These stereotypes are of course just that: stereotypes. But some of them have distant roots in truth – and in the case of the Danes, it’s in the fact that their language, once very similar to Norwegian and Swedish, has developed an increasing number of blurred word endings and glottal stops. When I first tried to learn Danish, I was amazed that a language could carry as many silent consonants as English. One of the first phrases I came across was the Danish for “what about you?” Written down, it is “Hvad med dig?” Out loud, it sounds like more of a mush: “vamedye?” Of its seven consonants, only three are pronounced. In other phrases, “ikke” (the Danish word for “not”) should technically be pronounced “ee-ker”, but in fact sounds more like the English word “air”; the Danish “d” is often softened into a kind of “l”-sound; while the “g” is sometimes lost altogether. In a famous example, the Danish word for cake was once the same as it still is in Swedish: “kaka”. But while the Swedish version remained fairly static, the Danish word has been eroded from “kaka” to “kage”, and its pronunciation has drifted from “ka-ka” to “kay-ger”, and from “kay-ger” to “kay-er”, and from “kay-er” to something that sounds a bit like the English name “Kay”.
This swallowing of unstressed syllables is nothing new – it was first documented in the 15th century by a touring Swedish bishop – and nor does it mean that Danish is any less sophisticated than languages like German and Russian, which are still fully inflected. (Word endings may have been strangled in Danish, but subtleties in meaning are instead conveyed by complex variations in word order.) However, harmless as it is, the process has sped up markedly in the last three decades, during which time the Norwegians and Swedes have found Danish increasingly hard to understand. In part, this is because Scandinavians have been watching less of their neighbours’ television and more of its English-language equivalents, and are therefore less exposed to the nuances of each other’s languages.
But a group of linguistic researchers I meet at the University of Copenhagen have another intriguing theory: that this exponential increase is a by-product of the introduction in the 60s of state-subsidised childcare. The policy, which sees the state pay for around three-quarters of the cost of childcare for every toddler over one, has made it much easier for mothers to go back to work. Today, 74% of Danish mothers return to their jobs after having children, compared to just 55% in Britain.
According to the researchers, this progression may have had a harmless yet fascinating side effect. Icelandic, says Professor Marie Maegaard, is still the most conservative of the Nordic languages, because in Iceland many children grow up on isolated farms and talk a lot with their grandparents. But in Denmark, she points out, “Almost every Danish child goes to kindergarten from the age of one. And that will speed up any development because they don’t talk so much with the older generations, who have more conservative diction.”
Maegaard and her colleagues are still fleshing out the theory, but regardless of its accuracy, it still gives an intriguing insight into the impact of the thing that may define Denmark above all else: the welfare state.
The state is huge in Denmark. It spends more money, as a percentage of GDP, than any other country in Europe. It employs around 900,000 Danes – about a third of the Danish workforce – and unsurprisingly therefore provides a raft of free services to its citizens. Childcare, healthcare and state education are naturally three of them – but more surprisingly, so is university education and most of its living costs. Over-65s receive a basic state pension worth twice the UK version. Despite recent rule changes, they can still retire up to three years early (receiving £19,000 every year in the process). The unemployed receive up to 90% of what they earned when they were last in work. As described in Chapter one, the vast majority of private school fees are subsidised by the state. The minimum wage is over £11 an hour – the highest in the world – which in turn means that the gap between rich and poor, though larger than it was 20 years ago, is still the world’s smallest. In fact, the state looks after its citizens so well that many people (usually right-wing politicians) claim that it is nearly impossible to find poverty in Denmark – much to the consternation of those on the left, including one MP in particular: Özlem Cekic. Who’s right is still a moot point in the Danish media, largely thanks to Cekic’s own cack-handed research. When challenged by her critics to find one Danish resident who was genuinely in poverty, Cekic presented a 36-year-old woman called Carina. Now sarcastically known in Danish tabloids as “Fattig Carina”, or Poor Carina, she turned out to be receiving monthly benefits worth over £1600, which, once her bills were paid, left her with a disposable income of around £600.
Needless to say, this level of state subsidy can only really be supported by an immensely high tax bill. Danes pay high levels of income, council, church and healthcare tax – and can end up owing between 50 and 60 per cent of their income. There are also high levies on commodities like cars (180%), which is one reason you see few four-by-fours on the streets, while VAT is at 25%, and is applied to payments for food – which is why eating out is a rare luxury for most Danes. High taxes are still seen as a reasonably fair trade-off for the services received in return (fittingly, the Danish word for tax – “skat” – is also a term of affection) but the amount of tax people should pay, and the exact size of the state itself, are subjects of increasing debate. Nevertheless, almost all political parties – right and left – are supportive of at least the premise of a large, social democratic state, not least because the public views it with such sentiment and would not vote in large numbers for a party that worked against it.
When he was elected prime minister in 2001, Anders Fogh Rasmussen – the then leader of Venstre, the main centre-right party in Denmark – made his first speech as PM a rallying call for the welfare state. Earlier in his career, he had written a book trumpeting the virtues of neoliberalism and a shrunken government. But by 2001, he was elected with a manifesto that merely called for an end to tax increases, rather than tax cuts, and barely suggested trimming the state itself. “The difference between Venstre and the Social Democrats [Denmark’s two main parties] has always been in foreign policy – how close should we be with NATO and the United States? – and in integration and immigration,” explains Mads Brandstrup, a political correspondent for Politiken, Denmark’s leading centre-left broadsheet. “It’s been on other issues than the economy.”
This is partly because the spectrum of Danish politics is, in economic terms at least, further to the left than it is in Britain. The far-right Danish People’s Party – which ranks somewhere between Britain’s UKIP and the BNP – may be Denmark’s third-largest party, but only one party – the small and newly established Liberal Alliance – actively opposes the welfare state. And while Britain’s Labour Party is as left-wing as mainstream parties get in the Commons, the Danish Folketinget houses two fairly large groups that lie to the left of the Social Democrats, Denmark’s main left-wing party. First, there’s the Socialist People’s Party and then – even further to the left – Enhedslisten, a ragtag collection of communist, anarchist and green groups.
The media takes them seriously, too. Enhedslisten’s de facto leader, Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, regularly makes the headlines – and even Danish Rail once made her their in-train magazine’s cover star. It was the Danish equivalent of plastering Salma Yaqoob – leader of Respect, Britain’s only sizeable hard-left party – all over First Capital Connect. To understand why there is such consensus for a social democratic model, we need first to rewind several generations, not just to the late 19th century, and to the cooperatives and folk high schools mentioned in previous chapters, but to the late 1780s, when revolutionary fervour was sweeping most of Europe. Most, but not all. In Denmark, political change did not arrive until 1848, even though the country was subject, like France, to an absolute monarchy: the house of Oldenborg, a line of kings stretching back to the Middle Ages who were almost always called Christian or Frederick. The reason why Denmark did
not yet go the way of France was that the Danish king at the end of the 18th century – Christian VII – recognised the need, out of self-preservation if nothing else, to grant his citizens greater freedom. Previously, peasants had been forbidden to leave the farms where they grew up, and instead had to work in a quasi-feudal relationship for the local landowner – a system known as adscription. In the summer of 1788, Christian VII abolished adscription, a move which paved the way for peasants to set up their own smallholdings.
The short-term impact was clear. There was no revolution, and a group of grateful farmers even erected a monument to the king on one of the approaches to Copenhagen. The long-term impact was larger. First, the state began to be seen as an enabler of freedom – as a social good rather than the authoritarian creature it is considered in many countries, perhaps even in Britain. According to the historian Daniel Levine, by the early 1900s many Danes talked about the state, society, the public and the public sector as if they were talking about the same thing. Second: the abolition of adscription turned the rural underclass into a newly aspirational breed of farmers – the very same people whose descendants would be educated in Grundtvig’s folk high schools, and would then go on to found the thousands of farming cooperatives described in earlier chapters.
By the late-19th century, this new class of entrepreneurial farmers had even formed a new political party in opposition to Højre, the group of conservatives who represented the interests of the larger landowners and the urban elite. By the 1890s, this party was not just championing the cooperative movement, but also campaigning for Denmark’s first pieces of social legislation: a primitive pension scheme for labourers that was introduced in 1891; social insurance (1892); and accident insurance (1898).
In the pages of the Danish Journal of Agriculture from the period, you can see this party’s politicians make a parallel argument for both the furthering of the cooperative movement and state support of the elderly and the sick. That party’s name? Venstre. Over the years, Venstre has become a party of business, and though a version of Højre still exists as the Danish Conservatives, Venstre – through its sheer size – could be described as Denmark’s nearest equivalent to the Conservative party in Britain. But it is significant that Venstre, unlike the Tories, has its roots in the premise of the collective and in the battle for social equality, something which helps to explain why much of the Danish right, with their distant roots in the agrarian community, is still reluctant to take an axe to the welfare state.
Borgen: the Danish parliament
“There is a way in which the Danish welfare state,” writes Knud Jespersen in his History of Denmark, “with its comprehensive social safety net and high level of collective responsibility, can be perceived as a modern, national version of the old village collectives from before the time of agrarian reform. These created a secure framework for the everyday life of the Danes over centuries and shaped their behaviour and norms to the point of defining what it meant to be Danish. The welfare state, with its innate security and collective protection against threats from both within and without, touched on something very deep in the heart of the Danish sense of nationality.”
Indeed, when Denmark initially voted against joining the EU in 1992, it was not simply because of a knee-jerk reaction from right-wingers. A great deal of the Eurosceptism came from Danes who feared that diktats from Brussels could eventually undermine the independence of Denmark’s welfare model.
Venstre is a funny name. Often translated as “the Liberal Party”, it literally means “Left”, which is amusing given the conservative role they now play in Danish politics. It’s a hangover from the 19th century, when they were created in opposition to Højre, a party that literally meant “Right”. Nor is Venstre the only odd feature of Danish political nomenclature. In the political drama Borgen, the fictional prime minister Birgitte Nyborg is the leader of the Moderates, a party based on the real-life Radikale Venstre. Literally translated as “the Radical Left”, Radikale Venstre is in fact neither left nor radical. The result of a schism in Venstre during the early 1900s, the mild-mannered group sits slap bang in the centre of Danish politics – more socially liberal than Venstre, but too economically liberal for the Social Democrats.
The latter were the defining force of Danish politics in the 20th century, though they were locked out of power for the first decade of the 21st. Founded not long after Venstre in 1871, the Social Democrats rose to prominence in the turbulent 20s, as Denmark’s finances collapsed, and the electorate grew frightened of Venstre’s by now ardently capitalist approach. As in much of Europe, unemployment had rocketed, the farming industry was close to ruin, and extremist political parties were gathering momentum. Once in power, the Social Democrats attempted to fight these problems with what is now known as the Kanslergade Agreement, a huge raft of reforms agreed after much debate with the three other main parties. Signed the day Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, it formalised labour rights, introduced state support for the economy, and gave large subsidies to the farmers. It was a seismic moment, not just because it was another large step towards the Danish welfare state that was finally realised in the 70s, but because it helped solidify a nascent model for consensus-based politics in Denmark – the kind which is dramatised to such acclaim in Borgen and the first series of The Killing.
It required the agreement of the four major parties of the time, and so all four had to compromise. Conscious that a failure to reach an agreement might undermine the legitimacy of parliament and lead – eventually – to fascism, Venstre backtracked on its previous opposition to social reforms. The Social Democrats retreated from some of their more Marxist policies, and so created a politics of compromise that has been a central part of the Danish parliament ever since. No party has held absolute power for a century now, while each of the four oldest parties has, with the exception of the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, been in coalition with each of the others. This is to a large extent also due to the Danish system of proportional representation, which guarantees at least one seat to any party that wins more than 2% of the national vote, and which therefore makes it almost impossible for any party to win an overall majority. But it is also testament to the importance the Danes place on working together.
The wrangling you see in Borgen is apparently not that great a departure from the machinations of most recent real-life elections – with one key difference. In the real world, all the parties approach the election in two broad coalitions – one on the left and one on the right – and whichever bloc wins more than half of the Folketinget’s 179 seats forms a government. The decisions about which parties will be allied to whom, who will be prime minister, and which politicians would hold which cabinet positions were their coalition to win, are all announced before the election so that the public can have the clearest idea of who they’re voting for. In Borgen, by contrast, Birgitte Nyborg’s party enters the election as the junior party in the left-wing bloc – but then performs unexpectedly well in the polls, allowing her to start new negotiations and form a new coalition after the election has taken place.
Reality followed fiction in 2011 when – a year after Nyborg was first sighted on Danish television screens – Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the leader of the Social Democrats and daughter-in-law of Labour’s Neil Kinnock, was elected as Denmark’s first female prime minister. It was a curious election. Unlike Nyborg, Thorning-Schmidt’s left bloc does not quite have an absolute majority. Meanwhile, the Social Democrats themselves actually emerged with fewer seats than they had in opposition, something that highlighted a quirk of the Danish electoral system: a party can technically lose the election, but still form a government if their coalition partners perform strongly enough. In 2011, the parties on the extremes of the red bloc – the Radikale Venstre (RV) in the centre and Enhedslisten on the left – did unexpectedly well, which makes Thorning-Schmidt problematically reliant on the support of both. In a way, the Social Democrats were victims of their own success. The electorate
knew the left bloc would probably win, so they tried to influence the direction it would take after the election by voting strongly for the parties at its fringes. A strong showing for RV would keep the coalition from going too far left, and vice versa for Enhedslisten. Unfortunately for the Social Democrats, both parties did well, which leaves Thorning-Schmidt in the political equivalent of the splits.
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The tube I’m blowing into is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s connected to an iPad, and on that iPad plays a cartoon featuring an angry man who looks a little bit like Alan Sugar. Then something even stranger happens. When I stop blowing, the film stops too – and so does Sugar. Only when I start again does Sugar spring back to life. Thinking it’s a coincidence, I try it all again – but then the same thing occurs. When I stop, Sugar stops. When I start, Sugar starts. Weird. And then it hits me. The iPad only works when I blow into the tube.
As unlikely as it sounds, this bizarre contraption is actually the result of a welfare state in crisis. I’m in the robotics wing of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense – the home, incidentally, of Hans Christian Andersen. A false limb lies on a table, and all around me are prototypes for robots that could one day perform some of the tasks currently completed by humans working in state healthcare. They’re all part of a project spearheaded by the university called Patient@Home – a response to the healthcare challenges faced by all European countries, but which, given the size of the country’s state apparatus, are particularly pronounced in Denmark. On the one hand, because the health service has fewer funds to play with, and because the population is getting older, more health professionals are retiring than can be replaced. At the same time, precisely because the population is ageing, there are more elderly people suffering from chronic disease. So there are more people to treat and fewer people to treat them – and for a country like Denmark, which prides itself on its welfare state, this is a serious problem. “In Denmark, you have the right to equal access to services no matter where you live,” says Professor Anders Sørensen, one of the engineers leading the project. “That is what we as a society have decided to provide. And to be able to do that in the future, we need to make some structural changes.”
How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark Page 6