Comparing Public Discourse on Immigration in Scandinavia: Some Background Notes and Preliminary Results

Abstract

This article briefly presents the SCANPUB project, devoted to the comparative study of public discourse on immigration in Scandinavia from 1970 to 2016, from which this issue of Javnost/The Public stems. Its emphasis is on a discussion of the terms “nation” and “nationalism,” particularly the notion of “methodological nationalism” in relation to the project. SCANPUB is not least about how the public sphere in liberal democracies handles large, complex issues over time, and the article thus deals with relatively recent contributions to the theory of the public sphere, concluding with a turn toward deliberative systems theory. Some preliminary empirical results are reported and references are made to the other articles in this issue.

KEYWORDS:

• migration
• immigration
• nation
• nationalism
• public sphere
• deliberative systems
• Scandinavia

ORCID

Jostein Gripsrud http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2631-8864

Notes

1 Mona Sahlin in an interview with Euroturk, a magazine published by an organisation for youth of Turkish descent, in 2002 https://ligator.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/intervju_3.pdf

2 In Sweden, there was a series of social-democratic coalition, minority and majority governments (coalition 1917–20, 1921–23, 1924–26, 1932–36, 1936–76, 1986–91, 1994–2006, 2014–18). In Denmark the social democrats were in government in coalitions or alone 1924–26, 1929–39, during the 2nd world war in an all-parties coalition, and then 1947–50, 1953–68, 1971–73, 1975–82, 1993–2001, and 2011–2015. The social-democratic Labour party in Norway was in government for about two weeks in 1928, and then basically ruled, with the exception of WW2, from 1935 to 1965, 1971–72, 1973–81,1986–91, 1990–97, 2000–01, 2005–13.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jostein Gripsrud

Jostein Gripsrud (corresponding author) is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has published extensively on theatre, popular literature, film history, television, journalism, popular music, media and cultural policy and relevant social and cultural theory for all of these media, genres and cultural forms. Among his publications are Media, Markets and Public Spheres (2009), Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context (2010), The Idea of the Public Sphere: A Reader (2010), The Public Sphere (4 vols.) (2011) and Allmenningen: Historien om norsk offentlighet (“The Commons: The History of the Norwegian Public Sphere”) (2017). Since 2016 he is the director of the project “SCANPUB: The Immigration Issue in Scandinavian Public Spheres 1970–2017”.