Bureaucracy, Integration and Suspicion in the Welfare State

Mark Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138124745
• eBook ISBN: 9781317299646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how the often well-meaning routines and assumptions of a generous welfare state can reflect and even contribute to the stigmatisation of refugees and Muslims in Europe today. While the main cases are from Sweden, examples are included from the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands. Mark Graham examines how suspicion is woven into the fabric of welfare bureaucracies with potential adverse consequences for the people they serve. He complicates our understanding of what Islamophobia means, and how it is expressed and created, by exploring contexts in which the logic of "othering" Muslims operates, but where explicit Islamophobia itself is absent. The book starts with Swedish public-sector bureaucracies and attempts by staff to make sense of Muslim refugee clients with categories and models that reappear in wider society. It goes on to explore the logic of integration policies, official concepts of culture, Swedish multiculturalism, educational strategies in schools, and debates surrounding "genuine" and "false" refugees. In all cases, the homologies between these different socio-cultural domains are explored.

1Homologies

This short book is about some very large topics: bureaucracy, refugees, Muslims, integration policy and suspicion. In it, I argue that the logic of bureaucracy – especially models of the person and forms of classification – resonates with how the figure of the Muslim is represented in Europe, and specifically Sweden today. In turn, Muslims, because of the way they are represented, amplify more general features of how bureaucracy conceives of and deals with refugees. The book also raises questions about the appropriateness of “integration” both as a descriptive term and a policy for turning immigrants into members of society. The homologies between bureaucratic logic, the representations of refugees, integration policy and the figure of the Muslim found in diverse social and cultural fields comprise the major themes of the book. They are all traversed by another central theme of the present work, suspicion, as it is directed at Muslims and refugees in Sweden today.

The bureaucracies and bureaucratic context the book examines are the national and local policies bureaucracies implement, the meetings between the bureaucracy staff and refugees in a municipality in Stockholm, the work of a local Education Department and Department of Culture, members of the adult education profession, and media coverage of numerous issues pertaining to refugees and Muslims.

A majority of refugees who come to Sweden today is from Muslim countries.¹ Partly because of this, “refugee” and “Muslim” have become, if not exactly synonymous terms, then certainly very closely associated with each other. In the present study, Muslims are largely represented by Iranians who lived in Haninge, a suburb south of Stockholm. Many of the Iranians who lived there were relatively recent arrivals and still in the process of passing through the Refugee Reception Programme of language courses, work schemes and other measures. Public-sector bureaucracies were very much part of their lives.

The book moves along several axes. It focuses up and down to encompass policy of most relevance to immigrants and refugees and the public-sector bureaucracies that serve them, and the local manifestations of policy in the views and practices of bureaucracy personnel. It also moves back and forth between the bureaucracies and the municipality in which they worked and the wider setting of Swedish society. It includes material from participation, observations, interviews, government policies, media debates, and educational materials so as to include as wide a field as possible in order to identify the homologies that connect them. It draws on earlier ethnographic material (Graham 1999) as well as more recent events in Sweden and Europe.

The book covers quite a long period from the early and mid-1990s to the present day. During this time, attention to Muslims in Sweden, as in the rest of Europe, has increased dramatically and issues that were fairly peripheral matters of concern for the majority, such as the veiling of women and radical Islam, have moved to centre stage and become the topic of heated public debates, so much so that some issues, such as forced marriages, have become virtually synonymous with Muslims in Sweden today. Yet, as I will show, these changes are a matter of degree rather than of kind. As the extended time-frame reveals, many of the current concerns are prefigured not only in earlier coverage of and debates surrounding Europe’s Muslims but also in apparently disparate and unrelated contexts and practices, ranging from meetings with bureaucracies, through multicultural theatre to the contemporary use of x-rays to determine the age of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum.

This is not a book about Islamophobia, on which there is a large and growing literature.² Instead, it explores the logic of othering – intentional and unintentional – and specifically the content of the logic that targets Muslims and Islam in contexts where blatant Islamophobia itself is absent. The book addresses the complicity between mundane bureaucratic practices and the demonisation, or at least awakening of suspicion, against a category of people. In doing so, it draws on classic anthropological concerns, among them categories of the person, systems of classification, gift exchanges and reciprocity, and culture concepts.

First, I turn to the subject of bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy

From an anthropological perspective, one of the most noticeable features of bureaucracies is their reliance on systems of classification. Everyone classifies, but bureaucracies entail a specific type of classificatory system that is more systematic than the general human activity of imposing conceptual order on the world. Don Handelman (1981) compares bureaucratic work with taxonomic classification. Its defining feature is the division of populations into mutually exclusive categories with different rights and obligations connected to them. Underlying his model of bureaucratic work is a Linnaean system of classification and the idea of a dispositif – the placement of persons, things and ideas into the correct category within a taxonomic tree. According to Handelman, bureaucratic classification is not only systematic, it is also “systemic,” in that it is characteristic of a specialised field of institutional activity. He suggests that practices which may be termed bureaucratic can be recognised by a “thickening” of forms of behaviour that are encountered in everyday contexts but which are not framed as bureaucratic (1981: 14). I shall refer to these as a bureaucratic ethos. These practices include redundancy, repetitiveness, the clarification of ambiguities, and goal-directed acts. We can also add attention to rules to the list. These devices are intended to create predictability in bureaucratic work and to render social relationships, especially with clients, “transparent,” that is to say, legible and amenable to control.

Michael Herzfeld (1992) has also urged anthropologists to pay attention to the use of classification in the mundane contexts of bureaucratic organisation in precisely the same way that they have studied the “exotic” classifications of religious domains (Herzfeld ibid.: 39). Much bureaucratic classificatory work, Herzfeld suggests, deals with the creation of a “We,” the members of a nation: “bureaucratic classifications are ultimately calibrated to the state’s ability to distinguish between insiders and outsiders” (ibid.: 109). Bureaucracies are therefore in the business of making people into the subjects, or citizens, of nation-states. Echoing Mary Douglas (1966), Herzfeld argues that those who do not fit into bureaucratic schema are apt to be treated like “dirt” or “matter out of place.” Bureaucratic classification is, then, about power: Who gets to label also gets to evaluate; classifications imply judgements with practical consequences.

In widely read and highly influential works on bureaucracy and modernity, Zygmunt Bauman (1989, 1991) (also drawing on the work of Douglas), argues that classification is the leitmotif of modernity and that all attempts to classify produce a waste or excess that does not fit into classificatory schema. Bauman casts bureaucracy in the role of modernity’s dark side.³ He sees morally blind bureaucratic efficiency as a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the Holocaust. He claims that “the very idea of the Endlösnung was an outcome of the bureaucratic culture” (1989: 15, emphasis in original). Bureaucratic culture in modernity is inseparable from the “gardening state” that divides the “cultured” people from the weeds that must be exterminated, most notably the Jews. According to Bauman, the Jew was an established figure, the alter ego of both Christian religion and modern secular society. The Jew was “slimy,” both in religious and class terms, it threatened chaos and had to be eradicated. Bauman writes: “It is the assertion of this study that the active or passive, direct or oblique involvement in the intense concerns of the modern era with boundary-drawing and boundary-maintenance was to remain the most distinctive and defining feature of the conceptual Jew” (Bauman 1989: 40). Jews were opaque figures in a world increasingly demanding clarity and as such a threat to all forms of order, old, new, and emergent (1989: 56). Moreover, the “defect” of the Jews was racialised in modernity, not even their conversion to Christianity could alter the ontological fact of their otherness. For Bauman, then, it was the meeting of modernity’s striving after order and the tools of a modern, rational bureaucracy that made the Holocaust possible, together with the moral paralysis of Germany.

This book adopts a related but different optic. It looks at the logic of bureaucratic work and ethos, in and outside public-sector bureaucracies, and argues that this logic resonates with the cultural representations surrounding Muslims, and that it can be complicit in their othering.⁴ Among the questions the book asks are: Who fits into this widespread if not always recognised bureaucratic ethos? Are certain categories of people especially vulnerable to it? Do aspects of bureaucratic ethos have different consequences for different categories of people?

Bauman’s focus is on bureaucracy as classification and the making of invidious distinctions between people with the production of “dirt” as a result. While I retain some aspects of his analysis – they are after all derived from classic anthropological ideas – I am also interested in other substantive aspects of what bureaucracies do.

Public-sector bureaucracies do a good deal more than categorise and calibrate. The public-sector bureaucracy is a site for the implementation and contestation of public purpose, and also the site for the enactment of particular kinds of social relations as well as the delivery of goods and services (Hoggett 2005: 168). When doing so, they inherit intractable problems from the political sphere (Lipsky 1980: 41). Public-sector bureaucracies in the Western industrial states have for some time been subordinated to economic policy agendas. (In Sweden, demands for efficiency and effectiveness emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as part of New Public Management.) Bureaucracies also have to deal with societies that are increasingly diverse in ethnic and cultural terms, and obliged to take on board recognition demands, not only redistributive policies. They therefore practise or live out social and political contradictions and tensions. They are fora in which wider anxieties and conflicts appear, crucibles of affect and emotion centred on fears of ageing, illness, security and integrity, personal failure, the challenges posed by cultural and social differences, taking care of people who are stigmatised and of whom bureaucracies lack previous experience, and sometimes people whose sheer numbers threaten to overwhelm services. All of the above place particular demands on bureaucrats, not for mechanical, rule-governed indifference, but for interpretations and judgements, compromise and discretion. Hoggett writes that “in reality, rather than the ideal-typical world, all public bureaucracies operate in this kind of environment – complex, indeterminate, ambiguous, contested, shifting, and so on” (2005: 175). The result is an agonistic bureaucracy, but not for that one unable to function.

Bureaucracy is then a “dilemmatic space” and container that can amplify and condense political, social and cultural concerns and reflect as well as contribute to what is going on beyond its walls. In this book, it is the presence of Muslims and specifically Muslim refugees and asylum-seekers that connects bureaucracies to wider issues surrounding the representation and integration of Muslims in Sweden and some of the challenges they are believed to pose.

The contact between the personnel who staff welfare and other public-sector bureaucracies and the general public is often conceptualised in terms of a meeting between specific kinds of persons, the bureaucrat and the client. Handelman (1976: 234) argues that bureaucrats label clients as lacking something, and it is this lack that is the reason for their contact with the bureaucracies in the first place. Clients have the status of “incomplete” persons who suffer from diminished agency and are unable to cope for themselves. But a lack also implies the possibility of completion or at least supplementation. Stated baldly: Clients are the recipients of bureaucratic services and resources needed for the completion of “unfinished” or “depleted” persons.

Models of the person in the West often stress independence and self-sufficiency (Dumont, 1985) in which mature social actors are able to engage or disengage from relations at will without this affecting their sense of self. This so-called egocentric self (Schweder and Bourne, 1984) may even be perceived as more advanced, as, for example, in the evolutionary schema of the person outlined by Mauss (1985 [1938]). As I explain in Chapter 2, a basic aim of Swedish welfare policy is to ensure the autonomy of persons by freeing them from the heteronomy of reliance upon others. Underlying this welfare doctrine is a model of the person, which, as I shall show in subsequent chapters, informs the person models held by bureaucracy staff and their expectations surrounding refugee clients (see Chapter 6).

Attributions of personhood always say something about the agency of people, such as their viable or unrealistic aspirations and their degree of control over external factors and capacity to achieve goals. The status of refugee is very much a bureaucratic subject position made available in policy and the practices of experts, and one often believed to entail a general lack of agency due to the traumas refugees have suffered (see below). Refugees are, then, doubly lacking both as clients of bureaucracies and as refugees.

Political debates in Sweden during the last two decades about the range and responsibilities of the welfare state towards refugees have often framed the topic in terms of agency and self-sufficiency. If the welfare state encourages independence, clients will mimic this and show initiative. If the welfare state encourages dependence, clients will mimic this and become passive welfare recipients. However, as I shall show in later chapters, ideas and assumptions about the mimetic actions of refugees, and especially Muslims, existed well beyond policy statements and bureaucratic contexts.

One noticeable feature of bureaucratic practice is the differentiation and disaggregation of individuals into a series of problems. This is probably unavoidable. The welfare needs of individuals rarely fall onto only one civil servant’s desk; they are normally relevant for a range of bureaux. This dispersal may come into conflict with more holistic ambitions of policies that aim to deal with the “entire” person. The full complexity of a person is passed over in favour of one or a small number of principal labels: refugee, immigrant, single parent, unemployed, etc. The list of labels that can be applied is potentially very long, and which specific label is to be attached may not always be obvious. People are “identifiably located in a very small number of categories, treated as if, and treating themselves as if, they fit standardised definitions of units consigned to specific bureaucratic slots” (Lipsky 1980: 59). These labels or categories imply specific types of person with appropriate forms of agency who are the target of specific kinds of measures. The label of “refugee” and the measures intended for clients subject to the label is a case in point.

The application of bureaucratic labels implies some kind of recognition of a client’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• 1 Homologies
• 2 The Challenges of Integration
• 3 Dealing with Culture
• 4 In Context
• 5 Classifications at Work
• 6 Muslim Persons
• 7 Mimetic Muslims
• 8 Doubts and Suspicions
• 9 A Fractured MirrorSome Final Reflections
• Index