The Guardian view on Trump’s Sweden: another country | Editorial

For most of the last 30 years, Sweden has been one of the most welcoming countries in the world for refugees. Other countries have taken in more as a proportion of their population, but they have been immediately adjacent to war zones, where the demands of charity and humanity can’t be ducked. Nowhere in Europe approaches Sweden’s record. Until the entire system was overwhelmed last winter, and the brakes slammed on hard, the country took its humanitarian obligations very seriously. In 2015 more than one in six of the inhabitants of Sweden had been born abroad. In that year 162,877 people claimed asylum in Sweden, which led to a complete reversal of the old policy, and a fierce clampdown at the border. Last year only 29,000 applied for asylum; so far this year, fewer than 2,000 have. A demographic transformation has gone hand in hand with the breakdown of the old political and industrial model that had made Sweden appear one of the safest and most secure countries in the long boom after the second world war.

Jobs are now far less secure, and the economy has much less use for unskilled young men of any religion or ethnicity. A rapid growth in inequality has left the city centres sleek, prosperous, and largely white, while the satellite towns around them are places of high unemployment where often immigrants and their descendants are largely concentrated. This recent change overlays longer-term trends. Sweden’s overall crime rate has fallen since 2005, but in the past decade there has been an uptick in violent crime, especially involving weapons. The murder rate in Sweden is now a fifth of that in the United States; guns are used in nearly a third of all murders. Experts rightly fret over the use of explosives and hand grenades in attacks. This a scandal. For a European social democratic country to remind us of American levels of violence and insecurity is deeply shocking. But that is not why some Americans are shocked. For a large proportion of the ill-informed and bigoted, including President Trump and some of his advisers, the problem in Sweden is not that it has developed American-style social problems, but that it is too Muslim. This may be too subtle an analysis. Perhaps the Fox News demographic thinks that in both cases the problem is the presence of black people, whether you call them “Muslims” or not.

Whatever misguided US conservatives think, Sweden is not a battlefront in a clash of civilisations. The immediate effect of Mr Trump’s remarks will probably be good for Sweden. The widespread mockery that has greeted them, including a tweet from Carl Bildt, the former prime minister, asking what he had been smoking, will have produced an invigorating surge of patriotism. But the country faces serious problems for which there are no short-term fixes. The Swedish welcome to refugees was not entirely humanitarian. It was also based on a demographic calculation: even though the country has some of the most child-friendly parental leave laws in the world, the welfare model there, as elsewhere in western Europe, demands a large working population to support pensioners. The problem is the jobs are traditionally filled by young women and the refugees are predominately male. Coupled with the failure of the school system in the most segregated areas, the result has been a growth of disaffection particularly among young men. The rage in communities seems directed inwards, not outwards. Swedes are not assaulted, still less murdered, by strangers. But assault by strangers is only the most obvious form of danger to law and order, and not the most serious. It is much more dangerous when everyone knows, or suspects, who the criminals are, but dares not say anything in public. Swedish media recently quoted an imam claiming he would be afraid to testify in court about some crimes. That is a more difficult problem than anything in the diseased fantasies of the nationalist right about European Muslims.