The Danish Disease: The Political Culture of Islamophobia

Monthly Review, June 2008

Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh

Notes from the Editors:

Ellen Brun has been an activist on the Danish left for many years. She is a researcher on development issues and international relations. Jacques Hersh is professor emeritus of Aalborg University, Denmark and former head of the Research Center on Development and International Relations there. They have worked together for many years and have coauthored many books and articles including in English: Socialist Korea: A Case Study in the Strategy of Economic Development (Monthly Review Press, 1976) and Soviet-Third World Relations in a Capitalist World: The Political Economy of Broken Promises (St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

In trying to comprehend the virus of Islamophobia now infecting Europe, the small country of Denmark offers powerful insights. Shakespeare’s phrase that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” seems appropriate to describe the transformation taking place in this former bastion of tolerance and conviviality.

In the course of one generation, beginning in the 1980s, a process has altered the ideal picture that many informed people throughout the world had of Danish society. The transition has been dramatic and the end point of the process difficult to fathom. Even politically aware Danes are somewhat at a loss to explain what exactly has been happening to the Danish political culture.

The Danish body politic has of course never been an undifferentiated monolith. The Second World War was an ambivalent chapter in the country’s history. Although there were substantial pro-Nazi sentiments among the upper sections of the population and the Danish government collaborated with the German occupation forces, there was an armed resistance movement and ordinary Danes helped a considerable number of Danish Jews escape to neutral Sweden.

In the postwar era, the Social Democratic Party benefited from the general progressive mood of the population. In the context of the defeat of Nazi-Germany and its Danish sympathizers on the one hand, and the existence of strong pro-Socialist sentiments within the working class on the other, Social Democracy aimed at humanizing capitalism through the construction of a “welfare state.” The project of “capitalism with a human face” served a variety of political purposes. It neutralized the anticapitalism of the working class while preserving the interests of the capitalist class. It also offered a counterpoint to the Soviet model of state socialism with regard to the post-colonial world. Especially in Africa, comparatively generous and effective Danish development assistance, implemented by Social Democratic governments, promoted an alternative to strategies of self-reliance or dependency on the socialist bloc. The vision of “capitalism with a human face” was thought accomplished, until the liberalization of capital controls in the 1980s and the onslaught of neoliberalism began to dismantle the “welfare state.” Paradoxically, what had been considered a Social Democratic project was not defended by the Danish Social Democratic party.

Continued . . .