This is actually my intuition, too: most of the Scandinavian countries' successes are better attributed to racial homogeneity than to actually being institutionally sounder.
I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.
You have an irrationally racist intuition, peoples hostility to racism should be your first clue to criticising your own opinion before voicing it.
Criminality has always been strongly linked to economic class differences. If you look at how immigration injects low economic class workers into medium/high class environments, it is only logical that crime numbers rise.
Racial arguments stem from self-preservationary superiority feelings, and have in the past also been used against Irish and Italian immigrants.
Yeah, I didn't fully spell out my intuition, which was based on the fact that Scandinavian countries are more democratic. This allows for a stronger welfare state, which reduces economic inequalities, thus resulting in a lower crime rate.
My intuition is that the stronger democratic nature of these cultures is due to racial homogeneity, rather than magical Scandinavian white sauce. There are cases in Africa where this can be seen (notion of "it takes a village" have generally come from African communities), but I honestly don't know enough about them to verify: have they scaled to an extent where they're comparable to the ultra-democratic bloc? Have they sufficiently negated the influences of Euro-American imperialism such that we can claim their democratic impulses are original rather than imposed?
The corollary to this is that most of the failures of American democracy can be traced back to the slave trade, from the Three-Fifths Compromise to the present day litany of anti-black sentiment. Irish and Italian immigrants did have problems, but they've been largely integrated into the American melting pot in the present day. Chinese people, such as myself, have had more trouble but have nonetheless integrated better than blacks did, possibly because our enslavement didn't have the same level of cultural momentum, possibly because of an imperialistic cultural history of our own; it's unclear to me.
The failures, thus, come from these struggles. These are struggles that, as far as I am aware, did not happen in Scandinavian history. They have humorous nationalistic jibes between each other, but they did not have the kind of wildly divisive events that led up to the Mason-Dixon line and the Reconstruction, which reinforced these divisions to the detriment of democratic institutions.
In other words, it's not actually that Scandinavians are better people. They're not more democratic because they're less racist. They're more democratic because there were no significant populations of brown people to oppress during their formative periods. Denmark is an interesting edge case, in that they participated in the Colonial Age, but nevertheless built strong democratic structures and were then enveloped in the firestorm over depictions of Mohammed. Or maybe that supports my intuition. Who can tell.
But that's how it is in political science; half of them seem ready to watch democracy deflate like a rubber ducky in the Hong Kong harbor.
Anyways, this was all off-topic, but I thought it was unfair to let an ad hominem stand.
My apologies for the ad hominem. I have a bit of a strong reaction whenever societal problems are linked to racial differences.
The biggest issue with it is that it's always better to look for a different cause, because any solution to a problem that has racial inhomogenity as a cause can only be solved by racial seggregation of one form of another.
If instead solutions are sought in equalizing social economic status and other external factors then the results can only be positive (as I believe social economic factors are dominant anyway).
I don't follow your arguments about the relation between democracy and populations of ethnical minorities at all. All countries that participated in the Colonial Age built strong democratic structures.
Many european countries welcomed a lot of north-african/arabian immigrant workers after the war, Denmark was not one of those. These workers are for a large share muslim. Because Denmark lacks this large muslim population a national paper actually dared show the images, with backlash from the islamic world as a result.
All other European countries had similar issues with mohammed depictions, but none of those made major news outlets (because of fear).
> I have a bit of a strong reaction whenever societal problems are linked to racial differences.
Except that I'm not talking about problems at all. I'm talking about the original question, which was "Why are Scandinavian countries doing so well?" Or put differently, "Why the hell aren't they having our problems?"
Or, the most actionable, "Should we copy their policies? Will those policies work for us?" And as Obamacare has helpfully demonstrated, the attempt to do so provides fuel for the fires of divisiveness. "Sweden did it" isn't a sufficient argument; we need to know why Sweden did it successfully. (For healthcare in particular, it's probably more helpful to look at the UK, since there are fewer differences.)
> I don't follow your arguments about the relation between democracy and populations of ethnical minorities at all. All countries that participated in the Colonial Age built strong democratic structures.
Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are generally accepted to be the strongest bastions of democracy internationally (when you ignore American patriotic "we were first and best" arguments, anyways). We, in this discussion, haven't come up with a useful measure for saying "strong versus weak democracy"; I suspect that I'm more strict than you are, but I also suspect that my notions are inconsistent, since the whole point of this is that I'm saying "strong but fragile", which smells contradictory.
Here's the thing: democracies are really, really hard when you have highly heterogeneous groups. As soon as that heterogeneity becomes a point of contention, your democracy is going to face some severe trauma. The last hundred years of American domestic politics have literally been a struggle with the fallout from the Civil War. For a different example, see Sudan. Or rather, Sudan and South Sudan.
> Because Denmark lacks this large muslim population a national paper actually dared show the images, with backlash from the islamic world as a result.
And this is my point. Denmark's democratic structures are held up as a guiding light for other nations. But if we actually look at how they got there, it's not because they successfully navigated the traumas that resulted from heterogeneity; it's because they never had to.
Immigration is pretty low in Scandinavia. Coming from Paris, it's quite bizarre to visit Copenhagen or Árhus and wonder what happened to the non-white people.
There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
You're welcome to show increasing percentages of non-white people in Scandinavian countries instead of spouting vitriol like an insulting and borderline racist ass.
I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.