Paper short abstract:

Analysis of a bulk of policy documents conducted for the project MaHoMe: Making it Home, allows me to make a conclusion that the concept of 'folkhemmet Sverige' has been reconfigured, especially in the context of discussions about integration and homing of the new immigrants.

Paper long abstract:

To unpack the meaning of home/hem conveyed in Swedish policy documents, it makes sense to address not only practices and policies of housing, but rather to revisit a mutual constitution between “the formal features of actual dwellings and the social life that inhabits them” (Boccagni 2016:4). In this respect, reincarnations of folkhemmet deserve a special attention as this highly adaptable political idiom continues to reverberate in both ‘social life’ and political discourses in Sweden.

In the twentieth century, the period of political salience of folkhemmet was associated with the rule of Social-Democratic Party, wide-scale social reforms, growing public sector, and significant improvement of housing conditions. Notably, the idea of folkhemmet gained traction in the 1930s, when both immigration and emigration were on historically low level, and faded by the end by the 1980s, with increase of global migration and adoption of humanitaristic policies. The period of folkhemmet is thus limited to the decades when the share of migrants in the country was still quite low, and the main referent of the social-democratic domorhetoric was the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation. Nevertheless, my analysis of a bulk of recent policy documents conducted for the international project MaHoMe: Making it Home, allows to make a conclusion that folkhemmet has been reconfigured and sedimented, especially in the context of discussions about integration and homing of the new immigrants. My presentation will thus spotlight ‘sedimentation’ of folkhemmet on the material of declarations of Moderate-dominated and Social-Democrat-dominated governments between 2010 and 2020.