Contemporary intellectual critique, seeing multiculturalism as a threat to liberal core values and social cohesion, tells us more about paradoxes of a contemporary Western ‘liberalism’, which is loosing contact with its founding premises, than about actual multicultural policies. The article sets out to review the Swedish trajectory between a unique liberal multicultural agenda and generous policies of asylum and naturalisation towards an alignment with a currently rising wave of retrogressive identity politics, securitisation of integration policy and the institutionalisation of heavily monitored processes of ‘circular migration’ in the EU. This development is seen as propelled by a political merger of a neo-liberal concern for economic growth and a neo-conservative focus on needs for reinforcing moral duty, family responsibility, cultural homogeneity and community cohesion, but with a rich body of established civil, political, social and cultural rights of citizenship exposed to erosion.