How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (10 page)

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 productivity, 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.”

“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 being 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.

Right-wing MPs argued that the burqa went against Danish values. Muslims argued that you could probably
count the number of Danish burqa-wearers on your hand, and that this was therefore just another attempt to tar a whole minority with the brush of fundamentalism. In fact, more generally, Muslims are frustrated at being lumped into one homogenous group – something this chapter is itself guilty of. Unlike the Muslim community in, say, Germany, which is predominantly Turkish, Danish Muslims come from a very wide range of countries, which in turn sometimes makes solidarity between the different factions difficult.