Jacob Christensen

The first part of this post can be found here.

A 20-Year Perspective

If you ask Swedish commentators you are likely to get an interpretation of the development of Danish attitudes towards immigrants that go a little like this: 1) The Danes turned xenophobic around 2000 and 2) The Danish People’s Party and opportunistic politicians within the Liberal and Conservative Parties are to blame.

If we use the data that Jørgen Goul Andersen presents in his paper, then the thesis that something has happened with Danish attitudes towards immigrants and immigration during the last 20 years is supported, but the changes took place sometime during 1986 or 1987 and again before 1998 rather than during the run-up to the 2001 election.

In October 1985 23 % of those asked in a survey declared that “immigration is a serious threat to our national way of life”, in September 1987 the figure was 47% and it has been hovering around the 40-45% mark ever since.

The attitudes with regard to refugees are more wobbly.

During a 17-year period the number of people who want restrictions in the number of refugees oscillate between 53 and 82% and the figure is in fact not especially high during much of 2000-2002.

Generally, people still want to limit the number of people granted asylum but the most extreme negative attitudes were measured back in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq war. What has changed over the last 20 years is the stress voters put on immigration as a political issue.

Immigration emerged as an important issue in 1986 – again: The Iran-Iraq war – then slipped back into obscurity until 1994 but only really manifested itself as a major political issue during the 1998 election campaign.

The Bosnian refugee crisis cannot explain the shift in priorities as people didn’t get more negative attitudes to refugees but on the other hand “traditional” economic issues such as unemployment, budget deficits and trade deficits disappeared from the political agenda. Immigration and integration policies as well as the quality of health care and other welfare services took their place.

But to conclude: Danish unease about immigration and the integration of immigrants is an older phenomenon than you would expect if you focus solely on the role of the Danish People’s Party and the change of government in 2001.

The International Perspective

So, how about Denmark in an international perspective?

The people from the Rockwool Foundation’s research project have tried to analyse this with data from Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the U.K. If we add data from the Eurobarometer (#53 from 2000 and 63 from early 2005), my interpretation of the situation is this:

In many aspects, Denmark isn’t unique.

The attitude towards refugees – unfortunately the Rookwool data do not include other types of immigration – is generally sceptical or negative and calls for more liberal asylum laws are rare in European countries. The British have a much more negative attitude towards refugees than the Germans and the Danes while the Swedes are more positive.

If you ask about the attitudes towards people of a different nationality, race or religion, things become more complicated. Among the EU-15 Denmark along with Belgium and Greece had the highest proportion of people who were negative towards foreigners or people of another faith.

We are still talking about a minority, though: Around 25% say that they hold negative attitudes with regard to nationality and race and 30% with regard to religion and the negative deviation is more pronounced than the positive with regard to nationality and race, i.e. the public opinion is more divided than in many other countries.

The negative view of religion follows an earlier survey which put the Danes in top of the league when people were asked if religion created a basis for social conflicts and intolerance. Playing the religious card in a Danish context will have some nasty side-effects. It may be worth noting that even though Denmark has a state church, the church has no theological leadership that is authorised to speak on behalf of the church. It is more an administrative shell than a congregational unity.

To Sum Up

1. Immigration and refugee policy is a highly divisive issue in Danish politics.
2. The big change in attitudes towards immigrants and refugees took place 20 years ago.
3. The issue began to emerge as a major issue on the political agenda during the mid-1990s.
4. Education and social status play an important role: People with short education and workers are more likely to view immigrants and refugees negatively than people with higher education.
5. In a European context, Danes are not unusually negative towards refugees (but the Swedes are unusually positive).
6. In a European context, Danes are more likely than most other Europeans to rate people of another race, nationality and religion negatively.
7. Among people in Europe and North America, Danes even before the Muhammad crisis were those most likely to see religion as a source of social and political conflicts.
8. In a European context, Danes along with Britons, the Dutch and the Spanish stand out as being more concerned with immigration, crime and terrorism than people in the other EU countries.

And By the Way

On Friday, the German weekly Die Zeit published an article about Danish immigration and integration policies written by Wolfgang Zank who was born in Germany but has lived and worked in Denmark for a long time. I haven’t had the time to read the piece – named: In Fortress Denmark – yet.

Newspaper headlines can be fascinating to read.

On Saturday, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter led a story about the political aftermath of the Muhammad cartoon-crisis with the headline: “Fogh is the loser of the Muhammad crisis”.

You will probably have to be a Swedish Social Democrat and engage in a lot of wishful thinking to arrive at that conclusion. The loser in the short run is without any doubt the Social Democrats and the winner – again in the short run – the Danish People’s Party.

The interesting point in theoretical terms is that Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the one hand gets a positive assessment while the Liberal and Conservative parties haven’t gained any support in opinion polls.

In fact, there is only a clear link between the assessment of the performance by individual politicians and support for their parties in two cases: The Social Democrats and the Danish People’s Party.

Break that down into voter segments and my guess is that what you will find is that only one part of the Danish electorate is willing to change parties because of the Muhammad crisis: Unskilled workers in medium-sized provincial towns.

If the DPP is able to hold on to its new voters – and that remains to be seen – the balance of power between the government and its supporting partner may change to the benefit of the DPP. But 1) that remains to be seen (I’m repeating myself, I know, but you can’t say a good thing too often) and 2) the Social Democrats are as far from the government officies as ever before.