How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (9 page)

“There is a way in which the Danish welfare state,” writes Knud Jespersen in his
History of Denmark
, “with its comprehensive social safety net and high level of collective responsibility, can be perceived as a modern, national version of the old village collectives from before the time of agrarian reform. These created a secure framework for the everyday life of the Danes over centuries and shaped their behaviour and norms to the point of defining what it meant to be Danish. The welfare state, with its innate security and collective protection against threats from both within and without, touched on something very deep in the heart of the Danish sense of nationality.”

Indeed, when Denmark initially voted against joining the EU in 1992, it was not simply because of a knee-jerk reaction from right-wingers. A great deal of the Eurosceptism came from Danes who feared that diktats from Brussels could eventually undermine the independence of Denmark’s welfare model.

Venstre is a funny name. Often translated as “the Liberal Party”, it literally means “Left”, which is amusing given the conservative role they now play in Danish politics. It’s a hangover from the 19th century, when they were created in opposition to Højre, a party that literally meant “Right”. Nor is Venstre the only odd feature of Danish political nomenclature. In the political drama
Borgen
, the fictional prime minister Birgitte Nyborg is the leader of the Moderates, a party based on the real-life Radikale Venstre. Literally translated as “the Radical Left”, Radikale Venstre is in fact neither left nor radical. The result of a schism in Venstre during the early 1900s, the mild-mannered group sits slap bang in the centre of Danish politics – more socially liberal than Venstre, but too economically liberal for the Social Democrats.

The latter were the defining force of Danish politics in the 20th century, though they were locked out of power for the first decade of the 21st. Founded not long after Venstre in 1871, the Social Democrats rose to prominence in the turbulent 20s, as Denmark’s finances collapsed, and the electorate grew frightened of Venstre’s by now ardently capitalist approach. As in much of Europe, unemployment
had rocketed, the farming industry was close to ruin, and extremist political parties were gathering momentum. Once in power, the Social Democrats attempted to fight these problems with what is now known as the Kanslergade Agreement, a huge raft of reforms agreed after much debate with the three other main parties. Signed the day Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, it formalised labour rights, introduced state support for the economy, and gave large subsidies to the farmers. It was a seismic moment, not just because it was another large step towards the Danish welfare state that was finally realised in the 70s, but because it helped solidify a nascent model for consensus-based politics in Denmark – the kind which is dramatised to such acclaim in
Borgen
and the first series of
The Killing
.

It required the agreement of the four major parties of the time, and so all four had to compromise. Conscious that a failure to reach an agreement might undermine the legitimacy of parliament and lead – eventually – to fascism, Venstre backtracked on its previous opposition to social reforms. The Social Democrats retreated from some of their more Marxist policies, and so created a politics of compromise that has been a central part of the Danish parliament ever since. No party has held absolute power for a century now, while each of the four oldest parties has, with the exception of the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, been in coalition with each of the others. This is to a large extent also due to the Danish system of proportional representation, which guarantees at least one seat to any party
that wins more than 2% of the national vote, and which therefore makes it almost impossible for any party to win an overall majority. But it is also testament to the importance the Danes place on working together.

The wrangling you see in
Borgen
is apparently not that great a departure from the machinations of most recent real-life elections – with one key difference. In the real world, all the parties approach the election in two broad coalitions – one on the left and one on the right – and whichever bloc wins more than half of the Folketinget’s 179 seats forms a government. The decisions about which parties will be allied to whom, who will be prime minister, and which politicians would hold which cabinet positions were their coalition to win, are all announced before the election so that the public can have the clearest idea of who they’re voting for. In
Borgen
, by contrast, Birgitte Nyborg’s party enters the election as the junior party in the left-wing bloc – but then performs unexpectedly well in the polls, allowing her to start new negotiations and form a new coalition after the election has taken place.

Reality followed fiction in 2011 when – a year after Nyborg was first sighted on Danish television screens – Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the leader of the Social Democrats and daughter-in-law of Labour’s Neil Kinnock, was elected as Denmark’s first female prime minister. It was a curious election. Unlike Nyborg, Thorning-Schmidt’s left bloc does not quite have an absolute majority. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats themselves actually emerged with fewer seats
than they had in opposition, something that highlighted a quirk of the Danish electoral system: a party can technically lose the election, but still form a government if their coalition partners perform strongly enough. In 2011, the parties on the extremes of the red bloc – the Radikale Venstre (RV) in the centre and Enhedslisten on the left – did unexpectedly well, which makes Thorning-Schmidt problematically reliant on the support of both. In a way, the Social Democrats were victims of their own success. The electorate knew the left bloc would probably win, so they tried to influence the direction it would take after the election by voting strongly for the parties at its fringes. A strong showing for RV would keep the coalition from going too far left, and vice versa for Enhedslisten. Unfortunately for the Social Democrats, both parties did well, which leaves Thorning-Schmidt in the political equivalent of the splits.

•

The tube I’m blowing into is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s connected to an iPad, and on that iPad plays a cartoon featuring an angry man who looks a little bit like Alan Sugar. Then something even stranger happens. When I stop blowing, the film stops too – and so does Sugar. Only when I start again does Sugar spring back to life. Thinking it’s a coincidence, I try it all again – but then the same thing occurs. When I stop, Sugar stops. When I start, Sugar starts. Weird. And then it hits me. The iPad only works when I blow into the tube.

As unlikely as it sounds, this bizarre contraption is
actually the result of a welfare state in crisis. I’m in the robotics wing of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense – the home, incidentally, of Hans Christian Andersen. A false limb lies on a table, and all around me are prototypes for robots that could one day perform some of the tasks currently completed by humans working in state healthcare. They’re all part of a project spearheaded by the university called Patient@Home – a response to the healthcare challenges faced by all European countries, but which, given the size of the country’s state apparatus, are particularly pronounced in Denmark. On the one hand, because the health service has fewer funds to play with, and because the population is getting older, more health professionals are retiring than can be replaced. At the same time, precisely because the population is ageing, there are more elderly people suffering from chronic disease. So there are more people to treat and fewer people to treat them – and for a country like Denmark, which prides itself on its welfare state, this is a serious problem. “In Denmark, you have the right to equal access to services no matter where you live,” says Professor Anders Sørensen, one of the engineers leading the project. “That is what we as a society have decided to provide. And to be able to do that in the future, we need to make some structural changes.”

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.”