Practicing Citizenship: Debating Iranian Immigrant Incorporation in Sweden

Politicians and journalists have been particularly vocal in proclaiming the failure of multiculturalism, blaming it for a variety of social and political ills ranging from unemployment to social unrest to international terrorism. In Sweden, multicultural policies have been famously touted abroad as a success story, while at home these policies are being blamed for immigrant rioting, high unemployment, and racial tensions – political rhetoric that is enjoying increasing popular favor as evidenced by increasing electoral success of the far-right xenophobic party, the Sweden Democrats. In this paper, I show how cultural producers in the Iranian community in Stockholm have responded to cultural policies and multiculturalism vs. interculturalism debates that have sparked heated community contestations over cultural representation, tradition, and authenticity. These community-level debates complicate the often binary representation of migrant positions in the debate over policy approaches to diversity and integration. Given the cultural, political, and economic stakes of this debate, state-level cultural policies have triggered immigrant communities to question their own relationships to culture and identity in ways that suggest multicultural policies are in fact ‘doing work’ in ways that lead to important incorporation and other diversity-related outcomes. I argue that the Iranian-Swedish case – particularly when viewed in context of the larger Iranian diaspora – demonstrates the ways in which multicultural policies impact cultural change, leading to shifts in the beliefs and practices of immigrants as emerging multicultural Swedish citizens.