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"I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and
Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people."
--Bernie Sanders
Liberal, Harsh Denmark
NY Review of Books, MARCH 10, 2016 ISSUE
by Hugh Eakin
1.
In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has
put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters
have brought to power a right-wing party whose leader, Jarosław
Kaczyński, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and
“various types of parasites” to Europe; in France, in December, only a
last-minute alliance between the Socialists and the conservatives
prevented the far-right National Front from triumphing in regional
elections. Even Germany, which took in more than a million
asylum-seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a
growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent
New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of
North African origin.
And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of
5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most
open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income
equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation.
Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and
university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like
accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and
its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has
long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state
has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have
a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in
Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost
its entire Jewish population.
When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent
in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that
large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social
democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from
Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable. In last June’s Danish
national election—months before the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe—the
debate centered around whether the incumbent, center-left Social
Democrats or their challengers, the center-right Liberal Party, were
tougher on asylum-seekers. The main victor was the Danish People’s
Party, a populist, openly anti-immigration party, which drew 21 percent
of the vote, its best performance ever. Its founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, for
years known for suggesting that Muslims “are at a lower stage of
civilization,” is now speaker of the Danish parliament. With the backing
of the Danish People’s Party, the center-right Liberals formed a
minority government that has taken one of the hardest lines on refugees
of any European nation.
When I arrived in Copenhagen last August, the new government, under
Liberal Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, had just cut social
benefits to refugees by 45 percent. There was talk among Danish
politicians and in the Danish press of an “invasion” from the Middle
East—though the influx at the time was occurring in the Greek islands,
more than one thousand miles away. In early September, Denmark began
taking out newspaper ads in Lebanon and Jordan warning would-be
asylum-seekers not to come. And by November, the Danish government
announced that it could no longer accept the modest share of one
thousand refugees assigned to Denmark under an EU redistribution
agreement, because Italy and Greece had lost control of their borders.
These developments culminated in late January of this year, when
Rasmussen’s minister of integration, Inger Støjberg, a striking,
red-headed forty-two-year-old who has come to represent the government’s
aggressive anti-refugee policies, succeeded in pushing through
parliament an “asylum austerity” law that has gained notoriety across
Europe. The new law, which passed with support from the Social Democrats
as well as the Danish People’s Party, permits police to strip-search
asylum-seekers and confiscate their cash and most valuables above 10,000
Danish kroner ($1,460) to pay for their accommodation; delays the
opportunity to apply for family reunification by up to three years;
forbids asylum-seekers from residing outside refugee centers, some of
which are tent encampments; reduces the cash benefits they can receive;
and makes it significantly harder to qualify for permanent residence.
One aim, a Liberal MP explained to me, is simply to “make Denmark less
attractive to foreigners.”
Danish hostility to refugees is particularly startling in Scandinavia,
where there is a pronounced tradition of humanitarianism. Over the past
decade, the Swedish government has opened its doors to hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis and Syrians, despite growing social problems and an
increasingly popular far-right party. But one of the things Danish
leaders—and many Danes I spoke to—seem to fear most is turning into
“another Sweden.” Anna Mee Allerslev, the top integration official for
the city of Copenhagen, told me that the Danish capital, a Social
Democratic stronghold with a large foreign-born population, has for
years refused to take any refugees. (Under pressure from other
municipalities, this policy is set to change in 2016.)
In part, the Danish approach has been driven by the country’s long
experience with terrorism and jihadism. Nearly a decade before the
Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015, and the coordinated
terrorist attacks in Paris in November, the publication of the so-called
Muhammad cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had already
turned Denmark into a primary target for extremists. Initially driven by
a group of Danish imams, outcry against the cartoons gave strength to
several small but radical groups among the country’s 260,000 Muslims.
These groups have been blamed for the unusually large number of
Danes—perhaps as many as three hundred or more—who have gone to fight in
Syria, including some who went before the rise of ISIS in 2013. “The
Danish system has pretty much been blinking red since 2005,” Magnus
Ranstorp, a counterterrorism expert who advises the PET, the Danish
security and intelligence service, told me.
Since the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, the PET and other
intelligence forces have disrupted numerous terrorist plots, some of
them eerily foreshadowing what happened in Paris last year. In 2009, the
Pakistani-American extremist David Headley, together with
Laskar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani terrorist organization, devised a meticulous
plan to storm the Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen and
systematically kill all the journalists that could be found. Headley was
arrested in the United States in October 2009, before any part of the
plan was carried out; in 2013, he was sentenced by a US district court
to thirty-five years in prison for his involvement in the Mumbai attacks
of 2008.
In February of last year, just weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, a
young Danish-Palestinian man named Omar Abdel Hamid el-Hussein tried to
shoot his way into the Copenhagen meeting of a free-speech group to
which a Swedish cartoonist, known for his caricatures of Muhammad, had
been invited. El-Hussein succeeded in killing a Danish filmmaker at the
meeting before fleeing the scene; then, hours later, he killed a
security guard at the city’s main synagogue and was shot dead by police.
Yet many Danes I talked to are less concerned about terrorism than about
the threat they see Muslims posing to their way of life. Though Muslims
make up less than 5 percent of the population, there is growing evidence
that many of the new arrivals fail to enter the workforce, are slow to
learn Danish, and end up in high-crime immigrant neighborhoods where,
while relying on extensive state handouts, they and their children are
cut off from Danish society. In 2010, the Danish government introduced a
“ghetto list” of such marginalized places with the goal of
“reintegrating” them; the list now includes more than thirty neighborhoods.
Popular fears that the refugee crisis could overwhelm the Danish welfare
state have sometimes surprised the country’s own leadership. On December
3, in a major defeat for the government, a clear majority of Danes—53
percent—rejected a referendum on closer security cooperation with the
European Union. Until now, Denmark has been only a partial EU member—for
example, it does not belong to the euro and has not joined EU protocols
on citizenship and legal affairs. In view of the growing threat of
jihadism, both the government and the opposition Social Democrats hoped
to integrate the country fully into European policing and
counterterrorism efforts. But the “no” vote, which was supported by the
Danish People’s Party, was driven by fears that such a move could also
give Brussels influence over Denmark’s refugee and immigration policies.
The outcome of the referendum has ominous implications for the European
Union at a time when emergency border controls in numerous
countries—including Germany and Sweden as well as Denmark—have put in
doubt the Schengen system of open borders inside the EU. In Denmark
itself, the referendum has forced both the Liberals and the Social
Democrats to continue moving closer to the populist right. In November,
Martin Henriksen, the Danish People’s Party spokesman on refugees and
immigration, told Politiken, the country’s leading newspaper, “There is
a contest on to see who can match the Danish People’s Party on
immigration matters, and I hope that more parties will participate.”
2.
According to many Danes I met, the origins of Denmark’s anti-immigration
consensus can be traced to the national election of November 2001, two
months after the September 11 attacks in the United States. At the time,
the recently founded Danish People’s Party was largely excluded from
mainstream politics; the incumbent prime minister, who was a Social
Democrat, famously described the party as unfit to govern.
But during the 1990s, the country’s Muslim population had nearly doubled
to around 200,000 people, and in the 2001 campaign, immigration became a
central theme. The Social Democrats suffered a devastating defeat and,
for the first time since 1924, didn’t control the most seats in
parliament. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the ambitious leader of the
victorious Liberal Party (no relation to the current prime minister,
Lars Løkke Rasmussen), made a historic decision to form a government
with support from the Danish People’s Party, which had come in third
place—a far-right alliance that had never been tried in Scandinavia. It
kept Fogh Rasmussen in power for three terms.
From an economic perspective, the government’s embrace of the populist
right was anomalous. With its unique combination of comprehensive
welfare and a flexible labor market—known as flexicurity—Denmark has an
efficient economy in which the rate of job turnover is one of the
highest in Europe, yet almost 75 percent of working-age Danes are
employed. At the same time, the country’s extraordinary social benefits,
such as long-term education, retraining, and free child care, are based
on integration in the workforce. Yet many of the qualities about the
Danish system that work so well for those born into it have made it
particularly hard for outsiders to penetrate.
Denmark is a mostly low-lying country consisting of the Jutland
Peninsula in the west, the large islands of Funen and Zealand in the
east, and numerous smaller islands. (It also includes the island of
Greenland, whose tiny population is largely Inuit.) The modern state
emerged in the late nineteenth century, following a series of defeats by
Bismarck’s Germany in which it lost much of its territory and a
significant part of its population. Several Danish writers have linked
this founding trauma to a lasting national obsession with invasion and a
continual need to assert danskhed, or Danishness.
Among other things, these preoccupations have given the Danish welfare
system an unusually important part in shaping national identity.
Visitors to Denmark will find the Danish flag on everything from public
buses to butter wrappers; many of the country’s defining institutions,
from its universal secondary education (Folkehøjskoler—the People’s High
Schools) to the parliament (Folketinget—the People’s House) to the
Danish national church (Folkekirken—the People’s Church) to the concept
of democracy itself (Folkestyret—the Rule of the People) have been built
to reinforce a strong sense of folke, the Danish people.
One result of this emphasis on cohesion is the striking contrast between
how Danes view their fellow nationals and how they seem to view the
outside world: in 1997, a study of racism in EU countries found Danes to
be simultaneously among the most tolerant and also the most racist of
any European population. “In the nationalist self-image, tolerance is
seen as good,” writes the Danish anthropologist Peter Hervik.
“Yet…excessive tolerance is considered naive and counterproductive for
sustaining Danish national identity.”
According to Hervik, this paradox helps account for the rise of the
Danish People’s Party, or Dansk Folkeparti. Like its far-right
counterparts in neighboring countries, the party drew on new anxieties
about non-European immigrants and the growing influence of the EU. What
made the Danish People’s Party particularly potent, however, was its
robust defense of wealth redistribution and advanced welfare benefits
for all Danes. “On a traditional left-right scheme they are very
difficult to locate,” former prime minister Fogh Rasmussen told me in
Copenhagen. “They are tough on crime, tough on immigration, but on
welfare policy, they are center left. Sometimes they even try to surpass
the Social Democrats.”
Beginning in 2002, the Fogh Rasmussen government passed a sweeping set
of reforms to limit the flow of asylum- seekers. Among the most
controversial were the so-called twenty-four-year rule, which required
foreign-born spouses to be at least twenty-four years old to qualify for
Danish citizenship, and a requirement that both spouses combined had
spent more years living in Denmark than in any other country.
Unprecedented in Europe, the new rules effectively ended immigrant
marriages as a quick path to citizenship. At the same time, the
government dramatically restricted the criteria under which a foreigner
could qualify for refugee status.
To Fogh Rasmussen’s critics, the measures were simply a way to gain the
support of the Danish People’s Party for his own political program. This
included labor market reforms, such as tying social benefits more
closely to active employment, and—most notably—a muscular new foreign
policy. Departing from Denmark’s traditional neutrality, the government
joined with US troops in military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq;
Denmark has since taken part in the interventions in Libya and Syria as
well. (In his official state portrait in the parliament, Fogh Rasmussen,
who went on to become general secretary of NATO in 2009, is depicted
with a Danish military plane swooping over a desolate Afghan landscape
in the background.)
Yet the immigration overhaul also had strong foundations in the Liberal
Party. In 1997, Bertel Haarder, a veteran Liberal politician and
strategist, wrote an influential book called Soft Cynicism, which
excoriated the Danish welfare system for creating, through excessive
coddling, the very stigmatization of new arrivals to Denmark that it was
ostensibly supposed to prevent. Haarder, who went on to become Fogh
Rasmussen’s minister of immigration, told me, “The Danes wanted to be
soft and nice. And we turned proud immigrants into social welfare
addicts. It wasn’t their fault. It was our fault.”
According to Haarder, who has returned to the Danish cabinet as culture
minister in the current Liberal government, the refugees who have come
to Denmark in recent years overwhelmingly lack the education and
training needed to enter the country’s advanced labor market. As Fogh
Rasmussen’s immigration minister, he sought to match the restrictions on
asylum-seekers with expedited citizenship for qualified foreigners. But
he was also known for his criticism of Muslims who wanted to assert
their own traditions: “All this talk about equality of cultures and
equality of religion is nonsense,” he told a Danish newspaper in 2002.
“The Danes have the right to make decisions in Denmark.”
3.
Coming amid the Fogh Rasmussen government’s rightward shift on
immigration and its growing involvement in the “war on terror,” the
decision by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 to
publish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad seemed to bring into the
open an irresolvable conflict. In the decade since they appeared, the
cartoons have been linked to the torching of Western embassies, an
unending series of terrorist attacks and assassination plots across
Europe, and a sense, among many European intellectuals, that Western
society is being cowed into a “tyranny of silence,” as Flemming Rose,
the former culture editor of Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the
cartoons and who now lives under constant police protection, has titled
a recent book.1 In his new study of French jihadism, Terreur dans
l’hexagone: Genèse du djihad français, Gilles Kepel, the French scholar
of Islam, suggests that the cartoons inspired an “international Islamic
campaign against little Denmark” that became a crucial part of a broader
redirection of jihadist ideology toward the West.
Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad that were published by Jyllands-Posten in September 2005
Roald Als
Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad that were published by Jyllands-Posten in September 2005
And yet little about the original twelve cartoons could have foretold
any of this. Traditionally based in Jutland, Jyllands-Posten is a
center-right broadsheet that tends to draw readers from outside the
capital; it was little known abroad before the cartoons appeared.
Following reports that a Danish illustrator had refused to do drawings
for a book about Muhammad, Rose invited a group of caricaturists to
“draw Muhammad as you see him” to find out whether they were similarly
inhibited (most of them weren’t). Some of the resulting drawings made
fun of the newspaper itself for pursuing the idea; in the subsequent
controversy, outrage was largely directed at just one of the cartoons,
which depicted the Prophet wearing a lit bomb as a turban. Even then,
the uproar began only months later, after the Danish prime minister
refused a request from diplomats of Muslim nations for a meeting about
the cartoons. “I thought it was a trap,” Fogh Rasmussen told me. At the
same time, several secular Arab regimes, including Mubarak’s Egypt and
Assad’s Syria, concluded that encouraging vigorous opposition to the
cartoons could shore up their Islamist credentials.
Once angry mass protests had finally been stirred up throughout the
Muslim world in late January and early February 2006—including in Egypt,
Iran, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan—the crisis quickly took on
a logic that had never existed at the outset: attacks against Western
targets led many newspapers in the West to republish the cartoons in
solidarity, which in turn provoked more attacks. By the time of the
Charlie Hebdo massacre in early 2015, there was a real question of what
Timothy Garton Ash, in these pages, has called “the assassin’s veto,”
the fact that some newspapers might self-censor simply to avoid further
violence.2 Jyllands-Posten itself, declaring in an editorial in January
2015 that “violence works,” no longer republishes the cartoons.
Lost in the geopolitical fallout, however, was the debate over Danish
values that the cartoons provoked in Denmark itself. Under the influence
of the nineteenth-century state builder N.F.S. Grundtvig, the founders
of modern Denmark embraced free speech as a core value. It was the first
country in Europe to legalize pornography in the 1960s, and Danes have
long taken a special pleasure in cheerful, in-your-face irreverence. In
December Politiken published a cartoon showing the integration minister
Inger Støjberg gleefully lighting candles on a Christmas tree that has a
dead asylum-seeker as an ornament (see illustration on page 34).
Explaining his own reasons for commissioning the Muhammad cartoons,
Flemming Rose has written of the need to assert the all-important right
to “sarcasm, mockery, and ridicule” against an encroaching
totalitarianism emanating from the Islamic world. He also makes clear
that Muslims or any other minority group should be equally free to
express their own views in the strongest terms. (Rose told me that he
differs strongly with Geert Wilders, the prominent Dutch populist and
critic of Islam. “He wants to ban the Koran. I say absolutely you can’t
do that.”)
But Rose’s views about speech have been actively contested. Bo
Lidegaard, the editor of Politiken, the traditional paper of the
Copenhagen establishment, was Fogh Rasmussen’s national security adviser
at the time of the cartoons crisis. Politiken, which shares the same
owner and inhabits the same high-security building as Jyllands-Posten,
has long been critical of the publication of the cartoons by its sister
paper, and Lidegaard was blunt. “It was a complete lack of understanding
of what a minority religion holds holy,” he told me. “It also seemed to
be mobbing a minority, by saying, in their faces, ‘We don’t respect your
religion! You may think this is offensive but we don’t think its
offensive, so you’re dumb!’”
Lidegaard, who has written several books about Danish history, argues
that the cartoons’ defenders misread the free speech tradition. He cites
Denmark’s law against “threatening, insulting, or degrading” speech,
which was passed by the Danish parliament in 1939, largely to protect
the country’s Jewish minority from anti-Semitism. Remarkably, it
remained in force—and was even invoked—during the Nazi occupation of
Denmark. According to Lidegaard, it is a powerful recognition that
upholding equal rights and tolerance for all can sometimes trump the
need to protect extreme forms of speech.
Today, however, few Danes seem concerned about offending Muslims.
Neils-Erik Hansen, a leading Danish human rights lawyer, told me that
the anti–hate speech law has rarely been used in recent years, and that
in several cases of hate crimes against Muslim immigrants—a newspaper
boy was killed after being called “Paki swine”—the authorities have
shown little interest in invoking the statute. During the cartoon
affair, Lidegaard himself was part of the foreign policy team that
advised Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen not to have talks with Muslim
representatives. When I asked him about this, he acknowledged, “The
government made some mistakes.”
A playground in Mjølnerparken, a housing project largely for immigrants
in north Copenhagen known for gang activity and high unemployment
Claus Bech/Scanpix
A playground in Mjølnerparken, a housing project largely for immigrants
in north Copenhagen known for gang activity and high unemployment
4.
Last fall I visited Mjølnerparken, an overwhelmingly immigrant “ghetto”
in north Copenhagen where Omar el-Hussein, the shooter in last year’s
attack against the free speech meeting, had come from. Many of the youth
there belong to gangs and have been in and out of prison; the police
make frequent raids to search for guns. Upward of half the adults, many
of them of Palestinian and Somali origin, are unemployed. Eskild
Pedersen, a veteran social worker who almost single-handedly looks after
the neighborhood, told me that hardly any ethnic Danes set foot there.
This was Denmark at its worst.
And yet there was little about the tidy red-brick housing blocks or the
facing playground, apart from a modest amount of graffiti, that
suggested dereliction or squalor. Pedersen seems to have the trust of
many of his charges. He had just settled a complicated honor dispute
between two Somalian families; and as we spoke, a Palestinian girl, not
more than six, interrupted to tell him about a domestic violence problem
in her household. He has also found part-time jobs for several gang
members, and helped one of them return to school; one young man of
Palestinian background gave me a tour of the auto body shop he had
started in a nearby garage. (When a delegation of Egyptians was recently
shown the neighborhood, the visitors asked, “Where is the ghetto?”)
But in Denmark, the police force is regarded as an extension of the
social welfare system and Pedersen also makes it clear, to the young men
especially, that he works closely with law enforcement. As last year’s
shooting reveals, it doesn’t always work. But city officials in
Copenhagen and in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, describe some cases in
which local authorities, drawing on daily contact with young and often
disaffected Muslims, including jihadists returning from Syria, have been
able to preempt extremist behavior.
Across Europe in recent weeks, shock over the arrival of hundreds of
thousands of refugees has quickly been overtaken by alarm over the
challenge they are now seen as posing to social stability. Several
countries that have been welcoming to large numbers of Syrian and other
asylum-seekers are confronting growing revolts from the far right—along
with anti-refugee violence. In December Die Zeit, the German newsweekly,
reported that more than two hundred German refugee shelters have been
attacked or firebombed over the past year; in late January, Swedish
police intercepted a gang of dozens of masked men who were seeking to
attack migrants near Stockholm’s central station. Since the beginning of
2016, two notorious far-right, anti-immigration parties—the Sweden
Democrats in Sweden and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the
Netherlands—became more popular than the ruling parties in their
respective countries, despite being excluded from government.
Nor is the backlash limited to the right. Since the New Year’s attacks
by migrants against women in Cologne, conservative opponents of German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy have been joined by feminists
and members of the left, who have denounced the “patriarchal” traditions
of the “Arab man.” Recent data on the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats,
who in January were polling at 28 percent of the popular vote, shows
that the party’s steady rise during Sweden’s decade of open-asylum
policies has closely tracked a parallel decline in support for the
center-left Social Democrats, the traditional force in Swedish politics.
Confronted with such a populist surge, the Swedish government announced
on January 27 that it plans to deport as many as 80,000 asylum-seekers.
As the advanced democracies of Europe reconsider their physical and
psychological borders with the Muslim world, the restrictive Danish
approach to immigration and the welfare state offers a stark
alternative. Brought into the political process far earlier than its
counterparts elsewhere, the Danish People’s Party is a good deal more
moderate than, say, the National Front in France; but it also has
succeeded in shaping, to an extraordinary degree, the Danish immigration
debate. In recent weeks, Denmark’s Social Democrats have struggled to
define their own immigration policy amid sagging support. When I asked
former prime minister Fogh Rasmussen about how the Danish People’s Party
differed from the others on asylum-seekers and refugees, he said, “You
have differences when it comes to rhetoric, but these are nuances.”
In January, more than 60,000 refugees arrived in Europe, a
thirty-five-fold increase from the same month last year; but in Denmark,
according to Politiken, the number of asylum-seekers has steadily
declined since the start of the year, with only 1,400 seeking to enter
the country. In limiting the kind of social turmoil now playing out in
Germany, Sweden, and France, the Danes may yet come through the current
crisis a more stable, united, and open society than any of their
neighbors. But they may also have shown that this openness extends no
farther than the Danish frontier.
—February 10, 2016
1
A revised paperback edition of Tyranny of Silence will be published by
the Cato Institute in September. ↩
2
See “Defying the Assassin’s Veto,” The New York Review, February 19, 2015. ↩
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