Like many other European countries questions concerning ethnoracial 1 co-habitation and justice take center stage in Swedish social and political discussions today. The background is not only the major changes in the ethnoracial make-up of the Swedish population that have taken place in the past few decades but also the strong patterns of socioeconomic inequality along ethnoracial lines. Although the image of Sweden as an ethnoracially relatively homogeneous country lingers on in and outside the country, in 2016 more than 30% 2 of the inhabitants of the country were either born abroad or had a parent who was. Like most other continental European states, Sweden does not compile official statistics on people's ethnic origin, race or color, but available information on the inhabitants', and their parents', places of birth suggests that the country has, proportionally speaking, one of Western Europe's largest minorities of people of non-1 Although 'race' and 'ethnicity' evoke different connotations, they overlap and have in the European context of the last century both worked through legible markers to differentiate and stratify groups of people of purportedly 'common origin' (cf. Hall 2000). I will therefore not differentiate between the two, but instead use the term 'ethnoracial' (when not reiterating the language of others). 2 Based on figures available in the database of Statistics Sweden www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/sv/ssd/?rxid=805ac5c6-cd49-46cf-9273-410845556ed9 (accessed 28 March 2017).
In recent years the Sweden Democrats have championed a clarification of the identity of the ‘the people’ in the Instrument of government. The reference, they argue, should be to the ethnic group of Swedes. This chapter will take this ambition to fix the subject of popular sovereignty as the point of departure for discussing some of the ways in which the contemporary anti-foreigner political forces of Northern and Western Europe imagine ‘the people’ and identify their allies and enemies within and beyond state borders. To set the stage for this exploration the chapter will start by looking at Carl Schmitt’s ideas about political friendship, and more specifically the way he imagines the relationship between ‘us’ in a political and constitutional sense and ‘the people’ in national and ethnoracial terms. The choice to begin with Schmitt is not arbitrary. His thoughts about the nature of the political association have found their way into the discourse of many radical right-wing parties of Western and Northern Europe.
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