Originally posted in September: 2016

Stand in in any major shopping area of Stockholm – Östermalm, Hamngatan, T-Centralenv, Södermalm – and you’ll see the same human colours of Benetton (black, white, brown, fair, reddish and everything in between) that you’ll see in any other major European city:

Since 2002 Sweden has taken in a steady flow of Iraqi refuges; respected analysts have predicted that Arabic will soon overtake Finnish as Sweden’s second largest language group. 

The presence of a new-generation of Swedes from all over Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East is highly visible within the centre of Stockholm. More and more as I move about the suburbs I visit small corner shops that are increasingly owned and managed by non-white Swedes with money to invest and needy relatives to employ.  New Generation Swedes, it appears, are everywhere.

Not quite.

I recently went to a one off small-scale opera event at the Swedish National Opera theatre that was designed to promote opera. About one hundred and twenty people attended the show. I think there was one other black person in attendance. On the streets of Stockholm you see plenty of evidence of young working class Swedes who have friendships and relationships with their non-white peers as a matter of course. This middle and upper class Swedes still, happily, maintain their social and cultural distance. We’ve only to look to France to see how that worked out.

I like Sweden a lot. The transformation of Sweden by the formerly brutally oppressed peasant under class into a thriving, fair and inclusive economy power has been one of the great European success stories. I hope the Swedes overcome their modern social challenges with as much foresight and ambitions as they have done in the past.