Jacob Christensen

Due to illness, I haven’t been able to write anything about the verbal attacks delivered by Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the political leader of the Social Liberal Party Marianne Jelved.

Right now, I will just note that the Muhammad crisis according to Mr. Fogh Rasmussen divided the righteous from the cowards and that Ms. Jelved replied by calling Mr. Fogh Rasmussen the most dangerous man in Danish politics for the last 60 years.

Danish political commentators have relished the unusual fight and foretold the demise of the Social Democratic Party.

And just to finish this post, Danish media are quoting a letter circulated by the chairman of the section of Immigration Lawyers under the Danish Bar and Law Society Anders Christian Jensen where he condemned colleagues who participate in meetings concerning immigration and refugee policies with the Prime Minister. Mr. Jensen argued that such meetings would be the same as having Jewish organisations entering negotiations with the then Chancellor of Germany, Mr. Adolf Hitler, during the Holocaust.

I don’t know why but for some reason Denmark and Danes used to have a reputation for being boring.

This is just to note that the Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds once again is the centre of an embarrassing controversy.

During the Muhammad cartoon crisis a Swedish web-hotel turned off the homepage of the extremist right-wing party Sverigedemokraterna because it featured some of the cartoons. The problem was that the web-hotel closed the page after being contacted by the Swedish Intelligence Agency and that the agency in its turn had conferred with the Foreign Office before contacting the firm.

So, was the government – i.e. the Foreign Minister – involved? Laila Freivalds said no, but new reports suggest that the correct answer is yes. Freivalds now claims that she was chocked by learning that the Intelligence Agency wanted to – erm – persuade the web-hotel to turn off the homepage.

To say that Freivalds is a political liability to the Swedish government and the Social Democratic Party is an understatement but how it all will end is difficult to say right now.

Someone at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights will be in a lot of trouble in the coming days.

The reason? The UNHCHR is celebrating the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21 – that’s the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre – and that in itself is all very well.

Things started to go wrong when the UNHCHR commissioned a poster with the headline “Racism takes many shapes” featuring the well-known image of a LEGO brick.

You don’t have to hold a Ph.D. in Political Science to see what the target of the poster is: Not LEGO, but Denmark. Victimising Denmark would also serve to earn the UNHCHR some cheap points in – say – Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Still, LEGO’s management will be furious at the UN for a) using its products without permission and b) implicitly but clearly accusing LEGO of being racist. The lawyers will no doubt be calling relevant persons at the UN tomorrow. (I wouldn’t be surprised if the poster has been taken down from the UN website by Tuesday).

What is more interesting is the collateral damage. Denmark has traditionally been one of the staunch supporters of international law and the UN system but for a number of reasons that support has been vaning during the last decade among the centre-right parties which a) takes a national rather than an international approach to law and b) generally supports the U.S. rather than the UN in international affairs.

Predicting effects of political blunders is difficult but I would expect the shares of the UN to hit an all-time low in the Danish political system in the coming year. Only the Social Liberal Party, the Socialist Party and the Unity List will seriously consider defending the UN and multilateralism after this. The Social Democrats have been badly damaged by the Mohammad cartoon affair and I find it difficult to see the party launching a pro-UN campaign at the present time.

Say what you will about the Swedes, but in international settings they have never lacked chutzpah.

The latest proof was offered by the business promotion agencies of Copenhagen and Stockholm who have engaged in a fierce battle over how the said cities should be promoted at an international business fair i Cannes.

The Danes have joined forces with Malmö to promote the Øresund Region while the Stockholmers simply declared that Stockholm as the Capital of Scandinavia is the only natural choice if you want to do business in the Baltic region.

That left the Danish delegation less than happy and a spokesman for Copenhagen Capacity suggested that the cooperation between the business promotion agencies would be affected in the future.

We can only hope that no-one loses his or her head because of this dispute.

Bad headline to an interesting column: On Wednesday E.J. Dionne published a column in the Washington Post entitled “What Kind of Hater Are You?” and the rather awful title covers a discussion about how the dynamics in political competition differ between states in the U.S.To make a long story short: The statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman wanted to address this interesting riddle: On the one hand rich people tend to support the Republicans and poor people the Democrats. On the other hand Democrats enjoy more support in rich states and Republicans in poor states.That’s a classical two-level problem which Gelman solves by applying the relevant statistical analysis and he presents his results in a very elegant presentation: Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State (pdf-document, opens in a new window). You can also download the analysis as a paper (pdf-document, opens in a new window).

Note 2009-11-24: As this post keeps coming up as active, let me please note that 1) I am not and have never been married to a German and 2) there are no links to dating or marriage sites here. /JC

If you for some reason should be contemplating marrying a German, the strategy is fairly simple: If you are a man with higher education – go West. Cities in the Western part of the country offer massive surpluses of young, well-educated women.

If you promise to do some of the household work, immediate success should be guaranteed. (Don’t sue me if you fail. Remember that you are not paying for this advice).

If you are a woman, things are a bit more complicated.

First of all, there are many reasons why you would not want to move to Germany in the first place if you are a woman. The official view on women’s place in public and private life is antiquated, to say the least. The idea that a woman can have a career and a family life simply hasn’t entered the German mind.

In an interview the German Minister for non-Males Ursula von der Leyen noted that one reason why she had seven children was that she lived in the U.S. during a crucial period of her life and that combining motherhood and a professional career was perfectly acceptable in that country.

The demographic effects of German conservatism in social matters are fascinating. Rather than encouraging childbirth, the ideology and its accompanying policies have backfired completely and left Germany as one of the European countries with the lowest birthrate. Italy and Spain are two other casualties of the social conservative ideology.

Another reason why you wouldn’t want to move to Germany if you are a woman, is that the available men tend to live in the East, have little or no education beyond school and be out of work. And that is probably not the kind of man, you imagine as a paternal role model for your children.

When it comes to female mobility – both with regard to educational and geographical mobility – and male immobility, Germany follows a pattern which is familiar to the Nordic countries. Young men linger in traditional lines of work and declining industrial and rural regions while young women can’t wait to move to the cities.

Figures can be found in a report published by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development: Die Demografische Lage der Nation (pdf-document, opens in a new window). The Berlin Institute as also published a note on why the fertility rate in Germany is so low in an international comparision.

Die Zeit has an article about the issue entitled “Systematic robbery of women“. You shouldn’t claim that the Germans haven’t got some sense of humour.

This is just to note that the Danish think tank CEPOS – that an acronym for “Center for Politiske Studier” – celebrated its first birthday on Monday.

As my brain is working at something like 20% capacity today (yes, a common cold can cause that), I will just note that CEPOS is a rare bird in a Danish context as it brands itself as freedom-oriented (as in free-market liberal) and bourgeois.

The Swedish Timbro think tank was an obvious inspiration to a group of Danish liberals who were disappointed with the turn toward the centre made by the Liberal Party under Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

We shall see if Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard will be flaming me for calling CEPOS a think tank.

The Swedish Forum for Living History – which is a government agency – today published a report on anti-semitism in Sweden. Depending on your point of view, the results can be seen as reassuring or troubling.

The good news are that hard-core anti-semites only constitute around 5% of the adult population and that anti-semitism has no hold within mainstream political parties.

Things get a little more troublesome when you start to look at issues related to anti-semitism. For instance, one in four Swedes do not find the idea of having a Jewish prime minister acceptable.

Furthermore, anti-semitic attitudes are widespread among Swedish Muslims: Nearly 40% of adult Muslims can be classified as anti-semites according to the study.

Interestingly, Swedish television chose not to cover the Muslim angle in its report about the study.

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.