On Danish exceptionalism

There is no ‘getting to Denmark’ without Danes

The Folketing, Denmark’s 19th-century parliament in the centre of Copenhagen, is a testimony to the Scandinavian virtues of reasonableness and moderation. Set within the Christiansborg Palace which is informally known as the Castle, or ‘Borgen’, it is the inspiration and setting for the hit drama that has just begun its fourth season in the UK.

Arriving in Britain in 2012, Borgen followed on the popularity of The Killing, soon to be joined by the Danish-Swedish crime thriller The Bridge, all of which helped to set off a sort of Scandimania across the North Sea. There followed countless think-pieces and books on the Danes’ superior way of life, their egalitarianism, happiness, those jumpers, cycling and, more recently, the hygge business. Shown on BBC4, Borgen appeals to an especially insufferable section of the British middle classes, of which I am one of the more insufferable.

One of the attractions of Borgen is that the stakes are so low; unlike with American drama, people aren’t trying to kill or even ruin each other, and season cliffhangers might end with the protagonist being out of power for a couple of years because the Moderates have gone into coalition with the Liberal Party or whatever. Game of Thrones it isn’t, but that’s the beauty of Scandinavia, the place where in the great life game of prisoner’s dilemma, everyone cooperates.

The real-life Borgen is a physical display of that worldview. In its corridors lie historical mementoes to Denmark’s transformation from absolute monarchy to social democracy, starting in 1788 with land reforms, a constitution in the mid-19th century, the introduction of universal suffrage in 1915 and the current settlement in the 1950s. In between where the two legislatures sat is a ‘conversation room’ where mutually-beneficial agreements were hammered out, a motto above the door extolling the ideals of justice and compromise.

After the war the Danes got rid of the upper house altogether, and proportional representation replaced the first-past-the-post system in the surviving ‘people’s assembly’, the Folketing, and so Danish governments are by definition comprised of coalitions. This suits the national psyche, since Danish social norms stress the importance of allowing everyone to say what they think, however offensive, a key cultural difference both with neighbouring Sweden and the English-speaking nations.

The little kingdom between the seas is often hailed as the world’s ideal, and with good reason. Denmark is the least corrupt country on earth. It is the third most equal. It is the third freest on the planet. It is — by a measure I’m very dubious of — the second happiest. (Are the Finns really the world’s cheeriest people?)

It is the country which US Democrats see as their model, whether in the centre or on the Left. Francis Fukuyama even talked of ‘getting to Denmark’, by which he meant reaching the pinnacle of political development.

It is little wonder that Denmark is the place that so many of us wish we could emulate. Culturally quite similar to us — it is, after all, where many of our ancestors came from — Denmark is roughly 30% richer than Britain, even though they work fewer hours. It is also run far more effectively: whereas the UK seems paralysed by an almost physical inertia, the Danes build endless infrastructure projects, including artificial islands, bridges, tunnels, electrified railways, 17 new cycle bridges just in Copenhagen, and a dozen cycle superhighways. The Danish capital hopes to become the first carbon-neutral capital in 2025 — because who else is going to?

Two-wheel activities are, of course, a big part of the Danish brand. Famously, Copenhagen is a cyclist’s paradise, the only rival to Amsterdam for the crown, and almost two-thirds of residents now commute to work or school by bike (up from a third in 2012). There are now five times as many bicycles as cars in the city, but what makes me seethe with envy as a Londoner is the fact that everyone leaves their bikes with the bare minimum of locks; this would be impossible in England, where bike theft is endemic and so under-investigated and prosecuted as to be effectively decriminalised.

The Danes love cycling because it’s healthy, fun and convenient, but there is an underlying political philosophy, bikes being a very egalitarian form of transport with almost zero externalities. An LA Times feature on the phenomenon quoted one Dane as saying: ‘I think biking is good for the society — it keeps people together’.

Yet there is a sting in the tail for the country’s many English-speaking admirers. Denmark’s happiness, relative equality and sense of cohesion will never be imitated by Britain, let alone the United States. Denmark is like it is because it’s full of Danes — and they’re quite keen on keeping it that way.

The trade-off between diversity and solidarity is a long-established finding of social science, a fact of human behaviour visible in almost any setting. Yet it’s a dilemma that politicians and social commentators across the western world hope can be overcome through good will and education, despite all evidence to the contrary. On this Denmark is the exception; here even centre-Left politicians take a relatively hard-line stand on multiculturalism, considerably to the Right of any other government in western Europe.

Indeed Danish policy on immigration and asylum goes well beyond anything the British government has proposed, yet while the New York Times has long held a grudge against the country similar to its relentless vendetta against Britain, the British media has been slow to absorb this idea, because it doesn’t fit the narrative that the Danes are progressives who do things better.

Take the Rwandan resettlement policy, which was greeted with outrage and disbelief by the British commentariat last month. Although debate here is often influenced by a terror of what our neighbours will think, not only has the EU paid poorer countries to take asylum seekers before, but the Rwanda policy had already been thought up by Denmark. Unlike in Britain, where politicians talk of managing the problem fairly, the Scandinavian nation is openly determined to reduce its number of asylum seekers to zero, as prime minister Mette Frederiksen has said.

Denmark is the world’s most progressive, happiest and greenest country, and in order to maintain that situation is quite keen to avoid following the path of neighbouring Sweden. Compared to Britain, the country’s migration policy is almost comically Right-wing. Back in 2019 the Danish government had to shelve plans to use the island of Lindholm to house the 100 or so migrants who have served sentences for serious crimes in Denmark, but are now refusing to return home. That island had previously been a research centre into infectious animal diseases and was contaminated with mad cow disease and swine fever. They weren’t able to go through with that idea, but Denmark does still plan to rent 300 prison cells in Kosovo to ease overcrowding caused by overseas inmates.

Foreign criminals who won’t return home remain incarcerated, while in more advanced and humane Britain, violent offenders who claim their homelands are too dangerous are simply allowed out again. In the case of asylum seekers, if they are rejected and refuse to leave, Danish authorities send them to ‘return centres’ where they are forced to stay until they change their mind. In advanced Britain, again, we do things differently.

While Denmark welcomed 30,000 Syrians in the summer of 2015, since then, and way ahead of any other European country, it has made it clear that it wants them to leave. Unable to deport Syrians, since it has no relations with Assad’s regime, Denmark sent them to ‘expulsion centres’; the message, as one charity founder told the Sunday Times, was that ‘you should stay in Germany or France or wherever. Everywhere else is better than here’.

The issue with asylum is that it is sold to voters essentially as a temporary measure to help people in danger, but the reality of migration is that it is path dependent; once people settle somewhere, they tend to stay and, furthermore, their relatives and other compatriots come to stay too. Once someone is integrated into friendship circles, and especially if they have children, it is far harder, ethically and politically, to ask them to leave. If you don’t want people to make your country their home, it is far easier to state that clearly from the start, rather than leave them in limbo. Allowing asylum seekers to work, as campaigners well know, makes it much more likely that they will make this new country their own.

These policies are controversial, at home and abroad, but it has successfully led to a significant drop in asylum applications. If people reasonably think that they have no hope in settling in one country, they will simply go to another where it is a possibility — Sweden and Britain being obvious choices. Denmark, a small country of under six million people, feels it is limited in how much it can do to improve the lives of the literally billions of people worldwide who suffer under bad governments and poverty.

But the country goes further than that. Denmark breaks what is for English-speaking commentators a huge taboo by stripping people of citizenship even if born there. In Britain the subject of deporting UK-born jihadis is extremely controversial, as was shown with the case of Shamina Begum.

Again, with this debate, much of the focus with the British commentariat was how the rest of Europe might view us, yet Denmark is not the only country that expels homegrown extremists. Germany, with its historical institution of Jus sanguinis — nationality defined by descent — also does so.

Danish laws have attracted considerable criticism in the American media, including their attempts to break up ‘hard ghettoes’. Wary of what has happened in Sweden and France, with their disastrous suburban housing estates, the Danes are determined to avoid the same mistake — but many here argue that US reporters misrepresented this law. The aim was to break up areas where crime and unemployment had reached a critical mass, and while these social problems happen to overlap with ethnicity, they were not simply moving people based on their race.

Similarly with the even more controversial bill confiscating expensive jewellery owned by asylum seekers. The law was certainly inhumane, although never enforced, and was compared to Nazi Germany (isn’t everything?). Yet a similar law was at the time already being enacted in Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg; the commentariat didn’t need to compare it to Nazi Germany, they could just compare it to contemporary Germany. Somehow the land of National Socialism largely escaped international condemnation and dubious Second World War comparisons, while Denmark, a country famous for its heroic role in saving its Jewish population, was slammed.

This all seems contradictory when one considers that Danish public opinion is certainly not conservative by European standards. It is among the core of liberal states in the continent’s northwest (roughly speaking, the same places where you’re apparently unlikely to get served dinner). Yet it’s notable that even the Social Democrats — their Labour Party — voted for the jewellery law.

Denmark, almost alone in the western world, has a very strong centre-Left, and the main reason is that, uniquely, it followed its voters on immigration. They didn’t just waffle on about ‘community’ and ‘solidarity’ and hold seminars about ‘progressive patriotism’, while enacting the policies their supporters objected to the most. They actually did what the voters wanted.

It began with a split on the Right when, back in 1995, the Danish People’s Party was founded as a breakaway from the economically liberal and eurosceptic Progress Party. Not entirely unlike Ukip in its place on the spectrum, the DPP benefitted from the country’s electoral system and had broken into double figures in 2001, becoming the country’s third-largest. Unlike in many western countries, where a cordon sanitaire was placed around Right-wing nationalist movements, in Denmark there is more of a sense that all opinions should be listened to, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

Their popularity soared further in 2005 with the cartoon controversy, the largely forgotten campaign to boycott Danish products over a hugely bogus and concocted campaign of offence. More than 250 people were killed in riots, Danish and other European embassies were attacked, and a small liberal state suffered a boycott at the hands of some of the most appalling authoritarian regimes on earth. Needless to say, Denmark treated its Muslim minorities better than any of the tyrannies which condemned it.

To make matters worse, the man who had stirred up the protests, and gone on a tour of the Middle East whipping up anger, had been an asylum seeker, looked after by Denmark with huge generosity. It was hardly surprising that many Danes concluded that their Danish welfare system might not work so well on a global level.

The central issue is trust. Social democracy is a beautiful system, but it depends on high levels of solidarity, a willingness to share and reciprocate. A vast amount of evidence from the social sciences shows that diversity has a negative impact on this willingness, and partly explains the failure of socialism to take root in America. It especially doesn’t work when high-trust cultures, like Sweden, take in large numbers of refugees from very low-trust societies, where such wide-reaching reciprocity is alien. The question of trust is why multiculturalism has had such a corrosive impact on the centre-Left’s fortunes.

Economics also plays a part, and the fact that non-western migrants don’t tend to be an economic net benefit. It is either naïve or disingenuous to talk about immigration in the general, and ‘immigrants’ as some semi-sanctified group of sturdy travellers, without looking at the huge variations that exist between nationalities, often driven by selection effects.

Then there is an even more sensitive issue related to trust, and which few of the American reports mention: crime, which again varies considerably by nationality. Because trust plays a huge part in building social democratic values, and crime erodes trust, so it helps push people to the Right, which also explains America’s political lurch in the late 1960s. Sociologists sometimes talk of ‘tight and loose societies’, the latter defined by lower feelings of outside threat and therefore higher generosity and liberalism, and Denmark is the loosest of loose. But such high levels of trust depend on strong external barriers.

This is even true of the Danish idea of hygge, comfort or cosiness, which as Richard Jenkins wrote in Being Danish, is ‘doubled-edged: it is necessarily exclusionary, because there are always boundaries to a magic circle’. Hygge does not scale.

Paul Collier, an economist who has argued against high migration from a social-democratic standpoint, has written that: ‘If a system of trust-based reciprocal obligations is stressed, it starts to crumble. From around 1980 all OECD countries faced not just immigration, but more potently, new economic forces of divergence. The metropolis began to boom, driven by the globalisation of markets, while provincial cities faced the risk of decline; the well-educated benefited from rising demand for their skills, driven by the greater complexity of the economy, while the value of manual skills started to fall.

‘The metropolitan skilled found that they got more esteem from the identity conferred by their job than by their nationality and withdrew from shared identity with their less fortunate citizens. They justified their selfishness by transferring their regard to the immigrants coming to the metropolis: these, not their fellow-citizens, were the needy. Non-reciprocal concern for the entitlements of immigrants displaced reciprocal obligations to citizens just as it became time for those obligations to be met.

‘Like other social democratic parties, that in Denmark had always been based on an alliance between the provincial working class and the young metropolitan educated. But the change in the belief system of the metropolitans faced the party with a choice. The metropolitans held the advantage: unions were in decline, while they were on the rise. As they took over the party, the working class gradually drifted off, and disdainful metropolitans accused them of being “deplorable”, by which they meant “fascist”.’

Yet here, almost uniquely, the centre-Left maintained this alliance between metropolitans and workers by not embracing a system of free-movement that clearly harmed the latter. If it seems odd that here centre-Left politicians talk the language of the radical Right, it is no less logical than the Anglophone political cleavage.

A Time magazine piece noted how in Denmark conservative views on immigration politically coalesce with social democratic views on welfare, including healthcare and education. Nils Holtug, director of the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen, was quoted as saying ‘There’s a growing part of the political spectrum that sees a welfare state and a multi-cultural society as directly incompatible, or at least difficult to have side by side.’

The Danish Left certainly see its that way. Mette Frederiksen, the current prime minister and a Social Democrat, criticised mass immigration in her autobiography, writing: ‘For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.’

This alignment might seem odd on one level, since the sort of personality type with socially egalitarian views doesn’t tend to feel comfortable with nationalism. As a whole, though, the philosophy is coherent, far more so than the contradictory and unbalanced political alliances found in the English-speaking world, in which a redistributionist but pro-migration Left competes against a free market and technically restrictionist Right (which in reality is just as pro-free movement).

That is why, almost uniquely in Europe, the Danish centre-Left won a majority in 2019, but as one critic told the Observer, it was a very different Left. Morton Østergaard, a former cabinet minister with the Danish Social Liberal Party, lamented that: ‘What’s different in Denmark is that we’re seeing parties coming out of a Liberal or Social Democrat value base eating into national conservatism in a race-to-the-bottom contest, because they’ve decided that the marginal voter can’t get tough enough on immigrants.’

Yet, looking around at this very happy, safe and tolerant country, it is not exactly hard to see why they would want to preserve what they have. Diversity v solidarity is the sort of trade-off that modern political thinkers find difficult to digest, seeing as it pits their two greatest ideals. But the Danes are happy because they are largely surrounded by other Danes, and they consider their future wellbeing dependent on that continuing, something that somehow surprises the English-speaking media. ‘Why is the world’s second-happiest country so averse to immigration?’ the Economist recently asked, sort of answering its own question.

Denmark really has nothing to prove, being by any measure one of the most ethical countries in the world — environmentally friendly, egalitarian, gender-equal and generous with aid — but it wants to, quite emphatically, stay Danish. Because the reality is that there is no getting to Denmark without Danes.