Failing to Perform Citizenship: Daily Narratives About Stockholm’s ‘vulnerable EU citizens’

Abstract

The question of mobile Roma beggars in Europe has been analysed in terms of securitization, racialization, and deportability. These people have been hailed as ‘abject’ or ‘failed’ citizens, the problem of race being made largely invisible. In the Swedish context, the category of race does not emerge in overt form, and Swedes generally imagine themselves to be an egalitarian and just society. However, in Stockholm, in 2015, the unprecedented visibility of rough sleeping EU-migrants turned daily chance meetings tasks into ‘ethical encounters’. Using the concept of enacting citizenship and the Narrative Policy Framework, this article analyses day-to-day narratives about ‘vulnerable EU citizens’ constructed by the media and experts in the winter of 2015 in Stockholm. Most press narratives would silence the voices of migrants, framing them as passive victims, their problem being defined in terms of extreme temperature, thus making cold weather the principle villain. With regard to acts of citizenship, the paper analyses expert opinions on the migrants’ performance. Their stories and discourse reveal the image of a ‘vulnerable EU citizen’: one of a passive, begging, distressingly visible individual who is failing to perform citizenship. This shortcoming is regarded here as contributing to the justification of a wider policy framework in which the migrants’ claims are seen as unfounded and undeserved, while their attitude is viewed as unappreciative, although they would allegedly not be racialized as a group.