, the history of migration policy, understandings of how the criminal justice system is worked, that I argue that in order to understand this dramatic event, the border closing and these larger process of processes of restricted migration control,
this again is really connected to this internal logic of the welfare state. But we need to understand the dynamics within that. There's a long view that the welfare state is the double side of policing and welfare. The state has this double side of taking care of the population but also of policing the population that this often goes hand in hand.
This again, in Sweden there's been a very long history, not of a minimal welfare state and a high police state, but how these institutions, the welfare state and say the policing have worked together in tandem over time. A very long history right of state intervention going back to forced sterilisation to control of alcohol, to control of drugs for the better of the population, for everybody's in everybody's best interest.
Also, I think this internal logic a point that may not be well appreciated, which I found I found a discovery in reading some of the historical records with this particular individual attachment to the welfare state. So we are a welfare state is written about, as you know, having really kind of some group solidarity. Everybody's the same. And this is why they're so generous. But it's not really the foundation of the welfare state, right?
It's about individual liberation through the welfare state, freedom from dependencies, from the family, from the church, from your employer. These independence, these which impacted the individual, the individual then becomes very much attached to the well-being of the welfare state itself and the sustainability of that welfare state. Because you as a person individual in Sweden, it really matters, right, how well the state, the welfare state, how it survives, how it functions your own future.
Right. In terms of your pension, it's very much tied to this well-functioning state, but there's very strong individual attachment to the welfare state itself. And so when it has come under threat, different kinds of political or social threats to its idea about sustainability and this is his take takes on a personal edge. So, you know, just in talking with with people who might say, well, I of course I am, you know, in favour of immigration, I'm not a racist.
But the push comes to shove. They're going to choose the welfare state over the idea of some idea about human rights or human security. The welfare state is also looking historically as a national project. And this me from this point of view, it may seem obvious because we organise nation states and welfare states are within that framework.
But at the time in the 1930s there was really an international workers movement and in Sweden there was a choice, a conflict about internationalisation, about a class struggle versus a national identity. And the Sweden just the historical the historical story here is that instead of making it about a class struggle, what was brilliant about the Social Democrats was they made it a national struggle.
So again, their individual attachment is because the national identity is wrapped up in the welfare state. This is a source of pride that it has been generous, that it is affluent, that this is something you if you meet a Swede travelling somewhere or an academic, you may be familiar with this idea about the welfare state. It's a source of national identity, national pride.
But it was a brilliant political manoeuvre because it got the entire population committed to this idea of sustaining itself for it, of contributing and of equalising social relations. This wasn't, say, in the United States, which was the means tested welfare state only the very poor and the unworthy. But this would be everybody. So this has implications because it's a a national project for everybody to equalise. This is a contemporary picture.
So even some scholars and social critics will argue that Sweden is just caught up in this kind of neoliberal paradigm as well, and there's been transformation of the welfare state and retrenchment and neoliberal policies. But this has to be put into perspective, into into scope. There has been increased inequality, but it's happening around the margins. And this has to do with the very wealthy, with the top 1%.
Their wealth has grown because of the tax policies, but the broad middle has maintained itself right in the spending, on the broad middle has maintained itself and the rates are the spending is comparable to what it was about 20 years ago. So there have been reforms. So one thing Michael hasn't done, the privatisation of schooling, privatisation in Sweden means that the government transfers the money they would have spent on a, I should say, state school.
Right. So a state school receives a certain amount of money per pupil. Privatisation simply means that money that would have gone to the state school now goes to the what we call the free school or the private school. It's not that you as an individual pay anything. So it's not a separation in that way. It's it's the money is just moved into this private into a private into a private school, not without controversy, but it's also the scale of in the perspective.
The welfare state is also very strong. If anybody loses their job tomorrow, there are protections and mechanisms in place. And this radically is very radically different than a place like the United States, which many people, millions of people do not actually have health care. There are not protections. Right. If they lose their job. So it is a there's been restructuring, but it has not been a full scale retract, retraction or retrenchment of the welfare state.
And it is precisely this affluence and well-being that is so vital to the population that they want to maintain this wealth and this this affluence. But I know I said in another talk that this is not actually my neighbourhood right over there. On that on that I was surprised to see it in the paper because we still don't think of themselves as living in this kind of glittery wealth. But you know that this is a very affluent society.
And the idea that you can take in people who are fleeing persecution and you know, rationally, I think it's very difficult to manage. So this idea of writing the welfare state is really central to individual attachment welfare, state welfare, state sustainability, that this is what drives a lot of these policies. We want to look out for it. This engine, right. This has brought prosperity, it brought development. It's brought prestige and status. We want to maintain this.
So we're going to protect this bubble that we're in and really protect who has access to the bubble and who who doesn't. Because, again, this is a very high quality of life and it really matters who who enters and who has access. And that I make these arguments in the book that this is a a logic, which is, I think, maybe underappreciated, where equality can or well-being or affluence here can drive exclusion.
That it's not that Swedes believe that people are unequal or that there's just this rampant inequality in society. And so we use the tools of criminal justice system to deal with inequality, although there's certainly a piece of that which part of driving this is that wanted to sustain this equality of well-being for everybody. In order to do that, we're going to make sure to not let everybody in because it's going to be a drain on on resources and identity who has access to that bubble.
So looking inside the welfare state, trying to get this internal logic and understanding what it means to the people involved, I think it's also connected to a part of what we came out of. This was again, like the connection between the welfare state and how punishment or criminal justice or penal power operates. In this context. And in order to explain the border closing and larger restrictions, I developed this concept of penal nationalism.
Now, the term itself, when Haney wrote about in the context of Eastern Europe, in Hungary, in Central Europe, trying to restore a sense of national sovereignty in the face of European Union integration. So she wrote about a similar process. I developed this term in the Swedish context, but I think it has broader implications.
You argue about how and why these tools of criminal justice are being used to to do this work, right, to protect that bubble or to do the sorting of membership and belonging. Right. Who's going to have access? Who's going to make it inside the penal power here? Right. It's used not as a replacement for the welfare state, as we know from from the week the accounts work and others who write about neoliberalism, but rather penal powers used to advance the interests of the welfare state.
So they often they are going together. And again, just a historical point. I stumbled upon this as well in the 1960s when you had labour migration in Sweden, booming economy, vast development, modernisation in migration, you also had an expanding prison population. And if we really thought that these worked in inverse relation, then we would have seen a decrease in the prison population at that time. But so in Sweden has a long history of these these these institutions working hand-in-hand.
And as I said, right, this is really about welfare, state solvency for insiders to preserve Social Security. And then in this context, I think Social Security is has a higher value than human security. It's not a it's not a it's not an all or nothing. But when push comes to shove, again, they're going to the Swedish and Swedish government are going to opt for Social Security. And this word three comes from it's a Swedish word. It has a very broad meaning in Sweden, both economic security.
So this idea, what we think about the welfare state providing protections in social well-being, but it has this, again, ideas about trust and attachment that you feel secure in your social relations. Then you can be free. If you feel secure, this is the way for individual liberty. So again, it's kind of the heart of what the welfare state is doing. It's providing the security for individual freedom and again, the ultimate value and driver here.
So the government was basically willing to draw this fence. To protect who's inside and willing, and then we're willing to impose, I would say, this outward harm or impose insecurity on others in the process because they're holding on to that to that value. Pale nationalism, right, is also this important here, using people power to uphold the welfare state.
It's not only about the welfare state sustainability, but it's the insiders, the membership who has access and the particular kind of people, rich people. So you have a long history, again, of non-citizens, non-members, some ethnic minorities, those with the least political power are the most vulnerable. Like I want to highlight here in Sweden, again, this is not a story only of or just of racial animus, because it also has had a long history of being open to migration.
It's a duality, ambivalence, and there's different historical periods where they've been open and closed when the welfare state has been threatened. This is where we see this, these types of closures. Right. So penal nationalism, right. So the state powers operating to uphold the bubble, to protect the bubble for insiders and this use of criminal justice powers for being to respond to unwanted to mobility for nationalistic purposes.
And here I was referencing Lin Haney's work because this nationalistic purposes I think is can be quite broad and this is where it can apply to different cases or different countries. So nationalistic purposes, what do we mean by that? And in Lynn Haney's work, it was about sovereignty, about many Eastern European states retaining their sovereignty in the face of EU identity.
And Mary Bosworth has written extensively about this and Emma Kaufman in the British detention centres about being part of who is a citizen and who is not, what is British identity. So this context about identity of nationalistic purposes exist there in the Swedish. In the Nordic context, I said that the welfare state is what the national purpose is.
So penal nationalism is not just reduced to welfare, state or welfare state nationalism or welfare chauvinism, if you if you're familiar with that term. But it's about upholding that, of course, it's related to identity. I think that border criminology and punishment studies have a lot to offer the understanding of migration or restrictive migration controls because it's particularly penal form of power.
So that relying on coercive power at this point, I think, again, I'm not sure the government is quite grasp this, but this is imposing power over another's will is coercive. We're basically denying autonomy and to self-determination. And if we think about what democracies are right, this is supposed to be about the recognition and realisation of self-determining city and states.
Other democratic states are well for states to block that are really posing challenges right to the ideas about democracy, which we'll return to at the end. But it's coercive. So in its in and many others have written about it's violent as well the imposition of penal harms.
These are not administrative or neutral decisions. So there's much argument and debate in Sweden about, well, the government, of course, we have as a society, we have the right to decide who who's in our who makes up our population. Right. All democratic societies retain that. Right. It's but it's not a neutral decision about who's in and who's out. It's relying on the criminal justice, penal power, which is coercive. It's also penalising. It's effective. That's what makes it powerful.
Penal power has been at the heart of state making since the early modern period. It has been the way that modern states establish themselves, right? If we think about not favour of first child to keep it in the contemporary period, it's using at the staff, the institutions, symbolic violence, material violence to impose right claims over the population. So mass migration challenges population like who who can be part of the population, who's on the territory.
We're using the sorting mechanisms and again a lot of work I build on from border criminology to make these arguments. Again, it's about penal power because it involves censure and sanction, kind of a court taking from in the it. Then there is also written about this. The core of punishment or what makes something penal is the censure for wrongdoing.
Right. The state says this is wrong or in the case of migration and border control, you are wrong, your actions are wrong, but you yourself are the wrong kind of person. Entry and sanction. So some kind of imposition or pain that's imposed could be confinement. It could be expulsion, but it's a sanction that gets imposed. So again, it's very powerful and effective. And we've in a place like Sweden, which thoroughly believes in the rule of law, it seems to be legitimate.
Because. Oh, well, if they're caught up in the criminal justice system, while the state is a legitimate actor here, then kind of reinforces it reinforces its legitimacy. Penal powers, I said. Right. It's been central to state making. It has this structuring capacity to produce political authority. So this is, again, in these moments of transition, states are coming undone at the nation state. It is it is under threat with with migration flows, with economic flows.
And one of its principal mechanisms here is this youth. So, again, this is probably what makes it successful. I'll just highlight here is while the censure and sanctuary censure and sanction aspect, this connects to the community capacity of the criminal justice system. It is sending messages, it's communicating worth right. And if you're not worthy, again, you're can be subject to this type of violence.
The state. Right. I wouldn't say it has a monopoly, but it is a very powerful actor in representing reality. How do we understand what is legitimate? It often comes from the state, so using the tools of criminal justice system at the border is sending these communication mechanisms about who's right and who's wrong. And again, these are very the symbolic power comes from virtue. This can't be underestimated. It has a constitutive force in how we understand the world and how we act on the world.
And Catherine, reacting incorrectly to divert it's making people illegal. This is a fantastic book, right? Which I think was an eye opener for me, where she really tracks the history of immigration law, say it's the law that makes people illegal. It's not that people are illegal. It's just with all these processes is making this illegality.
Could the communicative capacity of the criminal justice system is representing reality in a way that benefits the interest of state in in Sweden, the way that it benefits the interests of poor will preserve the welfare state. The yes, the social faultlines here. Right. So who's most vulnerable to this? Right. Falls along the social fault lines.
It's again, it's not a kind of all or nothing scenario. We have to actually look over time across different institutions, across groups, and look where the social fault lines are, who who is most vulnerable. I won't go into this now in an interest of time, but I have a chapter that goes through this, the institutional legal aspects of how this has occurred in Sweden. So Sweden, in the end, it basically say it has it.
There's just there's been a problem with pluralism or an ambivalence around difference and belonging. At the heart of the welfare state, its foundation is cracked. On the one hand, it really believes everybody's equal. On the other hand, it's really hung on to this idea that some people are just more equal than others, right? Some are just more worthy than others. It's not that they're unequal, but we are more equal.
And there's a it's a fractured it's it's a duality or fractured nature of that ambivalence. And it's, again, a very long and I argue that ambivalence has never been I don't think it's been properly recognised. So it hasn't been properly fixed. The social diagnosis hasn't unless they read my book.
You know, Ivan hasn't made the front page yet, but the diagnosis of what's really happening with the problems of pluralism and I'm focusing on membership on migration, but this also is true for religion, different religious differences in Sweden, right? So there's all across different kinds of groups. The ideas about what constitutes a plural society is it's challenging for that, for that society, for that population, excuse me, for that population degrees.
I have here five degrees of foreignness. I'll just highlight that here in Sweden again, it's there's a belief that everybody is equal. But if you come from the outside and newly arrived or migrant or you have foreign background, it's very difficult to ever shake off that foreign background. And it's not a source in Sweden of the hyphenated identity. This is not something of of pride. It's something of a conflict and an argument.
And it's very difficult even for long term residents, even who have become citizens, who are citizens, to have a shake off that sense that somehow they're still foreign, not quite belonging to the society. So there's a deep ambivalence there, which makes particular people more vulnerable to this penal power right. In the U.S., you think of the criminal justice tools. So this is a slide from policing called policing the refugee crisis.
So if we think about what we had asylum seekers coming in, we had the. Yes. They're at the border, meeting them, bringing them into reception centres. And I put this here both just to illustrate that, in fact, are where these criminal justice tools are being used. But then also to highlight the communicative path of the criminal justice system. So this is the police rather than the Red Cross. This is the police rather than the migration agents.
Why aren't the migration agents there escorting people? Right. This is the police and they're highly visible. So you might say, well, they're providing security and they're going to bring them into the reception centre. Sweden is a country which had a very low visibility with policing and again a source of pride with the last few years with migration.
This has changed and become much more visible at the border, the territory border, bringing in refugees or asylum seekers, but also in the city centre in the last few years. So checking for I.D., checking to see if you have a legal right to remain. And this is a program which was very controversial, which was basically some critics argue that how they would check randomly checked IDs to see if anyone had a legal right to remain in the country.
They were looking for people with outstanding deportation orders. Well, this what was it a coincidence that everyone was foreign looking? Or was it, you know, part of the policing strategy? And this this is if you've been to Stockholm, this is anti central in the central station at the heart of Sweden. In above is a big public square. So this is this isn't happening at the territorial border. But that border control and policing of membership is occurring right in the in the city.
The city centre. The increased use of confinement. So is this a prison or is this a detention centre? It's a it is a detention centre, but it doesn't look that much different than they make in a prison. This is a detention centre for immigrant like people who have immigration violations and people who are being expelled from the country. Sweden for a long time had very low numbers of people in detention centre. But this is this has increased and they've been at maximum capacity.
And so they've now put people who have expulsion orders in the prisons in a couple of spots in the prisons, and then some of those, not all of them, some of them have ended up in 23 hours confinement. Solitary confinement, not the image of the nice mild Nordic exceptionalism that we've come to take for granted. Just this piece, excuse me, on the confinement. So this is you know, there's barbed wire at this one. You can't see barbed wire, but many of them have barbed wire around them.
The security this high walls and concrete walls and those who study the prison, those who study detention centre can see some parallels. And again, Mary's written extensively about the ways detention centres are similar and the ways that they are different. But in Sweden I just highlight that there being the use of them is being increased in new ways. This is an older pattern of the foreign nationals.
I have a chapter long discussion about all the empirical details about how those who are ethnic minorities, migrants, non-citizens ending up in the criminal justice system. This has been within the traditional prison system percent foreign nationals, over 30% of the prison population. And eviction. So this is another kind of border control use of these restrictive aspects. This is in relation to the Roma population, Roma who have come from Bulgaria and Romania, who are EU citizens.
So they are not subjected to deportations, but they have been subjected to evictions on public order grounds. So I have a paper, a separate paper on Claudia Vagabonds where I take up that issue in much more detail. But this also highlights, I think, really at the core about who the welfare state is for. So you have very, very poor people coming from Romania and Bulgaria who are citizens of the EU, but they are treated as if they are disposable, don't belong.
They have no access to any public resources. In Sweden you have to have a person number in order to access the welfare state. And so the welfare state is highly developed. Right. If you're if you're an alcoholic, you've lost your job, you you beat your kids, that the welfare, the social services is what they can put you in, programs they can recorded. They can get you out.
If you do not have a person number, if you're not registered legally living there, you cannot access any of that a homeless shelter. So EU citizens, they have a legal right to be there for three months, but they're not legally registered as residents and so they can't access any of those benefits. So this is it's very clear who the welfare state is is for in this context. And they've been subjected to, you know, camp clearing and evictions.
Removal from the territory. Right. And this these have these have increased. So the slide that I showed you with a policing membership downstairs, the checking IDs in the tunnel, but in the subway, metro, this is upstairs. Right? So it's a public square. So you have this kind of proliferation of these types of tools going on in the in the city centre.
This is a I argue it in the book and I would argue here too, this is in relation to the Nordic exceptionalism piece that if we take into account this proliferation using of these criminal justice tools, right, to respond to problems of unwanted mobility. We really have to recalibrate, calibrate our understanding of how penal power is used in the Nordic context. And this is just to show the green pie chart here. This is expulsions, right in the blue is prison and the red is detention.
So when other scholars have looked at the Nordic penal regime, they focussed on the prisons. But that's just that's a smaller part of this entire system. So if we can appreciate why how criminal justice tools are being used in this broader context of migration control, this will change, I think. I argue it changes our understanding of what that system is doing and who it is. Who is it for? So why does any of this matter?
I think it matters. I mean, to understand this phenomenon, I mean, the dramatic events, I mean, why would we didn't do that? It's doing that to protect itself. Right. To preserve the welfare state. In terms of our understanding about the role of criminal justice system, I think this is also, again, incredibly important and something that we have to contribute. This is a deterrent, not neutral decisions, but nor is it just a power operation.
It's a particular form of power. And in the Nordic context, we simply challenged this Nordic exceptionalism. These are not mild inhumane systems. There are certainly elements of mildness and humaneness, but there are illiberal elements within and infringes on liberty, self-determination and the pains and harms that are imposing insecurity on others and a willingness to impose insecurity on others to preserve preserve what's inside.
Going outside of Sweden and thinking about European personality, the principles of European penology. Well, these developments that are occurring here in other places. This also challenges something that we've taken for maybe taking for granted as especially European quality. In contrast to the, say, the American case, which we're known to be more restrictive to value human dignity should be inclusionary.
But when we take into account these border control measures in in conjunction with the criminal justice system, this has taken on an expansive logic. These things are not retracting. They are expanding. So there's more forms writing, detention, expanding, putting people in prison, new forms of policing. This is an expansive logic rather than a restrictive logic. It's also exclusionary and I would say based if it is based to some extent on a dehumanised view of the other.
But in the process it further dehumanises right when we've subjected some of the some people who are seeking claiming their rights to political subjects when we subject them to this policing, this is also part of a dehumanising process. So it really questions this idea about human dignity and ideas about democracy. Right. So in Sweden, I didn't really develop this here, but there's also, I think, a troubling decoupling of crime and punishment.
So I'm not talking about the criminalisation of migration. It's more the Penal Association of Migration, and it just skipped over the crime. Right. So it's subjecting migration violation, those who are being exposed to detention, but also with expulsion. And against we as a society based on the rule of law. This is a high value where in the society, when we start to decouple what the justice system is based on, this can be trouble for democracy in a political terms.
The violation of the parity principle, I think, is really striking and problematic. So this is not only true in Sweden, but this is a true, I think, across the board. The parity principle is those who are most affected by a policy policing, prison, expulsion, refugee policy. They should have a say a fair say in the development of those policies.
And what we see in the contemporary situation is those who are most affected, asylum seekers, people on the move have the least ability to actually implement, implement and right those policies. They are in a political vacuum. Now, some migration scholars might say, well, they assert their political subjectivity by entering the territory. Well, the state then says you've entered the territory, now you must leave.
So it hasn't changed the policies. And there's a huge political vacuum there in terms of how refugees are asylum seekers can impact and change. And I have a chapter on civil society, no less of an answer of answer in the in the break. So just in closing, I think it matters for a lot of different reasons, but just kind of thinking about implications for the future.
So these these policies, this integration of criminal justice with border control, with preservation of the welfare state, this has some problems for democracy, but it can lead to destabilising. It is violation of the crime and punishment, violation of the parity principle, going against democratic principles of equality, the proliferation of political vacuums in the lap that this is allowed to go on. But I also think it spells trouble for how democracy stabilise themselves.
And then there are some outstanding comparative questions. How does Sweden, you know, how does it compare to other countries? Is this better or different? Is it? What are the transnational or global forces going on within Sweden? So Sweden is not alone in this. That's not the argument. But my idea my argument in my case was to try to understand what makes Sweden tick.
What's meaningful to the people involved. So it doesn't mean that they are not impacted by global forces, but that the meaning itself tends to be intrinsic of how they understand their society, what their values, what their values are. So it's kind of a question for kind of leading off into my next project to kind of take up some of these outstanding issues that I did not answer that are not answer in the book, but many other ones were. So thank you very much. Thank you.