{"id":973,"date":"2013-08-25T23:30:17","date_gmt":"2013-08-25T23:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/?p=973"},"modified":"2013-08-26T00:32:32","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T00:32:32","slug":"are-danes-afraid-of-foreigners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/2013\/08\/25\/are-danes-afraid-of-foreigners\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Danes afraid of foreigners?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"danskiverden\"<\/a>This week I\u2019m going to tackle a less charming side of Denmark. After all, as a Danish saying goes, livet er ikke lutter lagkage<\/strong>\u00a0[LEEWeth air eck LOOTor LOWka-yeh] \u2013 life isn\u2019t only a layered cake. After den 11. september<\/strong>, a lot of Danish people, especially in the countryside, became increasingly afraid of foreigners, especially muslimer<\/strong>\u00a0(Moslems). This created a lot of tension between \u201dold\u201d Danes and nydanskere<\/strong>\u00a0(New Danes = recent immigrants to Denmark). The politician Pia Kj\u00e6rsg\u00e5rd and her Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People\u2019s Party) gained a lot of votes playing on this fear. She claimed that foreign customs were a threat to Danish culture, not an enrichment. The debate got really ugly at times. For me, the worst thing about it was that many of those things that are nice about Denmark, like the pretty flag and the soft, humorous Danish language, became mixed up with ideas I\u2019d call a bit racist (no offence to good-intentioned DF readers of this blog!) In 2006, when the newspaper Jyllands-Posten<\/strong> published some cartoons that made fun of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, it got really bad. Demonstrators in Asia and Africa were burning Danish flags, and even our neighbours in Sweden started to say things like \u201dWhat happened? The Danes used to be this friendly, warm, tolerant, open, unconventional, egalitarian, peace-loving down-to-earth people, and now they\u2019re all a bunch of mad nationalists.\u201d I mean, things have really calmed down now, but that\u2019s what it was like when the so-called Muhammedkrisen<\/strong> peaked! It wasn\u2019t easy to be Danish.<\/p>\n

But are Danes really more closed than other people? Or just more wary? I found a really interesting book, \u201dHow to be Danish\u201d, by Patrick Kingsley. He writes:<\/p>\n

\u201dIn 1864, Denmark had just lost the last bits of its Baltic empire, and the population that remained felt humiliated. Once a multinational commonwealth, Denmark was now a tiny monoculture. Danes suddenly found that they were a people without an identity \u2013 and used Grundtvig\u2019s<\/a> ideas to create one. And so these ideas \u2013 enlightening as they may have been \u2013 became a means of defining and justyfying Denmark\u2019s newfound homogeneity. In this way, Danes became exclusive through their inclusivity, intolerant through their tolerance \u2013 which helps to explain some of the contradictions in today\u2019s society.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are your experiences? Have you felt welcome in Denmark? Or is harder to break the ice here than in other small countries?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

This week I\u2019m going to tackle a less charming side of Denmark. After all, as a Danish saying goes, livet er ikke lutter lagkage\u00a0[LEEWeth air eck LOOTor LOWka-yeh] \u2013 life isn\u2019t only a layered cake. After den 11. september, a lot of Danish people, especially in the countryside, became increasingly afraid of foreigners, especially muslimer\u00a0(Moslems)…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[293278,293276,293280,293277,293279],"class_list":["post-973","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dansk-folkeparti","tag-homogenity","tag-muhammedkrisen","tag-nydanskere","tag-pia-kjaersgard"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":975,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions\/975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/danish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}