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The Swedish integration debate should focus on the difficult trade-offs needed in a country that is not structurally optimal for immigration, rather than getting bogged down in the semantics of racism, argues political scientist Andreas Johansson Heinö.

There is a lack of political action in Sweden to address integration that has long been compensated by strong rhetoric that bashes old policies. "We might even stop talking about immigration policy," Ola Ullsten, a prominent Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) politician, said in the 1970s.

When the term "integration" came into vogue in the 1990s, it was meant to replace the then stigmatized concept of multiculturalism. And when Iranian-born professor Masoud Kamali presented the findings of a state inquiry on structural discrimination in 2006, the solution was to scrap integration policy.

More recently, some suggested ahead of the Social Democrats' party congress in Gothenburg last week that if they take power, they should abolish the job of integration minister all together. The party's governing board said that integration is "a problematic concept" that should preferably not be used.

Commentators from different political camps applauded the initiative.

Per Wirtén, a columnist with the centre-left Dagens Arena newspaper, wrote that he sympathizes with the spirit of the proposal, but would rather see a name change: let one anti-racism minister take over the fight against "structural racial discrimination."

The word "immigrant" has been purged from the new proposed party programme. While both the 1990 and 2001 programmes dealt with integration problems, the 2013 analysis says it time to face racism with a general policy of equality. The programme warns that "poor groups and impoverished areas" will be translated into an ethnic problem in the public debate. Accordingly, the Social Democrats have since called itself an "anti-racist" party.

Is this a return to traditional social democratic equality policy, a settlement with the last remnants of the craze for identity politics under the former leadership of Mona Sahlin? Hardly.

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