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.

­To this day, Sweden continues to be a signifier of exceptionalism—generalized as a good object for the Left and a bad object for the Right. Regarding the latter, we witness the continuing ideological project among transnational racist networks to rebrand Sweden as a cautionary tale of a country still reeling from the refugee crisis. Sweden still holds an ideological power as an imaginary and symbolic place of equality, feminism, and antiracism which makes it the “perfect enemy” of a racist chauvinist counter-ideology. In the latest discourse, Sweden’s ongoing problems with gun crimes is the target. Only Croatia has a higher rate of gun-related violence in Europe. Both the abovementioned networks as well as the right-wing government, de facto ruling on the benevolence of the fascist Sweden Democrats, and the opposing Social Democrats, blames this violence on previous “mass immigration.” The logic is that since the majority of violence is due to rivalling gangs of disillusioned youth and minors with non-European heritages, the violence is due to this heritages’ territorial presence.

However, ever since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, this has been the dominant political explanation to all sorts of social problems in Sweden that has the fundamental pair of poverty and racialization at its root. What, for example, is ignored is why there happens to be such an economic accessibility to illegal guns in Sweden compared to other similar countries. What is also ignored is that Sweden for several years has had a unique, indeed exceptional schooling system of private schools publicly funded without any ceiling on profit-outtakes. In 2021, 15 percent of the pupils finishing primary school were not qualified for upper secondary school, which is practically mandatory in order to secure any sort of formal employment in contemporary Sweden. Those who are failing school and entering the formal labor market are disproportionately non-white (foreign-born or second-generation) living in the poor suburbs. Not only does the educational system lack a proper alternative of training programs. The housing system is characterized by extreme racialized residential segregation, which is an outcome of this system’s character as a “monstrous hybrid” of market incentives and rental units with no formal social housing solutions.

It is, of course, easier to focus on the fact that Sweden, until 2015, has had an exceptional degree of refugee reception compared to the rest of Europe, and to blame the immigrants or the “naïve politicians” for letting “too many” deprived individuals into the country. However, such an argument does not consider that the political economy of Sweden’s welfare-capitalism demands a high degree of exploitative labor power to maintain its system.

In The Begging Question I argue that the actual crisis that led to this political shift towards dominant xeno-racist politics and discourse was not due to the number of refugees crossing the border. The actual crisis was one of hegemony of the Swedish state and its ruling fraction’s (the national dominant) ideology. In the book, I argue that the greatest symptom of this crisis was the debate on the presence of so-called “beggars”: impoverished vulnerable people from primarily the European Union’s poorest countries, Romania and Bulgaria. What’s more, the overwhelming majority are Romanian citizens and belong to the Roma minorities. Using their EU citizenship right of free movement, they travel to other EU states to find an income. Without formal employment or enrollment in school, they lack the right of residence. Instead, they are allowed to visit another country for three months as tourists. No border or ID control is regulating these visits.

Since Swedish authorities have determined that EU déclassés lack the right to social welfare in Sweden, the norm is that EU déclassés are homeless while in Sweden. They sleep in informal settlements, in cars, under the bare sky, or if they’re lucky, a few nights at shelters run by local NGOs. Typically they lack access to affordable health care, schooling, protection, sanitation, and public integration efforts, such as work training or education, though there are municipal exceptions. Significantly, there are no national rules on schooling or health care—it is up to the municipalities and regions to decide.

The political-economic contradictions that “the begging question” helped reveal were between capital and labor, expressed in different parts of the state complex and regarding different components of the reproduction of the social order. The threat to the hegemon was not the immigrants themselves, but the growing popular support for the radical-nationalist, ultimately fascist, counter-ideology of the Sweden Democrats. What partially neutralized this imminence was a concession to the Sweden Democrats’ counter-ideology by the dominant bloc controlling the state, capital, and media, which constituted a shift in the dominant ideology’s stance on Swedish “moral exceptionalism” and antiracism. Following this pivot, the ideology’s moral contradiction on begging—where neither begging nor its prohibition belonged in Sweden—was successively dissolved.

What I argue made the counter-ideology gain such unexpected popular support was the widespread belief that the “National Thing” of Swedish welfare society, or what I term exceptional equality, was threatened to be ruined by the racial Others crossing the border. This support, in turn, was enabled by backlash against several decades of neoliberal politics. Those steering the political field and the state initially underestimated the counter-ideology, but when a conjuncture of political and racial processes occurred in the autumn of 2015—the exceptional degree of asylum reception numbers, the growth of the visual presence of EU déclassés and their provisional settlements in public space, and the rise of terrorism against non-whites accompanied by the tremendous rise of preference for the Sweden Democrats in opinion polls—the ruling fraction turned to coercive measures to punish migrants in order to secure their hegemonic power.

Due to the begging question’s inescapable interconnections between race and class, state and capital, ideology and reality, rights and responsibilities, space and place, and anxiety and desire, its historical evolution during the 2010s lays bare this burgeoning crisis of hegemony more clearly than many other contemporaneous social issues. Within this perfect storm, the EU déclassés’ territorial presence—coupled with their external or liminal social positionality in the citizenship realm, labor market, housing market, legal field, and ideological sphere—signified the reality of Swedish ideological constructions of moral exceptionalism and the welfare-capitalist state apparatus.