Erik Hansson is a human geographer. He wrote The Begging Question (Nebraska, 2023) during his postdoctoral fellowship at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has also been stationed at Uppsala University, University of Gothenburg, and Mid Sweden University. The Begging Question, was published in May.

In The Begging Question Erik Hansson argues that the material configurations of capitalism and class society are not only racialized but also unconsciously invested with collective anxieties and desires. By focusing on Swedish society’s response to the begging question, Hansson provides insight into the dialectics of racism. He shrewdly deploys Marxian economics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain how it became possible to do what once was thought impossible: criminalize begging and make fascism politically mainstream, in Sweden. What Hansson reveals is not just an insight into one of the most captivating countries on earth but also a timely glimpse into what it means to be human.

On August 8, 2018, Gheorghe “Gica” Hortolomei-Lupu was found beaten to death in a park in the town of Huskvarna, Sweden. Gica was a forty-eight-year-old divorced father of small children and an unemployed former typographer. A Romanian citizen, he had been homeless in the municipality for four years and begged for a living, though the local social service was unaware of his situation. Gica’s assassins were a couple of teenage boys who had harassed him for two years and used to call him “the rat.” That night they awoke him, filmed their deadly beatings, and then proudly spread the footage on Snapchat. It took more than a week for the police to start a criminal investigation, since the cause of death was initially labeled “natural causes.” Although it was beyond reasonable doubt that the assault had led to Gica’s death, it could not be proven that the teens intended to murder him, as the injuries they had inflicted are not typically fatal. In this regard Gica’s otherwise poor health was thought to be a significant contributing factor; therefore, it could not be ruled out that he would have survived the attack under different circumstances. Ultimately, two boys were convicted for serious assault, for which the elder, at seventeen, was sentenced to five months at a youth detention center, while the fourteen-year-old was considered too young for criminal liability. Meanwhile, Gica’s relatives back home in Romania were not granted the right to compensation.

This was the first acknowledged killing of an individual in Sweden commonly labeled as an “EU-migrant,” “beggar,” or, simply, “Roma.” Notably, Gica himself was not Roma, but his social position in Sweden was equated with the Roma ethnicity. Although one man had died in 2014 due to suspected arson in an informal settlement in Stockholm, Gica’s killing was the first case of deadly violence toward a member of this population leading to a guilty conviction.

The prime minister and, in turn, leader of the Social Democratic Party (Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti—hereafter SAP), Stefan Löfven, commented on Gica’s death. Löfven said he was “very distressed” and that “we need to discuss how to stop begging because that is no one’s future.” This response, which frames the problem as the victim’s livelihood, is symptomatic of Sweden’s broader ideological stance toward what I call in this book the Swedish begging question. It was also politically strategic. With one month left until the national election, the remark signaled to the Swedish public that he would give them what they wanted: the nationwide disappearance of racialized individuals begging in urban spaces. Notably, this desire undergirded two levels of wishing. One level bore the egalitarian wish that no one should have to beg to survive. The other level represented the personal wish of eliminating the anxious encounter with the begging individual.

Löfven’s statement could be read at both levels. Put into context, his latent message aimed to satisfy the personal desire of getting rid of “beggars,” articulated as an egalitarian consideration. These “beggars” had been nationally present since the early 2010s, and in the national discourse the term signified foreign EU (European Union) citizens from Romania and Bulgaria, primarily of Roma origin. Due to severe poverty, these individuals and families had no choice but to travel to Sweden (and elsewhere) to find an income. No serious public efforts had been taken to combat their poverty. Instead, at the time of Gica’s death, a social truth had been established: these poor people, who are vulnerable victims of racist discrimination in their home countries, require special protection, so what Sweden needs to do is to make sure these victims return home—in order for a magical “long-term solution” to be found. I say “magical” since there have been no serious suggestions from either politicians or experts explaining what this structural long-term solution would look like in practice.

This discursive strategy of naturalizing this social truth has been accompanied by state-biopolitical expulsion of Roma via a logic of something akin to “libertarian paternalism.” Since it is juridically impossible to deport EU citizens if they have not been severely unlawful, the directives of the state to its officials have been to foreclose these individuals’ access to social rights: housing, education, sanitation, protection, and other social efforts that could fight poverty in Sweden (and elsewhere). This leads us to the curious thing about the Swedish case: the contradiction between this realpolitik and the discursive level. After all, Sweden is not unique in reproducing the structural discrimination, oppression, and persecution of Roma. What stands out is that, within this discursive framing and ideological belief system, Sweden’s politics of foreclosure was seen as poverty alleviation rather than its antithesis.