How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark

by Kingsley, Patrick

  According to Sørensen, some of these changes will include replacing the treatment previously provided by humans in hospitals with treatment carried out at home by robots. At first, this conjures frightening images of C-3PO running around a bathroom stabbing grannies with a syringe. But the robots Sørensen is creating are more subtle than that. As it happens, they include not just the blood-samplers whose interface was designed by the students at Kolding, but the Sugar-themed iPad described above.

  At present, chronic asthma sufferers need to be treated in person, not least because the treatment is boring. If left to their own devices, a patient will often fail to complete it. But it’s hoped that they could eventually treat themselves on their own at home, with the help of something incentive-based like this iPad. Since the iPad only plays movies when it is used properly, the idea is that it could coax a patient through their asthma treatment by itself, without the need for a doctor’s involvement – while still allowing doctors and nurses to keep abreast of the patient’s progress remotely via a digital database. This would save the patient from having to visit a hospital so often and free up hospital space for more urgent cases – particularly important in an area where nine hospitals have closed in recent years and 30% of hospital beds have been lost.

  But this is about more than just healthcare. It’s a symptom of a wider anxiety across Denmark; just one of many ways in which people are wondering whether, in these rocky economic times, the welfare state itself can be maintained – and if so, how.

  Many people are not optimistic. When I write to the great Knud Jespersen, asking for an interview about the future of welfare, he replies mainly to explain that this will not be possible, because he is away for the spring in Switzerland. But he adds a postscript that offers some insight into what his dispirited position might have been. “I wish you a pleasant and rewarding stay in Denmark,” he writes, “hopefully enjoying the setting sun over the Danish welfare state as we have known it over the last 30 years.”

  Few people have known that state better over the last 30 years than a venerable gentleman called Dr Gunnar Viby Mogensen. For much of his career, he was a senior researcher at the Social Research Institute, a national organ that investigates how best to improve the welfare system. More recently, he wrote one of the most comprehensive books on the subject – The History of the Danish Welfare State since 1970 – and his conclusion about its future is, like Jespersen’s, vexed. “The welfare state we have is excellent in most ways,” he says, over cake and coffee in his house in Lyngby, north of Copenhagen. “We only have this little problem. We can’t afford it.”

  Viby Mogensen cites the fact that Denmark is running a deficit worth around 3% of GDP. In global terms, particularly during a recession, this is not that high – but Viby Mogensen’s concern is that it will only get bigger. Taxes cannot be raised beyond their already astronomic levels, he argues, for fear of putting off foreign business, while more Danes are emigrating for good than in previous decades, which has stunted existing tax revenues.

  “This is a situation that cannot go on for ever,” he claims. “We will not end up in a situation like Greece, I am sure. But we are going small steps in this direction. Which means that there is no doubt that we will have heavy welfare reforms. The only question for me is who will make these reforms. Will it be Schäuble, the German finance minister? Or will it be the Danish politicians?”

  Viby Mogensen’s argument is the kind that will divide opinion, and he himself is – rather modestly – at pains to emphasise that he is no expert on economic policy. But as an economic and social historian, he is more confident in his assessment of how the welfare system grew so dangerously big in the first place. He puts the problem down to three main issues. The first was the complete reorganisation of the welfare system in 1970, which dramatically increased the level of the welfare benefits relative to wages. The second was the introduction in 1979 of the early retirement scheme, which allowed Danes to retire up to five years early. And the third was the loosening of the borders in 1983, which, for the first time in Danish history, saw thousands of immigrants from the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent move to Denmark. Since many of them neither spoke Danish, nor had university degrees, they tragically – and it is nothing short of a national tragedy for Denmark – found it hard to break into what is a highly skilled labour market. As a result, many ended up on benefits. In 2011, only 52% of foreign-born men and 43% of foreign-born women were in work, around 20 percentage points below their Danish-born counterparts. All three of these issues, says Viby, have resulted in an ever-increasing number of people on welfare being paid for by an ever-dwindling number of taxpayers – a fiasco in a system maintained mainly through high taxation. He points at the covers of the two volumes of his book. On the first are some women in a fish factory; on the second are some early-retirees on a golf course. “I can’t get it,” he says. “These women working in a fish factory are paying taxes to finance the people on the golf courses.”

  They are also financing a large number of people on unemployment benefits, something which increasingly sticks in the craw of some Danes. Previously, the number of people on benefits was a symbol of pride, at least for those on the left – the sign of a social democracy in good working order. But the media climate has changed, and in certain quarters those in unemployment are today seen less as the responsibility of the state and more as a drain on it. Even though it’s Denmark, you come across the same arguments you see in most countries during a downturn – they’re benefit-scroungers; they don’t deserve it – and you hear exaggerated rumours of youngsters hosting parties to celebrate their admission to benefit schemes.

  At the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Welfare Research, down the road from Sørensen and his robots, Professors Jørn Henrik Petersen and Klaus Petersen explain the numbers. Out of a population of 5.5m, they point out, 1.8m Danes are removed from the labour market – 850,000 on some form of benefits (unemployment; sickness; early retirement; parental leave) and 950,000 more in retirement. But in actual fact, that first group of benefit recipients is not a problem in itself; it is just rendered more significant because the second group, the number of retirees, is likely to grow greatly in size in the coming years.

  “The very centre of the problem is obvious if you look to the public sector,” says Jørn. “More than half the present labour force working in home-help for the elderly has passed the age of 50. This means that they will retire within the next five to eight years. And that means you have to find their replacements in a declining labour force. And that becomes a hell of a problem.”

  But where Sørensen sees robots as the answer, the Petersens see young immigrants. In years gone by, many Danes felt that the reason so many so-called “New Danes” remained unemployed was that they were not truly Danish – that they were not culturally wedded to the concept of the collective. It has often even been argued that the Danish welfare state can exist only in a monoculture inhabited by indigenous Danes, and no one else. But really the problem was social, rather than racial. Immigrants found it hard to break into the job market not because they were lazy, but because their skills weren’t yet suited to Denmark. They couldn’t speak the language, they couldn’t get into university, and consequently, in the absence of many manual jobs, couldn’t find unemployment. But the Petersens argue that if these “New Danes” were encouraged and trained to work in the social sector, it would kill three birds with one stone. Unemployment among immigrant communities would fall; tax revenues would rise; and there would be enough workers to staff the health service. “A lot of Danes have come to the conclusion that immigrants might from some point of view be a problem,” says Jørn. “But equally they might be the answer to another problem. If these immigrants could be integrated into the labour market so that their supply corresponded to the demand, it looks as though they will be part of the solution.”

  Mainstream debate centres on not just expanding the labour market, but also increasing its pro
ductivity, through changes to early retirement, increasing working hours and also reducing the time people can spend on unemployment benefits – it’s gone from four years to two, after which you receive a slightly smaller payment. There are now financial incentives for students to finish university earlier and so enter the job market sooner, and moves to tighten the qualification rules for a controversial scheme that allows people to retire long before 60 due to illness.

  In general, though, Jørn Henrik Petersen admits the threat to the welfare state is not yet as large as it is in, say, Britain. Cuts to actual services and benefits have been small, and the only major reforms have so far been limited to extending working hours or restricting early retirement. “These are minor problems compared to what’s being discussed in other countries. And that is linked to this emphasis on social cohesion, to the belief in a reasonable degree of social equality. Despite all the differences, there is some kind of solidarity in the Danish population. The only group excluded from that? That would be the immigrants.”

  5. BEING DANISH:

  the immigrant’s dilemma

  “It’s like being Danish is something that you’re born into.” – Michala Clante Bendixen

  About five years ago, as they often did at the time, Danish Broadcasting televised a live debate about Islam. Representing its critics was Mogens Camre, a skinny MEP from the far-right Danish Folkeparti (DFP). On the other side of the table stood Fatih Alev, a liberal imam. Short and stocky, Alev was born and raised in Denmark, and often speaks out against aspects of extremist Islamic culture such as forced marriage.

  At some point, the atmosphere turns toxic. Islam, says Mogens Camre, is akin to Nazism. That’s an absurd generalisation, replies Alev: Nazism is the kind of rhetoric used by the DFP. Then Camre loses it.

  “You have come to this country,” he snaps. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I was born in this country,” says Alev, calmly. “I’m not an immigrant.”

  “Stay in your country.”

  “Denmark is my country. You need to respect your fellow citizens.”

  “Du er ikke medborger i mit land,” replies Camre. “You are not a fellow citizen.”

  It would be nice to be able to say that this conversation (which you can see for yourself in Helle Hansen’s excellent documentary Ordet Fanger, or “Words Matter”) was a one-off – analogous with Nick Griffin’s one-off appearance on Question Time. But it wasn’t. Unlike the BNP, the DFP is not a fringe party. It remains the third-largest party in the Danish parliament, and from 2001 until 2011 the centre-right coalition government relied on their support to function. The DFP’s politicians were constantly in the news, and – since the government was so reliant on their support – they became powerful policy-makers, pushing through ever more stringent anti-immigration laws.

  It was, and to an extent still is, a noxious environment – and its nadir came with the Muhammed cartoons crisis in 2005-6. At the time, rumours swirled of a children’s author who wanted to write a book about the prophet Muhammed. The author claimed he couldn’t find any illustrators brave enough to draw the prophet – an action Muslims consider offensive – and saw this as a worrying erosion of free speech. The editors at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten agreed. Wanting to show that they wouldn’t be dictated to by the customs of another culture, the paper invited 40 established cartoonists to draw Muhammed. Twelve cartoonists complied, and the selection was printed in late September 2005. Some of the selected images were simply portraits of the prophet. One was a piss-take of the whole process – a schoolboy called Mohammed who had written on his blackboard: “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.” But two were clearly intended to offend. The first showed Muhammed telling a group of deceased Muslim men that heaven had run out of virgins. The second depicted Muhammed as a terrorist, with a bomb sticking out of his turban.

  The cartoons themselves caused considerable offence, but it was what happened next that created a crisis. Despite widespread protests and complaints, Jyllands-Posten would not apologise for printing the cartoons. Even more significantly, the then prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refused to meet with a delegation of ambassadors from across the Muslim world who wanted to discuss not just the cartoons, but other recent instances of Islamophobia too. Feeling ignored, a group of Danish Muslims toured the Middle East towards the end of 2005, in an effort to raise awareness about the way Muslims were treated in Denmark. The tour achieved its aim, and at the beginning of 2006, people across the Middle East began to burn the Danish flag, and to boycott Danish goods – costing the Danish economy hundreds of millions of dollars. Several Arab and Asian countries then recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen, and the crisis became the defining moment of the Danish noughties.

  Over the past few years, the issue has been trodden over so many times that the country is tired of discussing it. No firm conclusion was ever reached. Some Danes think the cartoons were a needless provocation. Others think they were an appropriate defence of free speech. Farshad Kholghi is from the latter camp. One of the stars of The Killing, Kholghi fled the Iranian revolution for Denmark as a child, and now writes a right-wing column for Jyllands-Posten alongside his acting and stand-up work. He justifies the cartoons with an anecdote from one of his stand-up nights. “I was discussing the crisis and defending the cartoonists,” says Kholghi, “and the audience were almost offended by my speech. But then this Iranian woman jumped out on stage and told them: “You shut up. I just came from Iran. I was in the streets, and when I said I lived in Denmark, everyone gave me the thumbs up. They said: ‘You guys in Denmark, you’re so brave, you make fun of the mullahs. That’s what we try to do here, but they kill us.’ And that was an eye-opener.”

  But when I meet Fatih Alev, he says this kind of argument misses the point. “We don’t have a problem with non-Muslims drawing the prophet Muhammed,” says Alev. “They do it. They have done it before. There was a book published around 2002 by a Danish priest called God is Great. It’s a comparison of Christianity and Islam, and it’s been in Danish libraries for many years. But no Muslim has ever objected to it. So the anger in 2005 was not about people drawing the prophet. That’s nonsense. The problem was that the cartoonists associated the prophet with terrorism, and that’s unacceptable.”

  This is the heart of the issue: the cartoons weren’t really about preserving open debate. They were intended to provoke and humiliate an already marginalised section of society. “Most Muslims value free speech,” says Alev. “We appreciate it all the more because of the problems in many of the countries that we come from. But this wasn’t about free speech. This was about offending a group in society that already felt very unwelcome. It was a provocation.”

  To understand where Alev is coming from, you need to see the cartoons in the context of widespread Danish Islamophobia and xenophobia throughout much of the past decade. Put simply, minorities (who form around 10% of the population) – and particularly Muslims (around 3%) – feel got at. In the run-up to the cartoons’ publication, minister of culture Brian Mikkelsen had called Islam “medieval”. The DFP MP Louise Frevert described Muslims as a tumour that needed to be removed from Europe. Søren Krarup, a DFP MP who doubles as a priest, has described the headscarf as the “equivalent to Communist and Nazi symbols”, and thinks that a teacher who wears one is essentially wearing a Nazi uniform. The Koran, he adds, is like Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

  Foreigners were and are still often portrayed in a negative light by the media. “I was used to the verbal attacks and insults being made in the Danish newspapers on a daily basis,” says Alev. In 2009, Lars Hedegaard – then a long-standing columnist for the centre-right broadsheet, Berlingske Tidende – was arrested for suggesting that Islam allowed men to rape their daughters. In Chapter seven, The Killing’s Farshad Kholghi talks about how hard it was to get an Asian part that didn’t involve playing a terrorist or a criminal – and that’s coming from a man who has himself been criticised for be
ing too critical of Islam. When I visit Denmark, everyone mentions a recent Politiken article about an immigrant who impressed at his job. That everyone talks about its publication with such surprise tells its own story.

  And then there were the government policies. During the noughties, the centre-right coalition revamped the immigration procedure to include a now notorious points system. In the words of Mads Brandstrup, a political correspondent for Politiken, “for any country with brown people, it was basically impossible to get in”. The sketch troupe Circusrevy, who broadcast an annual revue on Danish television, wrote a skit that satirised the absurdity of the system. The sketch depicted two would-be Muslim immigrants – Fatima and Ahmed – who wanted to meet the criteria so badly that they bought a bible and traditional Danish clothes, covered their flat in porcelain, started watching porn, and then got divorced. They still didn’t pass.

  The government also introduced a harsh set of marriage rules – rules sadly not too dissimilar to those announced in Britain in 2012. In order for a Danish resident to marry someone from outside the EU – or to be reunited with their existing spouse – both parties would have to be older than 24; produce a sizeable deposit; and be earning more than about £30,000 a year. Unless one of them had lived in Denmark for at least 28 years, the couple would have to have been in Denmark, on aggregate, longer than they had lived overseas. The move was justified as a crusade against forced marriages. But in reality, those immigrants who really wanted to get married went to live in Malmø, across the sea in Sweden, and every other immigrant just felt picked on – a feeling that was amplified by later attempts to ban the burqa and the headscarf.