Ellen Brun and Jaques Hersh
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.
Significant changes in the demographic composition of the population took place parallel to the socio-political evolution of the country. This was principally related to the three phases of Muslim immigration which were, in turn, a function of the need of Danish capitalism for labor power, and later the result of political disturbances in predominantly Muslim countries.
The first influx of immigrants, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, came from Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, and Yugoslavia to find work in Scandinavia. The end of the “golden age” capitalist boom of the 1960s also hit Denmark, with the average annual GDP growth falling from 4.6 percent in 1960–73 to 1.5 percent in 1973–82. And as Danish women started entering the labor market in large numbers, the need for “guest workers” decreased. Unemployment soared from the 2 percent level of the 1960s and early 1970s to rates well over 6 percent in the mid 1970s, and “guest worker” immigration ceased for good. The second wave of immigration in the 1980s was composed of political refugees who came predominantly from Iran, Iraq, and Palestine, and a third wave of political refugees arrived in the 1990s, mainly from Somalia and Bosnia. The category of asylum seekers accounts for about 40 percent of the Danish Muslim population as it came to include the reunification of families and marriages. In 2002, the Folketing, the Danish parliament, passed a law making such reunifications much more difficult as well as countering arranged marriages in the country of origin.
From a political perspective, it is interesting that most asylum seekers came from regions affected directly or indirectly by the policies of the United States or its allies. This applies especially to the Middle East where the United States and Israel have had a direct responsibility for the region’s political evolution. The experience and integration problem of the asylum seekers is quite distinct from that of the foreign workers who filled a temporary gap for labor power. Many in the latter category decided to remain in Denmark and obtain Danish citizenship. This variety of cultures and political backgrounds makes it difficult to speak of the Muslim community as a homogenous bloc. An understanding of why these different people came to Denmark is seldom evident in the on-going debates about the Muslim immigrants.
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