Talking to ... Göran Adamson

Sometimes, political landscape changes occur very slowly, almost
imperceptibly, and not infrequently; a social step backward is
disguised as a seductively progressive formula. In this context,
Göran Adamson is one of those rare specimens whose awareness of
undesirable developments of this kind was sharpened early on –
not least because he connected the rise of populist parties to
the failure of the political elite. Or, more precisely: their
entry into what Adamson calls nationalist masochism. The roots of
this peculiar self-hatred go way back to the 1970s – in the
meantime, having produced a political class underpinning its
political career with performative acts of self-flagellation.
Consequently, Sweden's conservative prime minister Fredrik
Reinfeldt could claim: »Swedish roots are nothing but barbaric.
The rest of the development has come from the outside.« If we
take the problem of nationalist masochism seriously, we
understand both that and how the ideology of multiculturalism has
made the deliberate and always consensus-seeking Sweden into a
form of mental paralysis in which turning a blind eye could
become a form of civic duty. In any case, Adamson, already a
sociology professor at the University of Malmö, observed how his
colleagues had developed a groupthink—a group pressure that’s
spread as a kind of mental mildew over the discourses and
threatened to stifle free speech and research. Was this a reason
for Adamson to leave the University? As a true citizen of the
world, he subsequently spent many years in Indonesia, Ethiopia,
Vietnam, Thailand, and Jordan. He currently lives in Berlin,
teaches at the University of Europe, and has just submitted a
study on the failed Swedish migration policy to the Mathias
Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels.


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