Should Names of Swedish STASI- Collaborators be Revealed?

This year, a continuing debate in my country has concerned a list of names of Swedes, extracted from a part of the DDR (a.k.a. GDR or East Germany) secret police, STASI, archives, that somehow drifted out of Germany in connection to the dismantling of DDR and in some way or another found its way into the hands of the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) The list is supposed to contain names of certified STASI collaborators, although SÄPO officially maintains that none of them have been found to be bona fide spies, albeit some of them possibly potential active agents against other countries (primarily West Germany). To the extent that people on the list could be said to have engaged in criminal activity, these crimes have passed the time in the Swedish statute of limitations when they are no longer possible to prosecute, SÄPO maintains.

For some time, journalists and researchers have tried to access the list and the associated files, while SÄPO has insisted on restricting the access due to national security, the integrity of SÄPO activities and concern for individuals. June 24 this year, the Swedish Supreme Administrative Court decided to order SÄPO to make the records in question accessible to professor Birgitta Almgren. However, the order was surrounded by qualifications, among these that Almgren was not allowed to identify the individuals on the list. Just recently, Almgren published a book (only in Swedish so far) where she reveals generic facts about the people on the list – stressing not least the point that there is more ways of being an agent for a country than being a spy. At the same time, apparently, the list has leaked and found its way into the hands of various journalists, who have started to argue that the reasons for protecting the identities of the individuals on the list are bogus – or at least not obviously strong enough to trump the public interest of letting the detailed information become widely known. Part of the argument is about that even if only a handful of the people on the list did things motivating suspicion of criminal activity, many of them seem to have collaborated with STASI in other, less criminal or draconian, ways – such as influencing the view of the DDR in Sweden, especially in the higher levels of official society. On the list, Almgren's book reveals, are names of not only politicians or interest organisation representatives, but also researchers, educators, journalists, politicians and business-people. Another argument is more about the general need for Sweden to relate itself realistically to the era of the Cold War, in the same way as the many sides of Sweden's famous neutrality policy towards the US and NATO has been detailed in later years. SÄPO, however, resists the call for transparency, insisting on the reasons given above.

There is a basic problem with trying to assess the competing sides of this debate in that SÄPO, true to its position (and maybe its nature), does not reveal any details supporting its claims. Almgren, on the other hand, make opposing claims on the basis of the records she has been allowed to access, but an outsider has troubles assessing the validity of her position, since the raw data are not available to anyone else than Almgren. That is, as long as we do not consider the claims of those journalists and debaters who claim themselves to have access to these data (i.e. the list). Looking at this situation with the calm and disinterested eyes of a researcher, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that neither side has - to this day - presented much reliable evidence. At the same time, the sole cause of this is the insistence of SÄPO to keep access to the files restricted.


Now, if we could be certain about the position of SÄPO being a result mainly of the "natural instinct" of any security or intelligence organisation to keep everything a secret, it would seem that the argument about the generic need of making this part of Swedish history clear would be a rather strong reason for SÄPO to reconsider its position. However, since SÄPO does not reveal any details, we cannot know that this is the case. There may be a national security interest in keeping the names of the collaborators hidden from the public eye in numerous ways. The most obvious are that these people may just as well have been double agents, or that they are presently active informers of SÄPO in virtue of their past experiences – in both cases, this means that the files may indirectly reveal details about SÄPO's operational methods. SÄPO may also be right in its argument about protecting innocent people against public embarrassment on false grounds, at least in some cases. The problem, of course, is that there is no way to reliably evaluate these arguments, since the evidence is kept under lid. And, again, the same holds for the claims of those debaters who maintain that SÄPO's reasons for continued secrecy are bogus.


On the basis of this, I make four general observations:


First, one part of the problem here seems to have to do with the need for public trust in public agencies. Security and Intelligence agencies are especially in need of this, since so much of what they do and how they do it is hidden from the public eye. Such agencies, it may be said, constitute a special section of the imagined social contract of any country. This means that, for better or worse reasons, if a process of distrust is initiated by some operation of such an agency, as this process becomes more powerful, it also becomes a continuously better reason for this agency to revise the operation in question. In fact, this can be claimed to be a central task of any agency: to act in such a way that maintains its legitimacy.


Second, another part of the problem is that – apparently – the secret list is not such a big secret as it used to be anymore. Besides Almgren, it appears that several journalists and the tabloid Expressen has hold of it. The latter has the last few days started a series of articles detailing the individuals on the list (here, here) – immediately provoking responses of denial from two of the accused. No names have been given so far, but the articles are as close to identification as you can get without revealing identities in a formal way. This obviously creates a problem for SÄPO, both regarding its claims about need for continued secrecy and its trust among the public. However, it also underscores SÄPO's argument about protecting innocent individuals from disproportionate public embarrassment. In view of the passionate denial, we have reason to ask also about the soundness of the reason for making this information public in the way that it is done. It appears that we may have cause to distrust the reasons not only of SÄPO, but also of the media, in this case Expressen. Is this campaign really only about making history clear? Doesn't it smell just a little bit of the vigilante mentality of making the bad guys pay – getting back at them in the only way currently possible?


Third, while the argument in terms of the need to make clear Swedish history in these respects is a valid one, it does not follow that the time to do this is while these people are still alive. Where we are standing now, we have no way of knowing with any certainty the substance of the detailed claims made by either SÄPO, Almgren or Expressen. The only way of achieving such certainty is to have open access to the relevant evidence. But such access, as may be exemplified by the latest developments due to Expressen's articles, may be used for furthering a lot of other, less honourable, agendas as well. In effect, it creates a new uncertainty, but now the doubt targets the press rather than SÄPO. In addition, the risk of unnecessarily harming individuals for no good reason seems to be real. So, in consequence, why not wait for a while? What is the hurry? As much as I sympathise with Almgren's project and the general agenda of making important historical facts known to the public, this is not the only thing that matters. And, to this day, I have seen no good arguments for why secrecy should be lifted before the persons on the list have indeed become historical persons.


Fourth, this last point actually reveals a rather serious research ethical argument that may not be apparent at first glance. One response to the just said would be this: if we are going to have a clear picture of this historical phase, we need to be able to talk to the individuals involved. This is an impossibility given the currently valid court decision on this case (Almgren is forbidden not only to give names, but also to contact anyone of the people on the list). However, let us play with the scenario that the list is made public, in what position will this put the people found in the files? We can be certain that the press will have a field day. We can also be certain that researchers wanting to investigate the area will not hesitate to publish details from the files also when the individuals decline any participation in a study. In other words, the offer being made to these people will be: "Have your say in my study, in the context of all the bad things the press is saying about you, or the details on file about you will be revealed without your comments and explanations attached". While not constituting direct force or coercion, it does come daringly close and I, for one, would hesitate to OK a study on such premises.


So, what is my final verdict? I'm still uncertain, but I tend to lean towards the view of doubting the urgency of publicity, while at the same time seeing that SÄPO is in a position where its arguments for maintaining secrecy are gradually becoming weaker. What I do not support, though, is any simplistic black-or-white view of this matter. Not least the research ethical complexity created by immediate and complete publicity should worry researchers a bit, and the news media seem to have reason to revisit and scrutinise their reasons for publication.

Approaches to Preventing Hate Crime

This piece connects to two former posts (here and here), actualised by my participation in the project When Law and Hate Collide: Perspectives on Hate Crime, meant to produce a basic ethical, theoretical and factual framework for harmonising various aspects of European hate crime policy. My Swedish colleague in the project, David Brax, also has a series of posts linking to this project at his blog, Brax on Philosophy.

My former post was about the concept of hate crime – or, since the term "hate" is not really a good one: bias crime as many are starting to call it – and how it connects to the concept of human rights. That post, like so many opinion pieces connecting to hate crime, suffers (at least a bit) from a tendency to be seduced by the word "crime". This word makes us immediately think about criminal law-making, court proceedings, police-work, punishment, and so on. And those aspects of a policy addressing the phenomenon of hate crime are, of course, important. However, if you think that hate crime is a serious matter – serious enough to motivate special legal provisions, at that – you should in fact be more interested in another aspect, namely, what a good preventive policy related to hate crime should look like.

Now, since I am a philosopher and ethics researcher, what I have to say about this will not be very hands on or immediately practical. It will, however, be of interest for those pondering more concrete preventive issues connecting to hate crime and possessing the qualification for doing that in a good way. What I will do, is to set out four different approaches to how one may go about pondering such issues – within what theoretical frames and assumptions the development of preventive hate crime policy strategies may proceed. I will present four such frameworks for preventive thinking in this area, and then conclude by pointing to some important ways in which these frameworks connect and may promote each other.

1. Effective General Crime Prevention
As explained in my former post, hate crimes are not a special type of crime. Hate crimes are ordinary crimes with an additional element: the occurrence of the crime is connected to some sort of factor signalling that the perpetrator commits the crime in conjunction with holding or expressing a particularly biased or disparaging attitude or view towards the victim in virtue of a perceived membership of this victim in some particular social group. This immediately implies that an obvious strategy of prevention as regards hate crime is to effectively prevent crime in general.

Now, many people believe that there is a connection between retributive responses to crime and the occurrence of further crime, and that may very well be so. At least in the individual case, if a perpetrator of a crime is sentenced to imprisonment for some time, this person will not have much opportunity to commit further crime while locked up (at least not outside of prison). However, it is also well known that such retroactive individual prevention strategies are a rather minor part of the tools available to a society that wants to reduce crime rates. Philosophers of law and punishment have often pointed out that, as a matter of fact, such reduction is probably most effectively reached by simply de-criminalising some of the most common crimes. While this is a logically valid point, I will, however, not consider it further here, since it so obviously misses the point about crimes that they are considered crimes due to some reason; for instance, that they tend to seriously harm people. Still, the philosophical point helps us to see that there are other ways of thinking about crime prevention than merely reflecting on fitting responses to people who commit crimes. Instead of becoming caught up by the individual case, where the idea of prevention is practically applicable only once we know that we are dealing with a person to some extent likely to perform a criminal act, we can think about prevention on a more overarching scale, in terms of general factors that appear to be linked to the general frequency of crime in a society.

There are several factors of this type that are well-known. One, of course, is the level of poverty, destitution, and similar conditions. Another factor that has been highlighted more recently through the book The Spirit Level, is social inequality. A further, very important factor, is the level of legal security and quality of government – the latter presently a major research theme at my university – factors which involve not only that societal systems of regulation are marked by formal efficiency, transparency, clarity and so on, but also by them being trusted to a high degree by the general population. All of these factors, in turn, point to a further one: the inclusiveness, recognition and equal treatment of a society as regards the various social groups found in it, at the same time as individuals are not as a rule treated primarily as representatives of such groups. The latter is added in order to make clear that I am not here alluding to some sort of mindless "anything-goes-as-long-as-it's-part-of-your-culture" relativism.

General prevention strategies to reduce crime that work with factors such as these become more important to consider the more a society contains people who live their lives in severe circumstances, the wider the inequality of a society is, the more of corruption and legal insecurity is pestering the lives of citizens, and the more culturally pluralistic a society is. On a European level, where wide variation in all these respects is to be found, it would thus seem that general crime prevention is, in fact, an important – if not central –part of a sound hate crime prevention policy.

2. Prevention of "Hate" or Bias Against Social Groups
The other rather obvious approach to shape a prevention strategy with respect to hate crime connects to the other defining component besides crime, the "hate" or "bias" component. If hate crimes are crimes linked to the perpetrator entertaining a biased or disparaging view against the victim in virtue of perceiving the latter as member of some social group, preventing such attitudes in the first place seems the thing to do, doesn't it? In order to become clear about what that may involve, and to what extent it should be seen as a desirable or important part of a hate crime prevention policy, we need to make some qualifications.

First, trying to prevent the appearance and occurrence of these sort of attitudes is not necessarily only about fighting antagonism or prejudice between different social groups. Attitudes of the sort in focus may very well occur within such groups – and may thus be expressed between individuals who are members of the same group. A simple example would be person A saying to person B: "you are not behaving as a member of group X should", when both are members of group X. There are a lot of examples of crimes seemingly being committed on grounds such as these, such as harassment of people who do not conform to some religious or moral rule of their culture, assaults or infringements to discourage or impede socialising or forming relationships with members of other social groups, and so on. Some of these instances may, of course, belong to the cluster of problems which hate crime policies are aimed to target, but it is not obvious that all of them do. When it comes to the attitudinal component, hate crime as a societal problem foremost connects to inter-group antagonism.

Second, we have to distinguish between two conceptually separate pieces of the attitude. One of the pieces is the attitude towards the group. The other piece is the tendency to judge individual people on the basis of that attitude due to their (perceived) group-membership. Both of these seem to be necessary in order for a hate crime to ensue. However, it would seem that a preventive strategy targeting one of these pieces of the attitude would have to be rather different than a strategy targeting the other piece. Moreover, it is far from obvious that it should be the business of society to try to influence the first piece of the attitude. Suppose for instance, that the disparaging attitude towards the group is based on certified presence within that group of some phenomenon towards which it is perfectly legitimate to hold a disparaging attitude. This could be a custom harming members of the group, a traditionally held worldview containing obvious falsehoods, or something else in that vein. While society may have good reasons to fight and prevent prejudice, this would not apply in such cases. The second piece of the attitude, seems much more apt as a target of societal action. For even if the attitude towards the group would be well-founded and legitimate, it is still a fundamental flaw to judge individuals, who may very well themselves be victims of the feature of the group that explains the dislike. Simply put, preventive policy as regards hate crime targeting the attitudinal component should focus primarily on the phenomenon of overgeneralisation occurring when people project collective patterns of behaviour on single individuals.

This line of reasoning may not look immediately acceptable to everyone. Why? it may be asked, shouldn't society care about antagonistic attitudes between groups as such? Didn't you just say above that this is what is problematic about the attitudinal aspect of hate crime from a societal point of view? Indeed I did, but what has now been added is the observation that this component is complex, and that not all parts of this complex appear to be equally important. For sure, if strongly antagonistic attitudes between different groups in society develop, this is something for society to care about. But the reason for why that is so mainly seems to connect to what may follow such a development. It is not a societal problem as such that people hold prejudiced or biased views about each other. In fact, in a liberal democracy, it would seem that one of the core values that we cherish is that we are allowed to hold whatever views about anything we want. Society has some interest, of course, to try to promote an educated and rational approach to the formation of such views (which is, partly, where action to prevent overgeneralisation and projection comes in). But we cannot escape that in the end, people will form their own opinions about each other, factually as well as morally. Society is also, of course, entitled to push this basic moral message – forming as it is the basic motivation for this society in the first place. However, as just observed, that would seem to entail primarily fighting the overgeneralisation and projection tendency, since that phenomenon runs directly contrary to basic ideas about the equal value and respect owed to each individual person. We all owe each other the courtesy of judging and assessing each other on the basis of individual features and merits - that is a basic cornerstone of a liberal democratic society, and it is indeed the business of society to promote such an attitude.

3. Prevention of the Tendency of Acting Out Prejudice and Bias
Now, if we look closely at the concept of hate crime we see that the most important feature of hate crimes is fact neither the crime nor the attitudinal component, but the conjunction of the two. In effect, I argued in my former posting that one of the most salient reasons for society to have a hate crime policy is not the presence of bias and prejudice, not the presence of crime, but the presence of behaviour where people act out prejudice and crime in the form of criminal acts. In effect, it would seem that the most apt target of a preventive strategy would be exactly that.

Such a strategy is basically about building and promoting a clear and widely embraced culture of tolerance. While we may dislike each other and hold prejudiced views about each other, there is a limit to what we are licensed to do on the basis of that. This limit is not special, it is the same limit that we are not allowed to cross for any other reason as well (such as purely selfish ones). Thus, it is defined by criminal law. However, as society becomes culturally and socially more pluralistic, instances of people stepping over these limits due to bias and/or prejudice based on group-membership becomes more and more important to address from a basic societal point of view. Again, liberal democratic ideology basically celebrates difference. Thus, it is only to be expected that intra-societal socio-cultural variation is increasing. The same effect is equally (if not more) expected when several liberal democratic countries join up to form a union, like the EU. But even then, there is a limit to how much of difference is compatible with a decent society. We may think whatever we like about other people and groups, but we may not break the law because of such thoughts. This is the minimal portion of toleration that has to be in place for civilization to endure.

4. Preventing the Damage of Hate Crime
Now, quite obviously, preventing the aspect of hate crime mentioned in the former section comes down to the interest of society to prevent serious damage – in that case to basic building-blocks of a decent society. However, equally obvious, this is not the only damage done through hate crimes. Hate crimes do damage also by increasing the harm to crime victims (a view pursued foremost by Paul Iganski), but also by attacking the collective confidence and security of whole communities (as argued by, e.g. Barbara Perry). Moreover, we need to consider how patterns of hate crime may create negative spirals of self-reinforcing mechanisms. At a workshop in our project in Strasbourg in May this year, one of the several members of the European parliament that we spoke to pointed to how the acting out of bias and prejudice based on group membership against individuals of the targeted group can be expected to give rise to a similar outlook in the group to which the victim belongs towards the group to which the perpetrator belongs. This is a damage of sorts that connects closely to the aspect of hate crime addressed in the preceding section. We will meet both Barbara and Paul, in addition to a number of other scholars of the philosophy and theory of hate crime and related subjects, at a workshop in Gothenburg in just over a week from now, and I'm sure that more nuances and details on these aspects will appear in our discussions.

What is interesting to note, is that these damages may by themselves be targets of preventive policy. That is, even if hate crimes cannot always be prevented, the damage they do may be possible to at least mitigate. What I want to hold out here is that such prevention may come down to two rather different things. What is more, me and my German colleague in the project, Michael Fingerle, are hypothesising that, actually, some of these different approaches may be in severe latent conflict.

Roughly, we may distinguish, first, between preventive policies aiming for damage control and policies aiming for what in public health is known as primary prevention. Damage control is about going in when the damage is already under way and mitigate it is some manner. In the case of hate crime, an example of damage control would be if, for instance, society offers special counseling and support to hate crime victims. A primary prevention strategy, in contrast, works with the aim of having all potential victims (that is, virtually everyone belonging to a group at risk) prepared beforehand. We may also distinguish between applying such strategies at the individual or collective level. In the latter case, the strategy would work with not only the (potential) victim, but with the entire group, membership of which is what explains (potential) victimisation.

Michael likes to talk about these things in terms of resilience, a notion popular in social psychology and sociology. To be resilient is, basically, to be such that even when you are under strain, you hold up and is able to continue functioning in a good way. The idea, then, is to mitigate or prevent damage caused by hate crime by strengthening the resilience of individuals and/or groups. However, Michael has pointed out that this may mean very different things.

A classic idea about resilience of individuals or social groups is that they are equipped with psychological, cultural, social and other resources that help them stand up to external threats. However, in later decades a rather different approach to resilience has emerged, where the notion of coping has come into focus. This latter notion is markedly different from the classic resilience idea. To manage strains or external threats by coping is, basically, to give in and accept. Now, what has struck us when discussing this is that this latter strategy, at least in the hate crime case, would seem to go against the former one. If you respond to external strain in the form of hate crime by continuously accept the situation and adapt you may indeed succeed in mitigating some of the damage of the crime. However, in other respects you will actually add to this damage. In the individual case, maintaining resilience through coping can end up in the situation where you never leave your home due to the acceptance of the situation that you are a potential hate crime victim. In the case of entire groups, the coping strategy becomes quite ugly, meaning basically that oppressed people accept and adapt to the whims of the oppressor. In both cases, the end result seems to be that, first, hate crime does more damage than it would otherwise have done and, second, the chance of establishing a sort of resilience where individuals and groups are less prone to be damaged by hate crimes in the first place is considerably weakened.

Since the coping approach to resilience is currently very popular, this has given rise to some concern about what sort of preventive hate crime strategies are currently being deployed across the EU. Everything said above points to the importance of such policies being anything else than short-sighted.

Now, it is probably as obvious to anyone who reads this as to us in the project that the various aspects of hate crime that may be targeted by preventive policy connect to each other in various ways. One example is the last aspect discussed, where it is obvious that ideas about preventing or mitigating damage from hate crimes needs to be considered in the light of how the attitudinal aspect and the acting out aspect may be targeted. Another example is how the first aspect (general crime prevention), if successful, would seem to provide us with a situation where all of the other aspects become less problematic.

Swedish Government Apparently Doing a 180° Turn on Compensation for Victims of Foster Care Abuse

Well, well, I'm not surprised.... 

As previously reported, the Swedish government this weekend decided not to implement the recommendation by a governmental committee to economically compensate the victims of a deeply repugnant pattern of abuse and mistreatment within the national foster care system. And I was far from the only one reacting against this uncommonly ill-considered decision and the so obviously empty rhetoric with which it was presented. On the contrary, it would appear that ministers Maria Larsson and her colleagues in the government were the only ones in the country actually being in favor of the decision. The storm of criticism has been massive and coming from all angles, from grass-root voters of all political shades to important and influential national politicians of all parties besides the ones presently trying to run a minority government.

It's not very surprising, therefore, that the responsible minister yesterday (joined by the prime minister today) went public expressing her willingness to reconsider the decision. Larsson couldn't quite entirely face up to the fact that she and her mates had made a colossal political blunder – surrounding her statement with conditions about "the entire opposition" having to present an alternative proposal. But these are just empty words. Larsson and her boss Reinfeldt know very well that if they don't roll over, they will be humiliated by parliament and will have to go back to square one to do the job that parliament had decided to have them do in the first instance.

In comments in the Swedish media, representatives of the opposition either laugh off this childish behaviour, or express surprise at the so obviously politically stupid formulations by a responsible minister. So, as it looks right now, the compensation will be forthcoming, regardless of how much that hurts the pride of a minister who should indeed have known better in the first place.