Across the love bridge to the promised land

(Across the bridge, my Dear, you and I will find the promised land of our mutual love)

One of the readers of my blog, Elizabeth from New York, wrote and asked me to evaluate something, her father had written on her blog about Danish racism.
This is quite interesting as an example of how foreigners view Denmark and Danish "racism", particularly in view of the enormous transformations Danish society is going through at the moment. The present situation can be characterised as one in which Denmark is opening up to globalisation in the economic field and closing to it in the field of human relations. That leads to a strangely backward and contradictory way of doing things and viewing the world. Large swathes of the Danish population even get at odds with progressive business interests that want an open and tolerant attitude to immigration, as this is a precondition for the effective development of the economy in the supposedly "open" global market.

Especially this part of Elisabeth's (father's) piece on Danish "racism" is quite to the point:

"Danes are odd in that they are well educated and great travelers, and have a splendid record on foreign aid, but at the same time seem to have very little empathy for people from different cultures. They like their homogeneous tight little island and feel uncomfortable if too many swarthy people are walking the streets with them. Much of the problem stems from their 1973 decision to alleviate a shortage of production workers by opening the gates of immigration to a lot of poor folk from the south and east -- mostly Yugoslavs, Pakistanis, and Turks, as it turned out."

- Even though, it's a bit exaggerated. Actually, only some 60.000 foreign workers came as part of the gueest worker programme, most of them Turks.
They are not the big integration problem, however. That is the asylum seekers and refugees entering the country in the 1990's. Particularly the 200.000 muslims, and especially the approximately ten per cent strong islamic believers among them. Many Danes see them as quite alien to the secular Danish culture.Denmark is not, like America, a "melting pot" of immigrant groups where people come and often live in separate groups next to each other. The Americans have their Chinatowns, their Little Italys, etc. Denmark, on the other hand, is a quite homogeneous country, - or has been a quite homogeneous country. Some years ago a certain neighbourhood in Copenhagen got populated mostly with Turks, and it was called "Little Turkey". A lot of Danes found it highly inappropriate that "foreigners" should gather in the same place. Demands were put to politicians that "the ghettos be dissolved". "Ghettos" are considered dangerous fractional activity.
The "foreigners" only constitute some 6-7 per cent of the Danish population. And those of them that are found hard to integrate only some 3 per cent. But the "problem" gets an unproportionately large media coverage. And the problem has transformed traditional Danish politics in fundamental ways. Previously the Social Democrats, who consider themselves the builders of the Danish welfare state, had a kind of birth right to government formation. Large party to the centre/centre-left in the political spectrum. That position they have no longer. The Danish electorate no longer feel they can handle the immigrant problems, and they have been voted out of power.

Danes get very uncomfortable at being called racist. They have traditionally considered themselves one of the most tolerant, humanitarian and generous (for instance in development aid) peoples of the world. It's difficult to come to terms with the new image of the "ugly Dane" participating in the Iraq war, America's staunchest ally in Northern Europe, tough on immigration etc. And a lot of them are yearning back to the good old times when they were world leaders in progressive policies, like calling for boycott of South African goods under apartheid in that country, giving more than one per cent of GDP in development assistance and supporting freedom fighters in Africa and Latin America. Many Danes are yearning back to that time. Usually that part of the brain that is dealing with the question of national identity is one of the most complex and contradictory: I want to be one thing, but I also want to be that other thing. What is going on there is opposed to the logic of normal language.

For some reason the Swedes seem to be better at integrating foreign people. The Bridge to Malmoe across the Sound is called the "Love Bridge". More than a thousand couples of mixed nationalities have moved to Malmoe, even though they continue working in Copenhagen. They flee the tight immigration laws in Denmark that make it difficult to be united with a bride or groom of another nationality, if that person is under 24. One of the official excuses for the policy is that it prevents arranged marriages, and hence is necessary to protect the girls. But it has the effect of stopping many inter-national couples, in which one is a Danish citizen, from moving together and getting a common home in Denmark:

A group of Danes recently gathered on Malmo's main square to protest, saying they felt hurt and betrayed. They also expressed deep gratitude to their Swedish neighbours. “I'm very grateful to Sweden. I know they had to take me but they were extremely welcoming,” says Ms Reves, who now lives in a Malmo apartment with her Egyptian husband. As many as 1,000 couples have now crossed the love bridge. The Swedish migration board reckons that Danes are arriving at a rate of 60 couples a month. The exodus could one day even exceed the country's previous migration record, set in 1943, when more than 7,000 Danish Jews were spirited across the Oresund to escape the Nazis. Then, as now, Danes found welcome refuge in Sweden. (The Economist)