The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four – over 20 per cent of the working population – do no work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits. The New York Times has called Denmark ‘The best place on earth to be laid off’, with unemployment benefits of up to 90 per cent of previous wages for up to two years (until recent reforms, it was eleven years). The Danes call their system flexicurity, a neologism blending the flexibility Danish companies enjoy to fire people with short notice and little compensation (compared with Sweden, where jobs can still be for life), with the security the labour market enjoys knowing that there will be ample support in times of unemployment.

  More reasons for the Danes’ happiness? We must also include this very summer house – a homely, single-storey, L-shaped cabin, identical to thousands of others scattered along the coasts of these islands. These little wood-and-brick hideouts are where the Danes come to unwind in flip-flops and sun hats, to grill their hot dogs and drink their cheap, fizzy lager. And if they don’t own a summer house, most know someone who does, or they maybe have a permanent plot in a campsite, or a shed in a koloni have (or ‘colony garden’ – like an allotment but with the emphasis more on sitting with a can of cheap, fizzy lager and a hot dog than toiling among vegetable patches).

  This summer house is furnished, like most, with bric-a-brac and IKEA perennials. One wall is lined with well-thumbed paperbacks, there’s the obligatory cupboard packed with board games and jigsaws with missing pieces and, of course, a fireplace primed with logs to warm bones chilled from the sea. The floors are bare wood for easy sweeping of sand and grass, and the whitewashed brick walls are hung with art works from the ‘School of Relatives’ – family members’ attempts at oils and watercolours, usually in a fairly grisly faux naïf abstract style.

  As I said, tonight the alcohol is flowing like the river Jordan. Denmark has a much more laissez-faire attitude to booze than the rest of the region; there is no state-owned alcohol monopoly here as there is in the other four Nordic countries. In Carlsbergland alcohol is sold in every supermarket and corner shop. The Swedes, whose twinkling lights I can see just across the Øresund strait this evening, have long flocked to their southern neighbour to let their hair down and sample what is from their perspective the Danes’ louche, fun-loving lifestyle. (Younger Danes, in turn, head for Berlin to get their jollies.)

  At the end of the evening a group of us go, giggling, to the beach, disrobe and tiptoe into the waters. It is something I have struggled to adjust to, but nudity is no biggie here and at least by now it is dark. The initial bracing chill as the water reaches thigh-height almost sends me scurrying for my clothes, before I finally pluck up the courage to dive under the surface and, once fully submerged, am reminded once again how surprisingly warm the Danish sea in summer can be.

  On evenings such as this it is easy to see why the Danes have come to feel so contented with their lot these past few decades. As long as they can avoid opening their credit card bills, life must feel pretty great as a middle-aged, middle-class Dane. It is hard to imagine how it could be any better, in fact. But things have not always been so rosy in the state of Denmark. To reach this point of heightened bliss, the Danes have had to endure terrible trauma, humiliation and loss. Until, that is, bacon came along and saved theirs.

  Chapter 2

  Bacon

  ONCE UPON A time, the Danes ruled all of Scandinavia. They like their fairytales, the Danes, but this one is true. The Kalmar Union of 1397 was a historic high point for the Danes, with their equivalent of Elizabeth I, Queen Margaret I, ruling a loosely unified Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The union held for over a century until, in 1520, the then Danish king, Christian II, rashly beheaded around eighty Swedish nobles in the so-called Stockholm Bloodbath, something of a diplomatic faux pas. Though Denmark did manage to hold on to Norway for a few hundred years more, henceforth the Swedes would play a far more proactive role in the region’s history, mostly by holding Denmark’s head in the toilet bowl while Britain and Germany queued up to pull the handle.

  There was a brief false dawn for Denmark under the reign of their great Renaissance king, Christian IV – Denmark’s Henry VIII, with similar appetites and girth – who oversaw some of Denmark’s most ambitious military and architectural projects, funded chiefly via the toll he extracted at Helsingør (Elsinore) from ships entering and leaving the Baltic through the narrow bottleneck there (it was the Panama Canal of the North for a while). Sadly, Christian IV lost a few too many battles, mostly with the Swedes, finally bringing his country to the brink of bankruptcy. He died in 1648, consumed by jealousy at the rise of his Swedish rival, King Gustaf Vasa (Gustav I of Sweden). One historian wrote of Christian’s funeral, ‘Financially Denmark had now sunk so low that, when the most splendid of her kings was finally laid to rest, his crown was in pawn and even the silken cloth which covered his coffin had to be bought on credit.’ In contrast, by the time Gustaf Vasa died, battling the Germans (a preoccupation of his later life), he had transformed Sweden into the key power in the region and beyond.

  Christian IV was fortunate not to have lived to witness one of the darkest days of Danish loss. By the terms of the Treaty of Roskilde, signed a decade later in 1658, the Danes were forced by the Swedes to relinquish what are today the southern Swedish regions of Skåne, Blekinge and Halland, as well as the Baltic island of Bornholm (the latter was eventually returned and remains Danish). It is easy to forget how Danish these territories once were because, on a map, they appear so clearly to be part of Sweden – the goatee on the chin, so to speak – but up to that point they had always been Danish, and their loss was keenly felt by Copenhagen.

  The ensuing centuries were even less kind to the Danes and, I am afraid to say, the English played a pivotal role in compounding their misery. In 1801 a British fleet, with Nelson as second in command, attacked the Danish navy anchored outside Copenhagen to prevent it from falling into French hands. The British returned in 1807 for similar reasons, this time bombarding Copenhagen itself for three days, resulting in the deaths of as many as two thousand locals and the destruction of a good part of the city. This is supposedly the first ever bombardment of a civilian target; really not cricket – even the British media were critical at the time – and, in fact, the attack had the opposite effect of that intended, forcing the Danes into the arms of the French. To this day, if you visit Copenhagen’s old university library, halfway up the stairs is a display case in which sits a book with fragments of a British cannonball still embedded in its pages. The book’s title is Defender of Peace (which is suspiciously apt, I have always thought. Just saying). Though the bombardment of Copenhagen has slipped from the memory of most English people, the Danes still bring up the subject from time to time. ‘Well, you were threatening to join sides with Napoleon,’ I always try to explain, but it doesn’t seem to mollify them.

  I can feel myself being dragged against my will into having to explain early-nineteenth-century European geopolitics here, but I shall resist the temptation. Essentially, when the dust settled on the Napoleonic wars and everyone had swapped sides at least once, Denmark discovered that it had lost Norway to Sweden in yet another of those dratted treaties, this one signed in Kiel in 1814.

  How the Danes must have come to dread treaty-signing time. Another, signed later during that, for them calamitous, century, would finally denude Denmark its troublesome territories, Schleswig and Holstein, the Danes having been forced to abandon their thousand-year-old defences, the Danevirke, to the Prussians in 1864. (Again, I’d love to go into this in more detail but, as Lord Palmerstone famously said, ‘The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.’) Suffice it to say that, at one especially low point in the negotiations, the Danish king even mooted the idea of Denmark becoming part of the German Confed
eration and, when that was rejected, offered Iceland instead. But Bismarck was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, and so both duchies became for ever German, and Denmark’s borders were redrawn once more.

  With Schleswig and Holstein gone south, Denmark had lost roughly a third of its remaining land area and population, and by some estimates as much as half of its potential income. Over time, it would also lose its small colonies in India and the West Indies, and even the Faroes voted for autonomy. Thank goodness for Iceland, I hear you cry. But eventually the slender thread of a shared monarchy linking those two nations was also severed by that most unlikely of liberators, Adolf Hitler: when his army invaded Denmark in April 1940, it inadvertently relieved Iceland of its Danish head of state.

  Denmark and Germany had signed a pact of mutual non-aggression a year earlier, but the Danes had effectively extended an open invitation to the Nazis to invade when they decided to leave many of their military posts unmanned for seven months of the year. The Danish Nazi Party had grown in strength, thanks largely to support from farmers and landowners, and now had representatives in parliament; the Germans rightly assumed that the Danes would be reluctant to retaliate and risk provoking a bombardment similar to the one they had endured in 1807.

  There was little resistance to German occupation for the first three years or so, indeed, both the Danish king and prime minister at the time criticised the nascent Danish underground when they occasionally carried out minor acts of sabotage. Unlike the Norwegians, who resisted with great courage and ingenuity (greatly aided by their mountains and climate, admittedly), Denmark had little choice but to submit to life as a pliable German satellite. Some have gone as far as to categorise the Danes as German allies, as they supplied much-needed agricultural produce and even troops to fight on the Eastern Front and in Berlin during the Second World War. Churchill called the country ‘Hitler’s pet canary’.

  It would be surprising if this long litany of loss and defeat had not had a lasting impact on the Danes, but I would go further. I suspect that it has defined the Danes to a greater extent than any other single factor – more than their geography, more than their Lutheran faith or their Viking heritage, more even than their modern political system and welfare state. You see, in a roundabout way, Denmark’s losses were her making.

  Their greatly reduced circumstances bound the Danes together more tightly as a tribe than any of the other Nordic countries. As historian T. K. Derry writes (about the accession of Norway to Sweden), ‘The Danish king and people resigned themselves to the loss . . . as a common misfortune which drew them together in a desire to avoid all further changes.’ The territorial losses, sundry beatings and myriad humiliations forced the Danes to turn their gaze inward, instilling in them not only a fear of change and of external forces that abides to this day, but also a remarkable self-sufficiency and an appreciation of what little they had left.

  No longer the great European power it had once been, Denmark withdrew, mustered what few resources remained within its much-reduced boundaries, and decided never again to have ambitions in that direction. What followed was a process of what you could call ‘positive parochialisation’; the Danes adopted a glass-half-full outlook, largely because their glass was now half full, and it is an outlook which, I would argue, has paved the way for the much-trumpeted success of their society to this day.

  Of course there are many factors which combine to form a national psyche, and I am being reductive to make a point, but this parochialist urge towards insularity and its accompanying national romanticism is a defining element of Danishness that is epitomised by a saying that every Dane knows by heart to this day:

  Hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes.

  (What was lost without will be found within.)

  The line was originally written by the author H. P. Holst in 1811, but it obtained greater purchase when it was adopted by the Danish Heath Society, which interpreted it, quite literally, in its work to reclaim coastal land by draining sandy territories in Jutland. So successful was the society at this that, by 1914, Denmark had effectively replaced the hectares it had lost to Germany with fresh, farmable arable land.

  But Holst’s declaration also encapsulates what turned out to be the Danes’ great cultural ‘Golden Age’, a mid-nineteenth-century period of increased social mobility and artistic blossoming that saw the son of a washerwoman, Hans Christian Andersen, publish his first fairy stories and go on to become one of the first genuinely world-famous figures; Søren Kierkegaard write his groundbreaking existentialist works; and the great classical sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, along with painters like C. W. Eckersberg and his pupil Christen Købke, and the Royal Ballet master August Bournonville, contribute to a great flurry of artistic activity within Denmark at the time. The Danes embraced the works of these genuinely world-class artists almost as a consolation for the painful losses of the era. They were learning how to do what they still do best: to be grateful for, and make the most of, the resources available to them; to cherish the simple pleasures of community; to celebrate their Danishness; and, above all, avoid annoying the Germans.

  Anne Knudsen is the editor of the Danish national broadsheet newspaper Weekendavisen and one of the country’s leading political and social commentators. When I met with her in her office in central Copenhagen, she talked me through her timeline for the establishment of this modern notion of danskhed – or ‘Danishness’.

  You had the loss to Sweden in 1658, and the bombardment by the British in 1807, and the loss of Norway in 1814, but at that time the people in Jutland didn’t know what people in Zealand thought about any of this. Of course the bombardment affected the bourgeoisie and the military, but they were centred on Copenhagen; and the loss of Norway was felt more in Aalborg, which had been Denmark’s second city, was very wealthy, and lost about 75 per cent of its trade. But still it was only really a very small group of people who had any opinion. The development of a Danish national consciousness really started from the constitution in 1849, so it is from here that you can first talk about ‘the Danes’ in any cohesive sense, really. Soon afterwards there was this disastrous war in Schleswig and that really created a common ground for all Danes. The party that lost that war set out to explain that we were all the better for being so small, and the Social Democratic Party continued this world view. Elsewhere, Social Democracy was firmly based on progress, industry, modernity, but in Denmark it was about the koloni have [those cosy allotment zones].

  In other words, while the Swedes forged forwards with their great modernist, progressive social agenda, the Danes retreated, seeking refuge in their parochial, National Romantic vision. Parochialism remains the Danes’ defining characteristic,1 but their radically recalibrated sense of identity and national pride has created a curious duality best described as a kind of ‘humble pride’, though many often mistake it for smugness.

  Let me explain. Assuming that you know nothing about their country, within the first five minutes or so of meeting a Dane they will usually say something along the lines of ‘This is just a little land. We are only a little over five million people; we’re pretty much all the same.’ They will probably add that they have no mountains or waterfalls, and that you can cross their country by car in four hours. But after a while – it can take anything from five minutes to a year, depending on the Dane in question – you will begin to detect the steely pride beneath the ‘aw shucks’ surface humility. That’s when they might casually mention their world-leading wind turbine industry, the absence of poverty in Denmark, their free education and health systems, and generous benefits. They will tell you how they are the most trustworthy and equal people in the world, how they have the best restaurant in the world, and, yes, the Vikings will probably crop up as well.

  A double-page spread in the newspaper today epitomises this schizophrenic self-image. On one page is a cartoon depicting Chinese businessmen looking at a map of the world. One of them is saying, ‘Denmark? Where is it exactly? Can you get me my glasses?’
– a reference to the fact that the Chinese have invested less money in Denmark than in any other European country. On the opposite page, meanwhile, is a headline which reads, ‘Thorning Can Put Pressure on China’, which is about how the Danish prime minister is going to tell the Chinese leadership a thing or two about their human rights record during an imminent visit to Beijing – I bet they were quaking.

  The Danes have a deep and justifiable satisfaction born from the knowledge that they have built, from relatively unpromising foundations, arguably the most successful society on the face of the earth. The ‘arguably’ is mine. To the Danes, there is no argument.

  An important building block for this success was Denmark’s Great School Commission of the mid-nineteenth century, which laid the foundations for one of the first free nationwide primary school systems in Europe. It was followed within thirty years by the Folk High Schools, founded by the poet, theologian and fervent anti-German N. F. S. Grundtvig (still a great national hero; Denmark’s propagandist-in-chief). Other key moments in Denmark’s recent history include the country’s peaceful move towards democracy when the king renounced his absolutist powers with the constitution of 1849, and the all-important agricultural cooperatives that emerged soon after. When corn prices crashed because of cheap US imports, these cooperatives meant that Danish farmers were able to turn from arable production to pig-farming virtually overnight. Then someone realised what type of streaky bacon the British preferred for breakfast, figured out a way to standardise pork production to meet that demand, and the Danish labour force found its true calling.