Conceptual Change in Postwar Sweden: The Marginalization of Assimilation and the Introduction of Integration

Abstract

Two of the key concepts in contemporary debates on Nordic multiculturalism are integration and assimilation: two intertwining concepts that float freely between political and scientific discourses and whose meanings are often highly contextual or, notably in daily political rhetoric, muddled. This is especially the case in Sweden, where the negative connotations associated with the word ‘assimilation’ are so strong that politicians and other opinion-makers frown upon the use of the word, leaving the term ‘integration’ as the only acceptable option in discussions about the inclusion of immigrants and the social cohesion of a multi-ethnic society. This in turn loads the term integration with contradictory meanings as some public actors clearly use it as a euphemism for assimilation (Johansson Heinö 2011). This sometimes bewildering use of the term integration can be seen as a problem of Swedish public discourse in need of clarification, but it also invites questions of a historical nature: when and how did the term assimilation, if not necessarily the concept, become marginalized in Swedish public discourse and when and how did the concept of (multicultural) integration, if not necessarily the term, emerge as the new paradigmatic concept?