Jacob Christensen

Weekendavisen wants to challenge its readers about what happens in 2010. Instead of waiting until December 2010, I’ll forgo the bottles of red wine already now and give you my more or less badly founded predictions:

1. Will the Danish national team reach the semi-finals at the Football World Cup in South Africa?

No. It would be fun, but I think the 1/8 or possibly the 1/4 finals will be what we have to hope for.

2. Will the author Jens Christian Grøndahl change publishers again?

Who cares? Okay: Yes.

3. Will Caroline Wozniacki win a Grand Slam tournament?

If she can keep free of injuries, yes.

4. Will Lars Løkke Rasmussen reshuffle his government.

Yes. But the reshuffle may be less extensive than many imagine or hope for.

5. Will the Iranian regime and president Ahmadinedjad be overthrown?

No. But there will be continued unrest.

6. Will the world’s countries reach a binding agreement at COP16?

No. Not with China and the US Republicans obstructing.

7. Will the Danish government set up a commission to examine the separation of state and church in Denmark?

No. Not even if we imagine the Social Democrats and the Socialists taking over government after an election.

8. Will a Danish rider win a stage in the 2010 Tour de France?

Yes. Well, it’s possible.

9. Will health warnings be introduced on wine bottles in Denmark?

No.

10. Will the Litterature Prize of the Nordic Council be awarded to Ida Jessen or Peter Laugesen?

Hmmm… No.

11. Will the US Government go bankrupt?

No.

12. Will the Sweden Democrats win more than 4% of the vote in the Swedish general election?

Yes. If the Social Democrats do not get their act together.

13. Will MECOM sell parts or all of Berlingske Media?

Sneaky question. MECOM may very well want to sell but the money are tight, so I wonder if there will be buyers. No.

14. Will Sophie Marceau be cast in a leading role in a Lars von Trier film?

No.

15. Will the Maldives disappear under the sea level?

No.

16. Will Helge Sander still be Minister of Research after 1 December 2010?

No. (Well, here’s to hoping, but I really don’t think a new minister will make that much of a difference)

17. Will Bob Dylan attend the opening of the exhibition of his paintings and drawings at the Danish National Art Gallery?

No.

18. Will Keith Richards and Jack White record a cd?

Fascinating thought, but: No.

19. Will Nikolaj Znaider be awarded the Sonning Music Prize?

No. (Tricky one, though)

20. Will Peter Ramsdal still be the vicar at the Brorson Church in Copenhagen on 1 December 2010?

Yes.

And with this: Godt nytår.

I probably owe some kind of commentary on the year in Danish politics but for the moment you will have to make do with my reflections about the gadgets that were added to my earthly possessions this year.

As it is, they were not too many: Only a SonyEricsson C905 (that’s a mobile phone, in case you wonder), an iPod Touch and a SAGEM decoder/HDD recorder.

To be perfectly honest, I blame Nikolaj Sonne – and the fact that I bought the phone before the presentation of the iPhone 3GS or the Android handsets – for the phone. It’s quite okay for my uses, so I don’t really have any regrets here if the thing is viewed in isolation. Syncing it with a Mac works very well indeed. I don’t understand the pre-installed browser so I fetched Opera Mini. Not perfect, but okay. The operating system hasn’t screwed up. Yet.

The TV decoder/recorder does what I want it to. End of story. Well, mainly.

And then there is the iPod Touch. You see, as it was I bought it because I was interested in watching movies and TV shows when I was travelling and a big screen iPod seemed a practical device. It hasn’t happened yet, and I doubt if it ever will. Bad buy. In fact, a total failure. Not that there has been anything wrong with the iPod – except that my inner cheapskate didn’t listen to reason: I should have gone for the 64GB model.

That said, the iPod was a brilliant buy. You see, it lacks the phone functions but has just about everything else an iPhone will give you – and the iPod is a bit cheaper. So once you have access to a wifi network, you have full access to the internet. You know: Facebook, Twitter, browser, e-mail, the works. It even serves as a remote control for my AppleTV (Fanboi? Moi? No way…). I do wonder, though, how long the battery will last – my 2007 iPod Classic is still alive and well (which is slightly frustrating as I would like a 160GB model) but the Touch goes through more loading cycles. Other than that, it is one of the cleverest devices, I have ever seen or owned.

So: The winner and the loser of the 2009 contest is – the iPod Touch.

Bonus: The second best thing gadget-wise was installing Ubuntu Linux on the eeePC I bought last December. Ubuntu is much more potent and flexible than the stripped down system Linux eeePCs came with. And no: You do not have to be a software engineer to perform the operation.

I hope Fred Bass and “The Editors” will forgive me for lifting his advice about getting rid of books:

My advice is to first clean out duplicates and books with repetitive information — why do you need six dictionaries? Next, remove all books with out-of-date information, like atlases and reference books. Political, economic and topical books should be the next category to sort through; you don’t really need that copy of Richard Simmons’ “Never-Say-Diet Book” (a 1981 best-seller), or a book on the future of the Democratic or Republican parties, written 20 years ago.¹

One should eliminate books that are in poor condition unless they hold sentimental value and remove those you never intend to read again.

Once you have weeded out the duplicates, the out-of-date material and those moldy, unreadable tomes, make sure to note any first editions or autographed books, as they could be valuable if they are in good condition. Put them aside and store them properly — away from direct sunlight and humidity. You might consider investing in some Mylar, as that is the only proven way to keep a valuable book in perfect condition.

I went through the pain last summer (2008, that is) and I’m more or less trying to figure out what to do with the different parts of my library in about a year’s time. Getting rid of old textbooks and books bought for a specific project is the easy bit, weeding out fiction and stuff bought for personal entertainment is much, much trickier. Still, there is something comforting in reading that other people make the same mistakes as I do when it comes to buying books.

1. For “Democratic or Republican parties, insert relevant European party or “the European Union” [↩]

I think this one pretty much nails it.

Click.

To be perfectly honest, I have never been much into Swedish crime fiction even if (or because) I lived in that country for nine years. I’ve read the occasional Mankell or Nesser while Stieg Larsson has eluded me completely. Well, Larsson was from Umeå and I didn’t have to read some 1500 pages to find out how people were up there.¹ That leaves the middle Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels as essential readings – in the early ones S+W are testing the waters and the last three read like tracts from what in Sweden is known as the letter-left.

Perhaps my empirically oriented social scientist brain objects to the plots, because – let’s face it: In Scandinavia, the person most likely to kill you is not Dr. Evil but your partner or one of your friends. If you have a psychiatric illness, Danish police will be more than happy to gun you down. Then there are the gang-related shootings and killings but again it is hard to make existential dramas out of those – even though the shoot-out between Yugoslav and Albanian mobsters on a public beach in Göteborg some years ago stand as a bizarre and pretty dangerous high-point.

But to make a long story short, I haven’t followed the dramatisations of the various series of crime stories (do a search and you should find a post about the enfant terrible of Swedish theatre Michael Persbrandt² playing the enfant terrible of Swedish police Gunvald Larsson somewhere in the archives), but yesterday I stumbled upon the British (!) dramatisation of one of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels featuring Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander. I’m not quite sure about the plot and it is very strange hearing people supposed to be from Skåne (which, at least to Danish ears, has the most unintelligible Swedish dialect save Älvdalskan) speaking a perfect Queen’s English. But the cinematography, by Anthony Dod Mantle, is truly and utterly stunning.

Oh, and just to add to the confusion: I watched the show on a Norwegian TV-channel.

1. I know that the Larsson novels aren’t set in Umeå, but as they say: You can take the man out of Umeå, but not Umeå out of the man [↩]
2. Never mind, here he is. [↩]

Last week I received the sad message that my former teacher and colleague Gunnar Sjöblom had died at the age of 76.

If you find a copy of the book which was published in honour of Gunnar on his 60th birthday and open it, you will be greeted by a photo of a sardonically looking professor (no tweed-jacket, though), a look which might be a bit unsettling for some. Maybe Gunnar imagined that the photographer was Thomas S. Kuhn or, even better, some 1970s or 1980s marxist student. He had very little love indeed for that bunch. Behind that professorial façade, though, was a man who in smaller groups could be very witty, funny and insightful, also beyond the world of political science.

Gunnar’s claim to fame was his dissertation which was published in English in 1968 as Party Strategies in a Multiparty System. Tellingly, Google Scholar informs us that the book was still quoted into the 2000s, more than 35 years after it was written.

Party Strategies is in many ways a strange book in political science as it is completely theoretical in nature without any open references to empirical data, just as it does not make any use of cases or examples to illustrate its argument. In a way, the book also lacks a thesis to be proved. Rather, the ambition was to apply a systems analysis approach to the study of (well, duh) parties that operate in a multiparty system to discover the various conflicts and dilemmas they face. Even if you are only marginally oriented in the history of the discipline, you will know that Gunnar was playing ball with David Easton (systems theory) and Anthony Downs (party competition).

The book looks at parties acting in the different political arenas and attempts to make a comprehensive overview of the tools and strategies available at each point in the decision-making process. Trying to make a complete empirical analysis of the parties in an existing party system using the scheme of analysis being presented would be a daunting, and in all likelihood impossible, task for any single researcher, but there are many bits and pieces which still merits consideration. And applied on more specific research topics, the book and its scheme could be put to good use.

Gunnar never repeated the feat but spent the 1970s and 1980s producing articles and book-chapters on aspects of party government, usually working in a network of party researchers organised around the late Rudolf Wildenmann. To mention some examples: In 1977, he took on the question of cumulating knowledge in the social sciences in an article in the European Journal of Political Research and in the mid-1980s he contributed to a series of publications about party government with chapters on parties and problem solving in politics and – unusually, for somebody who spent almost his entire career addressing theoretical and methodological questions - the role of parties in the Danish and Swedish political systems.

In Gunnar’s career, one big ambition eluded him: His plan was to write a comprehensive study of party government in Western societies and he made extensive preparations for this work, but it never resulted in a book or a series of papers. He told me, that when he had the opportunity to review the data and literature during a sabbatical, he discovered that much of the material was beginning to be out of date. Other priorities, including national and international organisational duties, had taken up the time needed.

That may be so, but I also suspect that Gunnar lacked the temperament needed to write a synthesis in the style of Giovanni Sartori’s Parties and Party Systems . His approach lent itself better to analysis than synthesis. But then again, who knows what would had happened, if somebody at the right moment had put Gunnar in the office next to Sartori’s?

Still, his contributions to the study of political parties and party strategies stand.

For some examples of early Sjöblom, here are two open-access articles from 1967 and 1968 published in Scandinavian Political Studies. Two reviews of Party Strategies (gated) can be found on JStor here and here.

PS: In case the Google Scholar link fails, this is what you should be looking for – http://scholar.google.dk/scholar?as_q=&num=50&btnG=S%C3%B8g+i+Scholar&as_epq=party+strategies+in+a+multiparty+system&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=title&as_sauthors=sj%C3%B6blom&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&hl=da

From a political science (and public administration) perspective, these stories are always illuminating, but first the background: The weather is pretty rough in Denmark today and there are lots and lots of delays and cancellations in the train traffic. But why, and who’s to blame?

Why, DSB of course. They operate the trains, don’t they?

Well, these days DSB may be operating the passenger trains, but the responsibility for maintaining the rail infrastructure – including clearing the rails from snow – is placed with a company called BaneDanmark. It used to be a public agency called Banestyrelsen (in itself a child of NPM) but in the 00s, turning agencies into companies was all the rage. Heck, the thing even has a “mission” and “visions” like a true company should have these days.

Okay, the Danish state still owns BaneDanmark but it is probably more difficult to get information about how the unit works. And it is also more difficult for the passengers to find out exactly whom and what to blame.

Actually, NPM is not just hard to understand for citiz … sorry, customers. Politicians are also able to confuse the different actors involved in producing public transport.

Oh, and we did in fact lose one thing when Banestyrelsen was transmogriffed into BaNeDaNmaRk. The opportunity to joke about Baneforstyrrelsen.

“Naughties” as in 00s, that is. And in an attempt to be so 2010, I’ve contributed to Bølgen which you can find at Google Wave if you belong to the select company of the Illuminati (or whatever) with a modest look back at Danish politics in the outgoing decade.

Okay – I belong to the grumpy minority who claim that the new millennium began in 2001 and that the 00s strictly speaking go from 2001 to 2010, but as we live in an age of democracy…

(And by the way, James Naughtie is not married to Eleanor Update. Obviously, I spend too much time on the intertubes).

In any event: Thanks to Bjarne Tveskov for putting in the time and effort.

In the absence of serious blog posts, here is some Swedish awesomeness:

Now, if you will excuse me, I will go back to nursing my upset stomach.