On a spring morning in 2018, I sit in Sandra's1 office, as the young mother and professional tells me about the recently settled refugee family with whom her own has been paired, the activities they do together, and how she views this as both an important thing to do ‘for society’ (samfunnsmessig) and an opportunity for mutual learning: they help their new neighbours navigate the myriad small issues connected to settling in a new society and themselves learn from ‘meeting other cultures’. She recounts becoming engaged with this activity in the context of the ‘2015 situation’, when a record-high number of asylum-seekers arrived in Norway and Europe as a whole. She saw an ad encouraging people to volunteer and thought this seemed a nice initiative to create a good local environment for newcomers and ‘for everyone’. Although she is deeply concerned with political debates regarding immigration, Sandra thought of this initiative as ‘outside the political’:
The politics around it are incredibly complicated, right? How many should be let in, what's a humane refugee politics, what's realistic, what are the consequences for the welfare state . . . And that, I think, is one level, while this is about integration, and . . . when refugees and immigrants come to Norway, it's in everyone's interest that integration goes as well as possible . . . So it felt in a way also . . . nice to distance oneself from the slightly complicated political level, where there's so much disagreement [chuckles], and in a way just, yeah . . . we're back to the local community [level]. People are going to live here, so everyone wishes them to have a good life.
Sandra is one of the numerous people – many of them without prior volunteering experience – who, as asylum-seekers and resettled refugees increasingly arrived in Norway in summer and autumn 2015, joined activities aimed at welcoming and including newcomers – refugees and other immigrants – in their communities. Many were motivated by a sense that authorities were not properly responding to newcomers’ needs. Some were frustrated that the government was not being ‘hospitable’ enough, not letting enough people in. Yet even when their drive to volunteer was rooted in discontent with politics, several of the volunteers I met framed their engagement as apolitical. Some of the grassroots organisers did present a more overtly politicised discourse than regular volunteers, and even lobbied for political change vis-à-vis authorities, but they presented this ‘political’ work as separate from activities with newcomers. Sandra's distinction of locally grounded, integration-oriented activities as separate from the broader realm of national-level immigration politics and debates resonated with how others I met presented their volunteering engagement. Speaking of their activities’ distance from politics with a sense of relief, they demarcated ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’ (terms they used interchangeably, and which I later discuss) as an apolitical realm of consensus, and regarded activities seeking to promote it as open to all. This might have been different had they been lobbying for the rights of rejected asylum-seekers and unaccompanied minors on temporary humanitarian permits to stay.
In this article, I examine volunteers’ desire for an engagement with newcomers ‘outside of politics’ as telling of how immigrant incorporation, difference and social cohesion are imagined vis-à-vis politics and the political in this particular socio-political context (see Turner 2018). My fieldwork took place a couple years after the intense 2015 period of arrivals and citizen mobilisation, between spring 2018 and summer 2019. There is thus a significant difference between the type of citizen engagement I observed and discuss here and that which took place across Europe during what was dubbed the ‘summer/autumn of welcome’ (see Hamann and Karakayali 2016; Sandberg and Andersen 2020: 41). Activities during the latter aimed at providing emergency assistance and/or defending the rights of people who were on the move across the continent or had arrived at what they hoped would be their final destination. They had not (yet) been granted protection by a host state, and European citizens, moved by the stories they followed in the media, experienced an ‘impulse to help’ (Bendixsen and Sandberg 2021: 15; Sandberg and Andersen 2020). By contrast, the activities I discuss here were aimed at facilitating the incorporation of people who had received permission to stay, or were hosted in an ‘integration reception centre’ (integreringsmottak) and were regarded as very likely to receive permission to stay (UDI 2022b). By the time of my fieldwork, all participants I met had received at least temporary protection.
The depoliticising desire and efforts of some of the volunteers I met – a depoliticisation not ‘from above’ (Ferguson 1994) but ‘from below’ (Brković 2016) – must be interpreted, I argue, in light of, first, a broadly shared view of integration/inclusion as presumed ground of consensus (as Sandra put it, ‘everyone’ shares the same wish); second, a predominant approach to promoting inclusion in line with vernacular understandings of, and concerns with, diminishing differences as a way of fostering social cohesion; and third, the historical relationship of mutual support, rather than contestation, between Norwegian civil society and state.
My informants’ understanding of the political implied a connection to party politics and/or state policy. Miriam Ticktin distinguishes between ‘politics’ (la politique) as ‘the set of practices by which order is created and maintained’ and ‘the political’ (le politique) as ‘the disruption of an established order’ (2011: 19). She thus found French humanitarian practices towards undocumented immigrants to constitute an ‘antipolitics’ of care, for while claiming to be apolitical they produced a particular form of politics that reinforced the established order and its inequalities. James Ferguson describes the Lesotho development industry as an ‘anti-politics machine’ that depoliticised poverty through a technocratic approach to suffering while denying its own political role in ‘expanding bureaucratic state power’ (1994: xv). I show that the activities I discuss both reflected state policy priorities and were enabled by public funding. Moreover, organisational structures reproduced state-mediated understandings of difference and ‘integration’ and power hierarchies between helpers and helped. In doing so, I argue, they revealed continuities between humanitarian engagement with faraway, suffering others and inclusion-oriented activities in helpers’ own home setting. Following from Ferguson's (1994) and Ticktin's (2011) take on the term, the activities I discuss here may be said to have performed a kind of ‘anti-politics’ in that, by reproducing, even enacting, state integration priorities and reinforcing distinctions between locals and newcomers and between different types of newcomers, they reproduced hierarchies and ideas of difference and need common to state and humanitarian logics, and inadvertently extended bureaucratic state power.
Volunteer Mobilisation with Refugees in Norway from 2015
Perched at Europe's northern end, without a colonial past and with a modest economy until oil discoveries in the 1970s, Norway began experiencing notable immigration in the 1960s, when it started welcoming workers from Pakistan, India, Turkey and Morocco. Immigration has since grown alongside the country's economic welfare. As new groups of refugees began arriving from Chile, Vietnam, Iran and Sri Lanka in the 1980s and Somalia and the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, concern regarding cultural differences, economic support for immigrants and integration increased (Midtbøen 2017). Immigration grew and diversified in the 2000s and 2010s with the arrival of numerous immigrants from Eastern Europe following the EU's expansion,2 and refugees and asylum-seekers from conflicts in Afghanistan, Eritrea and Syria. In recent years, with mounting nationalism and populism the Nordic countries have shifted towards more restrictive asylum policies, emphasising border security rather than solidarity with asylum-seekers (Bendixsen and Wyller 2019: 3).
The Norwegian state has a well-developed refugee reception infrastructure. Those seeking asylum must register with the police on arriving in Norway, after which they are accommodated in temporary (transitt) reception centres. Some of these provide food, though in most cases asylum-seekers procure their own food and clothing with a state-provided basic financial allowance (Brekke and Vevstad 2007). When in 2015 the asylum-reception infrastructure was unable to cope with the sudden surge in arrivals, numerous ad hoc volunteer initiatives emerged. Some aimed to fill gaps left by the state, others to complement pre-existing, established civil society activities (Bygnes 2017; Fladmoe et al 2016; Jumbert 2021). In Oslo's central Tøyen district, citizens provided food and warm clothing for the hundreds of people queuing outside for hours, often overnight, in the cold Norwegian autumn, as they waited to register an asylum claim with the Police Immigration Service. As soon as the central government enhanced its reception and processing capabilities and was able to take charge of asylum-seekers’ basic needs, citizens’ mobilisation to provide emergency assistance was no longer needed. By 2016, asylum-seeker arrivals had decreased by 89 percent from the 31,150 applications registered in 2015, remaining at historically low levels in the following years (UDI 2022a).
Many citizens were, however, left with an enduring desire to ‘do something’ to help the recent newcomers whose difficult journeys they had followed on TV and social media – a desire resonant with the ‘new global ethos of humanitarian reason and compassion’ (Mittermaier 2014: 519). Grassroots leaders and established NGOs channelled this vast urge to contribute towards activities aimed at longer-term engagement with newcomers. ‘The needs are still there’, explained Anna, the leader of one of the newly emerged grassroots volunteer initiatives I studied, referring to newly settled refugees. While Oslo does not host many reception centres for asylum-seekers (which are often located in sparsely populated areas), many settle in the capital after receiving protection. ‘Those are our new neighbours, in a local community that's a little too big for people to get to know each other. So that's something we wanted to address.’ Thus, Anna explained, her group developed an activity aimed at connecting locals with newly settled refugees at the neighbourhood level ‘for social contact, speaking Norwegian, getting practical help and tips . . . first and foremost knowing someone’. This is the pairing activity that Sandra, above, is engaged with. ‘Most can't go to Greece [to assist people crossing the Mediterranean], but they can still feel that they can do something’, she said. A range of activities emerged in the post-2015 years, aimed at connecting locals with newcomers to help them learn Norwegian and guide them as new neighbours, complementing pre-existing ‘refugee guide’ and language café activities (Paulsen et al 2012). Some grassroots initiatives that presented themselves as apolitical eventually saw the need to professionalise, and in so doing became part of the system they had emerged in reaction to (Jumbert 2021: 10).
Through ethnographic fieldwork in Norway's Oslo region, I studied3 how locals and newcomers meet, exploring what spaces and activities facilitate their encounters, who participates and why, and what social dynamics and ideas about otherness and newcomers’ incorporation both underlie and emerge from them. I focused initially on a post-industrial, inner-Oslo borough with a socioeconomically, ethnically and age-diverse population, participating in its neighbourhood life, markets and festivals. I soon realised, however, that observing such encounters required following organised activities and meeting spaces, for in an urban, northern European setting, the cold climate highly restricts possibilities (and thus habits) for casual socialisation in public spaces during much of the year. I began following and participating in a mothers’ group, two walking groups, two language cafés and a women's choir, all of which specifically catered to newcomers and were organised by citizens, civil society organisations and municipal authorities. Several of them took place in other inner Oslo boroughs, so the geographical scope of my fieldwork gradually expanded. Besides participants in these activities, I interviewed locals who volunteered as homework helpers or were paired (through other activities) with recently settled refugees. On joining these activities – and later as new members joined – I introduced myself and my research to everyone, encouraging participants to voice any reservations to myself or to organisers. At the language cafés, which were larger in size and with a looser composition of attendees, I introduced myself to every subgroup I joined on each session. My discussion here focuses on the language cafés, one of the hiking groups and the refugee–local pairing activities. I focus on volunteers’ motivations, and cover newcomers’ views elsewhere. All activities were aimed, in organisers’ and volunteers’ own terms, at ‘including’ or ‘integrating’ newcomers into their new communities. By this they meant helping them broaden their social networks and teaching them Norwegian and cultural and social codes that they considered important for successfully navigating life in Norway.
The language cafés were the largest activities, gathering dozens of individuals each time, and were mostly run by student-volunteers in their 20s. One of them, having emerged in the aftermath of the 2015 surge in asylum-seeker arrivals, specifically catered to refugees. It was held on two weekday evenings, each focused on Norwegian and English. Gathered in a large, institutional hall, two to six people (including one volunteer) sat around tables organised by language level. Level-appropriate texts and exercises were distributed; volunteers guided the discussion and answered questions. The two-hour session was divided by a break in which participants mingled while sharing warm drinks and snacks (biscuits, pretzels, fruit) provided by the organisers. On occasion, themed sessions were held, as with a Christmas workshop in which we made seasonal decorations and cards.
The other language café was run by volunteers, members of an established Norwegian humanitarian NGO. It was held at midday on Sundays in a community centre meeting room. Open to everyone, it attracted a more varied crowd, including young and middle-aged participants who had come to Norway for studies, work or family reunification. Many were Europeans who were excluded from public, free language courses (as I later explain) and fell outside of the other language café’s priority users. Volunteers here were fewer, so the number of participants around each table (each with one volunteer) was usually higher. Pictures, texts and games were distributed to spur discussion, though as at the other café, conversations often took off in their own direction. Volunteers at both cafés tended to let conversations follow their course: the point was to practise the language. When conversations returned to the planned exercise, it was usually at participants’ request. At the end of each session, participants at both cafés dispersed quickly while volunteers stayed behind tidying up.
Many newcomers criss-crossed the city throughout the week to attend as many language cafés – organised by NGOs, public libraries, boroughs – as possible. Several young men in their 20s and early 30s told me they preferred cafés run by students to those run by retirees, whom they found harder to relate to. Several of them also participated in other activities aimed at newcomers, such as the hiking groups I followed.
The hiking group on which I focus here was specifically aimed at refugees (the other was more open but looser in structure and attendance) and run by a hiking association. Participants (including volunteers) were predominantly young, in their 20s and 30s, some older. Volunteers were mainly students and young and middle-aged professionals, and a few retirees. Most participants had come to Norway as asylum-seekers from the Middle East and the Horn of Africa in recent years and had since obtained permission to stay. On a weekday evening every two weeks, around fifteen people (including volunteers) gathered at a spot in central Oslo. After everyone had arrived and greeted each other and new members had been introduced, the day's assigned guides (two volunteers on rotation, wearing recognisable vests, who on other days joined the group as unmarked participants) presented the day's hiking plan before we walked off or took public transportation to where the hike began. Since the activity built towards a longer, more ambitious hike in the summertime, the group was somewhat closed. This kept membership relatively small and constant. During the hikes, which lasted a few hours, the mood was light as everyone walked and chitchatted with whomever they wished. The walks were punctuated by breaks at picturesque spots during which volunteers distributed hot drinks and buns. Some of the participants brought food and tea to share with everyone – provoking admiration and embarrassment among Norwegians used to bringing food for one to limit their bags’ weight. Over time, many of us began bringing snacks (nuts, chocolate) to share. At the end of each walk, the mood was of delight, ease and conviviality. Many told me they enjoyed the mental disconnection from their everyday stress and worries that outdoor walks provided.
In what I call ‘pairing’ activities, organisations matched locals and recently settled refugees one-on-one or at a family level and they met for a coffee or a walk, attended events, visited each other or sometimes helped one another with practical tasks such as filling forms, moving houses. Volunteers usually committed to a minimum stay (e.g. a year). Those I was given access to were wary of exposing their ‘buddies’ (whose identities they had vowed to keep confidential) to a researcher, so I was not able to observe their interactions.
The volunteers I met varied broadly in age, migration history (some were non-Norwegian, some naturalised Norwegian, some had immigrant parents), gender (though the overwhelming majority were women), and outlook on immigration and asylum politics: from Kari, a retiree who considered Norway to have pursued an overly naïvely benevolent (snillistisk) approach to receiving refugees, believing they ‘could help everyone’, to Lisa, a student and language-café volunteer two generations younger, who passionately argued that, as a wealthy country, Norway should take in more refugees, even if that entailed a decline in Norwegians’ living standards: ‘It's a question of hospitality, giving some of what one has in order to . . . help others’, she reasoned. Both, however, regarded their respective volunteering activities as separate from politics. Many explained their motivations to volunteers in terms of empathy and identification with newcomers’ experience of ‘outsiderness’ (utenforskap). They could relate to this because they had themselves experienced not speaking the language, ignoring cultural codes or bureaucratic procedures, or lacking a social network while living abroad, or had witnessed a foreign parent struggling to settle into Norwegian society (cf. Pries 2019: 5).
Depoliticising Engagement with Newcomers: Difference and Social Cohesion in Norway
Struck by the inequalities between newcomers’ and her own access to rights, Lisa began volunteering in a language café to ‘make a difference’. She felt a ‘moral responsibility’ to engage. Though she expressed frustration with refugee and integration politics, she explained that she appreciated the language café being separate from them:
Some of what I find is really nice with . . . the language café is that it goes on at such a grounded level [lavt nivå]. And politics – at least refugee politics . . . yeah, I'm kind of tired of it. Because there's so much talking, and . . . there's a very big difference between changing the system and talking with individuals, like, trying to speak every week with someone so that their Norwegian improves. That's . . . at a very grounded level. And . . . Yeah, I actually think it's really nice, I don't feel so much like going into the politics. [. . .] I actually feel like it's two quite different things. To work politically . . . on refugee issues, and to work . . . for them . . . yeah, on this kind of grounded level. With the language café.
Author: Yeah. So you don't think of it as a. . . political . . . ?
No, not like . . . not so much, really. [. . .] And I have friends from . . . all – from all the political parties, who have participated in a language café.
Author: Right! As volunteers?
Yes. Who have completely different opinions from me. And it's . . . it's some of what I also think is really nice. That . . . the politics runs its course on one side, and then . . . everyone can, yeah, help out and be a volunteer.
Similarly, Kristin, a young private sector professional who volunteered at the hiking activity said: ‘I'm very concerned with integration, I . . . think that there's a lot of discussion about the size of the immigrant and refugee quotas we should take in . . . But I feel that . . . everyone agrees that integration can and should improve.’ Without explicitly bracketing the hiking activity from the field of politics, Kristin, as Sandra in the article's opening passage, presented it as being about integration, which she suggested was, as opposed to the controversies regarding immigration inflows from which she distanced it, a topic over which consensus reigned.
Several themes emerge from the ways in which these volunteers described their engagement with newcomers that hint at their ‘emic’ conceptualisation of ‘the political’ – one which differs from my analytical understanding of the political as explained above. First, they saw these activities as belonging in the realm of ‘integration’ or ‘inclusion’. Second, they presented the field of integration as separate from the realm of politics, with politics belonging in the sphere of government and party politics. They tended to distinguish between immigration politics and integration/inclusion-oriented practices, that is, between policies regarding who should be let in and why, and policies – and the mechanisms through which they are enacted – regarding how those allowed to stay are to be incorporated into Norwegian society. Sandra and Lisa distinguished between different levels of engagement, placing what they understood as ‘politics’ on a higher, or distant one, and volunteering with newcomers on a lower, proximate, one. Volunteering takes place at the local community level, as Sandra points out, where one engages face-to-face with individuals, as Lisa underscores. Several volunteers mentioned that they were partly drawn to these activities because of this distinction, which to them made the activities apolitical. Third, while they regarded (immigration) politics as ‘complicated’ and filled with ‘disagreement’, they evoked integration as a ‘simpler’, consensus-eliciting domain. The underlying idea is that it is ‘in everyone's interest’ that the settlement experience of those who have received permission to stay be as good as possible, so helping newcomers is, as Lisa suggests, something that all can presumably agree on and participate in – regardless of their political views. The notion that volunteering with newcomers (mostly refugees) is something ‘benign’ and non-contentious – an activity motivated by a sense of humanism that transcends all ideological divides – resonates with the humanitarian logic that depoliticises refugees and others affected by humanitarian catastrophes. Like children, they are cast as innocent and helpless, devoid of politics, so ‘everyone agrees’ on the necessity to help them (cf. Malkki 1996, 2015).
The Duty to Integrate Newcomers for Society's Sake
Besides seeking to ensure social cohesion within activities by avoiding conflict-eliciting topics, volunteers also sought to foster it through the activities. Some of the hiking volunteers suggested that the activity bore the potential to generate common points of reference between newcomers and Norwegian society at large. The hiking experiences equipped the newly arrived with palatable, relatable stories over which they could connect with their new Norwegian neighbours and acquaintances – ones less difficult to relate to by the latter than stories of war and flight.
Some volunteers, especially in the hiking activity, actively sought to keep activities ‘free’ of politics and religion to prevent dissent. Kari, a retired professional who volunteered in the activity told me how, during a forest hike near Oslo, a recently settled refugee with whom she was walking and chatting had begun complaining about the high tax levels in Norway. She had felt rather provoked by the young man's comments since, she said to me, ‘it's our taxes that pay for immigrants’ life in this country’. She had however decided to avoid entering a discussion, she explained to me, because the hiking organisation ‘is a very friendly [snill] forum. And it's not . . . desirable that one . . . takes up political, or religious . . . conflictual topics [konflikttemaer].’ She had not, as a volunteer, been explicitly instructed to avoid such topics, but stressed that the organisation itself is apolitical and non-religious – one where ‘there is no room for such’ – as is stipulated in the organisation's statutes. It seemed ‘evident’ to her, then, that one should ‘stay away from such topics’. Sam, a middle-aged volunteer in the same activity, expressed similar views:
I think there's no point in starting with such . . . when we're hiking, I rather try to . . . some, of course, some are interested in discussing something political, but there's going to be . . . someone who disagrees with him. Right? So I think, for example, if there are several people from Syria, right? People from Syria, they are Arabs, Kurds, from different parties and such. If they get into a discussion, each takes . . . their own side. Then it can quickly lead to an argument. That's why, I say, let's stick to the . . . hike. To the hiking culture . . . enjoy it.
Both these volunteers’ wish to bracket politics out of their activity resonates with concerns similar to Sandra's and Lisa's: they see politics and religion as potential sources of discord – both among refugees and between refugees and locals – and so consider them best kept out of this type of activity, so that all can harmoniously enjoy the hiking experience.
Volunteers saw their efforts as useful not just for newcomers’ incorporation, but also for society's overall social cohesion. ‘I think things will be a lot better if we help out and make that effort together and get people integrated’, said Bjørg, an older volunteer in a pairing activity, as she spoke at length about her concern with integration as a collective project. ‘We have a job to do, and that's helping the weakest in society to at least learn Norwegian so that they can get [a] job.’ Remi, a university student volunteering at one of the language cafés, was sceptical of the government's stance and saw his engagement as a counterweight to it. The current government, he said, ‘is willing to take certain measures that go against our moral compass, and . . . therefore, we feel that it's in a way our duty [oppgave] as citizens to take on the role we feel the state doesn't manage to’. ‘It's our responsibility as active citizens [aktive samfunnsborgere] to step in and meet those needs that aren't met’, he continued. ‘For society overall to function better and more seamlessly, it's important that everyone . . . tries to lift the groups that have difficulties.’ Recounting her motivation to volunteer as a hiking guide, Kristin explained that since both Norwegians and newcomers tend to live in social ‘cliques’, the best way to tackle fear of the other
is that we get to know each other! Create close ties! Teach each other, get to know each other, and . . . build understanding. I think that, if we're going to live together, we have a responsibility towards each other. I at least want to live in a society, and especially a local community, where we take care of each other and . . . know each other.
While their standpoints differed, Bjørg, Remi and Kristin's words express a shared sense of duty to assist newcomers for society's sake, that is, beyond other feelings – also present – of shared humanity, hospitality or curiosity vis-à-vis newcomers. They saw it as their responsibility, as ‘active citizens’ as Remi put it, to ‘help the weakest’ or transcend boundaries to build a cohesive community. This feeling, which pervaded among the volunteers I met, resonates with the sense of duty and responsibility towards the collective that underlies the Norwegian concept of samfunnsengasjement, meaning civic engagement or participation (Horst et al 2020). As I discuss later, this sense of ‘duty’ to engage for the sake of the collective speaks both to a particularly Norwegian, or Scandinavian, close entanglement between civil society and state, and to the expanding discourse on ‘active’ citizenship, through which Western neoliberal states increasingly delegate care labour to civil society by conflating voluntary labour with ‘good’ citizenship (Horst et al 2020; Muehlebach 2012; Sandberg and Andersen 2020).
My interlocutors’ wish to depoliticise their activities and reduce differences to prevent friction must also be read within both the socio-political context of the time, which I present next, and a broad Norwegian propensity to promote social cohesion by accentuating similarities and toning down differences. Marianne Gullestad (2002) has shown that the Norwegian approach to egalitarianism rests on a view of ‘equality as sameness’ (likhet in Norwegian) such that differences tend to be silenced to encourage a sense that all can be equal because they are similar.4 Similarity, and so inclusion or integration, was thus promoted not only through teaching Norwegian, transmitting local knowledge, cultural traditions, values and codes, and generating shared experiences, but also through leaving political (and religious) differences – anything that could disturb a sense of homogeneity and cohesion – aside.
Preserving ‘Norwegian Values’
Immigration, integration and the ‘protection’ of ‘Norwegian values’ became major points of contention in the build-up to the 2017 Norwegian parliamentary elections, which were held six months ahead of my fieldwork. Sylvi Listhaug, member of the right-wing Progress Party and then Minister of Immigration and Integration, sparked this debate in 2016 by suggesting that asylum-seekers should undergo a compulsory course in Norwegian culture and societal knowledge on arrival.5 The conservative coalition government additionally made asylum increasingly temporary by tightening the language and financial requirements for obtaining permanent residence from June 2016 (Brekke et al 2020; Stortinget 2016).
Throughout the summer of 2017, the debate over immigration, integration and social cohesion intensified, with Listhaug warning that ‘Swedish conditions’ (svenske tilstander) – criminality and other problems that she attributed to badly managed immigrant incorporation in the neighbouring country – could develop in Norway if it accepted ‘too many’ refugees.6 This cautionary tale became a slogan of sorts in the remainder of the campaign, with centrist politicians too expressing concern over preserving ‘Norwegian values’. The joint political programme (‘Jelæya Platform’) agreed by the government coalition in January 2018 outlined ‘an effective integration policy’ that highlighted the ‘excessively high’ rates of unemployment among refugees (Regjeringen 2018: 21) and stressed the need for immigrants to acquire linguistic and cultural knowledge and participate in the labour market to ensure the stability of the Norwegian welfare model.
Maintaining social and cultural cohesion lies at the core of Scandinavian integration policies that seek to socialise (certain) immigrants into citizens (Borevi et al 2017). This concern does not apply to all newcomers equally: settled refugees and relatives who join them have the right and obligation to follow a state-sponsored, two-year introductory programme (introduksjonsprogram) comprising courses on Norwegian language and society, and work internships. European Economic Area citizens, labour immigrants and their spouses have no obligation to learn Norwegian and therefore no right to free language instruction. Since not all employers provide or sponsor such training and private courses are expensive, many have limited opportunities for learning the language. This was evidenced by the presence of a large number of non-refugee participants at one language café, the mothers’ group, and the choir I followed.
When I asked Nora why the language café she coordinated restricted its target group to recently arrived asylum-seekers and refugees, she explained that students and labour immigrants generally have more resources and ‘things more in order’ than refugees and asylum-seekers, who have ‘a very long path ahead’ with ‘very much to learn and master’. The hiking activity coordinator similarly explained that ‘hospitality’ must be focused on those who ‘need it most’: labour immigrants may have other networks, she reasoned, while ‘as a refugee, one has nothing’. They are more vulnerable, meet more challenges and bear more traumas and worries than those who have not fled, she argued.
While refugees undoubtedly face particular challenges connected to their experience of conflict and/or persecution, the ideas of vulnerability and cultural distance that are embedded in these categorisations have been crafted through representations of distant, suffering ‘others’ that shape how encounters with ‘strangers’ are imagined (cf. Ahmed 2000). Inclusion-oriented activities with refugees from non-European, formerly colonised countries are shaped by, and reproduce, the hierarchy of helpers and helped of humanitarianism's logics (Fassin 2007; Malkki 2015; Ticktin 2011). In Norway, the patronising representations of ‘pitiable victims’ generated by missionaries to garner support for their missions have contributed to producing a ‘hierarchical distance’ between European ‘helpers’ and African ‘helped’ (Gullestad 2007: 3, 5).
The Norwegian example illustrates how in Western countries ‘integration’ is typically only required of some immigrants. While white individuals are given ‘dispensation of integration’, Willem Schinkel (2018: 3–4, 8) notes, the racialised, categorised as a priori not belonging, must integrate, for their difference is regarded as tarnishing an assumed previously static, homogenous whole. The concept of ‘inclusion’, Schinkel notes, is no less problematic, for ‘exclusion’ fetishises ‘inclusion’, reifying the ‘inside’. As assimilation earlier did, integration thinking assumes ‘that immigrants must conform to the norms and values of the dominant majority’ to be considered deserving members of the destination society (Penninx and Garcés-Mascareñas 2016: 12). In Scandinavia, where concern with sameness and cohesion holds centre stage, integration is, Karen Fog Olwig argues, a ‘political welfare project . . . imbued with moral and cultural values concerning what it takes to be a proper citizen and member of the local society’. ‘The establishment of an elaborate integration sector’, she argues, reflects a view that people from certain areas of the world ‘do not, by definition, belong in society’ (2011: 180, 194, 187). Norwegian welfare policy as a ‘state regime of discipline’, Ada Engebrigtsen writes, imposes ‘an elaborate and compulsory system of resocialisation that prepares migrants for the Norwegian labour market and society’ (2007: 733).
Encouraging Citizens to Integrate Newcomers
The Jæløya Platform underscored voluntary organisations’ role in ‘integration work’ and the government's commitment to facilitating their efforts. Already in 2015, politicians encouraged civic engagement in this domain: in a press conference in early September, then Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg praised citizens’ collective mobilisation (dugnadsinnsatsen) to assist the record number of asylum-seekers (NTB 2015). ‘I'm so glad to see so many volunteers and others making an extra effort. All those arriving in the country will need it’, she said, noting that besides material help, they would need ‘people who contribute to integrating them into the local community [. . .] both while they wait for a decision on whether they can stay in Norway, and afterwards’. Frode Forfang, Director of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, summoned citizens wishing to help to ‘include’ asylum-seekers in associations, sports clubs and other groups active ‘around reception centres’ across Norway (NTB 2015). In 2016, the governmental white paper (Stortingsmelding) ‘From reception centre to work life: an effective integration policy’ discussed this engagement as key to ensuring the success of governmental integration policies:
It is in everyday life, in the neighbourhood, at school, at the shop, in the kindergarten and in local communities that people meet. Succeeding in [our] integration policy requires an effort from all parties: authorities, local communities, the voluntary and employment sectors, and industry. It requires an effort, not least, from those who have recently arrived in a local community and must get to know new customs, a new language and a new society. The volunteer, sports, and cultural sectors and religious societies can play an important role in creating contact between local communities and persons who have recently arrived in Norway. (JBD 2016: 12)7
Continued calls for citizens to actively ‘include’ and ‘integrate’ newcomers into local communities often specifically appealed, as the Prime Minister's 2015 speech, to the spirit of ‘dugnad’. While volunteer engagement with receiving refugees has also been encouraged, applauded by authorities elsewhere such as Germany (Fleischmann 2019; Fleischmann and Steinhilper 2017; Sandberg and Andersen 2020), dugnad, a term for collective voluntary engagement typically linked to the needs of a given community (a school, a housing co-op), is considered a typically Norwegian, virtuous cultural practice. Holding an important place in the collective self-image (Horst et al 2020; Klepp 2001), it has a strong capacity to motivate civil action.
The idea that civil society should assist the state in integrating newcomers is also echoed by lower-level bureaucrats. Christer, a young municipal officer responsible for facilitating refugees’ settlement who worked at an Oslo office of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), told me:
It's very nice that some volunteers can . . . take that job that we, who finish work at four – we can inform about it, but we don't have the space, or time to go beyond that. Otherwise, you can get burnt out. And besides, I think it's important that . . . I'm a public servant, so I'm supposed to facilitate, but . . . not everything should be the responsibility of the public sector, as opposed to what the voluntary sector can do. And I think that volunteering [frivilligheten] is so important because it's voluntary care – not paid care.
Though Christer emphasises the distinction between ‘paid’ and ‘volunteer’ care, public funding is central to upholding many of the integration-oriented activities of the Norwegian voluntary sector, including those I followed. In Germany, by contrast, some organisers have refrained from seeking public funding, in order to maintain their independence. There, state funding is mainly integration-oriented, whereas volunteer initiatives often focus on excluded asylum-seekers (Karakayali 2019).
While all organisers and several of the volunteers I met spoke about their activities as a form of exchange and stressed the potential for mutual learning, they often referred to their activities as ‘inkluderingstiltak’ or ‘integreringstiltak’: a service (tilbud/tiltak) offered to or aimed at a particular group with the goal of meeting a specific public policy priority – in this case their ‘inclusion’ or ‘integration’. Except for the choir and the mothers’ group, where all were meant to be equal participants, in the other activities locals (Norwegians and long-settled foreigners) participated as ‘volunteers’, or ‘guides’, sharing their knowledge of Norwegian society and the Norwegian and English languages with newcomers. At the hiking activity this distinction was somewhat diminished in practice between participants and the volunteers who were not acting as guides on a given day. Volunteers were vetted (having to provide a criminal record certificate for some of the activities) and given some guidance as to their role. Newcomers were the ‘users’ or ‘target group’ and were (at least initially) recruited into activities through institutionalised channels: asylum-seeker reception centres, adult-education institutions and municipal authorities in charge of recently settled refugees, who ‘liaised’ between the latter and civil society groups.
Thus, while many volunteers imagine their activities as separate from the sphere of politics, as I have shown they were directly encouraged, partly funded and facilitated by authorities. The activities furthermore reproduced, even enacted, state integration policy concerns: by heeding state calls to facilitate, for society's sake, the ‘successful’ incorporation of (certain) newcomers – those whose difference should be minimised – and replicating the state's categories of concern, they reproduced its integration ideology.
Volunteers’ expressed sense of duty to assist with newcomers’ incorporation can be seen as representing an internalisation of the state's call for a national ‘integration dugnad’, whereby ‘good citizens’ mobilised to produce new ‘good citizens’: well-integrated newcomers who embrace Norwegian values and will contribute to society through their labour and taxes. The active citizenship discourse, which the call for a national ‘inclusion dugnad’ exemplifies, is thus an instance where citizens’ ‘participation’ is transformed into ‘a duty in the service of policy aims’ (Newman and Tonkens 2011: 10). When Norwegian volunteers in 2015 mobilised to fill gaps left by the state in assisting asylum-seekers or settled refugees, they were not merely substituting the labour of a shrinking neoliberal state (cf. Hamman and Karakayali 2016), but extending it. This symbiosis between state and civil society further illustrates how the two cannot be imagined as hermetically separate from each other, particularly where the acts of ‘good’, disciplined (in the Foucauldian sense) subjects are the product of their relations with the state (Mitchell 1991).
The fact that several volunteers did not regard their engagement as contestatory vis-à-vis state policy but as complementary to state action must also be read in the context of the historical relationship between civil society and state in Norway. Norway, as other Scandinavian societies, is typically described as having a high degree of generalised trust (Borevi et al 2017). The state is not imagined as an external threat to people's autonomy but an ally, a medium of the collective will. Their relationship is perceived as proximate – a perception connected to the prevailing image of the nation as small and homogenous (Horst et al 2020; Vabø 2011). Voluntary activity has historically been regarded not as separate from but as an integral part of the state (Bendixsen et al 2018: 10, 12). Volunteer organisations are considered a ‘supporting beam’ of Norwegian social democracy (Brochmann and Rogstad 2004: 315), and a survey found that a majority of Norwegians view volunteering a moral duty, a form of active, democratic citizenship (von Essen et al 2019: 181). Civic engagement is regarded as ‘cooperatively contributing towards the welfare state under a shared understanding of the common good’, which in turn ‘fosters an understanding of active citizenship that promotes the sustenance of the status quo, rather than opening up for critical voices towards authorities’ (Jdid 2020: 43). At the same time, the state seeks to influence popular values by for instance subsidising certain civil society organisations that it considers work for ‘commendable values and practices’ (Vabø 2011: 87). These factors might explain why, even in contrast to other Scandinavian countries such as Denmark (cf. Sandberg and Andersen 2020), the attitudes I found among volunteers were, if unwittingly, less contestatory than supportive of the state's approach to receiving newcomers.
An Anti-Politics of Inclusion?
Most civil society initiatives I followed sought to minimise difference both explicitly, by helping (certain) newcomers be more like locals, and implicitly, by bracketing out potentially divisive elements, such as politics and religion. Volunteers’ desire to frame their activities as apolitical may be seen as arising from the wish to be as inclusive as possible – of both newcomers and locals – and to promote social cohesion in the context of polarised immigration debates. Yet as I have shown, despite some volunteers’ efforts to depoliticise their activities both discursively and in practice, by virtue of their focus and structure these initiatives inadvertently functioned as hierarchically structured forms of service provision that reproduced state conceptualisations of vulnerability, difference and inclusion, and tacitly enacted its integration policy priorities. While acting as ‘good citizens’ by heeding authorities’ calls to engage with ‘integrating’ newcomers, volunteers reinforced both the humanitarian tendency to depoliticise ‘vulnerable others’ and its hierarchy of helpers and helped (cf. Stock 2019). By labelling their activities ‘integreringstiltak’, civil society actors reproduced the language of integration policy discourse and practice. Activities’ structure and focus reproduced state ideas of ‘successful integration’, or what it takes to produce new ‘good citizens’ – acquiring language skills, employment and financial self-sufficiency. They also reproduced the ways in which the state imagines, and thus categorises and prioritises, different groups of newcomers: asylum-seekers and refugees as more vulnerable and in greater need of assistance to ‘integrate’, and other newcomers as either ‘better able’ to integrate, more easily ‘integrate-able’ or simply not needing to be integrated at all since they posed no challenge to social cohesion. Some activities also ran in a financial and organisational symbiosis with authorities, depending at least partly on funding and state-mediated access to newcomers.
While my volunteer interlocutors did not think of their activities as ‘political’, Stuart Hall (2007: 152, 155) reminds us that the very erasure of difference is an act of power over an ‘other’, and social cohesion ‘a polite form of assimilation’ of that other. If politics is understood as ‘power-structured relationships maintained by techniques of control’ (Fisher 1997: 446), then volunteers’ and organisations’ efforts to minimise difference was not so much a depoliticisation as a form of politics. While their efforts to build bridges between locals and newcomers and teach the latter Norwegian may have helped some attain the requirements for permanent residence rights and so avoid the always-looming possibility of repatriation in an increasingly exclusionary immigration landscape, their intentions were hardly aimed at challenging the established order. Remaining as they did within the hegemonic logics of standard integration discourse, even where they implicitly opposed the established socio-political climate, they inadvertently ended up, as the initiatives Vandevoordt and Verschraegen (2019: 119) analysed, reproducing established ‘socio-legal subject categories’ such as ‘refugee’, ‘asylum-seeker’ and ‘economic migrant’. As a result, they may be seen to have generated an ‘anti-politics’ of inclusion.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the women and men – newcomers, citizens and long-term residents in Norway – who shared their time and thoughts with me during my fieldwork, my colleagues in the NORDHOST project for inspiring discussions, Čarna Brković (special issue editor) for inviting me into this special issue and graciously providing very useful feedback on successive versions of this article, and to the anonymous reviewers and Social Anthropology editors who, with their feedback, have helped improve it. Funding for the research was provided by the University of Oslo through the UiO:Norden research initiative.
Notes
All names are pseudonyms.
Norway is not an EU member but is in the Schengen free movement area.
Part of the larger research project NORDHOST: Nordic Hospitalities in a Context of Migration and Refugee Crisis, led by the University of Oslo .
This stems from a general republican idea dating back to de Tocqueville.
See https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/42P8E/listhaug-vil-laere-flyktningene-norsk-folkeskikk (accessed 11 January 2021).
See https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/yqMyJ/martin-kolberg-om-listhaug-opptrer-i-strid-med-kristne-verdier (accessed 11 January 2021).
Author's translation.
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