What is considered leftist politics has undergone a revolutionary change in the last twenty years. Where the emphasis was once on universal collective solidarity (resulting in a state with high taxes and general social security), focus has now shifted to individual identity as the basis of political mobilization. Identity may involve anything from sexual orientation to ethnic/religious belonging to having a particular disease, handicap or hobby. Perhaps this has become clearest in the women’s movement, where no one seems willing to call themselves a feminist in general anymore; instead, everyone is a particular kind of feminist. As Kajsa Ekis Ekman recently argued (Dagens Nyheter 7 March 2008), all feminists nowadays want to see themselves as belonging to a particular minority feminism. ”Majority feminism” is said to conceal the fact (thus adding to the repression) that not all women are white, heterosexual, mothers, Westerners, middle class etc. An example of how this might look comes from a thesis recently put forward by Athena Farrokhzad and Tova Gerge in an article from Aftonbladet’s cultural pages (17 March) that ”Queer is socialism”. They claim, in fact in total earnestness, that ”because the market economy system is completely dependent on the continual renewal of the workforce, obligatory heterosexuality is prescribed for everyone, in order to ensure reproduction, and thus keep production rolling.” We would wish them the best of luck in mobilizing the masses and bringing about socialism with this idea as its foundation.

The more serious question is what happens with a society that is increasingly splintered into identity-based clan-like oppositions and nuances. Is there a risk that this kind of society will end up in tribal conflicts where social solidarity is crushed in a destructive us-versus-them mentality? What happens in a society when clashes in identity politics take over the political arena from the traditional left-right divide? One frequently overlooked advantage of this class-based left-right divide is that it has largely been a conflict about money, which is an infinitely divisible entity. If the main opposition in a society involves the material world, like money, then there can be negotiations and compromise ad infinitum. But what if that takes place in a society where oppositions are treated as indivisible identity-based entities? Either a mosque is built or it is not. Homosexuals cannot be allowed to adopt ”a little bit”. Is there a risk that we will end up in a destructive spiral in which absolute, non-negotiable identity-based issues take over? Some social researchers have come to emphasize that a well functioning democracy is built on a certain type of trust. The question has been raised of whether an increased us-versus-them mentality will destroy general solidarity and the trust between individuals in society. The importance of trust can be illustrated by the following example:

Imagine that you have a small company or work freelance and that your business consists of commissions and orders. One day you get an order for a job you cannot possibly take because you are completely booked up. You have two choices – either you can say no or you can recommend one of the other freelancers that you know who can do the job. However, the second alternative means that you are actually helping someone who is your competitor on a future job, so from narrow self-interest you have no reason to give a recommendation like that. But there are two reasons you should still recommend one of your competitors/colleagues for the job. The first is that it might be good for your relations with the customer to provide this kind of alternative. The second is that you might be able to count on a competitor/colleague recommending you the next time you have no work. But there is a catch here, that is, you will in all likelihood only act in this way if you can expect the competitor that you suggested to recommend you for a job if she winds up in the same situation. If you have reason to believe that your competitors/colleagues in the business would never help you in the same way, then you naturally have no reason to be the only one who acts in solidarity. But if everyone in your business thinks this way, then naturally everyone loses due to the lack of general trust.

Trust has been defined by some researchers as social capital. As the example above demonstrates, it is reasonable to see trust as an economic asset – the freelancer in our example will get more jobs if her colleagues/competitors see her as reliable. If the bank (or your relatives) considers you reliable, they can lend you money – otherwise they will not. This notion of trust also creates a major headache for economic research because actors who only see their own self-interest risk creating social traps that are devastating to both themselves and to the group/society. For strict ”homo economicus”, the best alternative is if everyone else pays their taxes, recycles their waste, does not cheat on government entitlements, pays to ride public transport and chooses environmentally friendly modes of travel while he acts as a ”free rider”. But if everyone acts in that manner, there is sure to be a destructive outcome – no state based on law, no sustainable environment, no functional public transport and no social welfare policy will be possible.

With the American political scientist Robert Putnam as inspiration, there has been extensive research showing that society’s access to social capital has positive effects in areas like economic growth, the quality of democracy and people’s own satisfaction with the life they lead. Societies in which there is a high level of trust between citizens also seem to have less corruption, lower crime rates and fewer ethnic conflicts. Naturally, it is not easy to measure something as complicated as trust, but the attempts that have been made show that the variation between different countries is considerable. On the issue ”In general, do you think that a person can rely on others?”, roughly sixty percent answer yes in the Nordic countries and about 30 percent in central and southern Europe. In countries like Turkey, the Philippines and Bosnia, the rate is around ten percent. Research on social capital up until now has been marked by great optimism – by investing in ”social capital”, it would be possible for societies to achieve all the good things listed above.

In this research, there has been work done not only using surveys but also all kinds of experiments to determine the conditions necessary for trust. A typical example is one in which a small group of people are given a modest sum of money to manage. They can choose to either put all their money together into one shared pot, in which case they would receive twice as much as they put in when the experiment was over. But that requires that everyone joins together and puts their money in the same pot. If not, they all lose the money in the experiment. The subjects must decide without knowing how the others will act. If they can rely on everyone putting up their money, they will earn twice as much, but there is naturally a temptation to act as a ”free rider” and see the others lose.

Each experiment like this can of course be varied in all kinds of way, and it is not possible to draw general conclusions from individual experiments. But some researchers have analyzed the outcome of a large number of such experiments. The results are both positive and negative. The good news is that cooperation for shared goals occurs much more frequently than the theory of economic self-interest predicts. Fortunately, people in general are not such self-interested maximizers of their own utility as the dominant economic theory has assumed. The other good thing is that the opportunity for players to communicate and get to know one another sharply increases the degree of cooperation. If the ”players” simply have a cup of coffee and make small talk with one another fifteen minutes before the experiment, their chance of avoiding the social trap increases considerably. The third encouraging finding is that gender does not seem to play any role; it is not the case that men rely more on and prefer to cooperate with other men and women with women. Researchers who have claimed that men only see men, for instance in the workplace, have been given no support from this research.

So that is the good news. The less happy news is that it is incredibly easy to trigger group conflicts in experimental research like this. That is, if there are several groups ”playing”, it is easy to get the trust within the group to spill over into distrust and conflict with the other group. One interpretation of these results is that tribalism, clan mentality and other kinds of us-versus-them thinking are deeply rooted in human nature. What we see in the world around us – the deeply destructive religious, ethnic and clan-based conflicts of all the parties involved – is thus substantial and dismal support in this research.

This question has recently taken on added impetus in what the British political scientist Kenneth Newton has come to call ”the new liberal dilemma”. The backdrop to this is the rather extensive new research results indicating that major ethnic differences in a population have a clear negative impact on social capital and, as a consequence, all the good things that accompany broad access to social capital. The highly optimistic tone that previously characterized this research has now changed into an almost dystopian reverse of this. This is true, in particular, of Robert Putnam, who recently published a report in which he shows that there is far less social capital in local communities in the US with broad ethnic diversity. People have less trust in others (even though they belong to the same ethnic group!), they know fewer people they can turn to when they need help and they participate less in all kinds of volunteer organizations. Other researcher have also shown that ethnic diversity seems to lead to less social trust, which in turn can lead to less economic growth.

Part of this can be explained by the fact that corruption and other similar problems are higher in more ethnically diverse communities. This in turn makes it difficult to collect enough taxes to finance adequate public administration and social programmes to create equality. According to this research, ethnic diversity also goes hand in hand with difficulties in creating social solidarity and a shared sense of citizenship. This is what has produced what Newton calls the new liberal dilemma (liberal, of course, in this sense being the American version of ”general left”).

Most people who are ideologically on the left have a strong positive attitude, on the one hand, to the multicultural project, to tolerance and to the creativity that diversity brings. On the other hand, they are also worried, naturally, about the prospect that this could lead to a decrease in trust and social capital in their community with negative consequences, as a result, for the economy, democracy and social solidarity. In many European countries, we are also seeing an increase in ethnically based conflicts, which has led to the rise of political parties in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway that are fighting against this trend. The success of the nationalist party Sweden Democrats in many Swedish municipalities is also a sign of this.

But is greater ethnic diversity really negative for trust between fellow citizens, for social capital and for social solidarity on a broad scale? Or is there something that these largely American and British researchers have missed? A few very recent surveys show that one can actually question the idea that multiculturalism and ethnic diversity have the negative effects noted above. One positive effect, in fact, is the development in Swedish society. Even though Sweden over the last two or three decades has changed dramatically into a considerably more multicultural society, social capital has not decreased, at least not as it can be measured in the surveys.

The American political scientist Eric Uslaner maintains on the basis of a wealth of empirical investigations that it is not ethnic diversity in itself that decreases social capital. Instead, it is the combination of social and economic inequality and a special kind of housing segregation that are the root of the problem. The latter is not housing segregation in general but rather that there are ethnic housing areas established, ones where a single ethnic group is completely dominant. The Danish scholars Peter Nannestad and Gert Tinggaard Svendsen have investigated what happens to trust for people in Denmark who have emigrated from countries where social trust is very low (like Pakistan, Turkey and Somalia). The immigrants’ trust of other people increases significantly in relation to their country of origin after a period of time in Denmark, and a critical factor in this is whether they consider that they have been treated fairly by the authorities in Denmark. Based on Swedish data, Staffan Kumlin and I have found support for a similar thesis. Trust in others for people in Sweden from a ”non-Nordic background” has a strong positive effect on whether they consider they have been treated fairly and received by Swedish authorities.

Combining these research findings produces a picture with some interesting aspects. The first is that strong internal group loyalty can result in major inter-group conflicts. That is a real dilemma that must be taken seriously in multicultural societies. The second is that when trust between individuals and groups is ”broken”, it is difficult to repair. The third is that this can have major consequences for social capital in a community and thus for social solidarity. However, this is not written in stone – it is not at all clear that societies with greater diversity have to end up in this kind of vicious circle of greater distrust and increased group conflicts.

There seem to be four remedies. The first is to avoid all forms of housing segregation by ethnicity. ”Chinatowns” and ”Little Indias” may be picturesque, but they seem to be a strong contributing factor to social distrust between groups. Because of that, there is reason to hold a very negative view toward the trend of ethnification in the school system (including preschools), which seem to be an unintended consequence of the independent school reform. Second, greater economic and social inequality is presumably negative; above all, the existence of an ethnically defined ”underclass” seems to be negative for social trust in society. Third, a state with public institutions that are seen as just, impartial, uncorrupted and competent in meeting the needs of people appears to be central in creating trust between people in society. Basically, if a person can not rely on teachers, doctors and the police, who can they rely on in society?

Finally, there is reason to look with scepticism on all forms of ”affirmative action” and all public social programmes aimed at ethnic groups in particular. The groups that the programmes are aimed at are subjected to needs tests that are difficult to administer and sometimes offensive and which create distrustfulness about whether things have gone as they should. For the majority, these kinds of programmes can create the impression that there is no principle of equal treatment. As another well-meaning departure from the principles of impartiality, there is a risk that this kind of approach undermines trust in public institutions, which in turn reduces opportunities to increase social and economic equality through general public measures.

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This article is based to large extent on insight I gained from research reports presented in a working group formed at the conference for the European Consortium for Political Research in Helsinki 7-12 March 2007, which I oversaw together with Dietlind Stolle (a professor at McGill University, Montreal). Most of the reports are available on the consortium’s website http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/ (online service).