Logics of Othering: Sweden as Other in the time of COVID-19
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221110675 |
| Author | Linus Hagström,Charlotte Wagnsson,Magnus Lundström |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367221110675
Cooperation and Conflict
2023, Vol. 58(3) 315 –334
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367221110675
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Logics of Othering: Sweden as
Other in the time of COVID-19
Linus Hagström , Charlotte Wagnsson
and Magnus Lundström
Abstract
‘Othering’ – the view or treatment of another person or group as intrinsically different from
and alien to oneself – is a central concept in the International Relations literature on identity
construction. It is often portrayed as a fairly singular and predominantly negative form of self/
Other differentiation. During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden at first glance
emerged as exactly such a negative Other. This article problematises such a view of Othering.
Departing from a narrative analysis of news reporting on Sweden’s management of COVID-19 in
the United States, Germany and the Nordic states, the article proposes an ideal type model with
four forms of Othering – emotional, strategic, analytic and nuanced – not recognised in previous
research. These types differ in their treatment of the Other as more or less significant and in
involving a more or less self-reflexive construction of the self. Although narratives in all these
settings drew on previously established narratives on Sweden, they followed different logics. This
has implications for our understanding of Sweden as an Other in the time of COVID-19, as well
as of self/Other relations in International Relations more broadly.
Keywords
COVID-19, identity, narrative, Othering, Sweden
Introduction
When COVID-19 began to spread in the winter of 2020, Sweden quickly gained con-
siderable international attention in media narratives around the world (Swedish
Institute, 2020). Narrative meaning-making is expected to be particularly active and
visible during crises (Roselle et al., 2014: 74) – or ‘circumstances of radical disjunc-
ture of an unpredictable kind’ (Giddens, 1984: 61), when it seems impossible to keep
erstwhile autobiographical narratives coherent and consistent. The COVID-19 crisis
can thus be expected to have intensified narrative identity reconstruction around the
Corresponding author:
Linus Hagström, Department of Political Science and Law, Swedish Defence University, PO Box 278 05,
Stockholm, SE-115 93, Sweden.
Email: linus.hagstrom@fhs.se
1110675CAC0010.1177/00108367221110675Cooperation and ConflictHagström et al.
research-article2022
Article
316 Cooperation and Conflict 58(3)
world (Hagström and Gustafsson, 2021). Moreover, internarrativity – or the way in
which new narratives draw on and are shaped by narratives already internalised by
target audiences (Spencer, 2016) – makes Sweden a fairly predictable target in this
context. The country’s adoption of a strategy that differed from those of most other
states provided observers with yet more impetus to use it in their sense-making pro-
cesses in relation to a largely unknown danger. Sweden has historically received atten-
tion for being particularly liberal, rational, pragmatic, secular and so on, and been
described alternately as a ‘model nation’ and a deterrent example. More recently, it has
also become a special target for illiberal and antagonistic narratives, as far-right and
foreign authoritarian – mainly Russian – media outlets have sought to undermine dem-
ocratic processes and institutions around the world (Bennett and Livingston, 2018;
Walker, 2018). Such media tend to represent Sweden as an Other that symbolises all
that is bad about liberalism, feminism and immigration (Ramsay and Robertshaw,
2019; Wagnsson and Barzanje, 2021). Sweden stands out even among the Nordic
countries, as it has often been portrayed as ungovernable and in a state of chaos – a
‘lost case not to be imitated’ (Deverell et al., 2021: 30). At the height of the COVID-19
crisis, Russian state-sponsored media platforms continued to depict Sweden in a con-
sistently negative way (Hellman, 2021), using the same kind of stereotypical and
malign narrative strategies that they have been applying for some time (Wagnsson and
Barzanje, 2021).
However, Sweden received attention and criticism for its way of handling COVID-19
not just from Russia. International media reporting in the first month of the pandemic
widely sought to explain what were perceived as poor policy choices with reference to
Swedish culture (Irwing, 2020). To what extent or how did Sweden emerge as a negative
Other also among its friends and allies as the COVID-19 crisis struck around the world?
This question has theoretical implications as the existing scholarly literature on identity
construction portrays Othering as a fairly singular and predominantly negative form of
self/Other differentiation. According to this logic, the positive identity of the self emerges
through the construction of a negative Other.
Based on narrative analysis that compares American, German and Nordic media report-
ing on Sweden in the initial 8 months of the COVID-19 crisis, we argue that Othering is
more varied, and propose a novel ideal type model. We define narrative as ‘a temporally,
spatially and causally connected sequence of events, selected and evaluated as meaningful
for a particular audience’ (Colley, 2017: 4). The three cases are similar, to the extent that
these states are generally considered friends and allies of Sweden, and that all three con-
texts at first glance featured highly negative narratives about Sweden and COVID-19.
However, we find that the US narratives about Sweden and the pandemic drew on previ-
ously established narratives in a largely strategic fashion. German narratives, by contrast,
featured more analytic discussions, while Scandinavian narratives were emotional, but
sometimes also nuanced. While Sweden was positioned as an Other in all three contexts,
more was at stake in the Nordic states. The article contributes by demonstrating that not all
Othering revolves around an Other that is understood as significant, that negative and posi-
tive forms of Othering can exist in parallel and that more and less self-reflexive narratives
can become intertwined.
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