What’s Special about Sweden? Citizenship and Integration in an Exceptionally Liberal Country

In contemporary research on citizenship and integration, Sweden is invariably described as an open, inclusive and liberal country. Foreign nationals are allowed to vote in local and regional elections after three years of legal residence (or less). After five years of residence (or less) they are eligible for naturalization, which is easy, quick and cheap. There are no specific admission requirements, such as language and knowledge tests, and dual citizenship is allowed. Unlike most countries in Europe, citizenship is not envisaged as a reward for successful adaptation, but as an encouragement to inte-gration with no strings attached. In combination with Sweden’s generous refugee policy and the high naturalization rate, the Swedish citizenship regime stands out as exceptionally open, inclusive and liberal in comparison with most of its European counterparts. In this paper, I seek to explain why this is so. Drawing on conventional theories about citizenship and immigrant integration which focus on the civic-ethnic and monist-pluralist dichotomies, I argue that a fuller understanding of the Swedish, and other cases, also needs to take into account a proposed dichotomy of thin-thick citizenship. While the institution of citizenship in many Western countries is charged with ideological meaning and symbolism, in Sweden it is a predominantly sterile, administrative instru-ment which is separated from conceptions of the national society. The flip-side of Sweden’s liberal citizenship regime, then, is that it only offers limited recognition and inclusion in national society.