Introduction
In the mid-1970s Sweden’s parliament abolished the eugenics-inspired sterilization legislation enacted in 1935 by a social democratic government. During the four decades that passed between implementation and abolition, almost 63,000 Swedes were rendered infertile, in many cases in response to pressure from the state and sometimes as a result of outright compulsion. Furthermore, it was chiefly those regarded as “unproductive” who were the targets of that social policy.Footnote 1
Due especially to the collection of essays published as Eugenics and the Welfare State, which appeared in 1996, we now know a great deal about those eugenicist measures, which were implemented in other Scandinavian counties too.Footnote 2 Those essays build on a slightly older historiography that drew attention to illiberal life-wing policies towards the “underclass”, who were regarded as parasitical. That historiography reflected a debate in the 1970s and 1980s among British historians on the role of left-wing theorists such as the Fabians,Footnote 3 and the importance of eugenics to their theories of social reform. The Fabians (such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb) were especially influenced by the idea that the lowest echelons of society, sometimes termed the “residuum”,Footnote 4 had hereditary defects and would increasingly degenerate. In that, they drew inspiration from the work of the famous statistician, geographer, and anthropologist Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, thirteen years Galton’s senior. It was Galton who coined the term “eugenics”, in 1883, arguing that the elite should be encouraged to have more children, while procreation among the lower classes should be restricted.Footnote 5
Thus, the leading Fabian Sidney Webb wrote in The Difficulties of Individualism (1896) about the “breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized ‘residuum’ unfit for social life”.Footnote 6 That underclass would have many more children than those with superior hereditary material, such as skilled labourers and the middle class. Failure to intervene eugenically, either positively (by encouraging the better citizenry to have more children) or negatively (making it more difficult for the inferior citizenry to procreate), would lead societies to commit race suicide owing to the “rapid multiplication of the unfit”, as it was put in the title of a book by the US radical feminist Victoria Woodhull which appeared in 1891.Footnote 7 The Webbs argued that it was the duty of the state to take the lead in the matter.
Karl Pearson, a self-professed socialist,Footnote 8 prominent statistician, and, by 1911, head of the Galton Biometric Laboratory and the first Galton Professor of Eugenics,Footnote 9 declared in that respect that
The legislation or measures of police, to be taken against the immoral and anti-social minority, will form the political realization of socialism. Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the state short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. Every citizen must learn to say with Louis XIV, l’etat c’est moi.Footnote 10
Some, such as Pearson and Havelock Ellis, a well-known Fabian, took a Social Darwinist approach and categorically rejected any form of support for the “residuum”, since such support would inevitably have a “dysgenic” effect. That view is nicely illustrated by Ellis:
The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born. So it is the question of breed, the production of fine individuals, the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of mere quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble idea in itself, but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path.Footnote 11
Inspired by Marx, Lasalle, Bebel, as well as Darwin, Pearson was no less radical, advocating what he termed “national efficiency”. Socialist nations, he argued, must embrace eugenics, eliminate class antagonisms and inequalities, and promote national unity. Only then could competition from other countries be resisted, “chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade-routes and for the sources of raw materials and of food supply. This is the natural history view of mankind.”Footnote 12 So he supported the elimination of Aboriginals in Australia and North America. Sidney Webb did not go so far as to deny the “unfit” all assistance, but he too was unambiguous in his advocacy of negative eugenics. In 1907 he wrote that the superior classes had far too few children and the inferior classes too many. That “adverse selection” was leading to “race suicide”, and the country would slowly but surely fall victim to the Irish and the Jews.Footnote 13 He proposed a system of state grants for “good” families from the working class, and later argued in favour of segregating the “feeble-minded”.
Opinions differ about the significance of eugenics for the left. Many scholars argue that similar biological theories were fairly widespread in Europe and the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century and that they held a great appeal for leftist social reformers.Footnote 14 Others claim it was merely an opportunistic flirt, and that such theories did not form a structural element of their philosophy.Footnote 15 There were those too who argued that the Fabians were not real socialists. The current communis opinio is that most Fabians, the Webbs above all, had a major influence on the development of social democracy and on the welfare state in Europe, and that they were strongly influenced by Galton’s ideas.Footnote 16
Since the 1990s, the debate about the relationship between the “left” and eugenics has become much broader in the wake of Zygmunt Bauman’s influential studies of “modernity” and the Holocaust. Bauman describes “modernity” as a process in which to promote greater individual security people are willing to forego a degree of freedom. The managing of risks and uncertainties is left to bureaucracies, which in turn are expected to create order in the chaos of society. Everything which the responsible authorities believe threatens social stability is automatically regarded as a problem.Footnote 17 Closely related to that theory are Foucault’s concepts of the “pastoral state”, which exercises its power to ensure the health and welfare of its citizens,Footnote 18 and “biopower”, with the state endeavouring to control the personal lives of its citizens.Footnote 19 Foucault argues that the state uses a variety of different techniques for the purpose, from statistics and registration to recording personal identities by fingerprinting and photographing individuals.
The emphasis on the role of the state and its use of technocratic methods to discipline the population and so solve social problems is a central theme too in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which appeared in 1998.Footnote 20 Scott considers several examples of projects conceived by the state to promote human welfare which turned out to have calamitous effects for those involved, including the forced collectivization of agriculture by the Soviets and the construction of large-scale banlieues in France (inspired by Le Corbusier). According to Scott, many top-down projects of that type prove disastrous because the technocratic planners are seized by a spirit of “high modernism” and fail to take account of local expertise or the needs of the people whose lives the projects are intended to improve.
It is claimed that this “high modernism”, which could also be taken to include the social engineering discussed in the present article, was possible above all under dictatorships and in societies with a weak civil society, where, in its planning, the state encountered little if any resistance from citizens or other intervening actors, such as the Church, trade unions, or NGOs.Footnote 21 Independently of Scott, Frank Dikötter came to a similar conclusion in an article on the history of eugenics: “Open democracies with a vibrant civil society, such as Britain and the Netherlands, were generally less inclined to adopt extreme eugenic proposals than authoritarian regimes in Germany and the People’s Republic of China.”Footnote 22
Both Bauman and Scott stress that states, particularly authoritarian states, wishing to create a modern well-ordered society were receptive to radical forms of social engineering. With the major role assigned to intervention by state-paid experts, eugenics was easily assimilated into such modernization projects.Footnote 23 Today, there would seem to be a large degree of consensus regarding the relationship between eugenics and the progressive movement, certainly in the first half of the twentieth century, as Paul Crook remarked in his recent book on Social Darwinism: “In fact if you examine the rhetoric of eugenic science […] you find that it actually best fitted in with contemporary ‘progressivist’ language that celebrated social engineering and meritocracy, professionalism and the dominance of experts.”Footnote 24 According to Weiner, positive eugenics and its destructive twin brother “euthanasia” enjoyed virtually universal support during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 25 Given the significant opposition to positive eugenics, especially in Catholic countries, that claim is slightly exaggerated, but that many – spanning the entire political spectrum of left to right – were attracted by the ideas of eugenics is indisputable.
In the historiography of the past few decades, by far the majority of studies of left-wing eugenics relate to Britain and the United States. Generally, they lack any comparative perspective, and give relatively little consideration to the role of social democracy. The same cannot be said of a number of more recent comparative studies of Scandinavia, Germany, and Switzerland,Footnote 26 which show that eugenic ideas and programmes found easy acceptance within the ideologies of social democratic welfare states, with their emphasis on a strong state and the subordination of the individual to the community. Although the targets of negative eugenics varied (immigrants, ethnic minorities, or the indigenous underclass), the underlying societal vision shows great similarity.
We should also bear in mind that eugenics did not constitute a well-defined science but was interpreted in widely different ways; and, moreover, that many people involved in the eugenics debate did not necessarily regard the “nature” approach as incompatible with “nurture” factors.Footnote 27 As Dikötter remarked, it was more in the way of being a “modern” approach to discussing social problems in biological terms. And so during the interwar period it became a feature of the political vocabulary of almost every modernizing movement.Footnote 28
The present article therefore goes beyond eugenics policy in a narrow sense; it examines the broader relationship between biologistic ideas and other “left-wing” measures to curtail the rights of individuals under the pretext of protecting society from the “social locus of infection”. Though eugenics, with its emphasis on “nature”, differs from “nurture-type” policy, such as re-educating the “unsocial”, in both cases it was “illiberal” state policy that elevated the interests of what was presumed as the collective above those of the individual.
Having read the historiography, one wonders why eugenics was not embraced by social democrats in all western European countries after World War I. Why did it make such substantial inroads in Scandinavia and Switzerland, and to some extent in Germany, but not in Britain, the Netherlands, nor France? Can such a dichotomy be explained by the former having a weaker civil society and greater scope for “high modernism”, as Scott, Bauman, and Dikötter hypothesize? Or was it a reflection more of the nature of social democracy and its relationship to other “players” within the national arena?
In the first case, one could expect all social democratic movements in principle to have embraced some form of illiberal policy in order to improve society. The second hypothesis claims that the form taken by social democratic social policy depended largely on the particular view regarding that welfare state which was to be created and the position of power held by social democrats in relation to other political parties. To answer those questions we shall consider first the Swedish and Swiss cases, before analysing countries in which social democrats declined to embrace eugenics.
The Eugenic Temptation In Sweden
In Sweden, as well as in other Scandinavian countries,Footnote 29 the idea of eugenics as a means to create a better society was influenced strongly by the international debates taking place in Britain, the United States, and Germany.Footnote 30 In the wake of Galton, Fabians such as the Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, and Havelock Ellis propagated the idea that the welfare state must ensure that the “healthy and fit” should prevail above the “sick, parasites and unfit”. It was the duty of the state to lead that. Or, as Sidney Webb put it, “No consistent eugenist can be a ‘laissez faire’ individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!”Footnote 31 Like the Fabians, who pioneered Britain’s welfare state,Footnote 32 Sweden’s social democrats saw little merit in the class struggle. Instead, they regarded the Swedish nation as an organic whole, in which there was no place for spongers and parasites.
Unlike those in Britain, Sweden’s socialists were already emphasizing the interests of all the people and not just those of the proletariat as early as the late nineteenth century. In 1890, the Swedish socialist Axel Danielsson articulated this communitarian and anti-Marxist socialism,Footnote 33 which expressly included farmers and the lower middle classes. The emphasis on all people was later adopted by the social democrat Ernst Wigforss in his vision of “industrial democracy”, a concept that revealed the direct influence of the Fabians.Footnote 34 Closely related to that was the desire of the social democrats to define the boundaries of a Swedish “people’s home” (folkhem)Footnote 35 on the basis of productive rather than ethnic and cultural characteristics.Footnote 36
In Sweden, thinking in terms of “people” rather than class was stimulated further by the interest in the biological and anthropological characteristics of the “Northern race”. As early as 1882, the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography had conducted a survey of the population in the wake of large-scale emigration to the United States, and in 1909 the Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene was founded, followed in 1910 by the Mendel Society, the first Swedish genetics association. Even before World War I, leading doctors including Herman Lundborg, a prominent figure in studies of racial biology, saw eugenics as a means to counter the problem of immigration, and there was a widely held opinion that the racial unity of the Swedish people was threatened.
To understand the “Swedish model” properly, with its emphasis on folkhem Footnote 37 as a type of Gemeinschaft,Footnote 38 we must realize that Sweden’s social democrats, who were in government as coalition partners from 1917 and who dominated it from 1932,Footnote 39 believed society risked disintegrating because of an all-pervasive anomie. In short, it was the classic problem of “modernity” as formulated by the founders of sociology (Durkheim, Comte, Simmel, and Tönnies). In addition, Swedish socialists pointed to the country’s lack of economic development and low rate of population growth, which highlighted the need for an active and interventionist social policy.
From the 1920s onwards, the academics and public intellectuals Alva and Gunnar Myrdal (the latter also a Member of Parliament for the Social Democratic Party) played a leading role in shaping and legitimizing that policy.Footnote 40 Their role was comparable to that of the Webbs in Britain, except that the Myrdals were supported by the social democrats, who had the added advantage of being in government. In an extremely influential book on the population crisis in Sweden (Kris i befolkningsfrågan) which appeared in 1934, they argued that the decline in the rate of population growth should be countered by an active pro-natalist population policy and positive social measures, because otherwise the social integrity of the Swedish people would be endangered.Footnote 41
They regarded the Swedish folkhem as a third way between fascism and liberal democracy, and proposed an unprecedented degree of government intervention.Footnote 42 The faith, both of the Webbs and the Myrdals, in scientific method and analysis and their criticism of ideological prejudice was remarkable. Gunnar Myrdal wanted as far as possible to avoid romanticizing social policy and insisted again and again on the importance of purely rational technical analyses, even if those implied radical solutions.Footnote 43
That position can be seen too in their ideas on, for instance, immigration. Although the Myrdals were not opposed to immigration from neighbouring countries, they regarded immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia as a threat to the Swedish people and to Sweden’s cultural heritage,Footnote 44 since that sort of immigration would reduce the social standards of the working classes to unacceptable levels. Or, as Gunnar Myrdal cautiously expressed it in 1938, “Immigration to an old country with a well-organized labor market and a rather highly developed structure of social welfare is something which probably does not occur without international friction.”Footnote 45
It was argued that to prevent Sweden being infected by “foreign elements”, the fertility of its indigenous population should be raised, chiefly by making it more attractive for women to have children. Hence their proposal for an extensive system of crèches and paid pregnancy and maternity leave, as well as the right for women to continue in work after marrying.Footnote 46 At the same time, the state must prevent the “wrong” people from procreating. Alva Reimer Myrdal, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, wrote about this in the reissue of an English-language publication Nation and Family which originally appeared in 1941. “In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gained momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and more childbearing than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents.”Footnote 47
It was not the importance of the individual but of the “social body” which was paramount.Footnote 48 The Myrdals hoped that the creation of a wide-ranging system of state crèches, after-school childcare, and other social amenities would, to some extent, help young children to escape the influence of their parents, and ensure that they could be reared by professionals to become worthy citizens.Footnote 49 By ensuring that children were monitored continually by doctors, teachers, and other professionals, any abnormalities could quickly be detected and remedied. The children re-educated in that way could in turn exercise a healthy influence on their parents, a process which within a few generations would give Sweden better, healthier, and more collectively oriented and harmonious citizens. Unlike national socialists, the Myrdals assumed that participation would be voluntary and would prompt an improvement in the population from below, at least as far as “right living” was concerned.Footnote 50 For the socially inferior, coercion rather than voluntariness was envisaged.
Though the Myrdals saw more virtue in positive than in negative eugenics, they were not ill-disposed to the sterilization of those deemed “unfit” and they advocated a fairly radical policy of sterilizing the mentally disabled.Footnote 51 As technical developments and the demand for efficiency proceeded in industrial society, the question of human quality became urgent. They did not in the first instance regard the “social substratum” as a separate social class, but as a layer of “defectives” recruited from all social classes. And in the case of hereditary defects, society was entitled to intervene, not so much to improve the race, but in the interests of general welfare. In their 1934 book they argued that sterilization of the “deficient” was the inescapable consequence of the great sociological process of adjustment that society was experiencing.Footnote 52
A year after the publication of Kris i befolkningsfrågan the first sterilization law was enacted in Sweden. Sterilization was backed by all the major parties, but it was the social democrat Alfred Petrén (1867–1964), Member of Parliament and Chief Inspector of the Mental Hospitals, who played an especially active role in pushing the law through and implementing it. He regarded sterilization as an alternative to lifelong confinement, which was the fate of the mentally ill and epileptics. He was a strong supporter of social indicators and a vociferous opponent of the principle of voluntarism. He argued that the law should also be applied to “morally inferior individuals”, including those unable to care for their children.
In the more stringent legislation of 1941, the concept of “antisociality” was given more central importance: it would actually be more humane to sterilize people who displayed characteristics either hereditary or non-hereditary that made it impossible for them to raise their children property.Footnote 53 Some social democrats actually believed this new law did not go far enough; they were reluctant to be constrained by a hereditary strait-jacket and pushed for sterilization to be applied as well to people whose behaviour was “socially inherited”.Footnote 54
The 1941 law assumed that in general, health care and the welfare state were intended only for those who led respectable lives. One group which did not meet that criterion were the tattare (gypsies/travellers).Footnote 55 In the period 1920–1940 the belief that tattare formed a biological and social threat began to gain wider currency. Of interest in that respect is the anthropometric research conducted by Gunnar Dahlberg in 1944,Footnote 56 which revealed no difference between the tattare and the rest of the Swedish population, leading the author to conclude that in this case racial eugenic arguments were fallacious. However, that did not imply that the state should leave the tattare alone. Dahlberg argued that his research showed that social criteria were at least as important, and as a consequence the 1941 legislation was deemed applicable to “antisocials” – often without their prior consent – “if they were considered unable to exercise their legal capacity”.
With the exception of its democratic character, Swedish communitarian and “productivist” socialism had much in common with fascist and national socialist organic theories on the role of the welfare state. Just as under the Nazis, the welfare state in Sweden had to be protected from “unproductive antisocials” and so it became a “eugenic welfare state of the fittest”.Footnote 57 The difference with Germany was that in Sweden it was not racial but social criteria that formed the basis for exclusion. That is not to say that there was no criticism of such a radical form of “social engineering”. Criticism was voiced not only in conservative quarters, but also by the far left, including the leftist splinter group of socialists led by Karl Kilbom, who, in the mid-1930s, warned against curtailing the rights of the individual and accused the Myrdals of fascism. It was, though, a voice crying in the wilderness.Footnote 58
Ultimately, in Sweden, between 1934 and 1975 around 63,000 people were sterilized, 90 per cent of them women. Some of that involved voluntary sterilizations, for health reasons or as a form of birth control. However, perhaps one-quarter of those sterilizations were forced on people, largely women, regarded as morally and socially inferior.Footnote 59 During the course of the 1950s, the policy gradually became less paternalistic, with the emphasis increasingly on free individual choice. Moreover, the interests of society had given way to those of the individual.Footnote 60
Eugenics In The Swiss “Gardening State”
At first sight, the Swiss case differs significantly from the Swedish. Not only is Switzerland a federation, with each canton having a large degree of autonomy, but there was also no social-democratic dominated government, at least not at the federal level. Nonetheless, there too the relationship between the welfare state, social democracy, and social engineering was unmistakeable.Footnote 61
How advanced Switzerland was in the field is best illustrated by the famous Zurich-based psychiatrist and socialist Auguste Forel (1848–1931). Responding to the spirit of the age, this self-acknowledged eugenicist expressed alarm about the looming degeneration of the Swiss population, and so advocated sterilization legislation and the screening of marriage partners to exclude the “inferior” and thus their issue. Information concerning their hereditary background was therefore necessary. Forel argued that the greatest threat was posed by criminals, prostitutes, and alcoholics, the mentally ill, those suffering from tuberculosis, drug addicts, gypsies, vagrants, Jews, the Chinese, and Negroes; in short every “unordentliche Bürger”.Footnote 62 Forel was director of the world-famous Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich and, in 1892, the first person to perform sterilizations.Footnote 63
Switzerland was also the first country to enact eugenics-inspired legislation, in 1912, which made it impossible for the mentally ill to marry.Footnote 64 After World War I the welfare state came to form the institutional framework within which the “inferior” were treated. Since they made for a heavy burden on state finances, partners regarded as socially or morally inferior were permitted to marry only if they agreed to be sterilized. It was on that basis that, in 1928, the canton of Vaud (Waadt) enacted Europe’s first eugenics sterilization law; it remained on the statute book until 1985.Footnote 65
Forel, a leading eugenicist, worked closely with psychiatrists and other eugenicists such as Eugen Bleuler and Ernst Rüdin, the latter being also an adviser in Sweden.Footnote 66 Their ideas appealed to the Swiss penchant for “order”, which offered no place for deviant social groups such as gypsies and Jews, the mentally ill, the disabled, unmarried mothers, and homosexuals.Footnote 67 There was also the cost factor. Poor relief was a local responsibility, and we see Protestant and social-democratic governed cantons, such as Vaud, Berne, and Zurich, being especially receptive to eugenic arguments and eugenics-inspired measures.Footnote 68 In Zurich in the 1930s, for instance, thousands of sterilizations were carried out, almost all of them, as in Sweden, on women from the lower social classes. Closely related to the policy of sterilization was the removal from their parents of some 600 “Jenische” children between 1926 and 1972.Footnote 69 Those children were placed with foster families or put in children’s homes; some ended up in psychiatric hospitals or even prison.Footnote 70 Their parents were left in ignorance of their children’s whereabouts.
Implementation of that policy was entrusted to a private organization set up in 1926, Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse, part of the Swiss Pro Juventute foundation established in 1912, which revitalized the policy of assimilation of itinerant groups which had been in effect since 1850, two years after formation of the federal state, and made them a target of a policy of “normalization”.Footnote 71 The motive underlying the policy was articulated eloquently by the founder and, until 1960, director of Hilfswerk, Alfred Siegfried (1890–1972). Although, inspired by the leading psychiatrists of the time such as Robert RitterFootnote 72 and Josef Jörger,Footnote 73 he believed that the “Jenischen” had a congenital psycho-pathological “Wandertrieb”. As a Catholic he was opposed to sterilization; he preferred to isolate and re-educate “Jenischen” children, as is apparent from the following remark made in 1943: “Wer die Vagantität erfolgreich bekämpfen will, muss versuchen, den Verband des fahrenden Volkes zu sprengen, er muss, so hart das klingen mag, die Familiengemeinschaft auseinander reißen. Einen anderen Weg gibt es nicht”. [If one wants to fight vagrancy successfully, one must try to destroy the cohesion of the travelling people; although this may sound harsh, one must tear the family community apart. There is no other way.]Footnote 74
It was not until 1972 that the policy was officially terminated, and in the 1980s it led to a heated social debate in Switzerland, culminating in a public apology and compensation.Footnote 75 The affair illustrates that “nature” and “nurture” arguments were not mutually exclusive within the realms of social policy, and that in some cases they even reinforced one another. Thus Jörger employed eugenicist arguments to some extent, saying “vagabondage is a form of idiocy and crime”,Footnote 76 but he also believed that environmental factors influenced behaviour. Hence, the children were initially placed with Swiss foster families. If good parenting failed to help, one could always opt to prevent them from marrying or to sterilize themFootnote 77 – a practice that strongly resembles the policy pursued in Norway in relation to itinerant groups (tatare).Footnote 78
However, the sterilization policy pursued in several Swiss cantons targeted not so much travelling families as those regarded as antisocial, those who, as in Sweden, formed a danger to the corps social.Footnote 79 The most significant opposition to the policy came from Catholics and liberals, while right-wing and social democratic parties were generally supportive. Thus, in the interwar period, sterilization legislation was adopted by socialist-governed cantons such as Basle, Berne, and Zurich.Footnote 80 The combination of social democracy, the welfare state, and arguments favouring cuts in public expenditure proved especially irresistible for many social democrats. According to Mottier, who has studied at great length the relationship in Switzerland between social democracy and eugenics from a “Bauman-Foucault perspective”, one motive underlying the support given by socialists was their ideological affinity with state intervention: “Far from constituting an ‘accident’ in the history of social democracy, the eugenic social experiments fit in comfortably with core elements of social democratic ideology, in particular the subordination of the individual to the collective interest of the national community.”Footnote 81
Just as in Sweden, what we see here then is a clear case of “high modernism”, or in Bauman’s words a “gardening state” in which all “weeds” had to be eliminated from the national garden in order to ensure the creation of an exclusive national identity. Although racial differences were emphasized more in Switzerland than in Sweden, in Switzerland too the driving force were communitarian social democrats, who were focused on normalizing society and excluding those regarded as parasites and unproductive. Furthermore, in Switzerland too, “positive” eugenics-inspired measures, such as the institution in the 1920s of sex and marriage advice bureaus, were at least as important in social democratic demographic policy.Footnote 82 Socialists especially advocated subsuming personal interests in those of the collective state, as Natalia Gerodetti noted: “Removed from the realm of the private and catapulted into the arena of public concern marital reproduction in particular was a concern of local politicians, many of whom were social democrats.”Footnote 83
A Bridge Too Far: Eugenics In The British, German, French, Belgian, And Dutch Labour Movements
Although there was no lack of interest in eugenics on the left of the political spectrum in Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, unlike in Scandinavia and the Swiss cantons referred to earlier, in none of those countries did that interest lead to sterilization laws nor other forms of negative eugenics. At first sight, that can be explained by a lack of political power and by opposition from other parties: the social democrats were either excluded from participation in government for a long period or had to share power.Footnote 84
Most Catholics were bitterly opposed to intervening in divine providence: with the exception of Britain, the other countries discussed here all had substantial Catholic populations which, at least after 1930, firmly resisted all forms of eugenic interference. In that same year, Pope Pius XI promulgated the encyclical Casti Connubii, which stressed the sanctity of marriage and prohibited all forms of artificial birth control. The encyclical also explicitly spoke out against eugenic laws.Footnote 85 Another factor was the reluctance of most liberal political parties to become involved in eugenic policies.
There are many other indications that the character of civil society in western Europe differed from that in Scandinavia. Unlike Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, other European countries had a less homogenous society, and their greater political, social, cultural, and religious differences led to a much more variegated civil society with a greater likelihood of opposition to ideas which might have far-reaching consequences for the personal domain of certain groups of citizens.
Despite what our initial hypothesis might lead us to assume, the lack of a social-democratic illiberal social policy was not, however, only a question of a lack of political power and the presence of a more resilient civil society. At least as important was the second hypothesis, which accounts for the different experiences in terms of the nature of social democracy and the political and social arena in which it operated. The socialism that was more Marxist-inspired, with the key role it allocated to class antagonisms, seems to have been of crucial importance. Although in most European countries socialists played some part in government, the hatchet of class conflict had not yet been buried and, certainly at the national level, the labour movement represented primarily, rhetorically at least, the interests of the working class. In that context, eugenics, definitely when preached by the middle class, was quickly interpreted as an attempt by the bourgeoisie to stigmatize part of the working class as inferior. That can be seen certainly in Britain and France, but also to a slightly lesser extent in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. It also explains why neo-Lamarckism found much more support in those countries than in Scandinavia and Switzerland.Footnote 86
France (and Belgium) had a particularly strong neo-Lamarckian movement, which, though it acknowledged the role of hereditary influences, also believed in the importance of environmental factors such as poverty and poor housing. The central tenet of neo-Lamarckism was that human characteristics could be hereditary in an unfavourable environment. Moreover, as argued by Van den Eeckhout,Footnote 87 French and Belgian Lamarckian eugenicists were less obsessed by the lower social classes since they did not regard them as irreversibly and biologically inferior. They were more concerned about the three fléaux sociaux (alcoholism, syphilis, and tuberculosis) and, reflecting their obsession with underpopulation, they were more likely to emphasize positive eugenics instead.Footnote 88
An interesting feature and a characteristic of the influence of Lamarckism in Belgium was the work of the famous social scientist and socialist Emile Vandervelde, who, in 1893, co-authored with the genetics and botany professor Jean Massart a short book, Parasitisme organique et parasitisme social, in which they compared the biological and social parasite, which both lived at the expense of the other without giving anything in return. Unlike social Darwinists, such as Karl Pearson in Britain, they regarded social parasitism not as hereditary, but as a form of imitation.Footnote 89
We can illustrate the fact that the factors reviewed above were given different weights throughout western Europe by means of the following table.
Table 1 Factors hindering the success of leftist negative eugenics in Europe
Legend: X a major role; +/− a more modest role; – no role, or only a limited role.
The effect of those factors within the various national contexts and how they influenced the attitudes to eugenics and social engineering of socialist and communist parties will be discussed in what follows.
Britain
As explained in the introduction, Britain was an important breeding ground for leftist eugenicist and illiberal interventionist theories. However, that did not mean those ideas were automatically translated into eugenicist measures. Furthermore, many progressive and left-wing theorists were circumspect about forms of negative eugenics, such as sterilization.
That circumspection was illustrated well by the publication, in 1911, of The Prevention of Destitution by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in which they discussed in rather guarded terms the significance of heredity and emphasized the role of an effective welfare state.Footnote 90 Their book examined the problem of the British underclass, which the Webbs estimated comprised around 4 million people. The underclass was completely demoralized, and lived miserable lives in overcrowded British cities where, because of their antisocial behaviour, they constituted a threat to society. The Webbs referred in this connection to “moral malaria”, “bestiality”, and “apathy”.Footnote 91 Fortunately, they continued optimistically, science was now so advanced that something could be done about it. Moreover, it was absolutely necessary to do it, because otherwise Britain would fall behind other nations industrially and militarily.Footnote 92
The Webbs sought the cause both in hereditary and social factors, for many had succumbed to their desperate situation owing to external circumstances (poverty, ill-health, old age) and through no fault of their own. To solve the problem of destitution, a range of measures was deemed necessary, of which “eliminating bad parentage” was one.Footnote 93 The Webbs were categorically opposed, though, to the Social Darwinist option propagated by Karl Pearson and others, because there was no evidence that it would lead to the “best” being selected. Nor did they have much faith in a unilateral eugenicist approach.Footnote 94 They recognized that poor social conditions might lead to hereditary inferior offspring, for example through alcoholism,Footnote 95 but they continued to insist that the solution lay primarily in improving social conditions. Even “perfect stock” could degenerate in a bad environment.Footnote 96
Although not a dominant group, there were also those on the left sympathetic to the more hard-core eugenicist position, and, remarkably, they were not necessarily ostracized nor even marginalized within the leftist movement. One well-known example is the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, a member of the Communist Party who was appointed professor at University College London in 1933 and four years later accepted a chair there in biometry. Haldane acknowledged the role of environmental factors, but he claimed that even the best environment could not improve a “born idiot”. He was chairman of the editorial board of the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the British Communist Party, in which capacity he declared, in 1949, that the dogma of human equality was no part of communism and that socially responsible eugenics was therefore fully justified. It was a view he continued to espouse until his death in 1964.Footnote 97
The socialist and leading American academic Hermann Joseph Muller was another famous left-wing eugenicist. His controversial and popular book Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future (1935), distributed in the UK by the Left Book Club, was in effect a manifesto for eugenicist intervention.
It is easy to show that in the course of a paltry century or two (paltry, considering the advance in question) it would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat-sen, Marx (I purposely mention men of different fields and races), or even to possess their varied faculties combined.Footnote 98
Muller, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1946, worked as a zoologist at the University of Texas until 1932, and spent the next eight years in Europe and Russia. In Out of the Night he argued that, naturally, the environment mattered, but even the best circumstances cannot transform an inherently stupid or selfish person into one who is intelligent or altruistic.Footnote 99 He also criticized the use of purely economic criteria to determine whether an individual was genetically useful. Given the marked inequality in capitalist societies, it was impossible to separate genetic from environmental factors. A socialist revolution was therefore a prerequisite for ensuring equal opportunities for all. The state would then have to legalize birth control, as well as provide adequate childcare facilities so that mothers could work outside the home (in that, his position was similar to the one espoused by the Myrdals in their 1934 book). That would make it possible to prevent families having far too many children and those children then growing up in poverty.Footnote 100
If everyone were equal and able to decide for themselves how many children they wanted to have, then the technical eugenic options were unlimited, and included, he argued, the transplantation of fertilized female egg-cells of high quality among women whose hereditary qualities were greatly inferior. Conversely, using artificial insemination, the best men could reproduce.Footnote 101 In the 1930s Lancelot Hogben, who held a chair in social biology at the Fabian-inspired London School of Economics, developed a left-wing version of eugenics.Footnote 102 However, alongside the role of environmental factors he also stressed, like the Webbs in their 1911 book on destitution, the inherent class prejudices of many eugenicists.Footnote 103
Socialist and communist scientists such as Haldane, Hogben, and Muller were allowed to defend their views fervently, but ultimately they failed to mobilize many allies in Britain. The ideal state had not yet dawned, and, unlike most Fabians, until it did they continued to regard negative eugenics as a socially biased project of the bourgeoisie whose sole target was the working class.Footnote 104 Like the broader labour movement, they thought primarily in terms of class antagonisms, and in Britain at least that was a key obstacle to the development of the communitarian and collectivist vision of society which we saw in Sweden.Footnote 105 It was an obstacle reinforced by the strong liberal character of the British welfare state which, despite the expansion of pension and insurance arrangements in the 1930s, continued to be relatively rudimentary and leaned heavily on individual initiatives, with charitable giving playing an important role.Footnote 106
It is hardly surprising then that the campaign undertaken in the 1920s by the Eugenics Society for legislation permitting voluntary sterilization came to nothing. The parliamentary bill failed, due not only to controversies between academics, but also, and especially, to strong opposition within the Labour Party; among liberals, aversion to such legislation was almost as great.Footnote 107
Germany
Opinion on the role of eugenicists in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) is divided. According to Weindling, hereditary theories were a marginal phenomenon within the SPD.Footnote 108 More recently, however, historians have pointed out that well before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 German social democrats (including Kautsky, Noske, Valentin Müller, and Grotjahn) and sympathizers (such as the famous sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld) were in fact susceptible to ideas about social engineering and eugenics.Footnote 109 Moreover, especially in the 1920s, many articles were published in SPD circles reporting enthusiastically on the new eugenic possibilities and how they might benefit left-wing social policy. As in Switzerland, they included marriage advice, voluntary sterilization, and abortion. The argument that the lumpenproletariat was responsible for pushing up public expenditure also played a major role.
On the left of Germany’s political spectrum, eugenic theories were linked inseparably to the social question right from the late nineteenth century. Many, including the influential progressive doctor Wilhelm Schallmayer,Footnote 110 feared their country would degenerate, a fear expressed by the Fabians in Britain too, and so advocated a technological-eugenic solution.Footnote 111 By minimizing the size of the proletariat, the money that would otherwise have been spent on incarcerating them in prisons and other institutions could be used to emancipate decent and productive workers.Footnote 112 However, those forces were too weak to ensure broad support for socialist eugenics. Nonetheless, as in Switzerland, that support was much greater than in Britain.
A good example was the role of the SPD in Prussia, which, around 1930, forged plans together with the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum) to draft a sterilization law. Despite opposition among Catholics to eugenicist intervention (both positive and negative), participation in government encouraged many Zentrum politicians to consider carefully the problem of the “inferior”.Footnote 113 A recent study has shown that among German Catholics eugenicist thinking was much more widespread than assumed until recently, especially among socially left-leaning Catholics, who in Prussia worked closely with the SPD.Footnote 114 Inspired by technocratic theories of modernity and the necessity to rationalize society, after a brief incubation period during the 1920s, those Catholics embraced part of eugenic philosophy, including its negative variant – sterilization. Particularly the younger generation of Catholic politicians welcomed the new project of the welfare state enthusiastically, and they proved particularly willing to support the negative eugenicist proposals of the Prussian SPD.Footnote 115
Slowly but surely, Prussia’s Zentrum Party, which remained opposed to voluntary abortion, proved amenable to a policy of sterilization, certainly when the costs of the welfare state began to rise alarmingly with the onset of the global economic crisis. It was only with the rise to power of the National Socialists in 1933 that the Catholic and socialist parties recoiled. Ironically, however, that Prussian draft sterilization law, which was ultimately submitted by the Zentrum Party on its own in 1932, formed the basis of the far more radical sterilization legislation of the Nazis.Footnote 116
France
France, which like other European countries was seized by fears of degeneracy, had had a strong neo-Lamarckian tradition since the nineteenth century, and the emphasis in that tradition lay on environmental factors and positive eugenics. Interest in positive eugenics was closely linked to concerns about the low birth rate and led to the creation of a pro-natalist movement, supported by the Church and the conservatives,Footnote 117 which in turn accounts for the wide range of measures to protect mothers and children (sometimes termed natalism or puericulture). In addition, there was some acceptance of large-scale immigration from countries such as Italy, Belgium, and Poland.Footnote 118
The global depression of the 1930s increased the currency of negative measures such as limits to immigration, restrictions on marriage, and sterilization, as well as triggering a debate on the quality of the considerable immigration of unassimilable races.Footnote 119 However, the conviction that in essence “biology” was determined by poverty rather than the other way round remained entrenched. With the social situation rapidly deteriorating (increasing unemployment and poverty), the French were more easily persuaded to accept eugenic ideas.Footnote 120
In principle, French socialists and communists were not unsympathetic to eugenics, but they preferred the positive variant. In 1935 the communists adopted virtually the entire programme of the French Eugenics Society, because they wanted to prevent the working class degenerating through alcoholism and syphilis. Hence the Communist Party incorporated abortion and “pre-natal screening” into its programme, a policy aim which – ironically enough – would be implemented a few years later under the authoritarian right-wing Vichy regime.Footnote 121 As a result, the communists placed themselves firmly in the communitarian tradition in which the welfare of the entire people was paramount.
In 1935, the chief editor of the Communist Party newspaper L’Humanité, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, became a great advocate of combating alcoholism, slums, prostitution, and social diseases, arguing that otherwise the French people would go under. One solution was birth control, with motherhood being regarded largely as a social function.Footnote 122 Negative eugenics remained in the background, but it did not mean the individual was not required to yield to some extent to society as a whole, a point aptly summarized by William Schneider: “The left certainly had no qualms about government intervention in the private sphere; more important, the family policy could take advantage of the broad appeal of natalist, social hygiene, and eugenic ideas that had been developing in the first three decades of the twentieth century.”Footnote 123
The aversion to biological determinism in France explains why the most famous French socialist eugenicist, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), had so little success in his own country. Like Pearson in Britain, Vacher de Lapouge, to whom the origins of “anthroposociology” can be traced,Footnote 124 was a radical disciple of Galton. He believed in hereditary factors only, and also in the existence of races, such as the Aryan, which far transcended the nation-state. He was convinced that people were fundamentally unequal, and only by rigorously selecting the very best, preferably by artificial insemination, could mankind face the future with confidence and optimism. With ideas of that sort, he became popular in Britain, the United States, and Germany, but not in France itself, where the traditions of the French Revolution and Lamarck dominated. From 1902, criticism of his biological determinism swelled to such an extent that his work found an audience almost only abroad.Footnote 125
The Netherlands
In the Netherlands too, the social question was prominent on the political and social agenda in the second half of the nineteenth century. Around the mid-nineteenth century the Leiden university librarian and classicist Jacobus Geel characterized his less fortunate fellow Leiden citizens as: “the cursed common cattle married before their eighteenth, eat potatoes, have consumptive children, depend on the poor box and beg”.Footnote 126 Whereas in Britain and France especially, distrust on the part of the labour movement based on class antagonism acted as an obstacle to the acceptance of eugenics, in the Netherlands Catholicism played an important role,Footnote 127 as did the country’s highly diverse civil society and neo-Lamarckian tradition.
Although in subsequent decades many commentators continued to be concerned about the social question, the rapid pace of urbanization, alcoholism, and degeneration, whether or not due to “poisonous germ plasm”,Footnote 128 the Lamarckian emphasis on environmental factors remained dominant in the Dutch debate, even among socialists.Footnote 129 That emphasis was reflected in the more nurture-oriented “hygienist” movement, which aimed to address social problems through preventive measures such as better housing, improved water supplies, the construction of sewers, and by combating diseases such as tuberculosis.
At the end of the nineteenth century, eugenic determinism was certainly fashionable, as can be seen from the naturalistic novels of Louis Couperus, in which fatalism is a recurrent theme. Nonetheless, many regarded eugenic determinism as excessively materialistic and reductionist. That does not detract from the fact that many observers interpreted social problems in biological terms also, as is evident from the debate on neurasthenia, which was explained as being an exhaustion of the central nervous system attributable to the intense pace of modern civilization. Many doctors believed that this “disease of modern civilization” was partly hereditary.Footnote 130 And so there were enough eugenicists, such as Marie Anne van Herwerden (1874–1934), Reader in Biology at the University of Utrecht, who believed that the social developments taking place were leading to a significant increase in the number of socially inferior individuals, who in turn promoted antisociality.Footnote 131 Ideas like that could be found repeated in a wide range of journals, including the influential sociological journal Mensch en Maatschappij, and such thinking was far from marginal among doctors and psychiatrists.Footnote 132 Furthermore, that those ideas were more than theoretical can be seen by the castration of some 400 homosexuals between 1938 and 1969, though the term eugenics was carefully avoided.Footnote 133
Nonetheless, why it was that so few Dutch social democratsFootnote 134 felt drawn to eugenics can probably be explained by the following factors. To begin with, unlike in Britain or France there was no imperialistic social preoccupation with the declining quality of the population, and especially of the quality of recruits to the army. Further, not only was the urban proletariat relatively small, but urbanization was on a smaller scale and developed more gradually than in Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and France for example. The west of the Netherlands already constituted one of the most urbanized regions of the world in the early modern period. Thirdly, as in Britain, during the interwar years the social democrats were involved only peripherally in and responsible for the construction of the welfare state, again unlike what happened in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Weimar Germany. And, as we have seen especially in the Swedish case, in their ideas about the role and costs of the welfare state socialists were easily tempted to adopt eugenic ideas. Moreover, in the Netherlands the state took a relatively cautious role in the design of a welfare state which was administered from the top but left much to private initiative, both religious and secular. That option was related closely to the denominational nature of organized social life, characterized as it was by the emphasis on “sphere sovereignty”, which ensured a resilient and powerful civil society.
Given that after World War I the SDAP did acquire political responsibility at the local level, it is interesting to analyse the social policy they developed. In the four major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague, the socialists produced aldermen who were closely involved in the construction of the welfare state and who advocated greater intervention in social life. For the purpose of our argument, the attempts to re-educate “antisocials” and “unsocials” in the interwar period were important in that context, for which many SDAP aldermen and officials tried to derive credit.Footnote 135 During the interwar period, they laid the groundwork for the so-called woonscholen (literally, housing schools), small isolated complexes on the peripheries of cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague), where slum dwellers were accommodated and taught by social workers how to lead a “decent” life.Footnote 136
Although such projects were not very large in scale, and in principle the people involved were free to leave the complexes, they show that, unlike their Belgian counterparts,Footnote 137 Dutch socialists too were not averse to social engineering. Though hardly eugenic in nature, their policy was designed to subdue “unproductive” and “antisocial” citizens, so allowing collective interests to prevail over those of the individual. However, unlike in Sweden and Switzerland it went no further than modest, tentative steps along the path of high modernism.
Finally, another good example illustrating the fact that the majority of Dutch – and British – social democrats lacked the same eugenicist impulse for social engineering as seen in Sweden and Switzerland is their policy towards “gypsies” and other traveller groups, who were prominent targets of policy in both Sweden and Switzerland. Unlike in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden, those groups were left more or less alone by British and Dutch central and local government. In Britain and the Netherlands, the authorities did attempt to remove itinerant foreigners across the border, while municipalities refused access to Dutch caravan-dwelling families where possible.Footnote 138 There were certainly no serious endeavours to civilize them, let along sterilize them – certainly not before World War II.Footnote 139 That lack of interest was consistent with the general idea of the national population being defined less in organic terms (“social body”) than it was in Scandinavia and in German-speaking countries.
Conclusion
This article has compared the theories and social policies of social democrats and other representatives of the left-wing political spectrum in six European countries. Its chief focus has been the question of how we can explain why, in certain countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, weak social groups were the target of illiberal and negative eugenic policy, especially isolation and sterilization, while in other countries left-wing politicians and theorists were far less radical (positive eugenicists, neo-Lamarckians).
To answer the central question posed here, I tested two hypotheses: the first is derived from the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, and James Scott and emphasizes the desire of the state and the technocrats and professionals associated with that state to crack down on those elements of the population who found themselves unable to cope with social change and unable to assimilate themselves into modern society, and indeed to eliminate them, by, in the most extreme cases, sterilizing or killing them (Nazis). In that view, the political convictions of policymakers are subordinated to a shared “high modernist” ideology. The vision of the future offered by the Myrdals, and to a somewhat lesser extent by the Webbs, was wholly consistent with that. They were enthusiastic advocates of a rational and technocratic ideology designed to solve social problems, without taking much account of the expertise and opinion of the population on whom that policy would be inflicted.
Although such a hypothesis is seductive, it would seem – ironically enough – to be the victim of the phenomenon it purports to explain, since the approach of Scott and others pays relatively little attention to opposing forces, inconsequences, or unintended effects.Footnote 140 Moreover, and more importantly for our theme, it fails to explain why in countries such as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, the “left” was much less eager to follow the example of their counterparts elsewhere.
That brings us to the second hypothesis, the nature of left-wing ideology, which manifested itself primarily in the concept of class antagonism and which permeated the design of the welfare state. When we compare the six countries considered in our study, one striking feature that emerges is the difference between a communitarian-organic and a class-bound form of socialism. The first variant can be found chiefly in Sweden, appropriately captured by the term folkhem(met), which means something like a home (hem) in which all people can feel at ease; it is also the term for “welfare state”. At the other extreme is the orientation towards class antagonism, with Britain as its most pronounced representative.
Closely associated with the communitarian-organic variant of the welfare state is the distinction between productive and unproductive citizens.Footnote 141 Where the welfare state is regarded as a single large supportive and unified community, those members who do not observe the rules or simply profit from it soon become a liability, and not only in a financial sense, but morally too. There, citizenship is conditional and intended only for those with the right social attitude.Footnote 142 By regarding society as a single organism, there is a great temptation to view weak social groups in medical terms of “sickness” and “infection”. Moreover, it legitimizes restricting the rights of the individual on the grounds that doing so serves the interests of the community. Eugenics was perfectly consistent with such a view, since it was both diagnosis and at the same time cure. The Webbs and the Myrdals too were prominent representatives of that approach.
Such an organic-medical approach was less likely in a more class-dependent variant of socialism. As long as social democrats and other leftist politicians believed social problems such as inequality and poverty were caused primarily by an unjust capitalist system, there was little cause for a eugenicist solution. Instead, attention was directed towards a moderate form of class struggle and on countering liberal and confessional opposition. Furthermore, class-dependent socialists accused eugenicists of a one-sided and prejudiced approach, because they targeted only the socially vulnerable, something many found sincerely objectionable as well as being electorally unwise. The position of the Anglo-Saxon eugenicists Hogben, Muller, and Haldane, most of whom were communists, illustrates this political analysis. Eugenics was fine, but first the classless society had to be realized.
That second hypothesis does not exclude the “high-modernist” approach entirely though. As we have seen, technocratic forms of social engineering played a major role in shaping illiberal policy. Moreover, the nature of civil society, which Dikötter regarded as a potential buffer against “high modernism”, was indeed an important factor. Despite what is generally assumed, the resilience and influence of civil society can also vary markedly in democracies which in theory operate well. In states ethnically, politically, and religiously relatively homogenous, such as Sweden and Norway, resistance to radical social policy was fairly limited;Footnote 143 in countries more sharply divided along political and religious lines, such as Britain and the Netherlands (with its characteristic pillarization), no consensus could be reached; in concluding this, we should regard the inhibiting influence of Catholicism as a component of that civil society.
The distinction between the two sorts of socialism does not, though, explain developments after World War II. Influenced by the ideas of Beveridge and Keynes, the postwar period saw the emergence of a universal welfare state, which bore a close relationship to the communitarian-organic vision of the social democrats. Contrary to what one might have expected based on the analysis of the interwar period, that did not lead to a more stringent and illiberal social policy. The explanation is fairly simple. In the postwar welfare state social rights (such as benefits) became largely disconnected from productive obligations.Footnote 144
Moreover, after 1945 the radicalization of the racial social policies of the Nazis before and during World War II led to a huge mistrust of anything that even remotely smacked of racism or invasion of privacy, even if that did not apply to all groups, as Swiss policy towards the “Jenischen” demonstrated. The gradual turning point in Swedish sterilization practice in the 1950s, which saw greater emphasis on voluntarism and the interests of the individual, illustrates this paradigm shift. It was only with the reform of the welfare state and cuts in welfare expenditure in the 1980s and later,Footnote 145 and the rise of populism and neo-nationalism, that the illiberal aspects of the communitarian-organic model once again seemed to gain greater acceptance throughout western Europe, a point illustrated by policies towards ethnic minorities and the “underclass”, which have increasingly been problematized and categorized as alien and unproductive members of society.
It is a view by no means alien to many social democrats, as is evident from the debate in the Netherlands in response to the Dutch Labour Party resolution on integration in the early months of 2009.Footnote 146 In that resolution, drafted by high-ranking party officials and deeply influenced by the communitarian vision of Paul Scheffer, a very influential party member and public intellectual,Footnote 147 integration was to a large extent portrayed as a cultural problem caused by Islam. And, consequently, the solution would be for the Dutch-resident Moroccan and Turkish Muslim populations to adopt Dutch norms and values.
At the same time, social and economic causes, such as unemployment and the low level of human capital of the first generation, were largely downplayed. As the Rotterdam sociologists Schinkel and Van den Berg claim, because of its emphasis on consensus and on projecting Dutch society as a coherent whole, the current debate on integration and citizenship seems actually to promote antagonisms along ethnic lines between those who have lived in the Netherlands for a long time and those who have only recently arrived. In that sense, it is consistent with the communitarian-organic tradition, whose roots have been exposed in the present article.Footnote 148
