This book examines the current dilemmas of liberal anti-racist policies in European societies, linking two discourses that are normally quite separate in social science: immigration and ethnic relations research on the one hand, and the political economy of the welfare state on the other. Gunnar Myrdal’s questions in An American Dilemma are rephrased with reference to Europe’s current dual crisis — that of the established welfare state facing a declining capacity to maintain equity, and that of the nation state unable to accommodate incremental ethnic diversity. The book compares developments across the European Union with the contemporary US experience of poverty, race, and class, highlighting the major moral-political dilemma emerging across the EU out of the discord between declared ideals of citizenship and actual exclusion from civil, political, and social rights. Drawing on case-study analysis of migration, the changing welfare state, and labour markets in the UK, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, the book charts the immense variety of Europe’s social and political landscape.

Sweden, where some 20 per cent of the population is either foreign born or second generation, has long been known internationally as the model of a tolerant, egalitarian, multicultural welfare state, which extended substantial citizenship, welfare and labour rights to all within its borders, including immigrants. However, under the twin pressures of neoliberalism and the EU’s commitment to ‘managed migration’, this Swedish exceptionalism has been, and continues to be, substantially eroded. The shortcomings of the earlier multicultural settlement of the 1960s and 1970s, a growing extremist populism, the growth of an unprotected, semi-clandestine sector of the labour market, combined with high levels of youth unemployment and urban segregation, have led to unprecedented rioting and violence in Swedish cities. The voices of minority ethnic youth, many of them Muslim, should be heeded as rejecting the exclusivism of current political trends.

This article examines the 2013 riots in Stockholm in the context of other urban rebellions across disadvantaged metropolitan neighbourhoods in the North-Atlantic region over the past three decades of neoliberal transformation. The authors discuss the consequences of securitisation and police repression, institutional racism, the corrosion of citizenship and the structuring of inequality in Swedish cities. Beyond the violence of the recent riots, contemporary Sweden reveals the emergence of an autonomous, non-violent and organisationally embedded movement for social justice among young people contesting urban degradation and reclaiming the nation in terms of an inclusive citizenship, social welfare and democracy. The article asks whether the Stockholm uprising could possibly be read as a sobering moment of self-examination in Swedish politics that could open space up for new political voices.

This article attempts to provide a critical understanding of the dual signification of "precarity". It explores what "precarity" as a concept may potentially offer to studies of the changing contemporary political economy of migration. It discusses shifting trends in global migration and point to tendencies for a possible convergence between "South" and "North", "East" and "West". Based on a review of current advances in research, it discusses, with reference to the classical work of Karl Polanyi, the potential for a contemporary "countermovement" which would challenge the precarity of migrants. Bringing forward the issue of the "space for civil society" the article addresses a still lingering democratic deficit in the global governance of migration. POLICY IMPLICATIONSThe article is relevant to policymakers, trade unions and civil society organizations. It contributes to the understanding of policy making processes in emerging multilevel global governance and focuses on issues of precarization, migration, and the implementation and accountability of human, migrant and labour rights.

The current special issue examines the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. These take different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain characteristics in terms of conditions and capacity for agency. Contributions to this volume testify that precarity may be a political proposition as much as a sociological category that offers an analytical description of current transformations. The selection of articles has the ‘politics of precarity’ as a frame of reference. It describes the political economy of neoliberal globalization producing institutionally embedded precarization of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, but also resistance against the systemic structuration within which it is embedded.