Racism in Danish Welfare Work with Refugees

Troubled by Difference, Docility and Dignity

Marta Padovan-Özdemir, Trine Øland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367563332
• eBook ISBN: 9781000584691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores contemporary Danish relations of colonial complicity in welfare work with newly arrived refugees (1978-2016) as recursive histories that reveal new shapes and shades of racism.

Focussing on super- and subordination in helping relations of postcoloniality, the book displays the durability of coloniality and the workings of raceless racism in welfare work with refugees. Its main contribution is the excavation of stock stories of colour-blindness, potentialising and compassion, which help welfare workers invest in burying that which keeps haunting welfare work with refugees, i.e., modern ghosts of difference, docility and dignity.

The book dismantles the global myth of the Danish benevolent, universalistic welfare state and it is of interest to every scholar and student, who wants to make inquiries about Danish exceptionalism and the hidden interaction between past and present, the visible and invisible in Danish welfare work with refugees.

Chapter 1Race and welfare

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097327-2

In this chapter, we address how the book relates to and is in dialogue with two research fields, primarily in Denmark, but with an outlook to the Nordics. First, we describe a research field of welfare and integration studies related to immigrants and refugees. This research field has been a dominating research strand with its focus on the problem of migration and its solution of integration to the nation-state, although there are also studies scrutinising the whole endeavour of integration. Second, we describe the emerging field of race, racism and racialisation studies that has surfaced in the last 10–15 years, despite the silencing of race that continues to prevail, also in research communities. Finally, on the backcloth of these strands of research, the chapter conceptualises the book's understanding of racialisation at the intersection of race and welfare, i.e., the processes of giving welfare to racialised groups.

Welfare and integration studies related to immigrants and refugees in Denmark and the Nordics

In Denmark as well as in the Nordics and Europe for that matter (Lentin 2014), research concerning migrants, ethnicity and minorities has first and foremost been embedded in the nation-state's dynamic of solving migration in terms of quests for integration. Welfare and integration studies have investigated and evaluated welfare provisions and welfare work in diverse welfare policy areas such as social policy, cultural policy, educational policy and employment policy. Ethnographic studies have also investigated how migration and migrants are being described and understood as anomalies, thus often nourishing the idea of migrants as strangers to the nation. Finally, epistemologically oriented studies have examined integration endeavours as containing problematising and circular dynamics that continuously remake the problems they seek to solve.

In the volume The Question of Integration: Immigration, Exclusion and the Danish Welfare State edited by Karen Fog Olwig and Karsten Paerregaard (2011), Danish anthropologists locate the response to immigration and refugee arrivals in the sociocultural history of Denmark referencing a constellation of values informing Danish living. Ralph Grillo (2011, 268–269) summarises these values and emphasises “the idea that Danes are a family or ‘tribe’”, “individual freedom”, that there is a link between equality and sameness as Norwegian Marianne Gullestad has phrased it regarding the Norwegian case, and finally, that a “historical amnesia” concerning Denmark's past is prevalent, which among other things hides heterogeneity and favours homogeneity. Spiced up with the Protestant faith which is predominant in Denmark, these values have coined Denmark as a social democratic welfare society weaved together by a strong state and universalistic social policies. The welfare state in this volume has been analysed as a national and nationalistic accomplishment (Jöhncke 2011), which shows in analyses of how this ideological and institutional framework functions as the background on which integration processes are formed. In the volume, Grillo points to how relationships with an international context tends to be ignored by these Danish anthropologists, thus omitting a transnational intertextuality (2011, 271). Educational researchers add to the picture that in this sociocultural context, Muslim pupils are thought of as particularly problematic and not natural bearers of the liberal and democratic welfare state culture with an emphasis on individual freedom (Buchardt 2012). Also, that transnational universal modern Muslim identity strategies in relation to schooling are activated within this context and enabled through independent free schools (Padovan-Özdemir 2012). Although the integration regime is national and nationalistic, transnational and more complex strategies come to the fore.

Remaking the welfare nation-state through integration

The integration regime has predominately been investigated within a policy-oriented approach constituting migration and migrants as issues for the national societies to solve or handle using integration. In Denmark, historians with an interest in immigrants and refugees have had a focus on policy and the changing of policies (Jønsson 2013; 2014; Jønsson and Petersen 2013). These historians have illuminated how the presence of immigrants since the 1970s have mobilised a battle field where an “immigrant problem” was defined and this problem has been a turning point in statements of the crisis of the welfare state faced with and affronted by globalisation and immigration. The fact that people move across national borders becomes a problem for national governments and a dominating research object. From the 1970s to the 1990s, research centred on describing immigrants’ social problems, and immigrants and the immigrant family as a social problem (Jønsson and Petersen 2013). From the 1980s, with the increasing intake of refugees, cultural issues became the turning point for education policies and welfare. Political discussion about assimilation, labour market integration and language training, or accommodation to immigrants’ and refugees’ cultural difference took place, and in the 1990s, labour market integration turned out to be the conquering “solution” to the influx of immigrants and refugees. In the following years, research continued to investigate on these matters.

Norwegian sociologists, Grete Brochmann and Annika Hagelund (2011), illuminated that while some immigrants and refugees proved difficult to integrate, they became an even more explicit social policy problem, and social inequality was accompanied by an ethnic aspect. It was analyzed how immigrants had poor living conditions, were culturally different and had poor labour market participation and, thus, poor ability to be self-supporting. This research paints a rather pessimistic version of the Scandinavian universal welfare state's ability to integrate, and it is described how the situation seems to fuel nation-building projects immanent in the welfare state (Ibid., 16–17). The state initiated a whole lot of integration and labour market projects and they were studied meticulously. Cultural policy was one site for the launch of discussions about values and morality, liberty, equality and child-rearing. “Our values” such as democracy and freedom of speech were voiced as being threatened by the changing composition of the population, and in Denmark, the state published canons on history, culture and democracy to be implemented in schools and society at large, particularly aimed at (the threatening) immigrants. These canons were analysed to transport images of cultural “roots”, and images of native Danes versus non-native Danes, focusing on descent and kinship in the management of the population as a resource. On this basis, Sofie Rosengaard and Trine Øland illuminate how human differences are racialised through canons (2018, 66–69).

Education policy has been another site of research attention, and dispersal policies have been researched in particular. Gro Hellesdatter Jacobsen (2012) detects how immigrant children are treated differently through either bussing or day schools, and how such arrangements are legitimised with reference to Denmark as a competition state. Jacobsen analyses these explicit forms of differential treatment as a way of subsuming individual rights to the benefit and survival of the collective – or at least the competition state. Christian Horst (2017) has also described how equal rights and equality of treatment are subjected to national interests, which then legitimates differential treatment in education and society in general. The spatial dispersion policies pertaining to newly arrived refugees have also been investigated from a local and rural angle. Birgitte Romme Larsen (2011) has showed that the lack of relatives and so-called co-ethnics already settled in the area in which one lives, turns out to result in lacking mechanisms for integration which can affect refugees’ ability to form a new life in Denmark. However, it is also reported that local communities develop collective, pragmatic and inclusive approaches to refugees beyond the ideological debate in national media and politics (Whyte, Romme Larsen and Fog Olwig 2019).

It is fair to say that integrationist endeavours surface in research as nation building ingrained in the functioning of the welfare state. At a certain point in time, this is conceptualised as welfare nationalism which is discerned as a method to maintain the citizen's good will and willingness to accept the burdens, economically and socially, to sustain the welfare system (Suszycki 2011). Moreover, three different concepts have been separated (in the Finnish context but this resonates with the Danish context as well) to explain the political arguments for welfare nationalism in depth (Keskinen 2016). Welfare nationalism points to the entanglement of welfare and national identity and membership; welfare chauvinism signals that welfare is reserved for our own sorts of people based on ethno-national ideas; and welfare exclusionism refers to welfare only reserved for those who work, not for those with only a residence permit, thus excluding migrants and descendants who live in the country but do not have a job.

These concepts relate to how the ideologies of equal treatment are in tension with exclusionary quest for differential treatment of those not thought of as belonging to the nation or the work force. During the 2000s, increasing pressure was put on the immigrant and refugee not to continue to be a receiver of social security benefits; to be active and integrated into a normal life, including a work life (Moldenhawer and Øland 2013). At the same time, from 1970 to 2000, the immigrant and refugee moved from being only a labour market issue to being a social problem to being also a cultural problem and a security problem, thus continuously disturbing the national imaginary although in different ways. In a research project on school professionals’ making of educationally manageable immigrant schoolchildren, it is, for instance, shown how pedagogical repertoires, their objectives, techniques and truths and the social utopias they relate to feed into the fabrication of the Danish welfare nation-state (Padovan-Özdemir 2016). In all policy areas, the welfare nation-state seems to struggle to stand firm, often in a high-pitched fashion.

Reifying migration and migrants as eternal strangers

The integration regime and its in- and especially excluding effects have also been investigated from the point of view of migrants. Anthropol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Race and welfare
• 2 A post-colonial welfare analytics
• 3 A brief history of Danish refugee reception – contextualising the source material
• 4 Sociological history of racism and the methodological intervention of stock stories
• 5 The stock story of colour-blindness
• 6 The stock story of potentialising
• 7 The stock story of compassion
• 8 From modern ghosts to a racial structure of welfare work
• Index