The Social-Democratic Small-State Strategy and Immigration: Sweden in the 21st Century

Abstract

This study of neoliberal inclusion politics and policy in twenty-first century Sweden investigates how conservative-liberal tactics target, and dismantle, the institutionalization of relatively resilient socialist-feminist small-state governance. Analyzing authoritative conservative-liberal discursive tactics, particularly how they construct a state of moral emergency out of population change (immigration) within the high-capacity state and society, exposes their political target: How the state's capacity to include semi-sovereign labor, to relieve the economic and geopolitical limits upon citizenship, is girded by the state's internalization of social reproduction, particularly its capillary connections through female employment in a welfare state oriented to substantive rationality. Forged at the patrimonial-capitalist turn of the twentieth century, via socialist-women's movements alliance, to stem mass population hemorrhaging and allow stunted Swedish society and economy to develop, this targeted social-democratic governance crux is the basis for the small state's outsized capacity to moderate the society's, citizens', and residents' subjection to exploitation and appropriation within global monopoly capitalism's hegemonic geopolitics of militarized accumulation and resultant population dislocations.