How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (8 page)

Sometimes this process takes the form of “body-storming” – like a brainstorm, but using physical rather than mental experiences to stimulate ideas. Recently, robotics researchers at the University of Southern Denmark asked a
group of Kolding students to design the interface for a robot that could be used to take blood samples in Danish hospitals instead of human nurses. As part of the project’s body-storm phase, every single student had to learn to take blood from real patients. “We had to understand that fear of having blood taken, to understand the process of it.” What they soon realised was that patients would only stand for their arm being injected with a syringe by a robot if a) they couldn’t see the injection taking place; and b) the robot looked nothing like a robot. So what they came up with instead was a cosy, dolphin-shaped armrest into which a patient would slot her arm. A hidden infrared ray would then identify the right vein, an unseen syringe would pop out momentarily, prick the skin and then shoot back into the armrest, ready for testing.

Quite why such an extraordinary robot was designed in the first place – and the implications it has for Denmark’s massive welfare state – will be explored in the next chapter.

“The welfare state we have is excellent in most ways. We only have this little problem. We can’t afford it.” – Gunnar Viby Mogensen

There is a well-known sketch by a pair of Norwegian comedians in which a Dane tries to buy a bike tyre from a hardware store. Things begin badly. The man behind the counter can’t understand his compatriot’s accent – but is too embarrassed to say so. Instead, he just takes a wild guess at what the cyclist wants and hands over a long file. Then things get worse. It turns out the cyclist can’t understand the vendor either, but is similarly too polite to admit it. So he pretends the file is what he wanted all along and asks how much it costs. The vendor tells him, but again the cyclist can’t work out what was said, so he ends up holding out a fistful of Danish kroner and allows the hardware man to pluck the
appropriate amount from his hands. To round off the farce, a cunning milkman enters to ask if the store needs 1000 milk bottles. Again, the vendor can’t understand a word of the milkman’s question, says yes simply to make things easier and is landed with one of the largest domestic grocery bills ever known in Scandinavia.

The sketch’s popularity on YouTube shows how successfully it riffs on traditional Scandinavian stereotypes. The Swedes and the Norwegians think the Danes are loud, brash and unintelligible – even to each other. The Danes think the Swedes (their medieval rivals) are uptight control freaks. Both joke that the Norwegians are mere provincial bumpkins (Norway was once a colony of both Denmark and Sweden), while everyone thinks the Finns are weird. You can see a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of these hackneyed tropes in the first episode of
The Bridge
, when a Danish detective (played by Kim Bodnia) is paired with a Swedish one (Sofia Helin) after a dead body is found draped over the two countries’ mutual border. When a woman needs to drive through a crime scene to get to her husband’s hospital, Bodnia – the laid-back Dane – gives her the go-ahead before Helin – the pedantic Swede – slaps him down. Later, Bodnia tries to make a joke to a group of Swedish coppers. Cue: tumbleweed. Like in the Norwegian skit, no one understands him.

These stereotypes are of course just that: stereotypes. But some of them have distant roots in truth – and in the case of the Danes, it’s in the fact that their language, once
very similar to Norwegian and Swedish, has developed an increasing number of blurred word endings and glottal stops. When I first tried to learn Danish, I was amazed that a language could carry as many silent consonants as English. One of the first phrases I came across was the Danish for “what about you?” Written down, it is “
Hvad med dig
?” Out loud, it sounds like more of a mush: “vamedye?” Of its seven consonants, only three are pronounced. In other phrases, “
ikke
” (the Danish word for “not”) should technically be pronounced “ee-ker”, but in fact sounds more like the English word “air”; the Danish “d” is often softened into a kind of “l”-sound; while the “g” is sometimes lost altogether. In a famous example, the Danish word for cake was once the same as it still is in Swedish: “
kaka
”. But while the Swedish version remained fairly static, the Danish word has been eroded from “
kaka
” to “
kage
”, and its pronunciation has drifted from “ka-ka” to “kay-ger”, and from “kay-ger” to “kay-er”, and from “kay-er” to something that sounds a bit like the English name “Kay”.

This swallowing of unstressed syllables is nothing new – it was first documented in the 15th century by a touring Swedish bishop – and nor does it mean that Danish is any less sophisticated than languages like German and Russian, which are still fully inflected. (Word endings may have been strangled in Danish, but subtleties in meaning are instead conveyed by complex variations in word order.) However, harmless as it is, the process has sped up markedly in the last three decades, during which time the Norwegians and
Swedes have found Danish increasingly hard to understand. In part, this is because Scandinavians have been watching less of their neighbours’ television and more of its English-language equivalents, and are therefore less exposed to the nuances of each other’s languages.

But a group of linguistic researchers I meet at the University of Copenhagen have another intriguing theory: that this exponential increase is a by-product of the introduction in the 60s of state-subsidised childcare. The policy, which sees the state pay for around three-quarters of the cost of childcare for every toddler over one, has made it much easier for mothers to go back to work. Today, 74% of Danish mothers return to their jobs after having children, compared to just 55% in Britain.

According to the researchers, this progression may have had a harmless yet fascinating side effect. Icelandic, says Professor Marie Maegaard, is still the most conservative of the Nordic languages, because in Iceland many children grow up on isolated farms and talk a lot with their grandparents. But in Denmark, she points out, “Almost every Danish child goes to kindergarten from the age of one. And that will speed up any development because they don’t talk so much with the older generations, who have more conservative diction.”

Maegaard and her colleagues are still fleshing out the theory, but regardless of its accuracy, it still gives an intriguing insight into the impact of the thing that may define Denmark above all else: the welfare state.

The state is huge in Denmark. It spends more money, as a percentage of GDP, than any other country in Europe. It employs around 900,000 Danes – about a third of the Danish workforce – and unsurprisingly therefore provides a raft of free services to its citizens. Childcare, healthcare and state education are naturally three of them – but more surprisingly, so is university education and most of its living costs. Over-65s receive a basic state pension worth twice the UK version. Despite recent rule changes, they can still retire up to three years early (receiving £19,000 every year in the process). The unemployed receive up to 90% of what they earned when they were last in work. As described in Chapter one, the vast majority of private school fees are subsidised by the state. The minimum wage is over £11 an hour – the highest in the world – which in turn means that the gap between rich and poor, though larger than it was 20 years ago, is still the world’s smallest. In fact, the state looks after its citizens so well that many people (usually right-wing politicians) claim that it is nearly impossible to find poverty in Denmark – much to the consternation of those on the left, including one MP in particular: Özlem Cekic. Who’s right is still a moot point in the Danish media, largely thanks to Cekic’s own cack-handed research. When challenged by her critics to find one Danish resident who was genuinely in poverty, Cekic presented a 36-year-old woman called Carina. Now sarcastically known in Danish tabloids as “Fattig Carina”, or Poor Carina, she turned out to be receiving monthly benefits worth over £1600, which, once her bills
were paid, left her with a disposable income of around £600.

Needless to say, this level of state subsidy can only really be supported by an immensely high tax bill. Danes pay high levels of income, council, church and healthcare tax – and can end up owing between 50 and 60 per cent of their income. There are also high levies on commodities like cars (180%), which is one reason you see few four-by-fours on the streets, while VAT is at 25%, and is applied to payments for food – which is why eating out is a rare luxury for most Danes. High taxes are still seen as a reasonably fair trade-off for the services received in return (fittingly, the Danish word for tax – “
skat
” – is also a term of affection) but the amount of tax people should pay, and the exact size of the state itself, are subjects of increasing debate. Nevertheless, almost all political parties – right and left – are supportive of at least the premise of a large, social democratic state, not least because the public views it with such sentiment and would not vote in large numbers for a party that worked against it.

When he was elected prime minister in 2001, Anders Fogh Rasmussen – the then leader of Venstre, the main centre-right party in Denmark – made his first speech as PM a rallying call for the welfare state. Earlier in his career, he had written a book trumpeting the virtues of neoliberalism and a shrunken government. But by 2001, he was elected with a manifesto that merely called for an end to tax increases, rather than tax cuts, and barely suggested trimming the
state itself. “The difference between Venstre and the Social Democrats [Denmark’s two main parties] has always been in foreign policy – how close should we be with NATO and the United States? – and in integration and immigration,” explains Mads Brandstrup, a political correspondent for
Politiken
, Denmark’s leading centre-left broadsheet. “It’s been on other issues than the economy.”

This is partly because the spectrum of Danish politics is, in economic terms at least, further to the left than it is in Britain. The far-right Danish People’s Party – which ranks somewhere between Britain’s UKIP and the BNP – may be Denmark’s third-largest party, but only one party – the small and newly established Liberal Alliance – actively opposes the welfare state. And while Britain’s Labour Party is as left-wing as mainstream parties get in the Commons, the Danish Folketinget houses two fairly large groups that lie to the left of the Social Democrats, Denmark’s main left-wing party. First, there’s the Socialist People’s Party and then – even further to the left – Enhedslisten, a ragtag collection of communist, anarchist and green groups.

The media takes them seriously, too. Enhedslisten’s de facto leader, Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, regularly makes the headlines – and even Danish Rail once made her their in-train magazine’s cover star. It was the Danish equivalent of plastering Salma Yaqoob – leader of Respect, Britain’s only sizeable hard-left party – all over First Capital Connect. To understand why there is such consensus for a social democratic model, we need first to rewind several generations,
not just to the late 19th century, and to the cooperatives and folk high schools mentioned in previous chapters, but to the late 1780s, when revolutionary fervour was sweeping most of Europe. Most, but not all. In Denmark, political change did not arrive until 1848, even though the country was subject, like France, to an absolute monarchy: the house of Oldenborg, a line of kings stretching back to the Middle Ages who were almost always called Christian or Frederick. The reason why Denmark did not yet go the way of France was that the Danish king at the end of the 18th century – Christian VII – recognised the need, out of self-preservation if nothing else, to grant his citizens greater freedom. Previously, peasants had been forbidden to leave the farms where they grew up, and instead had to work in a quasi-feudal relationship for the local landowner – a system known as adscription. In the summer of 1788, Christian VII abolished adscription, a move which paved the way for peasants to set up their own smallholdings.

The short-term impact was clear. There was no revolution, and a group of grateful farmers even erected a monument to the king on one of the approaches to Copenhagen. The long-term impact was larger. First, the state began to be seen as an enabler of freedom – as a social good rather than the authoritarian creature it is considered in many countries, perhaps even in Britain. According to the historian Daniel Levine, by the early 1900s many Danes talked about the state, society, the public and the public sector as if they were talking about the same thing. Second: the abolition of
adscription turned the rural underclass into a newly aspirational breed of farmers – the very same people whose descendants would be educated in Grundtvig’s folk high schools, and would then go on to found the thousands of farming cooperatives described in earlier chapters.

By the late-19th century, this new class of entrepreneurial farmers had even formed a new political party in opposition to Højre, the group of conservatives who represented the interests of the larger landowners and the urban elite. By the 1890s, this party was not just championing the cooperative movement, but also campaigning for Denmark’s first pieces of social legislation: a primitive pension scheme for labourers that was introduced in 1891; social insurance (1892); and accident insurance (1898).

In the pages of the
Danish Journal of Agriculture
from the period, you can see this party’s politicians make a parallel argument for both the furthering of the cooperative movement and state support of the elderly and the sick. That party’s name? Venstre. Over the years, Venstre has become a party of business, and though a version of Højre still exists as the Danish Conservatives, Venstre – through its sheer size – could be described as Denmark’s nearest equivalent to the Conservative party in Britain. But it is significant that Venstre, unlike the Tories, has its roots in the premise of the collective and in the battle for social equality, something which helps to explain why much of the Danish right, with their distant roots in the agrarian community, is still reluctant to take an axe to the welfare state.