The reflections in this paper are based on a case study of three adjacent municipalities in west Sweden: Uddevalla, Trollhättan and Vänersborg (also called the “Trestad”-area). Since the beginning of the 1990’s, these municipalites have all experienced problems with racist violence and some form of right-wing extremist activity. The purpose of the case study was to analyse the local responses to these problems, or local public policy against racist or xenophobic violence.

For this seminar on strategies for local communities, there is a common framework. The framework suggests three topics to be discussed: Do local level problems have local roots? Do local incidents have national or even global impact? What are the patterns of local response to problems with racial or xenophobic violence? In this paper I will try to answer these questions in relation to my findings in the case studies referred to above.
The problem with racial or xenophobic violence is complex, and not easy to analyse. In the municipalities I studied the pattern of violence has very different and interacting explanations. On the one hand there has been unprovoked attacks on immigrants and asylum-seekers, which were clearly racist in character. The burning-down of the mosque in Trollhättan – which gave rise to international attention – also had racist or xenophobic motives.

 

On the other hand, there have been problems with violence between antagonist youth-gangs, immigrant against skinheads. In those cases it is unclear what the violence is really about: race, territory or perhaps no special reason at all. In addition, we have the question of right-wing extremist groups. What significance do the presence of such groups have for the local problem? Did the problems with racist violence have local roots? The answer is both yes and no. There are several factors to consider, and it is not clear how they relate to each other. One such factor might be a previous history of organised National Socialism or fascism in the area.

Areas with a high level of National Socialist activity before and during the Second World War have been found to co-vary with areas with a present high level of racist violence. A conceivable explanation is that ideologies and attitudes have been transferred from parents or grandparents to children and grandchildren. Evidence verifies this hypothesis in Uddevalla and Vänersborg, where National Socialism had a stronghold in the 1930’s and the 1940’s. But in Trollhättan, which among the studied cases experienced the highest rate of violence in the 1990’s, there were very few National Socialists before and during the war. So as a general theory, previous history does not hold.

Were there any other local roots? In the early stages of the problem with racist violence there was violence between antagonistic youth-gangs – militant immigrants against militant skinheads – in all the studied municipalities. Why such antagonism and violence arose may have several explanations. In Trollhättan one of the causes was the closing-down of a school in a housing area where many immigrants lived. The pupils were transferred to another school, where most of the pupils came from Swedish middle-class homes. In interviews, it has been described to me as a clash between two socially different cultures, or as a clash between two different schools or housing areas. The clash would, according to this theory, have occurred even if the new-comers had been Swedish. But here, the conflict took a racial turn, which soon spread and intensified. At the same time, a militant and partly criminal immigrant youth-gang was formed in the housing area where the school was closed down. It soon “took over” the youth recreation centre in the area. In another near-by housing area there was second recreation centre and here skinhead youth started to gather and mobilise against the other gang. There were weapons, threats and increased violence on both sides.

At the same time, there were causes of the violence that were not local. Central immigration authorities placed a large group of asylum-seekers at a hotel right in the centre of Trollhättan, which caused anxiety and rumours of shoplifting among people in Trollhättan. This probably nurtured the conflicts that had begun in the housing areas. Skinheads became much more visible, uniformly dressed, hailing in the streets and holding meetings. In the summer of 1993 the violence culminated when two immigrants were badly assaulted by a group of skinheads, and the mosque was burned down to the ground.

In Trollhättan, there was also a group of people with connections to right-wing extremist or National Socialist organisations or networks – VAM (short for White Aryan Resistance). At the time, these organisations had a violent character. There was a white noise rock band, the members of which were later convicted for the infamous and bad assault of the immigrants in 1993. Some of them were quite young, a 16-year-old boy was among the convicted and sentenced to prison. But not all of them were that young. One was 28 years old, and this person also ran a local mail-order firm selling nazi products and white noise records. In addition, he was one of the leaders of the local branch of Sverigedemokraterna, a xenophobic political party with nationalsocialist roots. Another one of the leading persons of VAM in Trollhättan had recently moved there from Karlstad, which is an area with relatively extensive skinhead activity. It is impossible to say whether it is racist attitudes and violence that give rise to National Socialist activity or whether it is the other way around: that it is National Socialist activity that fosters racist attitudes and violence. There is arguably a very complex interaction between these explanations, the one strengthening the other. Structures are important – the level of unemployment, the level of segregation/integration, the number and character of immigrants and asylum-seekers in the area – but there is ample room for intentional explanations. Within favourable structures, the intentions and acts of very small groups – or even those of a single person – may carry great weight. Sometimes a whole process might be sparked off because a leading activist moves to the area.

Next topic for the seminar concerns national or global impact of local incidents. Here, there is one incident of special interest in my case studies. In 1996, three years after the culmination of racist violence in Trollhättan, a central National Socialist organisation arranged a demonstration to the memory of Rudolf Hess in Trollhättan. The application for a permit to have the demonstration caused an indignant debate about the appropriateness - ethically and in relation to security – of giving such a permit. The local police argued that the Swedish constitutional rules of liberty of speech and demonstrations gave them no choice but to permit this demonstration, no matter what the costs. On the day of the demonstration, 200 National Socialists faced 200 militant antiracist activists and 400 policemen, all major media watching.

The demonstration was not a local initiative. It is obvious that Trollhättan was chosen to be the locality for the demonstration for strategic reasons. Having the demonstration there would no doubt cause more media attention than having it in a less tainted place. The last topic concerns the pattern of local response to problems of racist or xenophobic violence. I studied response from the local politicians and local public administration. How did they deal with problems? Was there any preparedness? How did various actors interpret events, conditions and possible threat scenarios in the area? Was there any organisational preparedness, like collaboration between different public sector actors? When did the problem appear on the political agenda? What happened then? What type of steering mechanisms was used to deal with problems? Can we say anything about the impact of local public policies?

As might have been expected, different local actors had different interpretations of the problem, and responded differently. Let me illustrate this by giving a few examples from the case of Trollhättan in the early 1990´s. The leaders at the two previously mentioned youth recreation centres felt that the situation was serious already in 1991. There was a militant “black power” culture and a militant skinhead culture, and the situation worsened steadily. A letter to the municipal executive board resulted in a social worker´s youth project a year later.

By then, the antagonisms had become so strong that attempts to bring the groups together in order to create understanding and tolerance between them were a dead failure. The local police was aware of the problems, but did not interpret them as expressions of racism or xenophobia. In the eyes of the police, the antagonisms were of a personal nature.

They were bad boys, but they were not racists or nazis. There was very little collaboration between the municipality and the police, little information was exchanged. When the mosque had been burned down, the municipality board and the police met and decided to have regular meetings to exchange information. As things calmed down, however, other issues on the agenda was prioritised and the exchange stopped until the next unfortunate event: the demonstration for Hess in 1996, when it was taken up again.
It is rather typical, it seems, that when there has been a serious incident, the level of active response to the problem increases rapidly, but very soon goes back to normal. We can see this for example in the response from the local politicians in 1993. There had been serious antagonisms between youth-gangs for over two years, an asylum-seeker from Somalia had been nearly beaten to death by skinheads and the mosque had been burned down to the ground. Still, the leading politicians at first denied that there was a problem of racist violence in the municipality. At the most, the problem was about xenophobia, the politicans argued in the local newspaper.

 

Four years earlier, there had been a survey of attitudes to immigrants among residents in Trollhättan, and the results had been that Trollhättan was the most immigrant-friendly municipality in Sweden. The politicians were convinced that this was still the case. What had happened now was purely incidental. Trollhättan was not the capital of racism in Sweden, as one of the tabloids had put it. There was no problems with racism, but possibly one of xenophobia.

Accordingly, the response from the politicians was information. Xenophobia is caused by false ideas and ignorance about immigrants and asylum-seekers. If people were given correct information they would cease to be afraid of the new-comers and their habits, and the violence would stop. So perfectly logically, the municipality executive board chose to deal with the 1 In Uddevalla, a similar project was quite successful. Possibly, the situation was easier to handle because the process had not yet gone so far there. This might confirm the importance of an early intervention.

problem by way of torchlight processions, public manifestations and information campaigns. Another youth project, parallel to the one that was already in working, was started as a direct response to the acute problems in the summer of 1993.
The chosen measures are typical. There is a serious situation and a lot of negative media attention. The reputation of the municipality is under risk of being harmed. There is a strong pressure on the politicians to do something, and this should be something that creates positive headlines. The politicians may not believe that there is a serious problem, but it would have a devastating effect on the legitimacy of the political system if society remained passive. Since the preparedness on the part of the politicians was low – the incidents felt like a cold shower, one of the politicians said – there was little knowledge about the matters that one had to deal with. Many of the taken measures were of urgent and short-term character and often not properly thought out. Accordingly, the problem soon disappeared from the political agenda.

What general observations have I made of local strategies? First, my general impression is that the municipalities have used a variety of measures to deal with the problem during the decade I studied. There has been restrictive measures, such as prohibiting racist clothing in schools and recreations centres; financial measures such as giving money to organisations working against racism; and informational measures, such as public manifestations and information campaigns. “Mobilising the good forces” has often been a strategy of leading politicians.

Measures of this kind may under some conditions be necessary, but they obviously risk being only temporary and short-sighted. Most measures are taken as a direct response to dramatic incidents in the local community, but such measures are not necessarily the best thought-out. If not combined with other, long-term measures and continuous preparedness and vigilance, such measures are probably not very effective.

One thing that I had expected to find was some form of collaboration between actors in different places dealing with the same problem. There was some collaboration at some levels in the municipality organisation. In some cases it worked well, which might be explained by the fact that the officials knew each other well and had worked together before. In other cases, the collaboration was only on a superficial level. Often, there would be some contact between different levels and sections of the municipality organisation, like between the recreations sector and the social sector, or between these sectors and the police. But a bit surprisingly, there was no collaboration at any level between the different but adjacent municipalities, as far as I could understand. The problems were conceived of as very local, and the pattern of racial violence and extremist activity in the area was not visible to the municipalities at this time.

So what local strategies are the most effective? This is almost impossible to say, unfortunately. The problem is so complex, having so many explanations and variables, that it would be very hard to identify what causal mechanisms are really in function. We can make qualified quesses, but not much more. It seems to me very uncertain what effects the local strategies have had on the problem of racist violence. At the time when I did the study, in 1997-98, there was an optimism in the municipalities. The situation seemed to have changed for the better. There were no more skinheads in the streets, and the level of open violence had decreased. Some people thought that racism and nazism had been fought back from the municipality, thanks to public measures. In the last two years, it has become apparent that the problem is not gone. It has changed appearance. There are still organised National Socialists in the area, probably even more organised than before, but they are much less visible. And these groups work in a different way compared to the beginning of the 1990’s. There is less open violence in the streets, more propaganda and enlisting of members in the secret, it seems.
Perhaps this is a consequence of public measures, but the question is whether it is a good consequence that problems are now less open and visible.