The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Neonationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World 9780857451019

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acronyms
Preface
Introduction
PART I Methodological Framework and Historical Context
CHAPTER 1 The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism in the Post-1989 World
PART II The Campaign(s) of 1997
CHAPTER 2 A Newspaper Campaign Unlike Any Other
CHAPTER 3 The End of Tolerance?
CHAPTER 4 The Danish Cultural World of Unbridgeable Diff erences
PART III The Mona Sheikh Story of 2001
Introduction
CHAPTER 5 The Mona Sheikh Story, 2001
CHAPTER 6 Mediated Muslims: Jyllands-Posten’s Coverage of Islam, 2001
CHAPTER 7 The Response from Muslim Readers and Viewers
PART IV The Muhammad Cartoon Crisis
Introduction
CHAPTER 8 The Original Spin Freedom of Speech as Danish News Management
CHAPTER 9 A Political Struggle in the Field of Journalism
CHAPTER 10 The Narrative of “Incompatibility” and the Politics of Negative Dialogues in the Danish Cartoon Affair
CHAPTER 11 “We Have to Explain Why We Exist”
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

THE ANNOYING DIFFERENCE

The Annoying Difference The Emergence of Danish Neonationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World

lm PETER HERVIK

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

©2011, 2014 Peter Hervik All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hervik, Peter, 1956The annoying diff erence : the emergence of Danish neonationalism, neoracism, and populism in the post-1989 world / Peter Hervik. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-100-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-101-9 (institutional ebook) -ISBN 978-0-85745-101-9 (retail ebook) 1. Muslims—Denmark. 2. Denmark—Ethnic relations. 3. Denmark—Politics and government—21st century. 4. Nationalism—Denmark. 5. Islamophobia—Denmark. 6. Freedom of the press—Denmark. I. Title. BP65.D4H47 2011 305.8009489—dc22 2010049894 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-0-85745-100-2 hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-101-9 institutional ebook ISBN: 978-0-85745-101-9 retail ebook


Contents List of Tables and Figures

vii

List of Acronyms

ix

Preface

x

Introduction

1

Part I. Methodological Framework and Historical Context   The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism in the Post-1989 World

21

Part II. The Campaign(s) of 1997   A Newspaper Campaign Unlike Any Other

55

  The End of Tolerance?

73

  The Danish Cultural World of Unbridgeable Differences

91

Part III. The Mona Sheikh Story of 2001   The Mona Sheikh Story, 2001

113

  Mediated Muslims: Jyllands-Posten’s Coverage of Islam, 2001

133

  The Response from Muslim Readers and Viewers

149

vi t Contents

Part IV. The Muhammad Cartoon Crisis   The Original Spin: Freedom of Speech as Danish News Management

177

  A Political Struggle in the Field of Journalism

197

  The Narrative of “Incompatibility” and the Politics of Negative Dialogues in the Danish Cartoon Affair

231

  “We Have to Explain Why We Exist”

242

Conclusion

269

Notes

282

References

287

Index

305


Tables and Figures TABLES

1. Immigrants and descendants according to country of origin

24

2. Muslims in Denmark according to nationality in 2006

110

3. Editorials, columns, feature articles, and op-eds by newspaper

200

FIGURES

1. The basic circuit of cultural production

14

2. Immigrants and descendants in Denmark by 1 January 1983–2005

23

3. Percentage of Western and non-Western immigrants and descendants of total population by 1 January 1983–2005

23

4. Lars Løkke Rasmussen among Mujahedin guerrilla leaders, 1988

30

5. Cas Mudde’s far right populism triangle

46

6. Basic far right wing populism

47

7. Contours of far right populism in the two Maastricht referenda, 1992 and 1993

47

8. Far right populist strategy of the Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet) and later the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti)

47

9. Danish newspapers’ circulation 1997, 2001, 2006, and 2009

56

10. “Ask the Danes”: “Yes” or “No” to immigrants (Ekstra Bladet 22 April 1997)

57

11. Ekstra Bladet’s story about Ali from Somalia (Ekstra Bladet 9 May 1997)

58

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12. Danish political parties in the Parliament (Folketinget), 1997, 2001, 2005, 2007

61

13. The number of Somali refugees in Denmark in the 1990s

65

14. Politiken’s placard, 13 March 1997

80

15. Danish and non-Danish attributes found in interviews

97

16. Attributes of guests as used by the host

103

17. The narrativizing sequence of the figured world of host-guest relations

104

18. The development of far right populism

111

19. “Multi-Denmark,” Jyllands-Posten, 29 August 1999

135

20. “The New Denmark,” Jyllands-Posten, 15 July 2001

137

21. Kurt Westergaard’s drawing of Babar Baig

146

22. Front page of Jyllands-Posten, 11 September 2005

174

23a. Kurt Westergaard’s illustration in Jyllands-Posten, 12 April 1997: “Theocracy in Iran as guilty of state terrorism.”

182

23b. Kurt Westergaard’s illustration in Jyllands-Posten, 27 August 2005

182

24. Number of sold and read copies of newspapers during the peak of the Muhammad cartoon conflict

200

25. The three frames—a struggle of news and views

217


Acronyms CHR: Danish Centre for Human Rights DCISM: Danish Centre for International Studies and Human Rights DMGT: Coalition of Muslim Immigrant Associations (Turkey) ECRI: European Commission against Racism and Intolerance EEC: European Economic Community EUMC: European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia IMER: International Migration and Ethnic Relations ISESCO: Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization MIM: Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare NAFTA: North American Free Trade Agreement NPR: National Public Radio OIC: Organization of the Islamic Conference


Preface



The politicizing of the Danish media and the emergence of neonationalism have polarized Danish society over the last couple of decades. In Parliament, the veil is compared to the swastika; Muslims in Denmark are compared to tumors in need of radiation; and Islam is called a plague that must be fought like Nazism. These three radical comments were made by members of Parliament. There seems to be no limit to what can be said in the Danish public, or what the majority allows itself to say about the country’s ethnic minorities including Muslims. The stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization of Denmark’s ethnic minorities and the discrimination against them disturb me and have motivated me to write this book. I have spent much of my professional research time studying Denmark’s drastic transformation, trying to understand the underlying mechanisms of radically anti-Muslim commentary and the racialized belief system that such speech reveals. In research projects since the mid 1990s, I have experienced and analyzed the incremental change in how ethnic minorities were dealt with in the media, in policy, and in popular culture from various perspectives. This book will seek to bring these projects together in order to provide background for understanding the Muhammad cartoon crisis of 2005–2006. The cartoon crisis occurred as a logical extension of the polarization of Danish society but reached its global peak in February 2006, with violent reactions triggered by high-profile news of the publication of those Danish cartoons. The development of Danish neonationalism has had a significant impact on my own research. When the new right-wing Danish government coalition of Denmark’s Liberal Party (Venstre) and the Conservative People’s Party (Det Konservative Folkeparti) came into power in November 2001, it chained itself to the far right wing, the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), to the extent that the three groups’ attitudes and politics toward the country’s immigrants and refugees seemed indistinguishable. The three parties agreed to close a number of “useless” committees and institutions that were run, they argued, by the elite “judges of taste” (smagsdommere). I was working for one of these targeted institutions, the Board for Ethnic Equality (Nævnet for Etnisk Ligestilling), in Copenhagen. According

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to a political agreement between the three right-wing parties, the Board and the Danish Centre for Human Rights had to be closed, since they had become “too politically correct,” as evidenced by their leaders’ critical remarks about the Danish People’s Party. Only two weeks later the government succumbed to intense international pressure and negotiated a new agreement with the Danish People’s Party which suggested that the Centre was to close but reappear in a restructured version. However, the Board for Ethnic Equality did close. The publication of my report for the Board, “The Muslims of the Media” (Mediernes Muslimer), in 2002 was one of its last activities. As part of the public presentation of the report, the Danish Union of Journalists’ Equal Opportunities Committee organized a public meeting. The meeting gathered about 100 people, many of whom had authored reports and news articles that I dealt with in my analysis. Adam Holm, a journalist with Politiken, chaired the meeting, while Lisbet Knudsen, from Denmark’s Radio (public service television); Lotte Mejlhede, of TV2; and Bent Falbert, from Ekstra Bladet, were invited to critically discuss the comprehensive 343page report, which presented the result of my research into the media coverage of religion from 15 May to 15 August 2001. It was Knudsen’s relentless criticism, more than anything else, that I came to regard as the epitome of journalistic vanity. Knudsen described the report as “tendentious and therefore not research,” dismissing it as a work where the “good people say, bad people assert.” A search of the manuscript for the words “say” (sige), “mean” (mene), and “assert” ( påstå) for what she considered the good guys and the bad guys revealed that her assertion was not supported by fact. The initial media response to the book was negative, with Knudsen’s spurious criticism leading the way. The negative response resulted in a marginalization of the work. Who does that serve? In whose interest is the marginalization of a comprehensive critical analysis of the news media’s role in ousting young people from Danish politics? Today, I see the politicizing of the Danish news media, the denials of criticism, and the influence of the radical right on news media coverage. Knudsen was the head of the daily TV news production of Denmark’s Radio, trying to maintain its image of objective news broadcasting in light of the criticism that was also raised by the Danish Press Council, in its ruling six months after Denmark’s Radio’s controversial news broadcast, saying that there was no basis in the journalistic research for representing three Danish-Pakistani politicians as supporters of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Another outcome of the events we researched is the actual marginalization experienced by Danish Muslims—not least those participants in our focus groups who discussed footage of Denmark’s Radio’s TV coverage, headlines, and images, and said that they couldn’t recognize themselves in that cover-

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age. I called my report “Muslims of the Media” in order to distinguish these two-dimensional media constructs from the diverse group of Muslims in the focus groups. Their views and their situation have not been recognized. For me the event represents a personal watershed moment. Working for a more just and peaceful society is one of my objectives. If structural violence is committed by a powerful majority against its ethnic minorities, then the society risks suffering from increased physical violence, crime, carelessness, political polarization, and so on; these will strike at arbitrary moments in arbitrary spheres. The international informed community has a right to know about how Danish society has changed, for instance, how the concept of “freedom of speech,” originally designed to protect small numbers, now is being used by the country’s government and most powerful newspapers to insult, ridicule, and mock certain minorities, and at the same time the majority is insisting on having no dialogue with the people it speaks about. Public denials of bad news journalism, trivialization of discriminatory and racist issues, or politicizing of the news media should never thwart such an understanding. Years later, in 2007, I analyzed the media coverage of the Muhammad cartoon crisis within the framework of another research project. We found three major discourses that are treated in this book. The most dominant— the one we call “Free speech is the issue, and it is a Danish issue”—could be found primarily in Jyllands-Posten, in the tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B.T., and in government statements, and it turned out that several confrontational writers in Jyllands-Posten were the very same radical right-wing, ex-leftist, anti-Islamic writers who fashioned what I have coined the “Mona Sheikh story” of 2001, following the key character in the media representations. Maybe my anger stemming from the meeting in 2002 was justified; maybe these journalist commentators had entirely missed the depth and power of the forces behind the most significant Danish media event in the 2000s next to the Muhammad cartoon crisis. The Annoying Difference brings together research on three significant historical media events carried out over a period of thirteen years, in order to show the drastic changes and emerging fissures in Danish society and to expose the politicizing of Danish news journalism, which has consequences for the political representation and everyday lives of ethnic minorities in Denmark. In the eyes of the media, the general public, and mainstream perceptions these minorities were annoyingly different, as they refused to reduce their visible and aural differences. The first event is the symbiotic 1997 campaign of the newly formed Danish People’s Party and the tabloid Ekstra Bladet, which in turn cannot be understood without reference to the banal nationalism of two Maastricht referenda in 1992 and 1993; the European Soccer Championship in Sweden in 1992; and debates regarding the arrival of Bosnian refugees in 1994 and 1995. The second event is the Mona Sheikh case—a story about how young Muslims born in Denmark with Pakistani

Preface t xiii

roots were forced to leave Danish politics in the summer of 2001 due to a Danish news media that, through its moralistic, panic-stricken coverage, “demonized” Islam and the young Muslims. Jyllands-Posten, Berlingske Tidende, and Denmark’s Radio played a crucial role in Denmark’s shift from a neonationalism that marginalized those who were ethnically different (particularly Somali refugees) to one that affected Muslims in Denmark and abroad. Cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who was later to draw the bomb-inthe-turban cartoon for Jyllands-Posten, was active in this period as well, and so were key Danish political players and journalists. The attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September came immediately after the Mona Sheikh story. Then, in Denmark’s November 2001 national election, the Liberals and Conservatives formed a strong coalition government based on the radical right-wing populist Danish People’s Party. The third event is the furor surrounding the Muhammad cartoons published in September 2005; violent reactions to those cartoons reached around the world and peaked in February 2006. In my view the anthropological perspective is useful in analyzing media practices and discourses, because it offers the possibility of a balanced view of the inside and the outside: One can be an active participant, a provider of thick description, and offer an outsider’s perspective. I do not wish to argue that some kind of foreignness or distance is required to get a proper perspective of the Danish situation. However, I do think that living and working abroad for more than thirteen years provided me with a fruitful background for studying the drastically changing Danish society through its treatment of ethnic minorities. In this case I see it as an advantage that I can understand the humor (good as well as bad) used to rationalize Danish neonationalism, since Danish is my native language, but can also look at Denmark through the eyes of others in Mexico, the United States, Norway, Sweden, and Japan since I have spent years in those places. Indeed, this experience and my ethnographic fieldwork with Yucatec Mayas and other Yucatecans help me to see more clearly that the entire Danish value system is tilting to the radical right, even as many Danes trivialize, naturalize, and normalize this development. Since I wish to reach a broader audience with this analysis of the Muhammad cartoon crisis and the events leading up to it, I decided to write the book first in English. By doing so I hope to meet the foreign interest in understanding the enigmatic Danish development without merely reproducing existing discourses and official versions of the course of events. For the last twelve years much of my research, publications, and lectures have revolved around the three key events that are used to organize this book. Here, for the first time I put them together in a single volume, with 3 to 4 chapters on each and an introductory section describing each event (details and acknowledgment of publishers are listed in the Appendix).

xiv t Preface

For the research and the writing that went into this book project, I first of all want to thank the generous people at Hitotsubashi University, Graduate School of the Social Sciences for giving me the unique opportunity to finish the manuscript while serving as a Visiting Professor. I wish to thank professors Kazuyasu Ochiai, Masonori Naito, Yoshiko Aishiwa, and Jonathan Lewis, and to recognize the outstanding efforts of senior secretary Miyuki Kobayashi for my smooth integration into Japanese society. Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM) and Malmö University College granted money that allowed me to spend two months as a Visiting Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the spring of 2008. Extraordinary support was provided by distinguished professor Dorothy Holland, who was also there to comment, discuss, and suggest. An equally special thanks goes to the caring and constructive Alison Greene. Also, generously commenting on chapters were Donald Nonini and Bill Lachicotte. At MIM the book-work benefitted from my affiliation with MIM and its researchers, who in times of restructuring and howling wolves granted economic and scholarly shelter. Thanks to the Helsingin Sanomat Research Foundation and Professor Risto Kunelius for the invitation to participate in the truly global research project on the Muhammad cartoon conflict. For research assistance, I am indebted to the efforts of Aintab Alseraj, Christy Stanforth, Maria Ettrup, Daniel Hervik, Thomas Hervik, Simon Hervik, and Lise Binderup. Participants in focus group discussions and individual discussions have been invaluable for their time and openminded talks. Likewise students in Copenhagen, Malmö, Chapel Hill, and Hitotsubashi have provided invaluable feedback. At Berghahn I have been happy and fortunate to work with the wonderful group of people Melissa Spinelli, Ann Przyzycki, Caitlin Mahon and Marion Berghahn. Thank you for the copyediting work of Michele Bowman. For additional constructive comments and exchanges, on smaller or larger pieces at various stages, I remain indebted to Ronald Stade, Carolina Boe Sanchez, Ulf Hannerz, Clarissa Berg, Risto Kunelius, Elizabeth Eide, Mark Allen Peterson, Kajsa Olsson, Maja Povrzanovic Frykman, Björn Fryklund, Ulf Hedetoft, Christina Jagd, Mikkel Rytter, Rikke Andreassen, Mona Sheikh, Simone Abram, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Andre Gingrich, Gavan Titley, Alana Lentin, Haci Akman, Karin van Nieuwkerk, and the late Marianne Gullestad. Thanks to Nordicom, Taylor & Francis, Berghahn Books, Clarissa Berg, Jørn Stjerneklar, Ekstra Bladet, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, Kurt Westergaard, and Politiken for permissions to published articles and illustrations. At the very end of the process, I thank my family, who means the world to me— Simon, Thomas, Daniel, and finally Lisbet —for standing at my side, as four pillars, as supporters, and critical caring interlocutors.


Introduction Denmark’s Transformation You would have to look hard for a country with a better brand-name than Denmark. It’s not only the home of Hans Christian Andersen, the country seems to live in one of his fairy tales. The people are pretty and prosperous, the land is green and fertile, and the towns are colorful and squeaky clean. Denmark’s queen is much beloved by her people and hails from the oldest monarchy in Europe. —Daniel Schorn, “The State of Denmark,” 2006



The image of Denmark has traditionally been positive. Danes are even regarded as the happiest people in the world. But these images are based on gross oversimplifications, and in any case, the reality is changing. A member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party, Søren Krarup, compares the contemporary contestation of Muslim presence in Denmark to resistance against the occupying German forces during World War II. In other words, Islam must be fought like Nazism, and he doesn’t hesitate to declare in Parliament that the Muslim veil is the equivalent of the Nazi swastika. To a Danish daily newspaper he explained: “I have said that the veil, the headscarf, is a totalitarian symbol, and thereby it is comparable to the totalitarian symbols we know from communism and Nazism respectively” (M. Mikkelsen 2007). Another member of Parliament from the same party, Jesper Langballe, has evoked the title of a 1930s Danish book which translates to “Pest over Europe” to state that Islam must be fought like a plague, similarly to communism and Nazism (2002). A third member of Parliament, Louise Frevert, used her Web site to broadcast reflections on the impossibility of integrating Muslims into Danish society: Let us make this clearer by comparing the problem to the everyday life of a doctor working with cancer. If the doctor was to cure his patients for what is similar to ‘integration’ it would mean, that he needed to try to convince the cancer cells to become good, well-functioning and healthy cells that could work in harmony within the patient’s body. He would have to refrain from any

2 t Introduction

type of therapy, treatment by radiation or operation, just talk to the cancer cells—and then observe how they spread in the patient’s body unhindered. (Frevert 2002)

Since 1989 Denmark has experienced a drastic transformation. The Danish Prime Minister has described it as a movement from the world’s most liberal integration policy to the world’s toughest (Hervik and Rytter 2003). Denmark has changed from being a role model in following international organizations and conventions to being a country where reports and research about racism are met with strategies of denial and trivialization (Hervik and Jørgensen 2002). Sociologists, anthropologists, and refugee experts have called for making higher demands on refugees and immigrants. Now, Muslims in Denmark must be prepared to be “insulted, ridiculed, and mocked,” according to the country’s largest national newspaper, Jyllands-Posten (Rose 2005; see also Jyllands-Posten 2005b). The Danish People’s Party and Ekstra Bladet described Denmark as changing status from a “peaceful country to a multicultural society.” Denmark has moved from a positive image of antiauthoritarianism and inclusive social interaction (Borish 1991) to a country known in Europe, the Middle East, and the Muslim world for xenophobia and Islamophobia—a country where 80 percent of native Danes see the relationship between themselves and Muslims as antagonistic. Finally, “The Danish Democracy and Power Study” (Magtudredningen) came about in the late 1990s because of Denmark’s emerging multiculturalism, which had to be analyzed for what was seen as a potential challenge to the country’s democracy. The global media and its consumers have witnessed a wave of global violent reactions variously represented as against Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, Christians, the United States, and the Western world, but all connected to two Danish events. On 30 September 2005 the largest newspaper in Denmark, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, published the result of its internal experiment to find out whether Danish cartoonists were censoring themselves when it came to drawing the prophet Muhammad. Twelve drawings came in. They were published and became the primary object of interpretation and reactions. The second event, closely connected to the first, concerns the Danish government’s rejection of a dialogue with eleven ambassadors. These ambassadors had asked for a meeting to talk about the deteriorating situation for Muslims in Denmark, using Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons as what they saw as one of four recent examples of great concern. These two events took place in September and October 2005, yet the more violent reactions across the globe did not occur until late January and February 2006. At this point the foreign news media had to break through a four-month-thick cloud of events and representations, including the Danish

Introduction W 3

government’s handling of the affair; value-based Danish news journalism; and a popular Danish distrust of ethnic minorities. Many Danish journalists had tacitly labeled the affair the “Muhammad crisis”; weaker voices used the terms “caricature crisis,” “cartoon crisis,” and even “Jyllands-Posten’s crisis.” Choosing one rather than the other would already put the foreign reporter within one of the competing frames of interpretation.

The Foreign Reporter in Search of an Explanation The evolving cartoon crisis left media reporters, politicians, academics, and foreign governments wondering about what had happened in Denmark in the years leading up to this crisis: What had facilitated this development, and what triggered the crisis? Is the Danish case unique, or is it part of a transnational development, and can the same thing occur in other countries? What bearing does the Danish cartoon affair have on other countries? Foreign reporters who turned to the Danish media coverage as a source for stories faced a choice parallel to that faced by Danish subscribers. Danes who wish to subscribe to one daily newspaper typically choose the newspaper whose political ideology, style, and viewpoints comes closest to their own. Each of the largest nationally circulating papers—Morgenavisen JyllandsPosten, Berlingske Tidende, and Politiken—embraced one dominant discourse on the cartoons. Choosing one over the other would yield a foregone conclusion about, for instance, what triggered the conflict or what transformed the conflict into a global news story. For some reporters, ignoring the Danish context might simply be easier. Professors in communication Mónica Codina and Jordi Rodríguez-Virgili used the New York Times as a reference to establish that “the “flashpoint” of the story occurred when Imams Ahmed Akkari and Ahmed Abu Laban traveled to Arab countries to raise support for their protest against JyllandsPosten’s publication and the Danish government’s refusal to meet with foreign ambassadors. On 9 February 2006, The New York Times stayed away from the Danish context , but nevertheless concluded that the imams’ travel to the Middle East was the cause of violent global reactions. Their travel was connected with a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in December 2005. The imams tried to “set international brush fires” and were successful in creating a turning point. The New York Times quoted a Cairo source as saying, “It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the OIC took a stance against it” (Fattah 2006). Yet the OIC was already engaged in the crisis by 15 October, when the organization sent a letter of concern to the Danish Prime Minister almost at the same time as eleven ambassadors representing more than 500 million people in Muslim countries

4 t Introduction

asked for a meeting with the prime minister. The meeting was denied. If the meeting hadn’t been denied, the imams probably would not have traveled to the Middle East in the first place. The New York Times ended up contributing to the blame the imams received for causing the cartoon outrage. And because the New York Times was then used as a source in academic papers and by other journalists, the story of the imams’ responsibility spread further. Analyses were carried out without consideration of the proper contexts. Incidentally, “blaming the imams” for the outrage was also a spin strategy of the Danish government and a popular strategy of journalists working for Jyllands-Posten. So if foreign news reporters who came to Denmark consulted Jyllands-Posten and the Danish government as the original source of the story and the official response, then they would find that the imams were most likely be the first ones blamed. One example is Pernille Ammitzböll, a Jyllands-Posten journalist who co-wrote a piece on the cartoon affair with U.S. terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino for the neoconservative Middle East Quarterly, edited by Daniel Pipes. The article was built around an attack on Imams Ahmed Akkari and Raed Hlayhel; the latter was said to have “an axe to grind” with Jyllands-Posten because of the newspaper’s series of critical articles on Hlayhel in the spring of 2005. The personal attacks on the imams also deflected attention from the way both Jyllands-Posten and the Danish government handled the story. Yet again and again this article is used as an objective source of information about the cartoon affair. Obviously, the imams’ travel to the Middle East was an important aspect of the story’s development, but it cannot be taken out of its politicized context. It is a winning strategy that prevailed in international reactions and was reflected by the popular Wikipedia in the first months after the crisis. One of the reporters who came to Denmark was Bob Simon of Good Morning America (CBS), who didn’t buy into the official version of the story or to the background statements made by Jyllands-Posten. Simon criticized Jyllands-Posten for defending free speech yet not allowing the newspaper’s culture editor, Flemming Rose, to speak to CBS. He was also critical of the way Jyllands-Posten and the Danes treated the Muslim minority of 2 percent of the population. In an interview with the Danish news media, Simon explained further: In my opinion it is not a coincidence that the Muhammad-cartoons were printed in Denmark. The Danes consider themselves as enlightened and moral beings, but not keeping up with their Muslim brothers and compatriots. I hope that this will be an opportunity to hold up the mirror and look at yourself and each other in a new way. My impression is that the Danes for many years have looked at themselves as if they in practically all areas were ahead of everyone else. This is not the case. Seen from the outside you are in a nation under pres-

Introduction t 5

sure. Not because foreigners are pouring into the country, but because you are afraid to be run over. You must learn to be more tolerant towards foreigners in your country, whether they have a passport and residence permit or not. One can fear a continuous polarization, where the nationalist forces in the Danish People’s Party will continue their progress. (Illeborg 2006)

The International Herald Tribune wrote: Now, after rioting that has raged for weeks in the Middle East and Asia after a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, Denmark has sunk even more deeply into an identity crisis. A country that once prided itself on having the most open immigration policies in Europe and a generous welfare state is grappling with how to preserve its vaunted liberalism while remaining Danish. But the cultural clash is particularly acute in Denmark. As Muslim protesters in the Middle East burned Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen in effigy this week, he insisted on Danish tolerance. “It’s a false picture to portray us as an enemy of Islam,” he said in an interview on Thursday. . . . But some Muslim leaders say such words fail to resonate when the Danish government relies on the swing vote of the Danish People’s Party, whose leaders have publicly compared Muslims to “cancer cells.” A country that touts itself as the world’s biggest net contributor of foreign aid per capita recently introduced legislation making it virtually impossible for torture victims to obtain Danish citizenship. Successful asylum applications to Denmark plummeted to 10 percent in 2004, from 53 percent in 2001. In a sign that the cartoon crisis is fanning even greater anti-immigrant sentiment, the People’s Party leader, Pia Kjærsgaard, wrote in her weekly newsletter that the Islamic religious community here was populated with “pathetic and lying men with worrying, suspect views on democracy and women.” She added: ‘They are the enemy inside. The Trojan horse in Denmark. A kind of Islamic mafia.’ (Bilefsky 2006)

Foreign commentators must also face the cultural aspects of interaction with the Danes. There are some general values said to be common to the Danish cultural outlook, and, as Gerd Baumann (1999) explains, these values form an essentializing discourse; they are acknowledged by many Danes but subscribed to by fewer. To make her entry into the commentary on recent changes in the Danish self-image, Swedish journalist Karin Söderberg uses a Lonely Planet quote: “The Danes love to make fun of everything and everybody, but when it comes to themselves, they are very sensitive to criticism” (Sydsvenskan 2005; Söderberg 2005). Söderberg uses popular travel guidebooks to state her case about Danes’ changing relationship to immigrants under the right-wing government. Some denials of Danish racism and discrimination are based on the idea that foreign correspondents do not understand Danish humor and “the real

6 t Introduction

situation in Denmark.” The clearest statement of this position may be Hans Jørgen Nielsen’s Er danskerne fremmedfjendske? (2004), in which he argues that Denmark is not xenophobic although foreign reporters perceive it as such. During the press conference held on the book’s publication date, foreign journalists were told that when politician Karen Jespersen, a Social Democrat at the time, suggested that the criminal asylum seekers should be placed on a deserted island, and when another politician, Kim Behnke of the Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet), suggested that Somali refugees should be sent home and thrown out of an airplane, with or without a parachute, these were not expressions of xenophobia but examples of Danish humor, which foreign reporters did not adequately understand (Jafari et al. 2004). Interestingly, the radical right nationalists of Danish Culture (Dansk Kultur) do the best job of capturing the social function of this claim that foreigners don’t understand Danish humor: Danish jokes are known for their warm, dry humor, yes they are even cosy, but can become biting, when the people are suppressed, the country is or on the verge of being occupied or when you can say what you mean. When the Dane feels that he can no longer speak openly, and when censorship-like conditions, day fines, and foreign cultures seek to suppress Danish humor and culture, then the best thing and the most subtle joke is the one only the insiders can understand. (Dansk Kultur n.d.)

“Being occupied” undoubtedly refers to the Nazi occupation (1940–1945), while “on the verge of being occupied” is often used in anti-Islamic war rhetoric. “Censorship-like conditions and day fines” refers to not being able to talk about how dangerous and unwanted the Muslim and non-Western migrants are due to the risk of being fined for making racist remarks. Jokes “only the insiders can understand” does not in my opinion refer to the humor as such. The content is not funny at all, as the reporters rightly noted in a comment (Jafari et al. 2004). If Nielsen is pressured to explain the meaning of the joke, he will come up short. My point is that the reference to Danish humor helps to close a gate between “ourselves” and the “unwanted others,” to create a situation where “we” can tacitly agree that “we” have something “they” don’t: a certain sense of humor, which consists of mocking the others without their knowledge. Danes love to criticize other countries, religions, and each other. But if criticized themselves, as the various quotes indicate, they often become upset and sensitive. Denials of Danish discrimination and racism are often met with arguments such as: “The visiting investigators must have come on a bad day,” or “What does a Spaniard or a Croat know about Denmark?” (Hervik and Jørgensen 2002).

Introduction t 7

The Politicized Danish Field of Journalism The Danish cartoon story unfolded in an already charged political atmosphere whose importance was seldom featured in the story’s coverage. For those who followed the events closely, however, it was predictable that something would happen, although the magnitude and idiosyncratic course of events was not. The drastic political development involves the print media. According to Danish media studies professor Stig Hjarvard, Denmark has witnessed a repolitization of the news media. In the early twentieth century, newspapers began losing their role as agitators; news began to be replaced by views. During the last decade, newspapers have again become political agents that try to make a difference. The presence of immigrants and refugees, in particular, has emerged as an area where newspapers have shown a strong stance. Hjarvard explains that to understand the repolitization one must not only look at the development of Danish politics but also at the major changes in the commercial conditions for Danish news production. In 2001 two new free newspapers, MetroExpress and Urban, made their début. By 2006 free dailies had captured close to 60 percent of the market, adding on to the damage already done by the electronic news media. The free newspapers, financed by advertisement, sought to reach a general audience with short fact-based news stories and consumer information. In response to this challenge, the largest established newspapers turned to values and opinions as a way to sell their papers. Offering an opinion by means of the editorials, the front page stories, and invited opinion pieces, these newspapers echoed the political parties, though nuances and variation could be found in all papers (Hjarvard 2006). The repoliticization of the Danish news media in the last decade is one of several historical aspects that are overlooked but necessary for understanding the Muhammad cartoon crisis. It is also a reality that foreign news reporters and scholars must learn to recognize and to operate within, if they are not to reproduce the politicization in their attempt to do serious news reporting and academic research. The repoliticizing of the Danish media is accompanied by a professionalization of news management, where the right spin on the news will help favor the interest of named politicians, individual cases, and broader political reform. The spin utilizes catchy phrases, apt visualizations, and bipolar simplifications, such as “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Most of the spin doctors are journalists to begin with. Through the spin they shape their messages and strive to be perceived as they wish to be by tapping into the way the news media is working. For instance, the news media currently thrives on a conflict-oriented boxing-match strategy: two opponents contend, every point made is reported as news, and at the ringside sit a num-

8 t Introduction

ber of wise experts who in various ways relate to the sides of the match—as former boxers, trainers, coaches, family, friends, and so on. When the field of journalism is politicized, journalistic criteria of news reporting is constantly challenged, and so is the news media’s watchdog role, which is to keep an eye on those in power, both government and others. In addition, the news media’s position as gatekeepers of events, issues, and ideas (Lule 2001) may become manipulated by spin doctors outside of the media institutions. Even history becomes politicized: the past is used didactically, and people are guided toward remembering some events and forgetting others. History becomes selective, decided by contemporary battles for favorable public opinion. As a consequence there will be blind spots that may seem innocent or may go unnoticed. In the coverage of the Muhammad cartoons there is a curious absence of information about Jyllands-Posten’s coverage of Islam in the last ten years. The angle is absent in the Danish press, yet available in the Swedish media. Another absence in the coverage is the demographic composition of Jyllands-Posten’s leadership. There are no women in the leadership—though according to Carsten Juste, this means nothing (Andreassen 2007)—and there are no Muslim journalists and very few journalists with an ethnic minority background among the newspaper’s journalists.

The Annoying Difference in Three Media Events This book seeks to provide an analytic and historical framework to the Danish situation by focusing on three important media events: the newspaper campaign of 1997, the Mona Sheikh story of 2001, and the Muhammad cartoon crisis of 2005–06. And it seeks to provide the immediate context to these events by filling in blank spots that have been neglected by journalists, politicians, and academics in the treatment of these events in Danish history. If you have lived in Denmark for the last decade, you can hardly fail to have noticed the development of a particularly strong and powerful “us/ them” division in the media and in the popular consciousness. There is much talk about “we,” the Danes, the hosts, who are born and raised in Denmark, represented positively in news articles and interviews, and “the others,” the guests who “do not belong” properly and are described in negative terms and considered a problem simply because they arrive with their importunate differences. The three statements made by members of the Parliament and cited earlier in this book speak to the saturation of the antagonistic division. The Annoying Difference will analyze the historical emergence of a certain and particularly rigid dichotomization that has arisen in the media and in

Introduction t 9

popular consciousness between a neonational “we” and “the others.” Not surprisingly, the media’s coverage has shaped the popular consciousness such that Danes talk about being hosts, and believe that as hosts they should have certain rights that the “guests” should not have, even if those “guests” were born in Denmark or have lived, worked, and paid taxes there for decades. The popular perception is now that cultural differences are so fundamental that newcomers are simply too different to be integrated into Denmark. Some of the analytical concepts used to capture the meaning of the unfolding rigid dichotomies are relational concepts such as neoracism, neonationalism, populism, and ethnicity. These terms pose a special challenge since they are also used analytically and empirically. So whereas foreign commentators in Denmark will experience these four concepts as emotionally loaded, outright rejected, and best avoided as political minus-words, their analytical histories and explanatory power cannot be rejected or reduced to a single historical expression. The development of neonationalism, neoracism, and populism over the three events does not occur mechanically. Therefore, I will pay special attention to the transnational network, political forces, and structural friction behind the development in the shape of entrepreneurs in politics and the media, who seek to capitalize on the anxieties brought about by global megaevents and structural change. The three media events are particularly suited for bringing out the involvement of networks of anti-immigrant groups. We shall see, for instance, that the primary anti-Islamists during the cartoon crisis were also active under one or both of the previous media events, though in different networks. The newspaper/party campaign in 1997 and the Mona Sheikh story in 2001 happened while I was carrying out two larger research projects. The “Structuring Diversity” project of 1996–1999 took place when the tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet undertook its unprecedented “Foreigners” campaign. This team research project involved twelve student-assistants and co-authors; a four month-long media study (January to April 1997); a broader study of the media coverage six months before and six months after this core period; and in-depth interviews with fifty-five people in which we spent one to three hours asking open questions about their concerns about the emerging multicultural presence. From a historical perspective on minority issues in the media, the second media event, the Mona Sheikh story, began on 17 May 2001, only two days after I had begun studying the news media’s coverage of religions in Denmark. We—myself and three research assistants—analyzed this period through a two year-long research project for the Board for Ethnic Equality in Copenhagen. The study looked at 800 articles on religion and ethnic minorities published between 15 May and 15 August 2001, nearly all of which dealt

10 t Introduction

with Islam and more than a third of which dealt with the Mona Sheikh story. Because of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September, we kept collecting news articles on a less systematic basis until the Danish parliamentary election on 20 November. We also carried out seven focus group interviews with younger media consumers about their response to the ongoing media coverage of the Mona Sheikh story. One of the most active newspapers during this period was Jyllands-Posten, the anti-Islamic stance of which therefore became one of the predominant themes addressed in the analysis (Hervik 2002a). During the Muhammad cartoon crisis I was approached by a Finnish colleague, Risto Kunelius, and we ended up in an international research project on the global coverage of the cartoon controversy (Kunelius et al. 2007, Eide, Kunelius and Phillips 2008). Through this project we were able to do a frame analysis of the Danish media coverage from 15 January to 15 March 2006. In the course of this earlier work in reorganizing and translation, I found it tempting and necessary to add some new research. I decided to do additional interviews and produce a preliminary analysis that addressed questions such as: Could any changes be found in the basic Danish perception of others after the two other major media events? What did ordinary Danes remember about the cartoon crisis? How did young Muslims feel the impact of the crisis? This new research was done in the fall of 2008 via three focus groups and individual interviews. The three research projects involved studying the media’s coverage of minority issues for two to four months and applying similar types of focus but often using different sets of analytical tools reflecting the different interests, affiliations, and intellectual trajectory of a ten-year period. Rather, than forcing a single coherent model or meta-theory upon the three unfolding events, I wish to draw on the empirical insights obtained at the time of my original research, which took place while these historical events happened, and I wish the treatment to reflect that the actors in the first event, including the researchers, didn’t know about the latter events. Only with the Muhammad cartoon conflict did the other two media events merge as the first and the second events of particular historical importance. I have organized the book so that it can be read from one end to the other, or chapters can be read, in most cases, relatively independent of each other. With this structure, repetition is unavoidable, although I edited out as much as possible. All of the research projects share an inspiration from cultural studies’ awareness of different interconnected phases, production, product, and consumption, and reflect the idea of seeing the news articles more broadly, rather than as detachable texts, with each moment requiring separate epistemological and methodological considerations.

Introduction t 11

Methodological Notes The general methodological framework for the research derives from social practice theory and was carried out as an interdisciplinary IMER (International Migration and Ethnic Relations) project. IMER is a multidisciplinary approach to international migration that has become a discipline unto itself, as well as a meeting point of multiple disciplines interested in following the processes and conditions relevant to migrant lives over time and borders as they are situated in a transnational and global world. As such, IMER approaches problems of migration from a methodological, epistemological, and grounded theoretical point of view. In my IMER approach, I draw from particular insights from media, anthropology, cultural studies, discourse analysis, and conflict studies as the primary subject fields. Generally, practice theory involves a study of “the practices and discourses that people engage in and embody, and a focus on the actual ways people produce these practices and discourses within socio-cultural constraints which themselves are subject to reproduction and change through such human activities” (Holland and Skinner 1996). I am interested principally in how an actor is engaged in practice yet constrained by experience and discourse. The practice approach seeks to get close to the practical ways of how actors enact and come to embody public cultural forms and live with them. Media anthropology (a subfield of anthropology) allows for such an approach, since it comprises ethnographically informed, historically grounded, and contextsensitive analyses of the ways in which people use and make sense of media products. But it also studies the media products themselves in contextualized and historicized ways; it argues that media texts must not be divorced from their immediate social context (Askew 2002). The lives of ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, and their descendants are to a large extent shaped by how native people perceive them, represent them in the mass media, and approach them in social interaction. My research looks at the mainstream Danes and the national news media in order to understand these perceptions, representations, and forces that are so important in the everyday lives of the minorities. The strength of practice theory for me is that it starts with the specific event, representation, interpretation, or case and first understands the phenomenon by examining its own operating principles and observing how people make sense of it, as well as how structural conditions and immediate circumstances influence the making of sense. A proper sense of social practice would not simply look at anger against refugees who are receiving free bicycles but would also examine why the anger is directed at those who granted the free bicycles, which is how the Danish television news shaped the issue in 1984 (see chap-

12 t Introduction

ter 1, this volume); it would look at the Egyptian newspaper Al Faqr to find out why its analysis of six Muhammad cartoons didn’t provoke angry Muslim responses in Egypt; it would not accept the explanation that young men with Lebanese, Palestinian, or Turkish backgrounds commit more violence than other young people in Denmark simply because of their Lebanese, Palestinian, and Turkish identities; and it would look to historicize the different sources of appropriating perceptions of Jews and Muslims in Denmark, rather than simply seeing different standards applied as a contradiction. The interdisciplinary IMER approach has been particularly constructive in moving beyond misconceptions and examining the actual relationship between migrants and minorities while avoiding common flaws; for instance, it would note how knowledge about different minorities may have been appropriated in two different historical moments and in different spheres of society. Cultural studies focuses on the power of the media text in shaping attitudes and ideas as it questions the uncomplicated, unilinear transmission of media messages directly from the producers to the consumers (Askew 2002: 5). Like practice theory, cultural studies insists on not divorcing media technology and media texts from their social conditions and historical circumstances. But anthropology, with its focus on people and lived practices, and its experience-near perspective, has been slow to incorporate theories and practices of power into the discipline (see, for instance, Abu-Lughod 1996). European anthropology neglected the study of race, ethnicization, and neonationalism for much too long, although obviously the study of ethnicity, culture, multiculturalism, racism, and identity cannot take place without the study of power, hegemony, privilege, or larger social formations of power. However interesting, an anthropology lost in ethnographic detail hardly has much chance to contribute to the general debate. Ferguson explains this risk from his African experience, where anthropologists may start out by saying: Conditions are really very different from country to country, and from locality to locality. So, I don’t know about “Africa,” but let met tell you about where I worked (. . .) The reply is a principled one, but it is also a strikingly ineffective way of responding to the question. The result is that detailed anthropological knowledge seems to have very little impact on broader discussions about “Africa” (in the world of policy and practice or that of popular representations). Journalistic and policy visions of “Africa” thus continue to rely on narratives that anthropologists already see as misleading, factually incorrect, and often racist; meanwhile, the scrupulously localized “Africa” that appears in the ethnographic accounts in professional anthropology journals becomes ever more difficult to relate to the “Africa” we read about in the New York Times. (2006)

Cultural studies is particularly important for opening up the reception, distribution, and production of meaning in different parts of the world, for

Introduction t 13

interpreting and experiencing the text, and for focusing on “the economy of meaning” that foregrounds certain interpretations and excludes others (Askew 2002: 6). The methodological framework for approaching the Danish media in the analysis of the first two media events in this book was inspired by a production circuit launched years ago by cultural studies pioneer Richard Johnson. In his seminal article “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” (1986–87), Johnson summarized some basic ideas of cultural studies that with few revisions still can serve to outline principles and decisive moments of the study of cultural forms. Richard Johnson was an early leader of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. In his 1986–87 article, he discusses the ongoing transformation of cultural studies from an intellectual, critical, left-wing stance into a university discipline. For Johnson, “[C]ultural studies is about the historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity, or the subjective forms we live by, or, in a rather perilous compression, perhaps a reduction, the subjective side of social relations” (43). Like the other members of the Birmingham school, he wished to focus on the underdeveloped sides of Marxist analysis, the study of subjectivity, and consciousness. “[T]he social forms through which human beings ‘live,’ become conscious, sustain themselves subjectively,” he said. (45). Three specific continuities inform Johnson’s work: a view of cultural processes as intimately connected with social relations and their asymmetries of position and exchange; a view of culture as a producer and reflector of asymmetries of power; and, following from these, a view of culture as an arena for social differences and struggles (43). He summarized his statements on contemporary cultural studies in a diagram that depicted a circuit of cultural production (reproduced here as figure 1 in a revised version by Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner (1996)). The diagram is intended to represent a circuit of production, circulation, and consumption of cultural products. Each box represents a moment in this circuit. In moment 4, “lived culture” and the “social relations” on which they depend, make up “reservoirs of discourses and meanings” that is “raw material for fresh cultural production” and include the asymmetries of everyday life—ethnic, racial, national, gender, sexuality, age, social, economic, and so on. Any production of a cultural product, whether video, documentary, news story, or commercial, will objectify and transform the material from “lived culture” into a conventional form. To speak of a transformation is to presuppose that there is no such thing as an image that mirrors real-life experience of the audience, even if some documentaries, photographs, and other visually based presentations do claim to mirror real life. Some are closer than others, yet it is a “transparent fallacy” that television somehow can represent, without human agency, what is happening in society (Fiske in Heide 1995: 19).

14 t Introduction

Figure 1. The basic circuit of cultural production Source: Johnson, adapted by Holland and Skinner (1996).

The producers of moment 1 draw from the ongoing experiences (moment 4), “selectively borrowing elements of meaning from lived cultures, reworking them, and incorporating them into commercial cultural products” (Traube 1992: 4). However, the primary concern of the moment is the institutional, political, and historical conditions of producing the specific set of products meant for mass consumption. In methodological terms the procedure is to establish the most relevant constraints imposed on the immediate production process, from institutional procedures to genre conventions, and these often cannot be deduced from an analysis of the outcome of the production process, which is the next moment (2). Wendy Griswold has approached this problem from the perspective of the constraints imposed on what we call cultural objects, or products; these constraints constitute the form itself, alternatively referred to as “text” (moment 2). Cultural objects are made up of “shared significance embodied in form, i.e. to an expression of social meanings that is tangible or can be put into words” (1987: 4). Such objects could be “a religious doctrine, a belief about the racial characteristics of blacks, a sonnet, a hairstyle, and a quilt” (4). In news media studies, this could be photographs, headlines, placards, advertisement, articles, and so on. Many cultural studies often begin their analysis with the product itself and fail to analyze the institutional condi-

Introduction t 15

tions of the production and the consumption of the media products. From a critical discourse analysis perspective, the discourse of society influences the production process (moment 1); the production-process will produce or reproduce one or more discourses, and the product will be the artifact of the discourse (moment 2). Regardless of how sophisticated and creative the production and marketing processes are, the product still appears only as the raw material for the readers or consumers. In addition, there is no guarantee that the reader will read the product or read it as it is intended by the producers. Therefore, the distribution and availability of the product is an important part of moment 2. Moment 3 refers to the actual meeting between the product and consumer, a moment that always takes place in specific settings, under specific circumstances, and with a specific set of actors. Again, the appropriation, or reading, does not automatically imply that the message and hidden asymmetric relations of power and privilege embedded in the product are internalized by the consumer or influencing them in any other way. Only specific studies of moments 3 and 4 can tell us when a message has become individually internalized or has affected anyone. This reading, like the production stage, must be situated in a specific context that may be private as well as public. Who is present during the reading? Where does it take place, in what circumstances, and so on? In moment 4, the appropriation of the given products is potentially incorporated into lived culture. Therefore, “reappropriation” seems to be a more adequate analytic term. At this stage, unequal social, racial, gender, and other relations embedded in the product may well end up as unreflected common sense and habit that orient our thoughts and actions. This is what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus: the social embodied and thus endowed with meaning and interests. Because practice is the product of habitus that is itself the product of the embodiment of the immanent regularities and tendencies of the world, it contains within itself an anticipation of these tendencies and regularities, that is, a nonthetic reference to a future inscribed in the immediacy of the present (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 138). Christine Gledhill suggests that reception of the product is best seen as an ongoing negotiation, “a process of struggle between competing frames of reference, motivation, and experience” (Traube 1992: 14). In cultural studies such a struggle “relies on a model of social spectators who actively and variably respond on the basis of prior experiences to cues structured into texts” (1992: 6). One type of experience that the spectators bring to any viewing involves prior encounters with other texts, through which they acquire a practical mastery in following textual cues. “By this account the capacity of

16 t Introduction

a text to ‘position’ its audiences is neither absolute nor insignificant but is realized only through the cultural competencies that audiences posses” (1996: 5). The original language used to describe the diagram is infused with words adapted from economic analysis and from Marx’s analysis of “forms”—“those social forms through which human being produce and reproduce their material life” (Johnson 1986–87: 45). By “social forms” or “historical forms,” Marx was referring to the transformation of capital from money to commodity, to abstract labor, and so on (Johnson 1986–87: 44). It appears that Johnson presents the structuralist influence that draws out the textual character of forms. Consequently, he prefers the term “texts” to the term “forms” for any cultural product crafted for intended readers or consumers, reflecting that “texts” work through genre and media (61). Subject positions, modes of address, and narratives are examples of forms that may be abstracted from the text, though the object of cultural studies analysis is not the text, “but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation, including their textual embodiments” (62). Elizabeth G. Traube is one recent user of Johnson’s methodological framework. In her approach to mass culture, she employs a concept of culture as a “contested terrain” that reflects the two halves of Johnson’s circuit. Culture is “a site where producers and receivers of cultural commodities engage from different positions and with unequal resources in a multifaceted struggle over meaning” (Traube 1992: 4). Traube uses a focus on stages of the cultural processes, rather than an “opposed viewpoints” focus that weighs one side against the other, as a crucial step in cultural studies. I found this step useful for my purposes as well. Different moments of a specific circuit of production would attract different and perhaps mutually exclusive methods, positions, and theories. Johnson’s four moments relate closely to each other, but no one moment can be inferred completely from the other. They are all needed as different phases of a process; none can be reduced to a reflection of the other. The local, intimate, and lived (moment 3 and 4), or the social, distant, imposed “texts,” discourse, and representation (moment 1 and 2) are epitomized by the different stages. Anthropology has shifted its emphasis on structure, an approach that denied the relevance of intentional subjects and denied the impact of history, to practice theory’s inclusion of motivated subjects that respond actively to the surrounding world. Cultural studies evolved from a reproduction focus that linked socialization with power (Holland and Eisenhart 1990) and the “determining” effect of the “system” (Ortner 1984) to its emphasis on diversity and coherence in appropriation that rested on an articulation model that “views meaning as an historical moment in which cultural forces, textual features, and social pressures on the individual re-

Introduction t 17

ceiver all intersect and articulate meaning to the receiver” (Heide 1995: 22). Closely paralleling this shift is the “ethnographic turn” in mass media studies, in which in-depth interviewing and content analysis no longer sufficed to adequately explain actual media use in identity formation and social communication but necessitated the prolonged periods of social interaction that the ethnographic method could provide (Drotner 1994). On the other hand, the embodied knowledge of moments 3 and 4, the knowledge studied by ethnographers, is linked in various ways to the imposed discourses and frames of moments 1 and 2, studied by (for instance) critical discourse analysts, yet they require distinct methods. I therefore suggest that critical discourse analysis is best seen as subsumed within practice theory, but is a crucial element of it, just as ethnography is a crucial element of moments 3 and 4. After all, several competing discourses go into practice. Some are more dominant than others; some are more readily internalized than others, and their importance depends on timing and the context of accessibility and the imposed discourse make sense only in terms of larger cultural frames of reference and must therefore include an anthropological study of how people make sense of the discourses. Even if critical discourse analysis includes a social and cultural practice level (Fairclough 1995), I don’t believe such a practice can be studied through the method of discourse analysis. Anthropologists have focused on the media representations of minorities since the mid 1990s as the main source for the popular knowledge of minorities and therefore also for shaping the everyday lives of the minorities. This influence, whether directly or indirectly providing a hegemonic language to talk about others, is under-communicated and under-theorized. I hope this book will be a media anthropological contribution to understanding the relationship between media production, popular consciousness, and the everyday lives of ethnic minorities. Before I turn to the first media event in the spring of 1997, I will look at some crucial prior events and processes that led up to it.

PART I


 Methodological Framework and Historical Context

CHAPTER 1


The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism in the Post-1989 World



When the first media event, the tabloid newspaper campaign in 1997, took place, there was already a fertile environment for the rise of neonationalism, neoracism, and populism. This chapter deals with the history and circumstances relevant to the formation of this fertile ground, without which radical right-wing populism couldn’t have caught on in the way it did. In terms of the cultural circuit presented in the previous pages, chapter 1 will deal with the historical context of the production of news items—moment 1—that prepare the circulation of nationalist appeals, anti-immigrant sentiments, and populist claims of elite betrayals. The objective is to keep the empirical object and the analytical categories within the vicinity of each other. The chapter also introduces analytical concepts necessary to understand the Danish situation. On the one hand, I agree with scholars like John Comaroff, who argues that there can be no universal theory of nationalism and ethnicity (1996); yet as Comaroff ’s work shows, there can still be studies of the regularities inferred inductively through substantial case studies. On the other hand, this should not be misunderstood to mean that we can’t use generalized insights such as Comaroff ’s own, or Cas Mudde’s studies of radical right populism from a more detached theoretical perspective (2007), or Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of anxiety of incompleteness, nationalism, globalization, and related issues (2006). These three examples may help us look for regularities in the local case studies, even if they are not borne out of these case studies, or in the end may be revised or even rejected from more local studies—studies that of course encompass both the global and local in various relationships.

22 t Chapter 1

From Danish Nation-Building to Neonationalism The prefix “neo” in this context indicates a revitalization of nationalism in the post-1989 world. This nationalism occurs within an established nationstate and differs from the nation building in Denmark that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That process began among Copenhagen’s emerging bourgeoisie, which had acquired some wealth and education during the relatively peaceful and economically prosperous eighteenth century but which saw the king and the aristocracy firmly in power, with German assistance. Grundloven (the constitution) was passed in 1849, ending absolute monarchical rule. A few years later, in 1864, Denmark was defeated in yet another war with Germany. By then the country’s loss of territory included Norway (in 1814), Sleswig, Holsten, and Lauenborg; 170,000 Danish speakers now lived outside Denmark. For the first time, almost all of those who lived within Denmark’s borders spoke Danish. In 1920 most of the Danish speakers located on the German side of the border returned when the lost territory in southern Jutland was voted back in a referendum. The referendum came as part of the negotiations of borders following Germany’s defeat in World War I, and ended up moving the national border farther south, reflecting the linguistic border as closely as possible. During the last third of the nineteenth century, nation-building efforts spread from the elite to the peasants, workers, and smallholders. Unlike in neighboring Sweden, the Danish popular movement of peasants and workers created a separate public sphere and a civic society independent of the state, which stemmed from the nation’s failure to establish norms for all citizens. Danish nationalism at the time was motivated by the hostile relationship to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Germany but was mainly aimed at gaining social and political power within the country. In Sweden social democrats pursued nation-building through a modernist utopian ideal by uniting popular movement and the state (Hansen 2002; Trägårdh 2002). In the late 1960s a new migration began taking place: unskilled laborers from outside Europe (and ex-Yugoslavia) were invited to work in the Western European industry (see figures 2 and 3, and table 1). As elsewhere, this migration provided the impetus for a new understanding of the concept of culture. “Cultural difference” soon came to refer to the differences displayed by these new (guest) workers and their families. Although the migration was formally halted in 1973, the number of migrants kept growing steadily in Denmark throughout the 1980s and 1990s as family members joined each other under the Family Reunification Act. These migrant workers and their families were represented fairly positively in the media until the late 1980s.

The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism t 23

Figure 2. Immigrants and descendants in Denmark by 1 January 1983–2005 Source: Ministry of Refugees, Immigration, and Integration Affairs (2009: 16)

Figure 3. Percentage of Western and non-Western immigrants and descendants of total population by 1 January 1983–2005 Source: Ministry of Refugees, Immigration, and Integration Affairs (2009: 17)

24 t Chapter 1

Turkey Germany Iraq Poland Lebanon BosniaHerzegovina Other Africans Pakistan Yugoslavia Somalia Norway Sweden Iran Other Asia Vietnam Great Britain Afghanistan Sri Lanka

Immigrants Descendants 31,834 26,357 27,791 2,594 21,283 7,634 24,383 2,815 12,035 11,528

Sum 58,191 30,385 28,917 27,198 23,564

Percent 11.1 5.8 5.5 5.2 4.5

17,989

4,104

22,093

4.2

16,408 10,827 11,248 10,231 14,541 13,225 11,904 11,041 8,865

4,354 9,053 5,893 6,458 1,415 1,915 2,992 3,283 4,761

20,762 1,988 17,141 16,689 15,956 1,514 14,896 14,324 13,626

3.9 3.8 3.3 3.2 3.0 2.9 2.8 2.7 2.6

11,757 9,717 6,703

1,229 247 396

12,986 12,187 10,663

2.5 2.3 2.0

Table 1. Immigrants and descendants according to country of origin Source: Ministry of Refugees, Immigration, and Integration Affairs (2009: 13)

In 1984, refugees from the Middle East fleeing the protracted conflict between Iran and Iraq (1980–88) arrived in Denmark. They were placed more or less arbitrarily in buildings that were being abandoned. In Kalundborg, a town 100 kilometers west of Copenhagen, about sixty Iranians lived in an old hotel building surrounded by both bars and private homes. On 26 July 1984 native Danes attacked the shelter, throwing bottles through the windows and trying to enter the building. According to the television news coverage, the mere sight of refugees with new bicycles provided by the authorities was provocative (Togeby 1997: 8–9). Television reported how the provoked Danes directed their anger at the refugees, but they did not pay attention the authorities handing out the bicycles. In 1985, Mogens Glistrup, the leader of the Progress Party, got out of prison after finishing his sentence for tax fraud. Glistrup had started a populist party in 1972 and had won a unprecedented 15.9 percent of the votes (28 seats in the 179-seat Parliament), based on popular discontent with the tax system as its key issue. From a populist perspective the party was unique, since it did not include nationalist appeals (J. Andersen 2004: 148–49), but

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relied on a tax rejection scheme. On his return to the political scene, Glistrup began to use an ever more anti-Islamic platform to attract voters, and in the process he turned to nationalist recruiting for party support. Although he was isolated within the party and was finally expelled in 1991, he is an important historical figure in terms of constantly putting Islam on the media’s agenda and for his populist appeals. Glistrup preferred the offensive categorization “Muhammedanians” (muhammedanere) rather than Muslims, yet his racist communication also targeted black Africans, particularly Somalis; his Web site featured a page of racist jokes about Somalis. Another historical figure, radical right-wing priest Søren Krarup, wrote for years in Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten. When the editorial leadership changed in 1988, Krarup no longer had direct access to the paper’s pages, but he had already made major news in 1986. Tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet called him “an apostle of evil,” a label that grew out of Krarup’s 1986 initiative to oppose a national door-to-door collection of contributions for the Danish Refugee Council. He chose this occasion to launch an attack regarding Danish refugee politics, calling for national resistance to hold the borders against foreign refugee “invasion” caused by “elite traitors.” Krarup made his campaign public through advertisements in Jyllands-Posten and received enough economic and political support to establish the Committee against the Refugee Act of 1983, later changed to the Committee against the Policy on Integration (Komitéen mod Indvandrerpolitiken). This committee became the core of radical right-wing group the Danish Association (Den Danske Forening), made up of members with xenophobic, nationalist, populist, and anti-Islamic convictions and agenda. They regard the association as a new resistance movement, directly comparable to the resistance against the Nazi occupation of Denmark from 1940 to 1945, and against traitors— those who supported the occupying troops. Members included leading politicians in the Progress Party and the later Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard (MP), who led the party while Glistrup was in prison: Søren Krarup (MP), Glistrup’s cousin; priest Jesper Langballe (MP); Søren Espersen (MP); and several others. The Danish Association, a Christian-oriented “Tidehverv” (epoch), a journal of the same name, and the Progress Party were four vehicles via which the far right cultivated the intimate relationship between Danishness, nationalism, Christianity, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and populism that developed in the early 1990s. Though the origin of these new calls to secure the Danish borders, values, identity, and language can be heard with increasingly louder voices in the late 1980s, the prefix “neo” only began to become a historical factor in the early 1990s in the wake of international mega-events, not least the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and processes of globalization.

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The Post-1989 World Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson have described what they call the “startling world transformations” since 1989: the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall (the border between the two competing world systems of capitalism and communism); the disintegration of the Soviet empire and state (with the reawakening of new states); the dissolution of Yugoslavia (with fierce redrawing of borders); the Gulf War (with its new alliances and information warfare); the expansion of the European Union and the formation of the “Inner Market” (with disappearing internal borders and new external ones); and peace accords in the Middle East and Northern Ireland (Donnan and Wilson 1999). In this post-1989 world or, as Comaroff (1996) terms it, this “age of revolution,” borders weakened, only to be replaced by new ones that were even stronger. On top of these events comes globalization of culture, society, and technology—for instance, the global introduction of the World Wide Web in 1989 as a freely usable technology; the growth of multinational corporations; new supranational trading blocs, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994; and environmentalist concerns, both as supra-border threats and as fuel for social movements (e.g., the Chernobyl fallout in 1986). The Chernobyl radiation disaster on 26 April 1986 and the following days knew no national borders. Even people such the Sami reindeer herders, more than a thousand kilometers away, were affected: They were forced to butcher their herds in August (Blackwell 2003). Such events involved people with vulnerable forms of subsistence and borders that failed to provide safety. Any drastic change may produce shared emotions that can be capitalized upon at any given moment. According to Anthony Giddens (1987: 178), “[T]he significance of nationalism in the modern world is quite clearly related to the decline of tradition and to the fragmentary character of everyday life in which lost traditions are partly refurbished.” The experience of fragmentation of day-to-day life may impinge upon what R. D. Laing called “ontological security” (1968), the sense of being at home in one’s being and thereby able to meet the hazards of life. Whereas Laing used the concept in an individualized sense, I would apply it more generally to the shared sense of security, or even the shared imagination of insecurity, resulting from the dramatic transnational changes reported by the news stream and its expert interpreters. As such, ontological insecurity relates to “human security,” an underdeveloped concept pointing to on-the-ground security rather than the security connected to the nation-state, which refers to the right to be protected from chronic threats, such as disease and hunger, and sudden disruptions of everyday life. The sense of insecurity may have arisen in Denmark, although I don’t want to exaggerate or be too specific about the character of

The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism t 27

this potential fertile ground for becoming a political or commercial platform. One aspect of the social anxieties that can emerge in the post-1989 world of disappearing borders and a bigger mix of newcomers, strangers, and natives is the mixophobia and proteophobia Zygmunt Bauman talks about. If “proteophilia” is the love, desire, and enjoyment of change often associated with the city, “proteophobia” is the opposite: the feeling of being endangered and threatened by not knowing what may happen and what to expect when one is in a big city. Likewise, if the pleasure of constantly mixing and mingling with strangers is “mixophilia,” then Bauman calls the opposite “mixophobia,” the off-putting and frightening experience of being completely surrounded by strangers, those “moments of fright” when people find them themselves in a crowd, surrounded by strange faces (Z. Bauman 2004). “When you visit unfamiliar places, you want to insure yourself against such moments; as a tourist, you are careful to keep to the narrow and well protected paths provided for the tourists’ use. You don’t mix with the local population. If you meet the local people, they are mostly the waiters, hotel maids and bazaar traders,” according to Bauman (2004: 4). This may be unlike the committed ethnographer, the “mixophiliac” who seeks precisely those moments of total absorption. Again, my point is not to describe causes and effects or to characterize emotions leading to action, but rather to describe some of currents in this turbulent post-1989 phase, for emotions can become the object of self-reflection and the potential target of groups aiming to mobilize supporters and consumers. A clear shift in Swedish newspapers’ presentation of issues concerning migration and migration policy occurred in the late 1980s, from a largely positive view of migrants to a view of migrants as a cultural, political, social, and economic threat to the Swedish host society (Fugl 1997). Hanne Fugl’s data suggest that even though the assassination of prime minister Oluf Palme in 1986 may have contributed to this shift, international events and processes are the most feasible explanation for it, given that similar patterns can be found in countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom and that all of these patterns revolve around 1989 (Fugl 1997). Elsewhere in Europe, perceptual turns took place. Within the year 1989, linguist Ruth Wodak noted that rhetoric and perceptions in Austria changed significantly. Following the democratic revolutions in East Central Europe, refugees from the behind the Iron Curtain had been welcomed as heroic refugees fleeing tyrannical regimes, but now suddenly they became socially more threatening “economic immigrants,” “spirit and salami merchants,” and “criminals” too lazy and selfish to remain in their own country and solve their own problems (Wodak 1997: 133). Following the dramatic events around 1989, Europe in 1990–91 witnessed a drastic increase in racially motivated violence and polarized attitudes to-

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ward immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. For instance, in September 1991, in the Saxon town of Hoyerswerda in the former East Germany, skinheads and neo-Nazis attacked guest workers and asylum-seekers (Peck 1995: 103). Such events were met by demands for tougher policies restricting the number of non-Westerners coming into Western Europe and stricter requirements for those already within the European Union. Leading politicians warned not only about insecure Russians in endless rows of trabants but also about hordes of disillusioned Africans threatening the “safety” of the Western European middle class; these “threats” were used to provide strength to the idea of the newly expanded “Fortress Europe,” with its vanishing internal and fortified external borders. Thus Italian Secretary of State Gianni de Michelis warned in 1990, “We must be careful that these two or three million refugees do not become 10 times as many, since this type of invasion [from Eastern Europe] would create a terrible destabilization” (H. Rasmussen 1996: 47). Borders, national ones in particular, are supposed to provide comfort and security for their citizens. After 1989, borders began to collapse and became an existential matter. The nation-state entered into a temporary crisis caused by the expansion of the economic market, the free flow of capital over the borders, and freer mobility of workers within the European Union, which meant that national economies could no longer be tied to production, trade, and consumption (Comaroff 1996). When the nation-state is in a crisis, agents of the nation-state, or self-staged agents acting on behalf of state, react with new nationalistic appeals: “The people” make ownership claims to the territory where they are living and act to exclude any who are not considered part of this people. Before I deal with the analytical balance of neonationalism and neoracism, it is necessary to look at the war engagement in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet Union, because this is where the “clash of civilizations” narrative is born.

Changing Enemies According to Steve Coll, President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski allowed the CIA in 1979 to begin supporting Muslim militant groups on the southern border of the Soviet Union in order to create an anarchic frontier that would make it difficult for the Soviets to make encroachments into the oil-rich strategic Middle East (2007). When Ronald Reagan became president in early 1981, support to Muslim rebels on the border, including militant Muslims and others in Afghanistan and in Iraq, increased dramatically. This support went hand in hand with Saudi

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Arabia’s support of several thousand Saudis (including Osama bin Laden) and others, who, among other things, set up hundreds of religious madrassa schools along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan (Coll 2004 see also Cooley 2002). Although information varies, there seems to be no doubt that Middle East expert Bernard Lewis is one of the architects behind the creation of what some have called the “Arc of Crisis”—the Muslim states on the Soviet Union’s southern border. The United States supported forces within the “Arc of Crisis” states, particularly the Mujahedin (“strugglers” or “fighters”) in Afghanistan, with money and sophisticated military equipment, such as Stinger missiles and advanced navigation equipment. Bernard Lewis knew exactly what was going on, and he knew about the danger of well-equipped militant Muslim groups. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, it took him only a few months to come up with the idea of clashing civilizations (Lewis 1990). Samuel Huntington popularized the term, but both of these political scientists asked who the next enemy would be following the disappearance of the former enemy, working from the premise that there must be either an enemy or a single major universal source of conflict. Lewis’s intimate knowledge of the support and strength of Muslim groups along the border and the potential power of China obviously concerned him, since he analyzed the “Roots of Muslim rage” (1990). The clash-ofcivilizations narrative must be seen as borne out of these policies and as one of the first attempts to conceptualize and discursively construct, in the Foucauldian sense of discourse, a clash of cultures, civilizations, or identities. The image of Islam as the West’s new enemy became even clearer around 1994, when the Taliban movement began to emerge through the leadership of Muslims who had attended the madrassa schools. For some years following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989, few politicians in the Western world had cared much about what happened to the militant Muslims (the Mujahedin) they had supported during the 1990s, except for some 800 who were known to be fighting in the Balkans for the cause of the Bosnian Muslims. But in the mid 1990s, the Taliban began to emerge, and it became clear that in many cases the Taliban were the same as the Mujahedin, who earlier had been supported by money and military equipment as part of the strategic ideological alliance against Soviet communism and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Coll makes this paradox exceptionally clear, explaining that advanced Stinger missiles were given to the Muslim militant rebels for use against the Soviet troops, and that later, in the mid 1990s, these same missiles became the focus of a CIA attempt to buy back leftover missiles: The Stingers were in the hands of many of the same people as earlier, but now, from the CIA’s viewpoint, these people had the wrong objectives (Coll 2004).

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Danish politicians also supported the Mujahedin. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, head of the Danish Liberal Youth (Venstres Ungdom), later to become prime minister, went to Afghanistan with a donation. In 1988 he travelled to the Logar province to hand over a check for $120,000 (U.S.) (2008 currency) to the Mujahedin. The money had been collected by youth organizations in Denmark and a committee that included Pia Kjærsgaard, who later became head of Danish People’s Party (Kim Kristensen n.d.) in an effort to counterbalance Operation Dagsværk, an annual day of support to projects in the Third World, for many Operation Dagsværk participants were members of the youth group of the Danish Communist Party. During his visit to the Mujahedin guerrillas, who at the time were seen as becoming fundamentalist, Rasmussen tried out the guerrillas’ Kalashnikovs (see figure 4). The post-1989 world has provided us with a scenario of change and social anxieties shared by all European countries, but these are played out differently in the national trajectories. The social anxieties and the attendant ontological insecurity, whether understood as potential or real, among those trying to negotiate values of freedom and security have evolved differently according to the different circumstances and historical patterns of each country. In Denmark, the period from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s was the first phase of social anxiety, emerging xenophobia, proteophobia, and ontologi-

Figure 4. Lars Løkke Rasmussen among Mujahedin guerrilla leaders, 1988 Photograph: Jørn Stjerneklar

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cal insecurity that provided the fertile ground and seeds for later harvest. Due to the unfocused dislike of and discomfort with the current situation, in which native Danes felt powerless, confused, or lost, foreigners were increasingly at risk of being regarded as deviant, ambivalent strangers, who gestate anxiety and breed discomfort (Bauman 1997). General anxiety about the future is then transformed into opposition against foreigners within the nation-state, and even a small number of foreigners can be seen as threatening the national identity and the welfare of the state (Appadurai 2006). I will turn to a brief conceptual introduction of some definitions of key analytical concepts necessary to understand what was going on in Denmark in the early years of the post-1989 world.

Nationalism and Neonationalism Obviously, the concepts of nationalism, racism, populism, and integration are intimately linked. For analytical reasons I will begin with a definition of nationalism and neonationalism, and then move on to racism and neoracism. Only after I have introduced the debate on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and 1993 will I put these concepts into the broader perspective of far right populism, where neoracism and neonationalism are important elements. A nation can be seen as the imagination of a community of people, real or construed, who consider themselves culturally homogeneous (Anderson 1991 [1983]), and in this view a nation depends on the constant ideological innovation and reproduction of its existence. Nationalism consists of actions and arguments based on the claim that this community of people should be given certain special rights within the state. People who are not part of this community do not have the same rights. Accordingly, the idea of an imagined community of cultural homogeneity implies that some people are included and others excluded and that those who hold this idea of an imagined community in common decide these matters. Those who belong are identified as having particular origins, often with certain racial features as well, and are considered part of a certain horizontal comradeship. Since the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy tends to fall along cultural and/or racial lines, we can claim that neonationalism and neoracism are two sides of the same phenomenon. Nationalism has come to divide people of the world into discrete units that today appear as naturally occurring groups identifiable by cultural differentia. The relationship between identity and territory is so naturalized, argues Liisa Malkki, that the natural order of things has become the “national order of things” (1992: 37). As such, it is not a self-conscious political ideology but the imagined cultural community preceding it (Malkki 1992). The cur-

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rent era of transnationalism and globalization may be making it clearer that “the nationally bounded societies are taken to be the naturally given entities to study” (Wimmer and Schiller 2002: 304), and that “methodological nationalism” (similar to “the national order of things”) is predominant in the academic disciplines as well as in popular thought. Thus, both “statistics and the social science research based upon them make national societies the natural unit of analysis” (327). The new nationalism is not isolated from older nationalism, such as that which occurred during the building of the nation-state, but encompasses the dramatic increase in upholding eternal values and defending timeless aspirations that reemerge from the nationalism of the post-1989 world. Within the anxiety of the post–Cold War phase, Banks and Gingrich find increased self-interest and economic chauvinism, which again extends into cultural chauvinism (2006), for example, appearing as fears of becoming reduced to minorities in their own society. Neonationalism is a reaction to these changes that can serve as a psychological bond holding people together and can make them go to war and even die for the country, now made strong through a critical stance toward immigration and mass appeals to the mass cultures of the present (Banks and Gingrich 2006). These appeals, with their foundation in metaphors of war, resistance, and fear, are wrapped in populist rhetoric about the plain truth that must come out at any price, such as the one politicians do not dare to express: namely, that there are too many immigrants in the country and more are on their way—immigrants who threaten to drag us back into the Middle Ages (Banks and Gingrich 2006).

Racism and Neoracism Racism is an ideology and discriminatory social practice that is based on an inferiorizing racialization, which is the process of assigning meaning onto biological characteristics and of naturalizing the culture of others, which could be backed up in institutionalized power and hegemonic social groups. Europeans widely believed that the success of their power sprang from the qualities (and duties) inherent in the white race (Banton 2000: 58). Race is the framework of ranked categories that divides the human population into the international hierarchy of color, races, religions, and cultures, originally developed by Western Europeans following their global expansion beginning in the 1400s (Sanjek 1994). Race-ranking, or racism, first became the object of academic or scientific research at the end of the eighteenth century. Since racism continues to exist in spite of the fact that race is no longer seen by biologists and geneticists as a biological entity, a second meaning of race has been established as a social construction. Thus, “race” (usually with quo-

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tation marks) is seen as the racialized outcome of racism or the long-term shared experience of racialized discrimination. Race was thought to represent a category with natural boundaries, but it turned out to be a social construction based on phenotypical variation. The differences people perceive are not “racial,” but phenotypical ones (Banton 2000). In the last decades of the twentieth century, neoracism has been evoked for a new but closely related social construction in which human differences are described using the terms “culture,” “ethnicity,” and “difference” instead of “race” for similar, almost invariable traits. According to Alana Lentin (2008) race was first used in 1684, by Francois Bernier, with reference to divisions of humans according to observable physical differences. It was not intentionally invested with ideas of superiority or inferiority. Only with the emergence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century do these ideas appear along with the newfound obsession with science (the ordering and classification of races) and the development of the modern nation-state. Most Enlightenment thinkers believed in the potential equality of all humans, yet soon reflections upon the social divisions of people within Europe, mirroring those in the colonies, gave way for explanations that these groups had distinct natures and perhaps were incapable of coming out of their barbarism. The Romantic movement’s idea of nations with unique histories and natures and the impossibility of not being part of a nation (aided by positivism) catalyzed a shift from seeing human beings as social creatures to primarily biological entities governed by natural laws. In this process, race functioned in the service of nationalism and nation-building processes to provide the basis for the idea of a shared, common destiny. Physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach believed in monogenesis—all humans descend from one original group—but claimed that non-whites had degenerated over time through climate, disease, and way of life. Whites had become the natural rulers destined to spread progress and to civilize the non-whites. The idea of polygenesis—that different races descended from various ancestors—allowed anatomist Robert Knox to introduce an absolute biological divide between races. Races were regarded as eternal, and mixing was deemed impossible. The idea of mixing races surfaced with force in race theorist Count Arthur Gobineau’s scheme (1853–1955). He turned to race to explain the social problems of his age, particularly what he saw as the degeneration of European civilization, which suffered from too much mixing with inferior races. Gobineau is attributed with the two sayings, “race is all; there can be no other truth” and “there can be no equality of races.” Early white supremacism comes in two rough forms of racism: naturalism and historicism. The naturalist racist sees Europeans as evolved human beings who have progressed over countless centuries and embraced the social

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contract to overcome permanent insecurity. The remaining “primitives” are immutable and incapable of changing. The historicist racist, on the other hand, finds non-Europeans to be capable of progress if governed under the tutelage of the white man, where education, guidance, and the establishment of infrastructure would allow non-Europeans to step up on the socioevolutionary ladder (Lentin 2008). Founding father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, sponsored a counter-reaction that shifted the ethnocentric (we are better than they are), racial view of human differences to one of cultural differences (1982 [1940]). Boas—inspired by Johann Gottfried von Herder—subscribed to an antiracist view by promoting cultural relativism, arguing that every culture had particular histories and cultures that could only be understood on the basis of that culture’s own premises. All patterns of culture were regarded as equal and no overarching shared values could apply. In this view cultures with their own religions, languages, and ways of living could live side by side in the same society without coming into conflict. Boas didn’t abandon the concept of race, but reduced it to a biological phenomenon that biologists and geneticists were to deal with. However, they found there was no biological basis to the concept. Even if biologists and geneticists have established that the concept of race has nothing to do with biology and everyone seems to have agreed that race is a social construction, racism has not disappeared. Even if “race” doesn’t exist, it still has consequences, as sociologist and historian W.E.B. du Bois explained in a celebrated quote: “I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia” (du Bois 1940: 153). Indeed, the experience of racism and is precisely, what creates race as a social construction. The shared experience of being racially discriminated against must then be in the focus of a definition of racism. In other words, “race” is also the designated outcome of racism with added negative characteristics. The shared experience of being racially discriminated against must then be a central part of any definition of racism (Omi and Winant 1994; Viswesvaran 1998). There is no single agreed-upon definition of racism and neoracism. In each instance of assumed racism, the specific historical circumstances must be accounted for through thick contextualization, which is so important in social anthropology. Such historicization must among other things be sensitive to the use of “race” across languages. One obvious case is the English “race” (with additional differences between groups of native English speakers), in contrast with “Rasse” for physical variation in German-speaking countries of central Europe. Use of “Rasse” and “Rassist” or similar German terms is directly connected to the Nazism of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and is thus to be avoided for legal, civilian, and moral reasons (Gingrich 2004). Whereas

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the German word disappeared after World War II, the English word “race” resurfaced shortly after the war to denote migrants arriving in Britain in connection with the decolonization of countries within the British Commonwealth (Banton 2000: 59; Tambiah 1996). In most cases the English “race” is best translated as “ethnic,” although this too is only an approximation. In Scandinavia “race” and “racism” are negatively loaded words whose associations originated in Nazi ideology, TV coverage of “race riots” in the United States during the 1960s, and the apartheid system of South Africa. Although ethnographic analysis departs from the shared, lived experiences of the “native” social groups, the anthropological analysis of racism cannot be reduced to single historical cases of racism, such as Nazism, apartheid, slavery, or white supremacy. Albert Memmi has emphasized that the ideology of racism is an evaluation of difference in a way that is advantageous to the accuser and detrimental to his or her victim. For Memmi, racism is a justification of privileges and of aggression toward the victimized, building upon existing or ascribed phenotypical characteristics as indicators of intellectual and moral superiority and inferiority (Memmi 1992). For others, color and blood are the metaphors through which inherent traits are read from external features. Color is therefore the one constitutive conventional metaphor for supposed innate difference. Common for most claims of race is that there is a deterministic link between physical variation and supposed group characteristics. Wodak and Reisigl argue that racism includes several ways of contesting or inferiorizing other groups and must therefore be seen as syncretic, as an ideological mixtum compositum that uses doctrines, religious and confessional beliefs, and stereotypes to inferiorize other groups and maintain its own privilege (1999). Neoracism (also known as alternative cultural racism, difference racism, or cultural fundamentalism) is a racism that can be analyzed as a process of inclusion and exclusion the dominant theme of which is not moral and intellectual superiority, but the incompatibility of cultural differences, arising from the abolition of borders (Balibar 1991; Barker 1981; Stolcke 1995; Taguiff 1988) and from people who break the national order of things. These differences are related not to color, but to cultural, national, and religious identities. The term “neoracism” was first used in Britain by Martin Baker (1981) in his analysis of British society. The central focus of the new racism was the defense of a mythic British or English way of life in the light of political and social crisis, which came out in Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement from 1978: “People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture. And, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the

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world, that if there is a fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be hostile to those coming in” (Stolcke 1995: 3). Taguiff and Balibar noted a similar shift of rhetoric in France in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With the increasing number of migrants to France, anti-racist organizations demanded that immigrants should be given the right to be different, as a way to combat racism. The New Right in France responded against this multiculturalist notion of difference by arguing that people of different cultures should stay where they “naturally” belong and that the French culture has the right to preserve and defend its culture against external threats (Räthzel 2002; Stolcke 1995). “Different” and “incompatible” were the watchwords of this philosophy. By introducing what on the surface is a non-hierarchical relationship between French culture and other cultures, the New Right took the steam out of French antiracism for a long time. According to the new doctrine, non-French cultures are not superior or inferior to the French, only different and incompatible, and therefore dangerous (Rydgren 2004; Stolcke 1995). Besides being able to stall French anti-racism campaigns, the new doctrine also provided an ideological framework for far right populist parties, making it possible for them to nominally reject racism—that is, to reject the old-style biological racism that claimed moral and intellectual superiority. Taguiff called this “difference racism,” whereas Balibar preferred to see it as “new racism” or “neoracism. At first this new racism does not postulate hierarchization and superiority, only that other cultures found in the wrong place will generate hostility (Balibar 1991). Taguiff rightly refused to make a strictly chronological distinction between “new” and “old” racism, instead seeing them as coexisting in different combinations. Other scholars have applied neoracism, or related terms such as “cultural racism,” to the post-1989 world, irrespective of its early uses in France and England (Hervik 1999c, 2006; Nieuwkerk 2004). Set within the influence of mega-events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the restructuring of borders within the European Union, and the unfolding of globalism, neonationalism and neoracism could grow strong as locally shaped responses. Within this process, neonationalism and neoracism are closely linked. The ideas of “race” and “nation” as the outcome of “racial discrimination” and “nationalism” are categories of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion (Miles 1993: 55). Neoracism rests on two basic claims. Unlike in “classic” racism, in neoracism different cultures are recognized as equal rather than being inferior, which makes it possible for users of the neoracist rhetoric to deny they are racists. The second claim is a condition: cultures are equal but incompatible. Like Romanticists of the nineteenth century, neoracists claim that it is impossible not to be part of a nation. People are seen as always part of cultures;

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and cultures are naturally tied to certain landscapes and climates. If people of different cultures are in the “wrong place,” their culture is incompatible with the culture of the new place, which will generate xenophobic reactions. A premise for this naturalization of culture is that living among one’s own kind is natural, and therefore mixing is not desirable. On closer scrutiny, the intention of neoracism is to exclude people of other races. The exclusion operates in the service of nationalism. The danger is imminent, as Arjun Appadurai warns, when the majority feels threatened; then it will contest minorities, claiming they do not belong naturally, reminding the majority of its incompleteness. The internally suspicious minorities in Denmark may be Danish citizens and assimilated, but they are represented as consubstantiate with the imagined globally threatening terrorists. In this way the national rhetoric of contestation draws on global threats to enhance the seriousness and the danger of having the domestic space contaminated with foreign presence. “[T]he road from national genius to a totalized cosmology of the sacred nation, and further to ethnic purity and cleansing, is relatively direct” (Appadurai 2006: 4). Surveillance systems are installed and the primary aim of politics becomes the ensuring national security, which is based on creating a separation between insiders and outsiders, with only the insiders protected, because they belong properly (Lentin 2008: 122). In the end the claim of equality of cultures dissolves in invasions of foreign countries based on the modern neoconservative rephrasing of Social Darwinism’s mantra: “There can be no moral equivalency” between Western democracies and rogue states. The duty of “morally superior” Western democracy is to invest its military superiority in advancing democracy in the rest of the world. From the perspective of those who are the object of racism, it makes no difference whether the type of discrimination is one or the other; the consequences are the same. The central feature of these processes is that the qualities of social groups are seen as fixed, made natural, and confined within a pseudo-biologically defined culturalism (Back and Solomos 2000: 20–21). Each is a trope of ultimate, irreducible differences between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems (Lutz and Collins 1993: 155), and this trope is used for arguments and practices of marginalization and exclusion. Neoracism may appear morally less reprehensible, with its focus on “culture,” “ethnicity,” and “difference” and its intensified struggles around the expression of a racism that often claims not to be racism (Solomos and Wrench 1993: 8). From a practical perspective, how does one scrutinize a discourse or incident in order to establish whether or not it is racist? For this purpose, three interrelated dimensions of racism must be present, and they can be found in different combinations in existing definitions of racism.

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First of all, there must be a dichotomization of “us” and “them” that freezes differences and excludes others: for instance, a nation-based “we,” the Danes, the natives of Denmark, who were there first, versus “they,” “the others,” immigrants and descendants, who do not naturally belong and therefore are foreigners. Such a dichotomy is not necessarily based on color, although this racial element is most often present. In new racism, cultural elements such as the headscarf or language or even accent may also be culturalized and essentialized as an unwanted, incompatible difference. Second, the “us/them” dichotomization must be examined for racialization, inferiorization, culturalization, or similar processes. Racialization provides justification for racist discrimination and “involves endowing the characteristics, appearance, traditions, and lifestyles attributed to groups of different others with negative signifiers that are deemed to be natural and insurmountable” (Lentin 2008: xv). Both biological and cultural elements are included in the racialization, since it is often part of the same gestalt onto which meaning is assigned. In a Norwegian study, a discussion about the radicalized term “negro” revealed a profound Norwegian sensitivity to skin color, based on the story being told about seeing a black jogger in a park in Oslo (Gullestad 2006: 193–220). Incidents of racialization are not expressions of racism in themselves but are the lens of race-thinking. Racialization must always be historicized both in the shorter and contemporary time span—in the moment that it occurs in a given society, but also in terms of its deeper historical roots, the several hundred years of European expansion and hegemony during which phenotypical signification was inscribed onto the human body (Murji and Solomos 2005). A third element is the power to ensure that this racializing and inferiorizing dichotomization has negative consequences. If racist thinking does not result in any sort of consequence that society can traffic with, it doesn’t make sense to treat it as racism, even if racial thinking can provoke hurtful emotions. The third element consists of the power to induce negative consequences of the radicalizing, culturalizing and inferiorizing dichotomization embraced in the first and second element. The aspect of power may be particularly clear in cases of institutional power used to control access to, for instance, the labor market, national politics, the news media, or the police force (Hervik 2002b), but can also be enacted by hegemonic social groups. In short, we must always ask whether a dichotomization based on antagonistic categories is used to inferiorize a person, or a group, and deny them access to inclusion by reference to this inferiorized difference. This is not a formal definition, of course, but a more practical principle to be applied to possible instances of racism, whether an utterance, a gesture, an incident, or attitudes expressed by an entire society.

The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism t 39

Nationalism and Education Act on the Folkeskole 1993 There were various events and signs denoting the buildup of neonationalism and polarization within the political sphere, in the news media, and among the Danish voters. One of these signs was the new Danish Education Act passed in 1993. After several years of work the Danish government, led by the Liberal Party and the Conservatives, agreed on a revised legislation called the Education Act on the Folkeskole,1 adopted in 1993. For the first time since the initial education act following World Word II, the act included the term “Danish culture” as an area students need to familiarize themselves with: The Folkeskole shall familiarize the pupils with Danish culture and contribute to their understanding of other cultures and of man’s interaction with nature. The school shall prepare the pupils for active participation, joint responsibility, rights and duties in a society based on freedom and democracy. The teaching of the school and its daily life must therefore build on intellectual freedom, equality and democracy. (Ministry of Education 1995)

This legislation added various new words to the Act of 1975, enacted eighteen years earlier. The most significant addition is that “[t]he Folkeskole shall familiarize the pupils with Danish culture and contribute to their understanding of other cultures” (emphasis added; see Kofoed 1994: 86). According to Jette Kofoed, the new act carried a concealed opposition between the Danish national community and “their understanding of other cultures” (Kofoed 1994: 86). Students have to learn about other cultures and students. Hence, the school is by definition Danish. Students from “other cultures” are not from the school. Kofoed also looked at the parliamentary debate leading up to the passing of the act. In this debate the party spokespeople consistently used common (Danish) values when arguing for the proposal, and they talked about the school as an institution for Danish children and not for the minority children in the school. The other cultures, as mentioned in the act, are by implication coming from outside the school and are not natives of Denmark. Kofoed maintains that the act and the debate talk about a school for Danish children, and not about a school for children in Denmark (Kofoed 1994: 88–89). According to Iben Jensen’s analysis of the same paragraph, the terms “active participation,” “coresponsibility,” “rights,” and “duties” can also be interpreted as additions that acknowledge a multicultural presence. But the presence is challenged by “Danish culture,” which is given irrefutable preeminence (Jensen 1998: 144–47). The point is not that Danish culture is mentioned but that the separation of Danish culture from “their” culture

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takes place as part of the response to the intensified debate on the increasing numbers of migrants and asylum-seekers coming to Denmark. The author of the law was Bertel Haarder, minister of education at the time, who is a known Grundtvigian nationalist of the German nationalromanticist variety. He later claimed to have given Danish culture a priority in the public school legislation, thus indirectly supporting Jensen’s claim. Later again, Haarder stressed, “Danish Culture is more important than other cultures are. . . . That’s why I say that all this talk about equal cultures and equal religions is nonsense. Cultural relativists [‘kulturradikale’] who ask for equality of cultures and equality of religions—they cannot have been in their right minds” (Hardis 2002). Haarder’s comment is not made accidentally or arbitrarily; over and over he uses the terms “discrimination” and “inequality” in an idiosyncratic way that differs significantly from how they are commonly used in Danish society, for instance, by the Danish Centre for Human Rights and the Board for Ethnic Equality. He clearly argues that Denmark shall not have ethnic equality, stating that “we shall not teach as much foreign religion as Christianity. And we shall not teach as much foreign literature as Danish literature. We shall be familiar with the Danish, and then we shall have knowledge with the foreign. This is not equality, but differential treatment. But that is the way it should be. In Denmark the Danish shall have affirmative discrimination” (Weis 2001). The way that Danish culture was reintroduced into the education act and given a certain priority in the early 1990s is one of the signs of neonationalism. But another event encapsulates the social anxiety and the merging growth of new “-isms” in Denmark better than any single other: the Maastricht referendum about the new European Union.

Voting on the Maastricht Treaty of the European Union European leaders had agreed on a new treaty in Maastricht in December 1991, a treaty suggested by France and Germany that paved the way for a fuller integration of EU’s twelve members’ military, economic, and foreign policies. But when the treaty went out as a referendum, it boomeranged with a surprise. Due to the uncertainty of the European Union (EU) after the fall of communism, the Maastricht Treaty suggested that the European Economic Community (EEC) be expanded and integrated into an actual political union, the EU (Rasmussen 1996: 45). Once the agreement was reached between the twelve heads of state, the individual governments were to be ratified by either parliaments or referenda, or by both. While national elections and referendums can be seen as the hallmarks of democracy, according to the Danish experience they are also events at which neonationalism emerged. The public debates that preceded the elections not

The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism t 41

only polarized the population but also revealed increasingly hostile attitudes and policies toward people of ethnic minority backgrounds. The international turbulence related to the disappearance and reappearance of state borders had a profound influence on public debate and the outcome of the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. The first country that decided to hold a referendum to accept or reject the Treaty was Denmark, and 2 June 1992 was set as the day. The domestic debate ran at fever pitch during the campaign: Most arguments were evidently designed to scare people into voting either “yes” or “no.” A clear positive outcome was expected, since 130 of the 179 members of parliament had approved the treaty. However, the result of the referendum came as a major surprise, and as had been predicted by some, the nation plunged into an economic and political crisis. The “no” side won a narrow victory: 50.7 percent opposed, and 49.3 percent in favor. Waves of shock paralyzed the otherwise highly vocal EU politicians throughout Europe. The media coverage was extensive and left Danes in a euphoric state of national pride. Some said that the Danes had defended democracy for all Europeans. National pride received a further boost when, shortly after the referendum, Denmark stunned Europe by winning the European soccer championship. The Danes had not qualified for the championships, but a few weeks earlier the Danish team had replaced the banned Yugoslavian team. During the reflections and political negotiations between those who supported the treaty and those who opposed it both within the EEC and within Denmark, a political scandal struck the far right government of Prime Minister Poul Schlüter. Minister of Justice Erik Ninn Hansen had in 1987–1988 rejected, or downgraded, the granting of residence permits to Tamil spouses and minors from Sri Lanka. Not treating Tamils like other refugees led to an examination and eventually the impeachment of the minister of justice, who was sentenced to four months in prison. The government stepped down in January 1993, giving way to an administration led by the Social Democrats, which then had to guide Denmark through the second Maastricht Treaty referenda. The most common explanations of the Danes’ rejection of the treaty involved the dire political consequences people expected it to have. Few people wanted further European integration, and many feared that the treaty was a first step toward a United States of Europe. Collaborations between states was acceptable, but not in the shape of a “supra-national” authority (Hansen 2002). Borders were to remain and to provide comfort. The “no” campaign later capitalized on people’s vision of treaty-generated chaos and disorder by using a very Danish slogan: “Vote ‘yes’ to the treaty, and you will never have to vote again” (see Skovgaard-Petersen 1994: 49). When this information about the democratic vote began to be known, politicians turned to the larger of the two parties in the parliament who had recommended a “no,” the Socialist People’s Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti).

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Without a single change in the Maastricht Treaty itself, a national compromise was reached in the parliament on 30 October 1992. The text begins, “The Danish ‘no’ to the European Union of June 2, 1992 is a signal that a majority of the Danes does not want a United States of Europe. It does not imply a ‘no’ to membership of the European Union or to European cooperation” (Skovgaard-Petersen 1994: 53). With this new national compromise, government leaders could negotiate a new agreement with other EU leaders at their meeting in Edinburgh. The result was that four reservations were amended to the Maastricht Treaty. The first specified that EU citizenship would not substitute for but complement national citizenship; the second accepted that Denmark would not participate in a common defense strategy of the so-called Western Union; the third stated that Denmark would not participate in the final phase of the economic and monetary union; and the fourth declared that Denmark would not cooperate with or be subsumed to a supra-national authority in questions of police work or refugee issues. All of the reservations sought to maintain decision-making power within the Danish borders. This last amendment is particularly interesting as a signal that legislators’ fear of external authorities sending Denmark an endless stream of refugees could have been a factor that made a difference in the referendum. With the common effort of seven political parties, enough votes could be shifted around that a second Maastricht referendum could be passed and the post-democratic disorder treated. The new result was 56.7 percent in favor and 43.3 percent against. Since only 7.3 percent of the votes changed sides, it seems fair to say that the gap between the politicians and the everyday world of the voters was not bridged with the second referendum. In terms of the cultivation of a fertile ground for populism, what is important is the discrepancy between the politicians and the media, on the one side, and the population, on the other. One way the gap is epitomized is in a popular “no” slogan, “Holger and his wife say ‘no’ to the Union” (Holger og konen siger nej til unionen). This double-edged saying associates two leaders named Holger: The national hero, Holger Danske, sits in the casemate of Kronborg’s castle and will wake up to help Denmark in time of trouble with foreigners and foreign countries; the leader of the Socialist People’s Party, Holger K. Nielsen, recommended a “no” vote in the first Maastricht referendum. From both of these perspectives, the treaty was threatening, dangerous, and better avoided. The debate leading up to the first Maastricht referendum, a second referendum less than a year later that ended in a narrow “yes,” the European football championship, and the foreign media blitz on Denmark all boosted the country’s national pride but also polarized attitudes toward the political development of the European Union. As citizens of a small affluent country, the Danes had asked themselves what would become of their language

The Emergence of Neonationalism and Neoracism t 43

and culture in a new Europe where borders disappeared and integration increased. Would their language and cultural identity disappear? What should Danes do? What role would Danish people play in such a large entity? Answers were difficult to find. Instead, it was easier to argue what the Danes would or should not be like within their own territory. The Progress Party had argued most explicitly and given the national resistance to the European Union an orientation. The transition from the EEC referenda to local elections with anti-immigrant stands has been eloquently described as a move “from ‘no’ to the foreign outside of Denmark to a ‘no’ to the foreigners in Denmark” (fra ‘nej’ til det fremmede til ‘nej’ til de fremmede i Danmark). The term “fremmede” itself is troublesome, as it contains associations of foreign, strange, alien, and unknown. It is often used as synonymous with immigrant, refugee, and ethnic minority. There is no doubt that the 120-page document explaining the treaty was a huge challenge for the voters, and therefore that their decisions were largely based less on rational analysis and more on emotional and arbitrary factors. But the first pillar of populism was built in the gap between elite politicians and the people, evidenced in the low percentage of votes that changed from “no” to “yes” between the first and second referendums. At the same time, the rhetoric of nationhood and anxiety was forming part of the fertile ground for neonationalist and populist politicians. The intense debates on the Maastricht Treaty and the fervent celebrations of Denmark’s “heroic” European soccer championship clearly showed that national sentiments were part of Danes’ daily lives. These nationalist ideological habits make up what Michael Billig calls “banal nationalism,” which occurs in established nations. Billig emphasizes the Jekyll-and-Hyde duality of nationalism that can shield a “reassuring normality” and a seemingly lack of violent passion of the extreme right. Thus, the Falkland War was clad in nationalism and boosted the popularity of both the British and the Argentinean governments, without a lengthy campaign or preparation (Billig 1995. In Denmark, banal nationalism showed its predatory nature only gradually, during the late 1990s. My argument is that a fertile environment began developing in the early 1990s. During the Maastricht Treaty debate a populist slot became clear, and so did the nationalist rhetoric. To put these concepts together, we need to introduce definitions of populism and theories of far right populism.

Populism and Far Right Populism According to one basic definition, populism is “a political ideology that holds that the common person is oppressed by an elite in society, which exists only to serve its own interests, and therefore, the instruments of the State

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need to be grasped from this self-serving elite and instead used for the benefit and advancement of the oppressed masses as a whole” (Encyclopedia4u. com. n.d.). According to political scientist Cas Mudde, populists see society as made up of two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite.” Populists want society to be governed by the general will of the people; their ideal is “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” which originally appeared in the form of resistance toward the rule of the nobility, landowners, the priesthood, and so on. The populist ideology celebrates the common sense of people and speaks for ordinary people and their needs and demands. Democracy, according to the populists, should be more direct. In fact, argues Paul Taggart, populists are hostile to constitutionalism, which gives individuals and minorities security in the shape of “rights” or the ability to redress injustices by means of legal recourse (Taggart 2002: 66–67). Populists align themselves with a heartland that is a kind of imagined territory inhabited by “the people.” The people may be perceived as a community of culture, or even race, with a distinct cultural homogeneity, but in the end the heartland is not much more than a retrospectively constructed ideal world, as it once was before the great corruption set in—for instance, before the admission of immigrants. But “the people” is not only a heartland but also the characteristic of “ordinary people” as opposed to “elite people.” According to Hans-George Betz, populists have “a pronounced faith in the common sense of the ordinary people; the belief that simple solutions exist for the most complex problems of the modern world, and the belief that the common people, despite possessing moral superiority and innate wisdom, have been denied the opportunity to make themselves heard” (Betz 1998: 4). In the most negative version of populism, people are mobilized through appeals to their most basic needs. Despite their moral superiority and innate wisdom, common people have been denied the opportunity to make themselves heard, according to this view. The populists seek to mobilize because of resentment of the elites who have denied them a voice (Betz 1993). Because of its mindset against elites who have betrayed the people, populists are verbally dominant and tend to control language. The verbal emotional appeal to rise against the elite and the moralistic emphasis on what is right and what is wrong is particularly effective. “Radical right-wing parties are [thus] radical both with respect to the language they employ in confronting their political opponents and the political project they promote and defend” (Mudde 2004: 24). When “the people” are seen as standing for the cultural homogeneity of the nation, and foreigners are represented as a threat to the nation, then we are closer to far right populism than to populism. For my purposes here, I will turn to Mudde and his so-called maximalist definition of far right popu-

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lism, which involves looking for the greatest possible number of similarities among three similar cases. I will not discuss how he arrives at these similarities; rather, I will present them and use them heuristically. I agree with Mudde that radical right populism consists of three interrelated and equally important elements—authoritarianism, populism, and nativism (which he also calls “nationalism” and “xenophobia”) (Mudde 2004, 2007) (see also figure 5). These elements must be kept in mind when one looks at historical cases. These will not be either-or cases, as implied by Mudde’s analysis; rather, they will be more-or-less cases of far right populism. Nativism is a term used mostly in the United States to denote beliefs and policies favoring established citizens over newcomers. Mudde defines it as “an ideology, which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that nonnative elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state” (Mudde 2007: 19). He adds that native-ness can be ethnic, racial, or religious. In this definition, nativism “closely resembles the combination of xenophobia and nationalism” (19). John Higman goes so far as to state that nativism is “little more than a general ethnocentric habit of mind”; he sees it as “a certain kind of nationalism” (quoted in Mudde 2007: 18). In my view, “anti-immigrant,” which has various shades of meaning linked to the local context, is a better term than nativism. Mudde’s definition of nativism does capture the notion of native-ness, although it takes for granted that natives are clearly identified and does not sufficiently address the categorization of newcomers or simply non-natives. The non-native needs to be further differentiated, because some non-natives may be more contested than others. This relation is a problem also embedded in the concept of xenophobia, which literally means “fearful of the foreign” but which is often used as a synonym for racism, which is again targeted against some groups but not others. If xenophobia is regarded as a natural reaction to the foreign, how can there then be a selective xenophobia, according to which subSaharan blacks are rejected access to discos in Copenhagen, whereas African Americans are not? (Nyhedsbrev DRC 1997: 12). Once again it is obvious that there is a close relationship between building the nation and constructing others who are not part of the nation, and we need to recognize this relationship in every single historical context. I prefer the concepts of “racism” and “neoracism” for the racism that emerged after 1989, since these terms tie more clearly into historical universal systems of discrimination than “nativism” does. Mudde turns to Theodor Adorno for his clarification of what constitutes authoritarianism: “a general disposition to glorify, to be subservient to and remain uncritical toward authoritative figures of the ingroup and to take an attitude of punishing outgroup figures in the name of some moral authority”

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(Adorno 1969: 228). This definition helps Mudde highlight the relationship between natives and the outgroup, where authoritarian principles clearly lie with the ingroup and the subservient role belongs to the outgroup. Authorities should be properly respected and obeyed, while criticism of the authorities by definition is viewed as destructive and motivated by a desire to cause trouble: Authoritarianism rests on “belief in a strictly ordered society, in which infringements of authority are to be punished severely” (Mudde 2007: 23). This belief does not concern immigrants exclusively, but speaks to the right’s general view of social and economic inequality as natural and outside the purview of the state. For the left, the state is to help overcome inequality (Mudde 2007). The solutions the right offers to problems regarding immigration, migrant presence, poverty, unemployment, and even feminist demands for gender equality often center around restoring authority based on family values, national values, and (to some extent) male power. The authoritarian principles within radical right populism are closely tied to the authority granted to the idea of the nation, cultural homogeneity, and rhetoric against cultural diversity and solidarity with the poor and the unemployed. Defending the nation becomes defending the rule of “the people,” which again authoritatively legitimizes any benign or predatory dealing with the newcomers, the settled migrants and refugees, and the descendants of migrants. In this era of real or fictive post-1989 insecurity, neonationalists offer national and masculine authority and reassurance—a firm control of immigration, a zero-tolerance policy toward migrant laborers, and a promise to restore familiar forms of identification, particularly around the nation (Gingrich and Banks 2006). Far right parties have a decidedly ideological element, such as a xenophobic or neoracist perspective, criticism of the democratic system, and an explicit antipluralist policy. But, as Mudde reminds us, there are not only right and radical right factions; there is also an extreme right. The “extreme” right is antidemocratic, whereas the radical right is at least nominally democratic and populist. The debate on the Maastricht Treaty during both campaigns leading up to the referenda and successive elections can be described as a resistance Authoritarianism

Populism

Nationalism/ Xenophobia/Nativism

Figure 5. Cas Mudde’s far right populism triangle

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against “the foreign” outside of Denmark, which is transformed into opposition against “the foreigners” in Denmark. If populism of this sort is viewed as a simple triangle (figure 6), then the right-wing Progress Party would ally itself with voters (the people), against the elite (the politicians who recommended the Maastricht Treaty), and against the foreign in Europe outside of Denmark, enacting a shift of emphasis to the foreigners in Denmark (figures 7 and 8). Against the elite

For “the people”

Anti immigrants

Figure 6. Basic far right wing populism

Politicians/the elite

EU - the foreign/ the strange

Voters

Figure 7. Contours of far right populism in the two Maastricht referenda, 1992 and 1993

Politicians voting “yes”/the elite

Politicans voting “no”/voters

EU - “the foreigners in Denmark”

Figure 8. Far right populist strategy of the Progress Party (Fremskridtspartiet) and later the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti)

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In the early 1990s, those foreigners in Denmark who appeared in the media and popular talk as the most salient others were undoubtedly the Bosnian refugees.

Bosnian Refugees and the “Day of Hatred” in Folketinget Between 1992 and 1995, Denmark received 17,000 refugees from BosniaHerzegovina. Generally speaking, these refugees are no longer considered “problematic,” but in 1992 the anticipated arrival in Western Europe and Denmark of refugees from the Balkans was discussed in the media. In the early phase the Bosnian refugees lived on two large ships docked in Copenhagen that were turned into refugee centers, each hosting 1,000 refugees. During this same period, annual debates took place in the parliament about the granting of Danish citizenship. The Progress Party stood at the forefront in these debates but was fairly isolated from other political parties (Holm 2006 102ff ). Yet the debate showed emerging tensions: Being Danish was beginning to be regarded as something positive, and being different as disqualifying. Kirsten Madsen of the Progress Party made the following statement in a debate about giving citizenship rights to people from the Middle East: The rules have turned out to be inadequate, since Members of the Parliament in earlier days did not have the imagination to either foresee the number of applicants nor the difference of their cultures that these applicants are in possession of. Often these are cultures that are in direct opposition to Danish, moral, ethics and rule of law with a rough view of the value of human lives. I am thinking particularly about circumcision of women and girls all the way down to 1–2 months all babies, forced marriage, exclusion from Danish society by giving women curfew from the homes and so on. (Holm 2006: 103).

In the debate, Madsen spent much time on the “number” and “difference” of applicants; in her view, politicians risked watering down (advance) Danish citizenship by allowing too many people to gain these rights. Therefore, the party introduced the idea of quotas for how many could receive citizenship rights. To further underscore the importance of numbers and difference, the party consistently referred to the number of newly granted citizenship rights with references to the “foreign” names of these people (Holm 2006: 102ff ). This is a practice that the party, and later the Danish People’s Party, has repeated every year. But the Bosnian refugees were somehow different, and so was the debate, which went through different phases. At first it revolved around the preparation of the legislation that granted Balkans refugees a collective temporary

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asylum for two years. Several politicians stressed the importance of helping refugees in situ (i.e., in the Balkans), and they made only one exception: flying the seriously injured to Denmark for treatment. Others stressed that people who fled “for their own convenience” should not be helped. During the debate the plan of distributing refugee camps around the country rested on the idea that Denmark could accept the refugees but did not wish to be influenced by their cultural and religious difference (J. Larsen 1997: 28). The legislation, passed in 1992, was based on the conviction that the war would end soon and the refugees could go home. According to the law, Bosnian refugees were granted two years of temporary asylum; the law implied that after two years they either would have returned home or could officially seek political asylum in Denmark. In the second phase of the debate, media coverage focused on clashes between Bosnian refugees, distributed around the country in camps, and local communities. A nationalist argument took this further, explaining that to the extent that problems occurred in Danish communities with refugee camps, they were caused by refugees “who were not really refugees,” since people in real need would not cause problems (J. Larsen 1997: 33–34). The third phase occurred before 1995, when parliament passed another law that would finally give the Bosnians standard rights for refugees, implying that they would go through a three-year program of integration. At this time it was obvious that the war had not stopped within the two-year limit set by the law on temporary asylum. In the three years during which the Balkan war and the Bosnian refugees in Denmark received media coverage, the dichotomization of Danes and refugees evolved further. On the political scene, the aforementioned law allowing the Bosnians to seek asylum in Denmark was passed on 12 January 1995. As part of the third phase mentioned above, a debate on the issue took place on 15 December 1994, which has been called “the day of hatred.” On the one side, the right-wing opposition did not want to turn Bosnian “refugees” into “immigrants”; they argued that the Danish population did not want that and instead simply wanted to extend their temporary asylum for another year. On the other side, the governing Social Democratic Party and the Social Liberals used humanistic language with appeals to individual rights, decency, and so on (Larsen 1997: 85). During the debate Pia Kjærsgaard of the Progress Party launched a populist call for a referendum on the future of the Bosnian refugees, arguing that more money for refugees would mean less money for the elderly, homeless, and other poor people in Denmark (Larsen 1997: 85–95). After the law was passed, Bosnians were integrated into Danish society, and their situation became more normal. They had received much sympathy because of the war and the poor living conditions in refugee camps, where each person was allowed only an average of three square meters. At the same

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time, although the Progress Party aired its generalized opposition between “Danish culture” and “other cultures” before the 1992 debates on Bosnian refugees, the fact that approximately 90 percent of the Bosnians were Muslims did not enter the debates or media coverage. Bosnians were the most dominant “others,” with culturally different “others” only present in a dormant form.

Conclusion The seven years from 1989 to 1995 can be regarded as a period in which the ground was thoroughly prepared for the emergence of intimately connected neonationalism, neoracism, and populism. But the bluntest statements still came primarily from the Progress Party, and Denmark had not yet experienced the full-fledged breakout of these “-isms”; events reach such a head only if someone is willing to capitalize on the situation. That moment was to come, and as scholars we can historicize and contextualize that moment by providing the details. The first indication that refugees and immigrants would be receiving stricter treatment came during the final discussions about the future of the Bosnian refugees as the two-year period came to an end. Parliament was not only divided between right and left; the Social Democrats were internally divided as well. At issue was whether Bosnian refugees should be granted asylum or whether some condition should be attached to the legal statutes that would compel the Bosnians to return to their home country when the war ended. Due to the Tamil report in January 1993, the new government of Poul Nyrup Rasmussen had taken over. Now, the polarizing debate about Bosnian refugees had prompted the government to form a committee that was to thoroughly prepare a first comprehensive Integration Act. The committee’s work, however, would be bypassed as a result of the first of three major media events dealt with in this book. Minister of Integration Birte Weiss began her work on 25 January 1993 and introduced a series of new restrictions for refugees and newcomers into Danish society. These restrictions represented part of the Social Democrats’ attempt to contain the populist rhetoric coming out of the radical right-wing Progress Party, but as a living example of the move of Danish politics toward ever more anti-immigrant policies and sentiment, Weiss was forced to step down on 20 October 1997, giving way to hardliner Thorkild Simonsen, who was expected to complete the new Integration Act and get it passed in parliament. Denmark’s two rounds of Maastricht Treaty votes meant that Danes discussed Danish cultural identity within the context of the larger European Union for more than a year. The votes showed that the European project,

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supported by the majority of politicians, had moved toward further European integration without the support of half of the Danish voting population, thereby building a formidable foundation of dissatisfaction to be tapped into by any politically, culturally, commercially or nationally motivated entrepreneur. Questions about the future of the Danes in Europe and in relation to increased globalization and decreased Danish control of economy and migration were raised in discussions about the legal and social position of 17,000 Bosnian refugees. Left and right ended up agreeing on a “waiting room” solution that temporarily placed the Bosnian camps outside normal activities of integration.

PART II


 The Campaign(s) of 1997        is tabloid Ekstra Bladet’s campaign “The Foreigners,” the largest explicit manifestation of the populism, neoracism, and neonationalism that developed in Denmark in the 1990s. The campaign, which ran in early 1997, served as a catalyzing factor in Danish politics and is intimately linked to the birth of the Danish People’s Party, which has since set the agenda of Danish neonationalism and the neoracism. Yet the newspaper and the political party were joined by the entire Danish news media, which either reacted to the campaign or brought to it more stories about outlandish practices, integration-related problems, and the belief that some people could not be integrated, since they were “too different” from the Danes. After all, in Scandinavian thinking, as Marianne Gullestad has shown, “equality” (lighed) literally translates into “likeness” or “sameness.” “Fitting in with” (passe ind, indordne sig) means to a large degree to be alike—and refers to the process of mediation between the idea of equality defined as sameness and unwanted differences (Gullestad 1992). If you are culturally different and still want to maintain your strong ideology, you must either tone down your differences or be forced to go “home.” As such, the first major media event refers to Ekstra Bladet’s campaign and the rest of the news media’s jumping on the bandwagon. According to the daily Politiken, the two-party government coalition—the Social Democratic Party and the Social Liberals—carried out a series of restrictions of the Alien’s Act beginning in 1993 after taking over from the

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government of Poul Schlüter, the Conservative People’s Party. Birthe Weiss of the Social Democratic Party, who was minister of the interior from 1993 to 1997, initiated nineteen restrictions of the Act, yet this was not considered sufficient to avoid voters fleeing to the right. During some heated days prior to a national parliamentary election in 1998, the former mayor of Århus, hardliner Thorkild Simonsen, became minister of the interior. He took up his new duties in 1997, and from then until his resignation on 23 February 2000, he fathered ten further restrictions and orchestrated the new Integration Act of 1 January 1999. Simonsen was replaced by another hardliner, Islam critic Karen Jespersen of the Social Democratic Party. She was able to add seven more restrictions to the Integration Act until the time Politiken’s article was written. The total of thirty-six instances of a stricter law bear witness to a period with polarizing and confrontational discussions of immigrant issues (Egelund and Thomsen 2001). When Mogens Glistrup, leader of the Progress Party, was convicted of tax fraud, his substitute in the Parliament was Pia Kjærsgaard. A home care assistant, she was elected in 1984. She has been a member ever since, and from 1985 to 1994 she was the party’s leader. After a dramatic annual meeting in September 1995, Kjærsgaard left the Progress Party and founded the Danish People’s Party on 6 October 1995. She was joined by a number of prominent individuals from the Progress Party, who chose her as the new party leader. In the summer of 1996 voters began supporting this new far right party, which had two major political issues on its agenda: opposition to the European Union and to ethnic minorities and refugees in Denmark. In the local elections on 18 November 1997, the young party received a stunning 6.5 percent of the votes. Just five months later the new party received 7.8 percent votes in the parliamentary election in 1998, giving it 13 seats out of 179 in the Parliament. A major reason for the rapid growth can be found in the party’s media strategy and its symbiotic relationship with Ekstra Bladet.

CHAPTER 2


A Newspaper Campaign Unlike Any Other A Campaign Against “Foreigners”



From 31 March to 8 June 1997, Ekstra Bladet ran its campaign about the presence of immigrants and refugees in the country (Ekstra Bladet 1997b). For nearly two and a half months the campaign was one of the hottest conversation topics in the Danish news media and among Danes. The campaign, called simply “The Foreigners” (de fremmede), was advertised aggressively with slogans such as “Mosque or Mosque not” (playing on the Danish pronunciation of Mosque and måske [“maybe”]) and “Where is the limit of tolerance?” with texts in both Danish and Arabic. Ekstra Bladet placed itself squarely on the side of “ordinary” and “straightforward” people. It might be, Chief Editor Svend Ove Gade argued in an editorial, that the majority of politicians do not see any problems, but still there is a conflict between voters and those who are supposed to rule us, so the current rule excludes the people. Debates on television are crucial for this situation, but the debates run without the people (Gade 1997b).1 Ekstra Bladet presents itself as broadly representing the Danish population and, in particular, protecting and speaking for the regular person in the street. Nevertheless, the paper is read more by men than by women, and more by people in Copenhagen than by people in rural areas. And finally, the profile of a typical reader reveals that a vast majority are individualistic rather than community-oriented (see figure 9 for overview of Danish newspapers). At the beginning of its campaign Ekstra Bladet explained that politicians and the mass media generally do not dare to touch the delicate question about foreign presence in Denmark. Everyone knows the consequences of touching this issue will be grave, yet everyone suffers from the silence. To create a space for ordinary Danes to speak, the paper directed its own critique against politicians. The paper knew that Danes like to criticize the au-

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Figure 9. Danish newspapers’ circulation 1997, 2001, 2006, and 2009 Source: Danske Dagblades Forening

thorities, politicians in particular. Social democrats and left-wing politicians, in particular, are regarded as outstandingly naive. Second are the academics: Ekstra Bladet’s targeted readers probably do not understand academics, and if they do understand them, they probably disagree with them. Third is the upper class, sometimes phrased as the “extravagant bourgeoisie.” Fourth is the elite, who are regarded as seeing themselves as too clever and good, and as complacent citizens with an unlimited naïveté (Gade 1997a). By pointing out these antagonists, Ekstra Bladet offered a clear right-wing populist platform, with an immoderate belief that “ordinary people,” despite their common sense, moral superiority, and innate wisdom, have been denied the opportunity to make themselves heard (Betz 1993). According to the chief editor, the objective of the campaign was to create a space for a free political debate about what the paper saw as the most salient topic for the Danes: the presence of immigrants and refugees. The campaign was crafted as a call for a debate, or a referendum, on whether Denmark should become a multi-ethnic society. Gade argued that the Danes were never asked if they would accept the immigration of foreigners—that it simply happened and continues to happen because of the reunification of families. Ekstra Bladet intended for the campaign to serve a democratic function (Gade 1997a). In Ekstra Bladet the transformation of Denmark from a peaceful society to a multi-ethnic society is referred to again and again as a crime committed by politicians against the Danish people. When the campaign’s eighty-eight pages were published as a special issue in June, few people in Denmark had

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Figure 10. “Ask the Danes”: “Yes” or “No” to immigrants, an illustration to a co-op article in a series called “Confrontation” by Pia Kjærsgaard, leader of the Danish People’s Party Source: Ekstra Bladet (22 April 1997)

doubts about what the newspaper writers’ votes would be in this hypothetical referendum, thus indicating that the campaign was directed against the presence of ethnic minorities, as exemplified by the recurrent question, “What are we going to do with the foreigners?” (see figure 10). References to the unwanted presence of culturally diverse others were present everywhere in the campaign. One example was the consistent use of the category fremmede (literally, “foreigner,” “stranger,” or “alien”) in writing about people of ethnic minority backgrounds, thus suggesting that they do not belong in Denmark regardless of how long they had lived there. In this way, they made a sharp, uncomplicated distinction between those who belong and those who do not. However, second-generation immigrants with Danish citizenship were also called “foreigners” and contested for their presence. The choice of category is attuned to the rationale of the tabloid paper: to create a public stir and to sell papers.

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Ali and the Outbreak of Moral Panic Toward the end of the campaign, Ekstra Bladet published a front-page story about a Somali refugee who was to become an icon of the campaign. According to Rikke E. Jørgensen and Vibeke S. Bülow, the story can also be seen as a tool of the campaign’s two dominating discourses, a discourse of criticism against “the establishment” (systemkritisk diskurs) and a discourse of culturalism (kulturalisme) (1999). Both discourses are part of radical right populism—against the elite establishment, for the national values, and against

Figure 11. Ekstra Bladet’s story about Ali from Somalia Source: Dahlerup (1997b)

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the foreigners—and both are encompassed in the story about Ali, and more broadly in the campaign and Ekstra Bladet’s profile. Ali, whose full name is Ahmed Hassan Ali, was granted asylum in 1992. Two years later, his “first” wife and six children received permission for family reunification. At the same time, four other children of his also received permission for family reunification and their mother was granted asylum. Another child, the eleventh, was born in Denmark. Now Ekstra Bladet was claiming that Ali had three children with his divorced wife, which revealed that he was cheating and taking advantage of the Danish welfare system. The headline on 23 May 1997 read, “Receives 631.724 kr in social welfare” (Dahlerup 1997b). This amount, equivalent to approximately 83.500 Euro, is the sum given to Ali, his two wives, and their eleven children. The article inside the paper was accompanied by a color photograph with a smiling Ali and his family. Next to this picture, there was a black-and-white photograph of a Danish woman and her mother; these women were not smiling and were said not to be receiving the help they needed. On the same day, Ekstra Bladet published an editorial titled, “The happy insanity” (Det glade vanvid) (Ekstra Bladet 1997e). In the end, the newspaper carried three editorials, two news articles, four interviews with local officials and residents in Maribo, one interview with Ali, two summaries of the “hard facts,” more than thirty-five letters to the editor, and six interviews with members of the Parliament. The discourse of culturalism comes out in Ekstra Bladet’s framing of its stories. When refugees and immigrants arrived in Denmark, they were seen as “strangers” who brought with them a “culture” that usually “did not fit” very well there. The “natural” hostility between “cultures” that do not belong in the same place would provoke clashes and had to be resolved. Two letters to the editor illustrate this belief. According to one, “Muslims are reasonable people—so are the Germans south of the border. Only when different religions or nationalities have to live together will problems arise” (Ekstra Bladet 1997f). “We [the Danes] will become a minority,” according to another. “The culture will disappear automatically, and in the end we will have civil war (. . .) I am not a racist, but my culture is coming to an end” (Ekstra Bladet 1997d). Ali’s original story is set within the culturalist discourse: At Wichmannsvej 19 Ali keeps his circumcised illiterate wives in strict isolation according to Somali custom (. . .) The school age children must come home straight away and only play indoors (. . .) [Ali knows] nothing about modern European installations (. . .) The Danish Refuge Council has, for instance, not told him how a toilet is used (. . .) The house in Nysted will be left so neglected that re-establishment will cost the taxpayers approximately 100.000 kr [13.500 Euro]. It has happened before, the Somalis are nomads, and Ali has lived seven different places. (Ekstra Bladet 1997e)

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In Ekstra Bladet’s article Ali becomes the symbol of what is wrong with Danish society and the negation of what it is to be Danish. He doesn’t even know how to use a toilet. He is spoken of in different words than the rest of the population. Unlike Danes, who are unfaithful to their husbands or wives, Ali is said to practice polygamy. Ali was poor when he came, but now he is rich. Because of people like Ali, we, the Danes, cannot pay for the elderly. There is causal link between the number of refugees and the length of our waiting lists. Ali is a criminal who is exploiting the system, since he is divorced only in theory. He is different from the Hungarians and Poles, who sustain themselves, and the Bosnians, who repatriate. In sum, Ali has become the stereotype of “the foreigner”—a single person epitomizing what is “wrong with the system” and the “unwanted difference.” The Ali story rapidly spread from a single, sensationalist paper’s depiction to other newspapers and on the way was expanded with contributions by experts of all kinds and members of Parliament (see figure 12 for list of political parties in Denmark). Public fear escalated, and in the end Ali’s story produced its own vocabulary: for instance, the “Ali-loft,” the maximum amount of money a person can receive on welfare. Given the out-of-proportion reactions to the story, the episode can be seen as an instance of moral panic (Cohen 1972). According to Matthew Durington, the development of moral panic involves five stages: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Something or someone is defined as a threat to values or interests This threat is depicted in an easily recognizable form by the media There is a rapid build-up of public concern There is a response from authorities or opinion-makers The panic recedes or results in social change (2007: 9)

Ekstra Bladet depicted Ali as a foreigner who was exploiting the Danish welfare system and posed a threat to Danish majority values and interest, taking money away from someone with a more legitimate need for it. With quick responses from politicians, who were eager to seek their own gain from the story, stages 1 to 4 were played out almost instantly. The day after Ali made headlines for the first time, Minister of Social Affairs Karen Jespersen (the Social Democratic Party) contributed to the story and the build-up of public concern by saying, “Of course, I make a statement on the basis of what I have read in Ekstra Bladet. However, it makes me feel uncomfortable, if there is cheating with public funds (. . .) People need to be given more information (. . .) There must be a better control of cheating with child benefits.” (Jørgensen and Bülow 1999: 102). The vice president of the opposition party, Anders Fogh Rasmussen (the Liberal Party), was equally quick to show his concern and make his contribu-

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Figure 12. Danish political parties in the Parliament (Folketinget), 1997, 2001, 2005, 2007 Source: Ministry of the Interior and Social Affairs (n.d.)

tion to the moral panic and, from a long-term perspective, the rebuilding of the Danish community’s sense of security, saying, “I am totally outraged. In my opinion it raises the question, whether it is reasonable that non-Danish citizens have access to precisely the same welfare benefit as Danish citizens, whom one may assume contributes to the system of taxation” (Ekstra Bladet 1997h). In the following days the newspaper continued the story, looking to evoke more public indignation by interviewing local officials and members of Parliament. The new sources knew the story only from reading Ekstra Bladet, yet they expressed concern and intentions about doing something about it. Minister of Social Affairs Jespersen (the Social Democratic Party) said: “They receive a lot of money—but they don’t get enough out of them, since everything is so foreign to them. They put a frozen chicken in the plastic bag into the casserole. And the question is how the children actually are doing (. . .) In any case it emerges clearly that they do not lead to a happy life here, and that they clearly have their roots in Africa” (M. Nielsen 1997).

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Ekstra Bladet was blunt when it came to nationalist appeals; according to one story, “[I]t is highly debatable whether people who come into the country and are not Danish citizens should have precisely the same rights as those whose mother country is Denmark: those who are born here, grew up here, paid their taxes and helped build this society” (Ekstra Bladet 1997e). In the following weeks there were urgent and repeated calls for new policies, perhaps peaking during the Parliament’s concluding debate before its summer vacation. However, it was only with the implementation of the new Integration Act one and a half years later that the story got its imprint in policy. As the story died down, Ekstra Bladet tried to reinvigorate the debate and keep the sensation going. In June the newspaper reported that Ali’s third wife and another eight children had arrived in Denmark (Dahlerup 1997). In telling Ali’s story, the reporter, Ulla Dahlerup, who later joined the Danish People’s Party, had done a short interview with Ali. When she wrote the story she simply added up the welfare benefits received by his wife, his ex-wife, and their children and reported it as a single amount received by Ali. In the Danish system, this is not a normal procedure. Ekstra Bladet compared Ali’s welfare benefit of 83,500 Euro to an annual average Danish income of 220,000 Kr (approximately 30,000 Euro), but in fact the 83,500 should have been compared to benefits received by a household with three adult breadwinners plus an extra child benefit, which goes to parents regardless of their income. On 28 October Ekstra Bladet finally revealed that Ali and his family had received approximately 4,100 Euro (or only 6 percent) too much, and Ali himself was not to be blamed for this mistake (Schønberg 1997).

A Political Party Against “Foreigners” In 1995 the leader of the Progress Party, Pia Kjærsgaard, and other central members broke away from the party to form the Danish People’s Party. The new party’s two major political issues were opposition to the European Union and to ethnic minorities and refugees in Denmark. When Ekstra Bladet’s campaign ran, the Danish People’s Party was quick to seize upon this unique opportunity to publicize its nationalist program and contestation of foreign presence. Chief editor Svend Ove Gade had aggressively attacked protestant minister Søren Krarup when Krarup started a campaign against the national Red Cross contribution by criticizing the organization for opening the Danish border to foreigners. But Gade flip-flopped. Soon Søren Krarup became a regular writer for Ekstra Bladet, contributing more than 100 pieces from January 1997 to January 2002 (see R. Larsen 2001). During the campaign

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he wrote editorials and other pieces praising the Danish People’s Party and its leader, Pia Kjærsgaard. Yet Ekstra Bladet also copied his nationalist messages. For instance, on 5 May 1997, Denmark’s annual day of celebration of the end of five years of Nazi occupation, Ekstra Bladet’s editors wrote: “The enemy is back in new robes: An occupation is given without war. It comes creeping up bloodlessly, takes over our lives imperceptibly and the control of our freedom as a people. Europeanism and immigration are the present threat against Denmark’s freedom as a people” (Ekstra Bladet 1997a). The Danish People’s Party praised Krarup for such statements, but it was only later that he joined. In November 2001 he was elected to Parliament. The campaign introduced a new dimension to tabloid journalism. In wishing to let “ordinary” people speak, Ekstra Bladet’s reporters tracked down the authors of letters to the editor in order to interview them. People with predominantly and overtly hostile attitudes toward ethnic minorities played an important role in this initiative. In full-blown articles, the letter authors voiced their indiscreet, gut-level opinions about politicians and ethnic minorities, while the reporter refrained from asking critical questions: We will become a minority. Danish culture will disappear automatically and there will be civil war (. . .) I am not a racist, but my culture is being wiped out (Ekstra Bladet 1997d). I would also like to be able to continue eating meatballs and roast pork [flæskesteg] . . . According to the Qur’an they have to kill us (Ekstra Bladet 1997c). If you want it straight: Lock them up! (Ekstra Bladet 1997g).

Later even Ekstra Bladet became critical of this practice, since such articles had no focus or news value. Several of these interviews turned out to be with people who sympathized with the Danish People’s Party. Party secretaries contacted these letter writers and invited them to join the party. The new leader of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard, had easy access to Ekstra Bladet and used the newspaper to express populist, anti-immigrant sentiments. Her program and active recruitment of voters were—in accordance with Ekstra Bladet’s campaign—centered on the demand for a referendum on Denmark’s multi-ethnic status. The Danish People’s Party and Ekstra Bladet positioned themselves as protectors of the voice of the ordinary people. They spoke directly to the discrepancy between public tolerance and ordinary people’s experience of everyday life, an archetypal populist platform. Moreover, this sense of a problematic contradiction between political rhetoric of equality and people’s social experience of cultural difference is often important in the organization of collective action and was utilized by the party to near perfection, for instance, in these two statements by Pia Kjærsgaard.

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I don’t care about what the political establishment says and thinks (. . .) What is important to me is that the local storekeeper agrees with me. (Qvortrup 1997) In meetings around the county I experience daily the insecurity that prevails among Danish citizens. And the many letters I receive every day speak of the same thing: people are disconcerted, insecure, and feel they can no longer walk around freely. (Kjærsgaard 1997a)

Again, Cas Mudde’s basic radical populism triangle is evident. Pia Kjærsgaard appealed to people’s frustrations and aggravation about having to spend money on others who do not properly belong in Denmark. At the same time, she attempts to appear humane, arguing: “We will meet foreigners as friends but do not want to be abused by them.” When it comes to arguments about what is “wrong” with the ethnic minorities, we learn from Pia Kjærsgaard that it is not a question simply of how many we can bear, but also of whom we can accept: “It is not natural for Somalis to be here.” The “foreigners” targeted by the paper and the party are not Scandinavians, EU members, and North Americans, but those people who originally came from other regions, from the so-called traditional immigrant countries. In this campaign Bosnians do not play any major role, as they did earlier. Instead a new group, Ali’s group, the Somali refugees, were in focus. I shall return to that in a moment. The Danish People’s Party’s influence on policies toward ethnic minorities was overwhelming, as other parties followed their lead in questions about immigrant and refugee politics in order to regain their voters. The politicians were anticipating that the Danish voters would demand restrictions on the rights of ethnic minorities. It is one thing to see a discrepancy between public tolerance and private frustrations and utilize it to recruit voters, but did the dilemma have an empirical foundation, or was it entirely constructed by the newspaper and the party? Our analysis of the Maastricht treaty and the various warnings by politicians about racist practices that follows easily from referenda and elections suggest that a populist gap between voters and politicians were very real.

Somali Refugees “Out of Place” Ethnic studies can help us understand the historically significant “ethnicization” of the Somali refugees in Denmark in early 1997. Ethnicity always embeds an explicit response against another group or encroaching forces. This relational attribute was one of the important features emphasized by Fredrik Barth (1969). Yet rather than seeing ethnic groups in relation exclusively to

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other ethnic groups, Abner Cohen, among others, emphasized that ethnicity had both an identity dimension and a power dimension and that ethnic groups should also be seen as interest groups competing within the state for scarce resources by mobilizing language, rituals, and culture (Urban and Sherzer 1991: 4). Brackette Williams was one of the first to argue that the “other” need not be an ethnic other but could also be the nation-state, which had a crucial influence on how groups could organize politically and culturally (Williams 1989). Later, the economic market, modernization, and globalization were seen as additional forces against which ethnicity developed. What is important in the context of this book is the theorizing of an ethnic group as a minority with some features of shared peoplehood, and therefore the weaker element in an asymmetric relation of power. Indeed, ethnicity arises in the exertion of power between unequal groups within a larger political economy (Comaroff 1996; Warren 1998; Williams 1989). The majority does not claim an ethnicity, since it is in power. Analytically speaking, we would approach this as something other than ethnic identity—for instance, as national identity, which receives its “identity” in relation to neighboring nation-states, and through the legitimate use of force and education. Newcoming migrants and refugees are not considered “ethnic” until they are ethnicized by the majority or until they build an identity through oppositional response to existing cultural hierarchies, the state, and modernization (Pieterse 1996: 26; see also Hervik 2003b). For anthropological analysis, the historical moment of ethnicization is of great importance. When the Somali refugees arrived in Denmark in the 1990s, they did not comprise an ethnic

Figure 13. The number of Somali refugees in Denmark in the 1990s Source: Ministry of the Interior (2001); Danish Immigration Service (2009)

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group as such. Their ethnicization occurred only in 1997, when Somalis were ethnicized by the Danish media, politicians, and the Danish consumers of the media. I will discuss this process in the following section. In mid December 1996 Ekstra Bladet and Jyllands-Posten published articles about a police crackdown that revealed twenty-four Somalis hidden in a van on its way to cross the border into Denmark (Jacobsen 1996; Rasmussen and Thomle 1996). These articles triggered a debate about Somalis and deceptive asylum-seekers, and this debate prompted the question of allowing DNA testing of asylum-seekers. The debate continued until around 10 February 1997, then shifted, with a new series of articles about the number of Somali refugees with asylum in Denmark. One article called Denmark “a supermarket for fake refugees” (Burchardt 1997). For the next month Fyens Stiftstidende published a series of articles about the Somalis and the problems faced by the authorities in Odense related to the rising number of Somali refugees. Some of the headlines of these politically framed articles were “Politicians in Odense: Stop the Inflow of Refugees” (Rørbech and Brahe 1997), and “The Limit Has Been Reached” (Rørbech 1997a). Other newspapers too—Aalborg Stiftstidende, Politiken, and Berlingske Tidende—published similar Somali feature series.2 Ekstra Bladet is not the sole agent behind the discourse of culturalism and the emerging neonationalist division between “Danes” and “foreigners.” In November 1996 a provincial paper, Aarhus Stiftstidende, published five articles on Somali refugees within one week (Fadel, Hervik, and Vestergaard 1999). The purpose of the series was not made explicit, but the common denominator of the articles was the question of why Århus, the second largest city in Denmark, should be burdened with so many Somali refugees. At this point in 1997 there were about 12,000 Somali refugees in Denmark, while in 1993 there had been only 2,000. The idea of a series of articles on the topic of Somali refugees, the number of Somali refugees, and the degree of cultural difference was taken up by several other newspapers as well. Because these newspapers did not explicitly explain the idea behind their series, Somali difference ended up as the implicit rationale behind the stories: The Somalis were simply presented as problematic and very different from the Danes. At this point a new genre had been created. Somali sources did sometimes appear in the newspaper’s Somali coverage, but they were severely limited in numbers: Often the same three to five men were used. When they were used as sources, they were presented as positive examples, Somali success stories that highlighted wider Somali failures. The stories confirmed that these men were willing to be integrated into Danish society. In March 1997, a few weeks before Ekstra Bladet launched its campaign, the same story was repeated in different but collaborating papers in four larger cities: Odense, Esbjerg, Ålborg, and Århus. The story dealt with the

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approximately 1,000 Somali refugees in each place. The message was that there were too many Somalis and that they were so different the local authorities could no longer fulfill their responsibilities toward them. Kaj Kjær, the mayor of Ålborg, in northern Denmark, said: “They don’t really care for working. I don’t know if they are all sons of a king. But they take much time and are difficult to integrate” (Moe 1997). He went on: “They don’t want to be integrated . . . Many families don’t want language classes . . . Because of the prayers on Fridays they skip courses and integration projects . . . They live many people together and often have guests. Therefore there is a lot of noise and trouble and bad relations with neighbors” (Skousen and Klit 1997; see also Brauer 1997). The media’s coverage of the presence of Somali refugees and of the Ekstra Bladet campaign showed clearly that most newspapers and most politicians from the right and many from the left, including the Social Democratic Party, took part in the contestation of the Somali refugees. Another sign of the split between Danes, who saw themselves as rightfully belonging to Denmark, and “others,” such as the Somalis, who were regarded as invaders and irreconcilably different, came from the government. The government coalition of Social Democrats and Social Liberals chose to introduce a new minister for the interior, Thorkild Simonsen, to meet and curb the growing anti-immigrant feeling and the rapidly rising voter support for the successful Danish People’s Party. The new minister was the retiring mayor of Århus, one of the cities complaining about the Somali refugees. The purpose of the Somali articles was never made explicit. Their differences seemed to speak for themselves, even appearing an annoying difference to the readers, one that had to be addressed through spokesmen rather than by talking to the Somalis themselves. However, it was not simply that they were different. The kind of difference also mattered: The Somalis were portrayed as nomads who were backwards. Many of the Somali refugees that came to Denmark were, in fact, better educated than most other refugees and came from bigger cities. Nonetheless, a journalist who visited the Somalis in Copenhagen wrote: It is just like stepping into a Third World country when you take the four steps down the stairs [to the Somali club]. Dark-skinned men are sitting everywhere at wooden tables and talking; some are drinking strong Somali soup with chili, made over a gas burner in the temporarily built kitchen in the back room. Practically nothing is on the raw concrete walls, and old khat leaves—– a mild euphoriant substance that many of the men are chewing on—lie on the floor. (Bjerre 1997)

This quote illustrates the broader view of the Somalis: They are everywhere; they live in a primitive manner (the wooden table and concrete walls); and they drink soup rather than eat it.

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Another newspaper claimed that the Somali children were in poor health, and offered explanations by doctors and nurses: “They bathed in dirty rivers, and the food has also not been okay”; the Somali parents have not been very helpful, since “they don’t have the same tradition for treatment as in Denmark” (Kristensen 1997). Some Somalis sleep on mattresses in the basement and leave their trash lying around in the yard. As the major of Ålborg put it: “The real problem is that the cultural leap from the backward Somalia to Denmark is too big” (Stenstrup 1997); he referred to their transition as a “paralyzing culture shock” (Stenstrup 1997). Headings further indicated the problem: “They want to go back to their poverty” (Holm-Pedersen 1997); “Upsetting traditions” (Rørbech 1997b); “Noise is prestige” (Rørbech 1997b); “The ‘insolent’ refugees” (Ahlgreen 1997; Skousen and Klit 1997); “The fight of the clans: Somalia’s strong family tradition has led to chaos” (I.F. Jensen 1997); “Three days on a camel’s back with a sick child” (Simonsen 1997); and “Stubborn president in the desert of stone” (Strudsholm 1997). The Somalis are presented as ignorant and years behind the Danes. They eat primitively, they live primitively, and they don’t know about health or nutrition. They are simply not as highly developed as the Danes. In 1995 Øivind Gaasholt and Lise Togeby (1995) showed in a quantitative study that the Somali refugees in the spring of 1993 were rather popular, more so than Iranians and Palestinians. At the time there were about 3,000 Somalis in the country. Nothing seems to indicate that the Somalis changed their cultural and religious ways between 1993 and 1997. Yet the Danish media and politicians in the course of months in 1997 put forth scores of articles and statements with the message that the Somali refugees were so problematic and different that they could never be integrated. According to the media and politicians, the Somalis’ visible differences indicated that they were traditional, backward, and unable to change from a nomadic lifestyle to a modern Western one. It was as if the difference was so obvious that it had become legitimate to state out loud: “This won’t work.” Some Somalis left the country as a reaction to the public harassment, while others complained to the United Nations that they were targets of discrimination. A few years later a study revealed that the Somalis’ experienced more discrimination than any other group (Møller and Togeby 1999). These authors did link the experience of discrimination to the negative treatment in Danish society, but then went on to argue that one cause for their experience of discrimination included that their “appearance deviates more than any other from the blue-eyed pale Danes” (92). However, this racialization of difference as the cause of discrimination was not pursued by Gaasholt and Togeby. In Pieterse’s terminology, the Somalis became ethnicized by Danish society. In fact, they become the dominant Other of the Danish discourses of neonationalism and populism; and given the general socio-evolutionary per-

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ception of the Somalis—the focus on the “backwardness” of their culture— neoracist features were present as well. Whereas the Bosnian refugees were the dominant Other in the first half of the 1990s, the Somalis now took over this role—the role of prügelknabe. Even if the Bosnians were regarded as true refugees of war—atrocities in the former Yugoslavia could be watched on television during this time period—they were distributed spatially across the country, in nearly 200 camps, but in temporary positions so that they wouldn’t influence Danish culture, and they were to be sent home once the war was over. The fact that 90 percent were Muslims wasn’t considered a problem. The fact that the Somali refugees were mainly Muslims didn’t play any significant role in the debate. They were the dominant ethnic Other because they were “too different.” In response to the comprehensive and largely negative media exposure and to the dispersal of Somalis following the New Integration Act, Somali associations mushroomed all over the country. In this way a new SomaliDanish ethnicity was constructed within a network of voluntary organizations and interest groups (Kleist 2007).

New Integration Act The purpose of the Integration Act, which took effect on 1 January 1999, was to enable immigrants to become productive citizens “on equal terms” with the Danes. A late political change resulted in the deletion of a clause that had appeared after “on equal terms”: “with a consideration of their cultural background.” A number of initiatives were taken: new, improved courses in Danish language and the workings of Danish society were created; special programs to introduce immigrants to the job market were established; municipalities were now required to take a certain number of refugees that would be determined centrally; and refugees were now required to accept the choice of municipalities that had been decided for them. Despite the fact that the Integration Act was directed against refugees who were accepted to stay in Denmark, increasing their obligations while reducing their rights, and Danes were not bound to do anything themselves, the Act was generally viewed as an improvement. Refugees and others accepted into the country who entered the official program of integration or naturalization would receive far less welfare money than Danes on welfare. This provision was new and controversial. Kirsten Hvenegård-Larsen identified the lower payment established by the Integration Act as the first legitimizing of the unequal treatment of certain people in Denmark (2002). Newcomers were becoming second-class citizens. This contentious piece of economic discrimination was quietly taken out of

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the Integration Act thirteen months later. Yet later, in 2001, it reappeared in a different form via the new government. Morten Ejrnæs has shown that the lower welfare payment came as a direct response to Ekstra Bladet’s editorial calling for a reduced welfare rate for newly arrived foreigners (2001). He further identified support for the legislation in the much-covered case of the Somali refugee Ali, who allegedly had “two wives and 11 children” (2001). As has already been discussed, the Ali story created a moral panic, and the case was used in Parliament to legitimize the lower payment to newly accepted refugees (Ejrnæs 2001; Hervik 1999c; Jørgensen and Bülow 1999). Ejrnæs’s argument shows that the government—at this time, the Social Democratic Party and the Social Liberals—readily responded to the explosive growth of support of the Danish People’s Party in the opinion polls by including some stricter anti-immigrant policies that in the end would not stand closer scrutiny in terms of national or international legal conventions. The Integration Act differs in striking ways from parallel legislation in neighboring Sweden. Where the Danish Act spoke of newcomers participating on “equal footing with other citizens,” which incorporated the possibility of a lower payment for refugees with asylum, the Swedish Act talked about “equal rights and opportunities regardless of ethnic and cultural background,” which would never justify a lower payment. Second, the Danish Act stressed that newcomers should have “an understanding of the basic values and norms of the Danish society.” The stated Swedish goal is to protect basic democratic values and work for men and women’s equal rights and possibilities and in addition, to prevent and counter discrimination, xenophobia, and racism. Third, the Danish Act concerns requirements only for newcomers; the Swedish law talks about mutual requirements of newcomers and the Swedish society (Regeringsproposition 1997/1998: 21; see also Holm 2006: 188–89; Hvenegård-Lassen 2002: 251, Jørgensen 2006). Danish national values (not “democratic” values) are built into the Integration Act in the same way that they are built into the Education Act. In popular speech one could hear the two countries compared this way: Denmark is integrating newcomers, whereas Sweden is integrated. Danish Former Minister for Foreign Affairs Uffe Ellemann-Jensen (the Liberal Party), who was the leader of the Liberals, had previously warned against letting identity politics and the ensuing nationalism become the major theme of national elections, since this would inevitably lead to racist arguments and eventually to overt conflict (Cordsen 1997). He refused to use the growing neoracism for political advantage. Nevertheless, the government’s adoption of tougher policies toward immigrants was an important factor in the parliamentary election on 11 March 1998. After acknowledging his narrow defeat in that election, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen stepped down and

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Anders Fogh Rasmussen took over the leadership of the party, thereby becoming the new candidate for a right-wing government in the next election. Unlike Ellemann-Jensen, Rasmussen would welcome the question of immigrants and refugees as the primary theme of the election campaign leading up to the parliamentary election on 20 November 2001. By the time the government decided to call the election in November 2001, other events had occurred that further strengthened the country’s neonationalism.3

Conclusion In the spring of 1997 Ekstra Bladet and The Danish People’s Party capitalized on the emerging dissatisfaction concerning ethnic minorities, migrants, and refugees, and the gap between politicians and voters, by attempting to translate the dichotomy between “us” and “them” into an increase in the number of readers and voters. During the campaign, membership in the Danish People’s Party skyrocketed. Opinion polls taken during and right after the campaign predicted that the two-year-old party would attract up to 15 percent of the vote. In the first half of the 1990s Denmark had witnessed a growing antiimmigrant sentiment as well as a collective anxiety stemming from events beyond Danish borders. Debates about the Bosnian refugees further directed these anxieties toward groups of non-Danish people in Denmark. The period from 1989 to 1995 can be regarded as a time in which a foundation necessary for the development of neonationalism and neoracism evolved. Then, in 1997, political entrepreneurs capitalized on the situation and began to make use of the neonationalism and neoracism. Although the terms “nationalism” and “racism” are loaded emic words as well, “neoracism” and “neonationalism” are the appropriate anthropologically and sociologically conceptualizations of what was going on. The first move toward a stricter treatment of refugees and immigrants came during the intense discussions about the future of the Bosnian refugees, when the initial two-year time-out came to an end. Not only was the Parliament divided between right and left; the Social Democrats were internally divided as well. The issue debated was whether Bosnian refugees should be granted asylum or whether some condition should be attached to the legal statutes that would compel the Bosnians to return to their home country when the war ended. A second development, and a foreshadowing of the breakthrough of neonationalism, was the establishment of the Danish People’s Party in October 1995. Once established, the party could conveniently jump on the opportunity provided by the friends at Ekstra Bladet, who created the newspaper’s

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campaign “The Foreigners” and by the rest of the media’s coverage of that campaign, which voiced anti-immigrant attitudes to an unprecedented degree. Ekstra Bladet’s “Foreigners” campaign was a true gift to the party. “Danes Fear the Foreigners” was the headline of the newspaper Aktuelt on 11 September 1997. “More than every third of the Dane are afraid of immigrants and refugees,” according to the lead story. “This is a doubling in one year.” In particular, the article stated, “elders” and “right-wing voters” are worried. They were also core Danish People’s Party voters in 1997. Sources in the article point to Ekstra Bladet’s campaign as the cause of this drastic increase, which took place at a time when fewer refugees actually came to Denmark. They went on to note that the campaign had made it legal to criticize the foreigners (Dalgas and Mathiassen 1997, Mathiassen and Dalgas 1997). One group of refugees received more negative attention than any other: the Somalis. The governing Social Democratic Party and Social Liberals hoped that the new Integration Act would contain the increasingly popular neonationalist, anti-immigrant stance. Even though the new Minister for the Interior, Karen Jespersen (the Social Democratic Party), suggested ever tougher measures toward immigrants and refugees, the neonationalist and neoracist factions kept attracting more and more voters. On this issue Jespersen’s view could not be separated from that of the Danish People’s Party, to the extent that Kjærsgaard openly declared that Jespersen would be welcome to join her party. The neonationalist strategy began on the radical right wing in the late 1980s and has since been consistently reinforced through the emphasis on belonging, origin culture, history, and Christianity. Then, in the mid to late 1990s, governing Social Democrats and the Social Liberals also turned to a view of immigrants as deeply problematic—yet another view that was grounded in neonationalist thinking. Thus the new Integration Act included the use of legislation to legitimize unequal treatment of native Danes and newcomers. This development is followed by the appearance of icons used in the merging discourse of bio-cultural incompatibility, such as the presence of black Somali bodies in Danish municipal capitals. By the end of the 1990s neonationalism and views critical of immigrants had spread and grabbed hold of the entire political spectrum and the voters. In the run-up to the election on 20 November 2001, neonationalism became the decisive factor and successfully mobilized voters across traditional party loyalties.

CHAPTER 3


The End of Tolerance?



A survey by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) has showed that Denmark is one of the most polarized countries in the European Union. The material for the survey was collected between 26 March and 29 April 1997, when Ekstra Bladet’s campaign was running. Denmark had some of the highest tolerant and racist answers (EUMC 2001). This data suggests that the notion of tolerance relates to racism either in opposition or in a more delicate relationship. The EUMC opted for the first and concluded, “Denmark is a quite polarized country” (EUMC 2001: 12). During classes in Copenhagen, Oslo, and Malmø, I played a little game that may further illustrate the complexity of this relationship. To introduce discussions about the nature of racism, I asked the students whether they felt they were “racists.” A unanimous and prompt “No” followed. Then I asked: “Is ‘racism’ widespread in Denmark, Norway, or Sweden”? Again the answer came out strongly and instantly: “Yes.” I asked these questions at the beginning of the class to illustrate the complexity that lies in the questions and to trigger the urge to seek an explanation. The affirmative answer “Yes, racism is widespread in Denmark” is consistent with the EUMC findings. Racism is widespread and would therefore produce many racist answers. The other answer tells us that the students do not identify themselves as racists; instead, they see themselves as tolerant. According to the EUMC typology Danes scored high on “not being disturbed by people from different minority groups,” which in the survey terminology is called “actively tolerant.” In other words, the students in the class could also produce both “racist” and “tolerant answers.” How can one at the same time produce tolerant and racist answers? One of the tools that opened up the classroom discussion is the Eurobarometer Opinion Poll of 1997 or, rather, one of the questions posed in that survey. Instead of asking, “Do you consider yourself racist”? this poll asked approximately 16,000 people in the European Union to rate their opinion on a scale between the two extremes of “not at all racist” and “very racist.” In my

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classroom, students no longer entirely denied their own racism but admitted “some degree” of racism. Besides perhaps demonstrating the fragile nature of quantitative research, this little experiment also suggests that tolerance and racism appear in a delicate, intimate, and perhaps uneven relationship. At no point did I present a definition of racism, and neither did the researchers conducting the opinion poll—for different reasons. I continued the discussion in a way that would bring up various connotations of racism, including its relationship to tolerance and antiracism. The opinion poll assumed that all knew and understood the definition of racism, including its relationship to tolerance and antiracism; the poll simply alluded to the “commonly used” way of describing “a process of prejudice which leads to groups being stigmatized, discriminated against and considered as inferior because of the particular characteristics of their group” (Eurobarometer Opinion Poll 1997). This is an analytical definition that does not necessarily reflect the range and complexity of popular associations. Research, including my own, has shown that several clusters of related meanings dominate Danes’ discussion of racism. First of all, the term is associated with German Nazism, white supremacist movements such as the American Ku Klux Klan, and South African apartheid. Secondly, racism also simply refers to “not liking” people of different color or different cultural background. Thirdly, racism may be acknowledged, but associated only with the various problems ethnic minorities present for the host society (Hervik and Jørgensen 2002; Hervik 1999c). When we take these popular connotations of racism into consideration, we can no longer be sure what the Eurobarometer Opinion Poll exactly showed. I use this information to illustrate my general argument: that the discourse of tolerance is intimately connected to racism. In the 1990s tolerance was challenged in Denmark by the emergence of a new nationalism and new racism seeking an end to what was called “blue-eyed” tolerance. In UNESCO’s general definition, “[T]olerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of the world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. It is fostered by knowledge, openness, communication and freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Tolerance is harmony of difference. It is not only moral duty; it is also a political and legal requirement” (UNESCO 1997: 9). Definitions like this go hand in hand with multiculturalism (Hastrup 2001: 2) and are being challenged by critics who claim that there should be no tolerance, or zero tolerance, of people who do not rightfully belong in Denmark. Such contestation has lead to two observations that I wish to look at more closely in this chapter. On the one hand, when tolerance is challenged and limits are crossed, we could expect the notion of tolerance to be defended by sanction if necessary, and by appeals to moral education, or otherwise restored. (Only in an

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improbably ideal setting would there be no intolerance at all.) Nevertheless, there is a limit to tolerance—otherwise it would not make sense as a shared value or ideology. The limit of tolerance is not absolute, but dynamic and debatable. Obviously, tolerance does not apply to all actions. There seems to be a general agreement that civilized societies cannot tolerate acts of murder, violence, physical harm, or denials of the right to fully express diverse beliefs and practices (Kurtz 1996: 1). Social claims about the limits of tolerance in Denmark are one of the key issues in this chapter. One can easily imagine people arguing that the limit of tolerance has been overstepped, making claims about cultural differences that are seen as incompatible and not to be tolerated. If the headscarf (covering of Muslim women) is contested, does that express a tolerance limit that has been crossed, or does it express something entirely different, such as racism? Ideally, two responses may occur. Either the discourse of tolerance is evoked and defended or it is abandoned. However, regardless of what occurs, when the limit of tolerance is challenged by racism, the position of power held by tolerators is exposed and separated from people who are the objects of tolerance. Tolerance exists at the mercy of those who practice tolerance. I will show how this is demonstrated through political discourse and popular understandings. On the other hand, Denmark has witnessed the unfolding of limited tolerance, in the form of racism that uses tolerance as a cover for attempts to contest and dominate ethnic minorities associated with a non-Western origin. Tolerance is evoked in discourse (“We are tolerant”), but the appearance of cultural others is not tolerated (“We should not accept the headscarf”)—so we speak of “limited tolerance.” Those who are culturally distinct are inferior from the perspective of holders of power, who use that inferior status as a basis for denying those who are different access to public resources—material as well as symbolic. This we can refer to as “limited tolerance” for racism. In my opinion, racism must include the culturalist division typically between an ingroup—a positive, unspecified, majority of “we”—and an out-group of “others,” but only insofar as the distinction is used by the in-group as a rationale to manage, control, and dominate the out-group (see Hervik 1999b; 2001). Tolerance is best seen as an attitude, and toleration, the active form of tolerance. Toleration is therefore a matter not of nondiscrimination, but of engaging the value of difference (Hastrup 2001). By introducing this distinction Hastrup (inspired by Michael Walzer) rhetorically seeks to shift the significance of tolerance from a passive attitude of acceptance to an active outreach and commitment to engage positively in the difference. Michael Walzer introduces the useful idea of shades of tolerance, an idea that allows for different practical engagements in toleration. The first shade is simply “a resigned acceptance of difference for the sake of peace” akin to the Christian toleration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second re-

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fers a “passive, relaxed, benignly indifferent to difference” attitude, one that says, “It takes all kinds to make a world.” Thirdly, there is the belief that “others have rights, even if they exercise those rights in unattractive ways.” The fourth attitude concerns openness to, curiosity about, and even respect for the difference of others. And fifth is the “enthusiastic endorsement of difference, since difference is seen either as God’s creation or liberalism’s condition for flourishing” (Walzer 1997: 10–11). The first three types of engagement—“resigned acceptance,” “benignly indifferent” and accepting the rights to “unattractive ways”—tolerate the existence of what is perceived as fundamentally different. The fourth and fifth types of engagement with difference seem to be the most active and positive, since the imperative is “learning” and “endorsement of diversity.” Walzer (and Hastrup) does point to the inherent positions of power and to tacit assumptions about who is tolerant of whom. However, while he expands the concept to allow for different degrees of tolerance, he does not address the relationship between tolerance and racism—issues which, I argue, are intimately connected. At this point, he may be prisoner of his own liberal perception of the individual. If tolerance “presupposes the value of the individual, his or her autonomy, and freedom of choice” (Kurtz 1996: 1), then in the tolerant society there is an inherent risk of deemphasizing the dialectic and usually asymmetric relationship between tolerator and tolerated (Vanges 2001). What happens, for instance, if tolerators declare that there are certain cultural practices of other people that they do not want to tolerate, and insist on ending tolerance toward certain groups and their beliefs? This seems to have been the case in Denmark in the late 1990s. And if tolerance refers to the attitude that some ideas, beliefs, and practices of other groups of people are permitted, then how does that relate more specifically to the growing culturalist perspective that sees differences as incompatible and antagonistic? That is the question for this chapter’s first section, where I analyze the political discourses on tolerance and racism that have emerged since 1989. In the second part of this chapter, I turn to popular talk about Danes as tolerant people. In the third section, I deal with basic assumptions of tolerance and with quantitative research into Danish attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. Then, in the fourth and fifth sections, I tease out and discuss hidden beliefs and assumptions of tolerance, including the separation of tolerators and tolerated and the so-called “threshold of tolerance.”

Discourse of Tolerance and Discourse of Anachronistic Differences The nationalist upsurge reached a new peak in 1998, when immigrant and refugee presence became the dominant issue in that year’s national elec-

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tions. In these discussions, nationalist calls for strengthening of Danish values emerged in tandem with growing new racism targeted at the “foreigners in Denmark.” Through the efforts of political entrepreneurs and opportunistic leaders of newspapers, a distinction was made between a “wegroup” of seemingly unproblematic, open-minded, democratic people and an “out-group” of unbridgeably different cultural others. The elements used to construct the positive we-group and the negative out-group are syncretistic, since they are formed by any available argument regardless of internal inconsistency. This culturalist distinction does not in itself constitute new racism, but it becomes new racism when the dichotomy is used to deny the out-groups rights to the labor market, welfare, access to political office, and public recognition. In Denmark the discriminated out-group consists of people associated with what Ghassan Hage playfully has labeled “Third World–looking people” (1998: 57ff ). Given this development one would perhaps expect that there is a large number of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers in Denmark. This is not the case: the relative number of immigrants and their descendants in Denmark is not much different from that in other European countries. Foreign citizens in Denmark made up 5 percent of the population in 2002. The number of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, regardless of citizenship, adds up to 7.7 percent or almost 400,000 of the 5.2 million Danes (Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik 2002). Of these approximately 200,000 are Muslims, including all degrees of religious commitment. In the late 1990s leading Social Democrats (the big brother in the government coalition with the Social Liberals) decided that they needed to tap into the growing anti-immigrant sentiment. To do so they appointed a new hardline minister of the interior, Thorkild Simonsen, who was expected to be tougher in talk and policy than his predecessor. Simonsen was given the task of passing a new Integration Act that supposedly would increase the quality of integration and curb the growing racism. The new minister tried to situate tolerance at the national level. He summarized his concern for tolerance: Some Danes speak about a threat against the national values. And they have stirred up worries about Danish ‘hygge,’ culture, language, and economy. But there is a national value, which is very important in the future of our society—a value that is really threatened. Still, many fall short of defending it. That value is tolerance. Tolerance does not mean that we should blindly accept everything foreign. But tolerance means that we shall be open to each other without too many biases. Tolerance means that we should not stigmatize people who look different from us and not belittle other people’s way of living and their religion. (T. Simonsen 1999; emphasis added)

The minister of the interior thus identified tolerance as a Danish national value that needs to be cared for. The culturalist division is clearly present.

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“We” is not specified but was meant to refer to Danes, while “they” are “foreign,” some of which “look different from us” and have a different “way of living” and “religion.” Tolerating is something “we” the unmarked category Danes should do, “without too many biases,” rather than “blindly accept everything foreign,” and we should not “stigmatize” or “belittle” those who are to be tolerated. Simonsen’s reflections suggest that Danes should be tolerant (which they are not) toward those who are foreign, appear physically different, or practice different religions. Thus, he is addressing racism by promoting tolerance, but he ends up establishing and reproducing the same culturalist and nationalist distinction that new racism builds upon. Another politician, John Vinther, also addressed the themes of racism and tolerance. But this member of the Conservatives disavowed racism and attempts to promote tolerance by referring to Denmark’s international reputation: “Racism is really not a genuine problem in this country. On the contrary, Denmark is known for its tolerance, and by those, who really have felt racism on their body, they recognize Denmark as a people whom without hesitation helps other people, for instance the Jews during the war” (Vinther 1997). During his celebration of tolerance and denial of racism, Vinther uses Denmark’s historical reputation to argue that contemporary Denmark is not racist. In other words, tolerance is evoked to trivialize racism. The rhetoric of Pia Kjærsgaard, leader of the Danish People’s Party, is an example of the evolving new racism as well as an entrepreneur appropriating intercultural differences for political purposes. Kjærsgaard exploits and capitalizes on the contradiction between political rhetoric of equality and people’s social experience of cultural difference as a problem that is important in the organization of collective action and that the party utilizes to near perfection. Kjærsgaard explained in an emotional appeal, “Denmark is not a country of ‘racist’ people. We are an open-minded and tolerant people, and meet foreigners in a natural manner of friendship. But we refuse to let ourselves be abused. That is what it is all about. In the Danish People’s Party we do not hide the fact we are against having Denmark turned into a multiethnic society.” (Dansk Folkeblad 1997). “The fundamentalist perception of Islam still lives in the Middle Ages, and is incompatible with the Danish society. We cannot simply give free scope to people who in our opinion are more than 100 years behind in terms of norms and ways of living” (Kjærsgaard in Hansen 2001). Placing people in different historical times, such as the Middle Ages, places them on a different socio-evolutionary stage of development. The systematic calls for restrictions on people of diverse cultures from outside contemporary Western time constitute limited tolerance. Claims of tolerance emerge with a culturalist/nationalist division between a “we-group” of Danes and an “out-group” of foreigners. The politicians ap-

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peal to the notion of tolerance, but the appeals are rhetorical. The minister of the interior wanted people to remember to be nice. John Vinther denies the obvious and ongoing contestation of ethnic minorities in order to care for Denmark’s historical reputation, which is at stake. And Pia Kjærsgaard’s “limited tolerance” turns the presence of ethnic groups in Denmark into a security issue and a cultural threat. The discourse of tolerance and antiracism prevails in Danish society, but it competes with and can be subdued by the stronger and more galvanizing discourse of culturalism that sees cultural differences as unbridgeable and even hostile. When the discourse of culturalism embeds a more or less articulated sentiment directed at individuals and groups who are identified as “culturally diverse,” with the purpose of making them inferior, marginal, and excluded, it is a discourse of neoracism. This is the case when the “outgroup” is placed on a different step on the socio-evolutionary ladder—by being described as a hundred years behind in terms of “norms and ways of living.” In this way, neoracism is one radical version of the discourse of culturalism.

“Danes Have Become More Tolerant” In this section, I will discuss whether popular talk about the cultural expressions of Denmark’s ethnic minorities relates to the notion of tolerance or to racist discourse implicit in talk about tolerance. “Danes have become more tolerant” was the sales slogan of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken on 13 March 1997. The text appeared on a placard that also displayed an eye-catching photo of a dark-haired female wrapped up in the Danish flag (see figure 14). She used the flag as a veil, thereby displaying two immensely powerful symbols: the Danish flag and the veil generally used as a metonym for Islam. This captivating image appeared as an artifact of Politiken’s participation in the upbeat Danish debate on which rights and obligations immigrants and refugees should meet. Many Danes had their curiosity aroused and perhaps satisfied at the newsstand when they glanced at the large, full-color front-page photograph, which added a headline to the sales slogan: “We have become accustomed to foreigners.” The text itself said that in the last years, we (the Danes) have become more tolerant as the result of declining media coverage (Olesen 1997a, Olesen 1997b). Months later, those of us in the research project acquired a copy of the placard and used it to facilitate conversations with Danes about their concerns and anxiety relating to the emerging multiculturalism in Denmark. Here are some reactions from our interviewees:

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Figure 14. Politiken’s placard, 13 March 1997 Source: Olesen (1997a)

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It is a ridiculous message; I do not know what could be behind it. (Pia, 24, student) It seems to me that she is being covered up in the Danish flag, like covering up foreignness. (Thomas, 24, student) I too see an ambivalence between the text that says we are becoming more tolerant and then we go on to shield ourselves in the flag. (Morten, 29, student) What does: ‘Danes have become more tolerant mean?’ It might just be a slogan for selling the paper. (Morten) Besides that her veil is the foremost symbol of xenophobia, I also think there is a curious ambiguity in that the Danes have become more tolerant and then we are shown a picture of what we like the least and use it as a symbol. (Erik, 31, teacher) I just feel like in the text it is the foreigners who say this, right? And that makes me a little upset. They should not think so. (Anna, 19, unskilled worker) We have been tolerant, but I don’t think we are anymore, and I don’t think we should be. (Anna)

The placard photo and text left all interviewees perplexed. Their perplexity arose from the ambiguity of the photograph and from the text, which contradicted interviewees’ experience of what was going on in Denmark at the time. They either reasoned that the symbols, the headscarf and the flag, contradicted each other, or looked for a subtext that could explain why someone would come up with a statement that so obviously contradicted the popular commonsense notion that Danes were becoming increasingly intolerant. All in all, the interviewees disputed the assertion that Danes have become more tolerant. In terms of accepting (tolerating) different cultural markers, most interviewees would agree with Agnete (age 34, economist), Grethe (61, secretary), and Lola (32, editor-in-chief), who explained to us that wearing scarves is provocative for the Danes and that some people are judged to be foreign simply by their appearance (see chapter 4, this volume). One informant, Helle (25, teacher), had a hard time tolerating immigrants who commit criminal acts and wished to send them back to their country of origin. She argued that she wished to be tolerant but couldn’t help being offended. These interviewees were annoyed by cultural difference, but they did connect their feelings with the idea of tolerance. The idea of tolerance was not an available option. Danes may have been tolerant in the past, but they no longer are. A social worker’s commentary epitomizes the change: “Headscarves mark a difference, but it is a difference that I can live with. I think it is nice and I think it is exciting to experience, how these women dress differently. . . . They should do as they please. I cannot see why wearing a head-

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scarf would annoy anyone, but then of course it marks a difference. I mean, I think they should be allowed to, but it might be that it would be smart of them not to wear it, since some people may be offended by it” (Marianne, 53, social worker). At first, Marianne talks about tolerance in the sense of tolerating different cultural markers, but then she moves on to note that some people may be offended. The use “some people” (or “one” or “you”) in place of “I” is often used as a backing strategy of what a person really means. When Marianne later in the interview claims that immigrants have to know the norms “so that they don’t appear so provocative,” it becomes clear that the same markers are annoying to her. They may even be difficult for her to accept, since they represent something provocative. In both the politicians’ talk and in the interviews, we have seen a culturalist distinction between a “we-group” of Danes and an “out-group” of foreigners. Any such construction of others also serves the constitution of groups (Wodak 1997). In the case of Marianne, we saw an example of the denial of personal responsibility and a displacement of responsibility onto the group as a whole. Rather than demanding that immigrant women cease to wear the headscarf, Marianne displaces her stand from herself to the anonymous “we-group,” when she says “it might be that it would be smart of them not to wear it, since some people may be offended.” To avoid harassment and discriminatory remarks these women—in their own interest—should not wear the headscarf. Like the previous informants, Marianne does not evoke the discourse of tolerance. The aim of such discourse of self-justification, says Ruth Wodak, is a way of allowing the speaker to present herself as free of prejudice or even as a victim of so-called reverse prejudice (1997). Even when respondents were asked for their views concerning specific individuals known to the wider public, they would automatically leap into the general “we” and “they” categories, as if everyone understood who “we” and “they” were (Hervik 2003a). Annoyance has now reached an extent to which even intimate items such as food and clothes (particularly the headscarf) cannot be accepted. Vibeke associated ethnic clothing with the worst category of “foreigners” in Denmark, whom she saw as exploiting the welfare system, “clothing is—in my opinion—most provocative regardless if foreigners keep one or the other form of dress” (45, official). Similarly, Abelone (83, retired) could not accept the sight of religious activity such as kneeling five times a day. In these cases, cultural differences are experienced and constructed as incompatible and unacceptable. Therefore, my argument is that the cultural practice that cannot be tolerated undercuts the ideal of tolerance. The interviewees relate to intimate issues such as clothes and food, items that, most people would normally agree, belong to the realm of what is tolerable. Danes

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may not like the headscarf, the turban, the color, or the unfamiliar name, but if the idea of tolerance is to make any sense, then it would as a minimum entail the coexistence of different lifestyles and expressions of cultural and religious beliefs; people must be what Walzer (in his shades of toleration) called “benignly indifferent to difference.” Likewise, it seems fair to argue that if one says a person does not have a right to wear a headscarf, and then the denial of this right indicates a clear lack of tolerance. However, if these comments do not express the limits of tolerance, then it is limited tolerance—a sham tolerance that shields racist attitudes. Solomos and Wrench have argued that a novel characteristic of contemporary forms of racism is an intensified struggle around “the expression of racism that often claims not to be a racism” (see chapter 4, this volume). The shift from culturalism to racism and from the acceptance of intercultural tension to racialized prejudice is present in the case of Anna (19, unskilled worker). Anna explained that immigrants do not care about Danes. They only come here to receive the benefits of the state. They think they can do whatever they want. As she went on, it became clear that racism is associated with disliking things about the other. But then she explicitly dismissed the idea of racism, arguing that disliking each other is a two-way thing: “So, we do not like the way they dress or smell or talk and they probably also think we are strange.” At this point, Anna talked about intercultural differences and tensions, which are not in themselves racist. But the culturalization of differences would soon enough be used in racist reasoning. A few minutes further in the interview she spoke about crime (including murder and theft): “Well, now, there is another robbery, where some person is attacked by a black person. It is always a black person. It might be because we don’t hear about the Danes, but I don’t believe so. I really believe blacks commit the majority of crimes.” In fact, there is no statistical evidence to show that blacks commit more crime than “white Danes” of similar social background do. By ascribing negative characteristics to a category of people to whom she obviously does not belong, Anna supports a positive image of her own group. Line (42, teacher), another interviewee, noted that women who wear the headscarf are assumed to be Muslim. And devout Muslims are stereotypically associated with foreignness and fanaticism, whereas Danes are not similarly provoked by someone who enters “the bus with a stick in his nose or green hair.” In other words, only some cultural differences are seen as incompatible and therefore intolerable. Cultural markers such as the headscarf objectify something unwanted and are therefore more than a simple and practical problem. This argument then raises the question, Who is tolerating whom, and when? I shall return to that in a moment. First, however, I wish to look more

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closely at the research behind the headline “Danes have become more tolerant,” which our interviewees responded to.

Have the Danes Become More Tolerant? “Danes have become more tolerant” referred to the publication of a survey by political scientist Lise Togeby (1997) that relates to earlier work (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995). The material used for their research consisted of telephone interviews where respondents gave quick answers to questions about immigrants and refugees according to a scale ranging from “in complete agreement” to “total disagreement.” Accordingly, Gaasholt and Togeby use methods similar to the EUMC survey. Therefore, a scrutiny of the assumptions behind their use of “tolerance” can be used to further reveal how tolerance and racism are connected in the Danish public sphere. A series of assumptions define what the authors named “ethnic tolerance.” Ethnic tolerance is not the tolerance of ethnic minorities, but a label given to the respondents’ perception of non-Danish immigrants assumed to be of non-Western origin. Answers to these questions make up the “ethnic tolerance” segment and are measured as “tolerant” or “not tolerant” answers. When the authors compared the original count of tolerant answers from 1993 with the results of a new, follow-up study in 1996, they found that there were more tolerant answers in the later survey than in the first. Measuring “ethnic tolerance” in terms of a percentage can hardly be compared to popular perception of tolerance inferred from in-depth interviews. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the reactions we found in the interviews contradicted the news report about the quantitatively based study that showed Danes were becoming more tolerant. Togeby’s method and argument beg the question: What are the features of tolerance? Based on a theoretical discussion, she and Gaasholt argued that tolerance consists of fighting off the internal reluctance one may be nourishing and, despite this feeling, treating the immigrants and refugees in a decent manner (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995: 20). Accordingly, Gaasholt and Togeby take the libertarian humanist position that the inner thoughts and conscience are part of the inviolable private sphere (Kurtz 1996). “All things considered, it is reasonable to assume that resistance towards immigration and immigrants is a natural reaction—a very normal and perhaps also necessary adjustment in a society which is exposed to immigration from foreign cultures,” according to Gaasholt and Togeby (1995: 13). Liking or disliking each other is not the important thing when it comes to tolerance; of greater importance is treating each other in a decent manner. Tolerance consists of fighting the internal aversion, “the inner swine” (‘den

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indre svinehund’) and treating others decently in spite of it. In fact, tolerance is what keeps racism away. But Gaasholt and Togeby’s assertion is fragile in its actor-oriented liberal focus. If tolerance consists merely of fighting off the inner natural intolerance, then toleration has shifted its focus from the object to be tolerated to the individual tolerant subject. Consequently, toleration cannot embrace an active effort of listening and learning (Walzer’s fourth possibility). Moreover, when the public space is opened up for expressions of intolerant and racist views, doesn’t this undermine tolerance, threatening to turn it into flabby humanism? In both cases, we see clear limitations of tolerance subdued to antihumanist and racist discourse and practice. Gaasholt and Togeby explain that xenophobic reactions are only to be expected when Denmark comes under pressure from increased immigration. However, this assumption is false. Xenophobia is not natural but naturalized. Naturalizing xenophobia is precisely what cultural fundamentalism aims to do. Cultural fundamentalism is Verena Stolcke’s term for denoting the shift of rhetoric of the political right (1995). “Rather than asserting different endowment of human races, contemporary cultural fundamentalism emphasizes differences of cultural heritage and their incommensurability,” according to Stolcke (1995: 4). Cultural fundamentalism recognizes the equal status and rights of the other, but stresses the incommensurability of cultures in such a way that the alien is opposed to the natural. People naturally belong to certain territories. When they are deterritorialized, the incommensurable cultures will evoke antagonistic reactions unless their bearers assimilate. Karin Norman has pointed out that if xenophobia is in play, then one would avoid “the foreign” at all costs. In the case of refugees and immigrants from Third World countries, there is room for contact despite the xenophobic hostility and aversion, but then, at some historical moment, there is an attack. This attack is not xenophobia. “Xenohostility” would be a more appropriate concept than the “xenophobia,” which medicalizes the phenomenon (Norman 2004; also, in theory any foreigners will cause outbursts of “xenophobia.” But in fact this xenophobia is selective, following a hierarchy of rejected groups. Thus, xenohostility, if nothing else, forces us to infer which groups are the target of hostile thinking and practice, whereas xenophobia is a vaguer psychological concept describing a person’s disposition to fear persons or groups perceived as outsiders (Cashmore 1996). In the previous sections, I have dealt with tolerance and the construction of “we-groups” and “out-groups” that fell roughly along the lines of nation (we) and the foreign (the other). Now, I will turn to the relationship of inequality between tolerators and tolerated. In Walzer’s words: “To tolerate someone else is an act of power; to be tolerated is an acceptance of weakness” (1997: 52).

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Tolerance and Tolerant Individuals The EUMC report noted that Danes had both more racist and more tolerant answers than most other European countries. This seeming contradiction of simultaneously presenting racist and tolerant answers must be seen in relationship to the inherent asymmetry of power between tolerant individuals and those who should be tolerated, which belies the equality tolerance professes (Hastrup 2001). In Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren’s terminology, the “tolerant majority” is the producer of the nationalist discursive construction of “we” and “the other.” It is nationalist because the “we” are (according to the nationstate ideology) seen as consisting of those people who share an imagined cultural sameness and belong “naturally” to the territory that make up the state. The conditions are set, then, within a nationalist framework where the tolerant majority captures “the layer of society, which also professes the virtues of openness and tolerance” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 11–12). According to the two Belgian scholars, this tolerant majority shares with the extreme right the view of cultural diversity as a problem to be managed. Management is always in the hands of the powerful, and the management of diversity is not an exception. “The ‘managed’ have little say in all this. Therefore, the debate is really about the ‘other,’ viewed from the perspective of the majority” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 15). In light of the interviews above, tolerance disappeared rapidly and was substituted by the management view. In other words, the solution to the problem of diversity lies in the hand of the managers or even the tolerators.1 The tolerating group of antiracist activists may construct a “we” group that is hardly more visible that the tolerators themselves. Anthropologist Ruth Frankenberg showed that American middle-class women engaged in various antiracist activities constructed themselves as a group “without culture,” since they did not seem different to each other. In this process, ethnic minorities of color were visible carriers of culture. Whiteness was unmarked, invisible, and without a specified content, but still normative and determining (Frankenberg 1994). When people enact privileged positions based on their group position as white, we can follow David Wellman and call it “white privilege.” Wellman (1993) maintains that the rationale used by white people to justify their relative location to blacks in society is based on the preservation of privilege. During the growth of the new nationalism in Denmark in the 1990s, Danes discovered that they were “white.” The privileged position is white and Danish, while the out-group is composed of immigrants of color. The political right wing seeks to manage these visible immigrants by denying their

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right to be different as a means of allocating public, symbolic, or material resources. This strategy seems to rest on the idea that if difference is ignored, then “the immigrant problem” will vanish. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, we find an acknowledgment of difference. However, since the left wing too see the cultural distinctness of ethnic minorities as a problem, it turns to programs and acts of integration that can remove the disturbing differences (see also Blommaert and Verschueren 1998). I do not want to exaggerate the racial dynamics of the construction of “whiteness” in itself. One can easily gain the impression (a false one, I would argue) that the presence of people of different shades of color and culture is the prime reason for growing intolerance. Nationalism and the growth of the middle class are also producing marginal groups and enemies. I see the growth of nationalism and of the middle class as responses not so much to Denmark’s ethnic minorities as to the collective self-scrutiny or identityformation in the post-1989 world of rapid international changes and global processes. The majority’s management of cultural diversity is an approach that depends on two premises. First, ethnic minorities must be recognized as Danes and part of Danish society like anyone else. This is also crucial for safeguarding the collective right of ethnic minorities to be different. Cultural fundamentalists contest this right by arguing that these “foreign” cultures do not belong in the Western world to begin with. Second, and proceeding from the first, when ethnic minorities are accepted as Danes, the tolerant majority and the state elite will fiercely deny that they are enacting privileged white positions and possibly committing ethnic discrimination, regardless of existing documentation. The national image of itself as an exemplary case of egalitarian society will endlessly deny discrimination and racism, since such an acknowledgement would imply that egalitarianism is no longer present.

Threshold of Tolerance Cultural relativism has shifted in subtle ways from an emancipatory weapon against cultural imperialism and evolutionism to an argument in defense of cultural fundamentalism—that is, the idea of incompatible and hostile cultures (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 4). In a similar manner, nationalism embodies two aspects. The first is nationalism applied in struggles for independence and freedom from dominant external powers or directed toward other nations within the larger complex of nation-states. The second refers to the nation-state’s internal dominance and chauvinism, which cause ethnic differences to be seen as threats for the imagined cultural community. Likewise, tolerance requires a positive acceptance of difference. Neverthe-

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less, the fact is that tolerance exists at the mercy of tolerant individuals and can therefore be severely limited, giving way to racism. “In Western democratic countries, where tolerance is highly valued as a self-ascribed property, the radical elimination of diversity in the form of segregation, undisguised discrimination or the expulsion of foreigners is not available as a public option—though it is openly advocated by a growing number of people at the extreme right of the political spectrum.” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 4). In this way tolerance forms part of the country’s positive self-image, but then coincides with the practice of ethnic discrimination and racism. The crucial point in the coexistence occurs when tolerance is challenged (regardless of whether it is imagined or real). Indeed, “in nationalist ideology the nation is envisioned as a natural entity characterized by its culture,” which again “is understood in a somewhat atomistic fashion as a collection of traits integrated to form a unique object in the real world” (Handler 1984: 61). Tolerance is objectified when the limit of tolerance is reached. The objectification of this limit can be seen through the metaphor of a threshold of endurance. Tolerance can be abused and threatened to the extent that the tolerators are no longer able to manage or contain diversity and therefore give in to discrimination and racism. In the Danish debate, we saw this idea of a threshold of tolerance in press reports about “annoying” Somalis. In March 1997—as shown in chapter 2—newspapers reported similar stories from four of the biggest cities in Denmark. Mayors in Odense, Esbjerg, Aarhus, and Aalborg, all of them Social Democrats, came out with similar stories about how approximately 1,000 Somali refugees in each city had become too much of problem. “[The] breaking point has been reached,” “The city is flooded with refugees,” and “We cannot absorb any more” were some of the descriptions to be found in the media. Somalis and Somali culture were described as annoying, impossible to integrate, and incompatible with Danish culture. As the number of these extremely different refugees increased, the threshold of acceptance was reached. The Somalis were described as extremely different, but tolerance was not evoked as the relevant strategy for relating to this cultural difference. Instead, the Somalis represented a burden that needed to be managed properly. The diversity-as-a-problem attitude became objectified in terms of a “threshold” where problems became unbearable. Blommaert and Verschueren have also observed the tension between the tolerant majority’s self-image and the observable expressions of racism and xenophobia (1998: 77). Having too many “foreigners” or immigrants in one area, whether “area” means residential zones, schools, or other administrative units, is considered particularly problematic. They go on to theorize the threshold of tolerance, which they see as “an objectifying socio-mathematical

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concept that defines the conditions under which the all-European tolerance and openness may have cancelled without affecting the basic self-image. The European does not become intolerant until this threshold is crossed. Just let him or her step back over the same threshold, i.e. just reduce the number of foreigners again, and the good old tolerance will return” (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 78). In other words, even in moments of intolerance, the European is still tolerant at heart, and the observed behavior is completely due to the factual circumstances, which render it impossible to exercise this essential openness (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998). Permissiveness, then, is defined as excessive tolerance for deviations from one’s traditions. Permissiveness is not acceptable, since it threatens one’s own identity.

Conclusion Let us now look back to the EUMC study referred to at the beginning of the chapter, which showed Denmark on top with both most tolerant and most racist answers. We obviously still do not know exactly what the EUMC measured, nor for that matter do the political scientists Gaasholt and Togeby, who sparked the headline “Danes have become more tolerant.” To find out what was measured, we need to do research on the research. This could be fruitful for some purposes, but not for increasing our knowledge about the phenomenon of tolerance itself. In the nationalist self-image, tolerance is seen as good. Yet the term is dealt with ambivalently by the Danes, since excessive tolerance is considered naive and counterproductive for sustaining Danish national identity. Consequently, tolerance may be severely limited and may give in to new racism. This racism is subtle, indirect, often unintentional; it uses terms such as “culture” and “difference” instead of “race” and “racism,” although the terms frequently refer to the same trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between groups or adherents of specific belief systems (Gates 1985: 8). In everyday usage, racism is not included in the self-image of Danes or Europeans. Therefore, charges such as the one above, on the basis of an analytic concept of new racism, are heavily disputed despite existing documentation. Racism simply cannot be acknowledged, as I argued, within an egalitarian ideology, Scandinavian or otherwise. When racism and ethnic discrimination are acknowledged, they are immediately explained away as a natural reaction due to the increasing problem of diversity. In this scheme, integration and restrictions on who can enter the country become a cultural, psychological, and even biological selfdefensive measure.

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The notion of tolerance operates within this framework that separates the managers of diversity and tolerance from those who are to be managed and tolerated. Tolerators inhabit the same privileged position as those who naturalize xenophobia, deny racism between Danes and the people of nonWestern countries, and ethnicize, culturalize, and racialize immigrants from non-Western countries. These tolerators are also the ones who maintain the self-image of tolerance. Rather than ensuring the “right to be different” (which could be done as long as social, cultural, religious, and other differences do not lead to physical harm of other people, crime, or violence), Denmark enforces strict limits of tolerance and self-defense. When the limits of tolerance are strictly defined to encompass matters as specific as clothes, lifestyle, and religious practices, the notion of tolerance must be regarded as discontinued. The right to selfdefense is celebrated and is referred to as something natural that happens when what are viewed as incompatible cultures meet. These widely different cultures are presented as possessing an irreducible, undeniable essence that cannot be changed and that must be addressed in a certain way. Furthermore, by referring to this “natural” difference, the national “we-group” can displace any responsibility for the outcome of the meeting with cultural others, whether that is limited tolerance or outright hostility from themselves to the “out-group.”

CHAPTER 4


The Danish Cultural World of Unbridgeable Differences



A historical shift in the discourse of discrimination has been widely noted throughout Europe. Anthropologists and others have seen this as a transformation from ideologically based racism to an indirect, “morally less reprehensible” focus on “culture” and “cultural differences” (Stolcke 1995; van Dijk 1991: 26–27). John Solomos and John Wrench have argued that what is novel in contemporary forms of racism is the “intensification of ideological and political struggle around the expression of a racism that often claims not to be racism” (1993: 8). While the political, educational, academic, media, and corporate elites deny the overt, intentional, racist ideologies, van Dijk maintains that the elites still reproduce subtle forms of racism, which control access to employment, media, and culture (van Dijk 1991). In addition, Les Back and John Solomos have noted that in contemporary discourse race is coded in terms of “difference” and “culture” (2000: 20–21), which can be compared to the use in the United States of implied words for African-Americans, such as “welfare recipients” and “at-risk children.” All of these scholars address the denials of racism that accompany these discourses. However, such analyses fail to tell us much about their effects on popular consciousness. They would not, for instance, tell us whether and how the cultural schemas produced by exposure to these discourses similarly embrace denials of racism. Quantitative computation of people’s attitudes often fails to fully capture the cultural schemas that shape people’s talk and reasoning. The work of two Scandinavian political scientists, Øystein Gaasholt and Lise Togeby, serves as an illustration of this problem. These scholars looked at the media coverage of immigrant and refugee issues in Denmark in relation to the viewers and readers of the media (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995). Inspired by a theory of “issue attention cycle,” Gaasholt and Togeby went on to hypothesize that a decrease in the media’s interest in immigrant and refuge issues made Danes more tolerant and open toward the new members of Danish society. Togeby

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found that in 1993, more than 900 articles in the major Danish newspapers related to immigration, but in 1996 the number dropped to only 250 (Togeby 1997). This development was accompanied, she argued, by a small increase in Danish tolerance. Gaasholt and Togeby made their assumptions about increased tolerance through a survey of 1,671 interviews in 1993 (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995: 166) and two small complementary surveys in 1995 and 1996 (Togeby 1997). In these quantitatively based interviews, respondents chose between preformulated answers (Gaasholt and Togeby 1995; Togeby 1997). Results were added up in percentages that compared to other percentages in different projects. However, it is still murky exactly what the numbers reveal. I argue that these measurements of attitudes fail to capture the endurance and moral persuasion of the negative Danish perception of people in Denmark with ethnic minority backgrounds. My aim in this chapter is to examine the popular consciousness that arises as the long-term outcome of the discourse of neoracism, which has dominated Danish media and politics since the early 1990s and positioned immigrants and refugees as unwanted guests. In terms of the cultural study circuit, this chapter turns to the consumers of mainstream media and their more or less shared popular consciousness, which has emerged as the longterm effect of the news media’a coverage of the presence of Somali refugees, Ekstra-Bladet’s campaign, and the anti-immigration agenda of more and more politicians. More specifically, I argue that the denial of racism occurs not only in public political rhetoric but also in the widely shared Danish cultural interpretation of perceived problems with the country’s new residents. Immigrants and their descendants make up slightly less than 8 percent of the 5.3 million people in Denmark (2004). The first group of non-Western migrant workers arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s, mainly from Turkey, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, Algeria, and Morocco. The granting of new work permits came to a halt in 1973 due to the oil crisis. However, the family unification law allowed for spouses, parents, and children to continue entering the country. In the 1990s, the number of refugees increased with the wars in the Balkans and Somalia. At the same time, the first “guest workers” began losing their jobs because of economic restructuring, which drastically reduced the number of unskilled jobs. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, the arrival of thousands of new refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo, the gradual disappearance of borders between countries in the European Union, and the economic restructuring that this entailed led politicians and media in the 1990s to become ever more unfriendly toward Denmark’s ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims, and especially Somalis. In the previous chapter, we saw two competing discourses: One is the discourse of tolerance (including the discourse of antiracism). The other is neoracism, expressed largely in the more dominant discourse of unbridgeable differences.

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We discerned these discourses, understood in a Foucauldian sense, from the nationally circulating newspapers that imposed messages upon their readers. In addition to analyzing media discourses on immigrant and refugee issues, we interviewed people about their relationship to the country’s ethnic minorities. From these interviews we can infer the interpretative framework (cultural worlds) that people used in responding to and making sense of the prevailing discourses. Recent studies have shown that we can no longer take the relationship between the extra-personal and the intra-personal realm of culture for granted. Public messages and discourses are not simply e-mailed or faxed into private minds (Strauss and Quinn 1997). Learning is not simply the result of processes of the individual consciousness but takes place in the context of social interaction and is thus always both social and situated (Lave and Wenger 1993). One implication of this is that we cannot understand any discourse except by relating it to a larger framework of cultural interpretation. The meaning of discourse requires a referential horizon upon which that meaning can be fixed. As this localization and contextualization of meaning occur, circumstances of encountering the media receive more relevant attention. Repetition, emotions evoked in delivering and receiving messages, and social evaluations of what is right, wrong, and inevitable are some of the factors that need to be attended to for a full understanding of the media’s relationship to readers’, listeners’, and viewers’ knowledge (Holland and Quinn 1987; d’Andrade and Strauss 1992). Obviously, this kind of analysis goes beyond what can be done in a single chapter. Instead, I look at the taken-for-granted schematic knowledge that our interviewees used when they talked about ethnic minorities. In the preceding chapter, I argued that a discourse of tolerance exists as an opinion that can be selected as a choice among several options. Once knowledge is filtered through practical experience and settled in the mind as salient cultural schemas, that knowledge may be considered reality. In the early 1990s, media coverage of immigrant and refugee issues began to stress the presence of widely different, socially visible ethnic groups in Denmark as unnatural. At the time of our interviews (1997–98), holders of this understanding saw it as part of reality, not to be negotiated or denied. An illustration can be found in reasoning about Denmark’s Somali refugees, people who are regarded as problematic simply because they are so different (Fadel, Hervik, and Vestergaard 1999). My treatment of Danish shared cultural understandings of the immigrant and refugee presence in Denmark builds on the analytic concept of culturally figured worlds. The people I am quoting participate in cultural worlds in which these discourses make sense. In the first section I provide some details of this analytic framework, including common features of cultural worlds. In the second section I infer these features from the interview material and

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then present the cultural world of host-guest relations that informs many Danish people’s and the media’s view of immigrants.

Culturally Figured Worlds A radical theoretical shift in anthropological studies of how cultural knowledge is organized occurred in the 1980s, when the notion of cognitive schemas was recognized as the common means by which humans learn new things. In practice, this shift has been formulated as moving from rules to regularities and schemas (Hanks 1990), from linguistic (or cultural) forms to activity and social communication (Hanks 1996). Now a widespread approach in the anthropology of learning, schema theory focuses on circumscribed habitual conventions of interpretation without the assumptions of coherence that characterized older definitions of culture. Schema theory relies on a notion of culture as multiple complexes of meaning (Holland and Cole 1995: 478). These schemas mediate behavior and action: “Meanings and understandings are not just representations about what is in the world; they are also directive, evocative, and reality constructing in character” (Holland and Cole 1995: 478). The basic constituent of such a system of meaning is called a schema. Schemas are personal knowledge structures that are important to memory. Cognitive schemas are always the outcome of socially shared behaviour and are informed by a larger network of schemas. When such clusters of schemas are shared by groups living in similar life conditions, anthropologists have called them cultural schemas (Quinn 1987) or, alternatively, “cultural models” (Holland and Quinn 1987). Recently, in order to distinguish schemas of physical objects, to focus exclusively on cultural schemas that encompass humans, to indicate the possibility of self-investment or identity, and to focus on imaginary and practical aspects of social activity more broadly, Holland et al. have suggested the term “culturally figured worlds” or its shorter form, “cultural worlds” (1998).1 These are the two terms I use in this chapter. The notion of figured worlds is more a working concept than an analytic concept susceptible to a set of defining criteria. It includes all those cultural realms peopled by characters from collective imaginings: academia, the factory, crime, romance, environmental activism, and so on. Figured worlds take shape within and grant shape to the co-production of activities, discourses, performances, and artifacts (Holland et al. 1998). They are not necessarily expressed in language and are never expressed in their entirety, even though they organize meaning and are used in language (Hervik 2003c). They are embodied within a person, but are learned in social interaction over time and are therefore also a product of a collective history. Accordingly, we must

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infer the more coherent, if unarticulated, figured worlds that lie beneath the representations or discourses. These figured worlds present us with hypotheses of what is going on in interaction, provide interpretations and guides for action, and present a scenario in which subject positions and social relationships can be ideally played out. In the cognitive anthropology of the 1980s (see, for instance, Holland and Quinn 1987), the imaginary world (roughly corresponding to the ideational definitions of culture) was rightly criticized for focusing too exclusively on the imaginary. Today there is an important attempt to incorporate constructionist and communicative perspectives, stressing the social in addition to the cultural aspect of discourses and practices (Hanks 1996; Hervik 1999b, 2003c; Holland et al. 1998). Thus, figurative worlds are seen in conjunction with relational identities. Relational (or positional) identities are those that deal with behavior as indexical expressions of claims to social relationships with others. As such, they concern the day-to-day, on-the-ground relations of power: deference and entitlement, social affiliation and distance—with the social-interactional, social-relational structures of the lived world (Holland et al. 1998). In the illustration of children at play, relational identities would be the children’s social claims of who they are relative to one another—by age, for example. Another example is the specific figured world of romance. Social activities at American colleges studied by Dorothy Holland and her collaborators often involved talk about the conduct of romantic encounters and relationships. Holland has shown that gender type categories used in talk are interpreted against a figured world of intimate male-female relationships. A categorization of a person is cognitively related to how that person will function in a relationship in this ideal world of romance. The figured world of romance inferred by Holland “[p]osited a simplified world populated by a set of agents (in the world of romance: attractive women, boyfriends, lovers, fiancés) who engage in a limited range of meaningful acts or changes of state (flirting with, falling in love with, dumping, having sex with) as moved by a specific set of forces (attractiveness, love, lust)” (Holland et al. 1998: 52; see also Holland 1992). In the horizon of meaning employed to interpret a specific instance, an attractive man and an attractive woman are drawn to each other and provide each other with equal intimacy.2 If the attractiveness or prestige of the man is less than that of the woman, he can compensate by treating her especially well, and if she is less attractive than the man, she can compensate by being satisfied with less good treatment from the man (Holland et al. 1998: 52). In their investigation of gender-typed categories, a jerk would be considered, for example, a man who causes this taken-for-granted course of events to go awry, since he is unable or unwilling to acknowledge his lesser attractiveness and lacks the social skills to compensate.

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The people we interviewed often expressed their distress concerning “odd” foreign behavior and customs, by arguing, for instance: “If I were in Saudi Arabia I wouldn’t walk around in a bikini in the street,” or “When I go to a foreign country I try to learn the language” (Fadel 1997). In this example, the informant evokes an imaginary world that on the surface is analogous to that of immigrants in Denmark. The immigrant is a visitor or guest who should follow the rules of the new nation, just as an informant would do when visiting the immigrant’s country of origin. On closer inspection, it becomes obvious that the image is evoked to morally condemn the actual behaviour of immigrants. In the imaginary world of hosts and guests, there is an asymmetry: the host leads, the guest follows the host’s lead. The comments rarely refer to their actual behavior during travel in foreign places. In the following, I contend that a Danish cultural understanding of immigrants and refugees follows the general pattern of figured worlds and contains a set of agents, a set of typical progressing events, and a specific set of motivating forces. What does that world look like?

The Unbridgeable Differences One of the key features of the neoracist wave is the construction of a rigid dichotomy between “us” (Danes) and “them” (the out-group of foreigners)—to the point that the gap is unbridgeable. However, as we shall see, the socially constructed “foreigners” category comprises an “outwardly defined population” (Banton 2000) that uses pseudo-biological ascription but mainly focuses on cultural criteria as well—for example, clothes, food, and language. Few Danes know any immigrants or refugees personally. Since the Danish media have been saturated by negative stories about immigrants, it is therefore hardly surprising that the distinction between an in-group of Danes and an out-group of immigrants was present in all of our interviews. Talk about “the other” in terms of cultural competence and diacritical signs (veil, clothes, food, and language) is widespread in conversation in Denmark. In the research project, our list of issues to be talked about in conversations with informants included Wilson Kipketer, the Kenya-born black track and field athlete who, representing Denmark, won the 800-meter world championship. Asked about this specific person, one informant leaps automatically into the general “we” and “they” categories as if everyone would know which people he is referring to: “They can do something we can’t. They are, they are good at playing cricket and we don’t even know the rules” (Søren, 27, carpenter/ student). When Søren was asked about Muslim women’s practice of wearing the headscarf, he likewise switched from a gendered pronoun to the anonymous, unspecified “it” (det), “I think it doesn’t make sense. This is about keeping it [cultural difference] within the four walls of the home.”

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This tendency to take for granted who “we” and “they” are marks most of the interviews. Helle, a 25-year-old teacher, appeals to common sense reasoning in order to make her point about the “we-they” distinction, remarking, “Even when they try their hardest to do like the Danes do, in order to be accepted, then that is still never sufficient. They can’t all of sudden have blond hair like the Danes.” Regardless of the concreteness of the terms being used in the questions, the informants turn to the general pronoun “they.” Who “they” are need not be specified. In a broader analysis of the interviews, Ulla Fadel (1999) found that this “they” (the “foreigners” or immigrants) are those who have attributes that the Danes, Danish society, and Danish culture discourage (figure 15). The distinction tended to fall between those who were perceived to be of Western and of non-Western origin (Hervik 1999b). The following features derive from the interviews and other informal conversations:

Foreigners

Danes

Group-oriented

Individualist

Live in large families

Live in nuclear families

Have many children

Have few children

Exploit society

Contribute to society

Dirty/smell bad

Clean/does not smell

Loud/bad-tempered

Quit/calm

Fight/kill each other

Talk/compromise

Poor upon arrival

Rich before immigrants arrived

Submissive to religious and moral doctrines

Casual relationship to religion

Traditional/old fashioned

Modern

Suppres women

Women emancipated

Women wear headscarves and long dresses

Women wear bikinis or go topless on beaches

Figure 15. Danish and non-Danish attributes found in interviews Source: Fadel (1997) in Hervik (2004)

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The categorical distinction between the two sets of characters is a key feature of the interviews. If everyday discourses can be taken as indications, the distinction saturates Danish popular consciousness. Researchers generally agree that in the 1990s the culturalization of the distinction between “us” Danes and “them” has become more salient than ever before (see, for instance, Schierup 1993).

“They Do Not Belong Here” Marianne Gullestad has noted that “they” (the immigrants and refugees) become a problem only when they leave the country of origin (Gullestad 2006). One of our informants made this point in a particularly succinct way, stating, “It is normal [in the sense of “natural” or even “instinctive”] to flee to a country that is closely related to yours in terms of religion and climate and so on. I think it is wrong that a man who lives in Somalia flees from a tropical climate to a damned cold northern climate. This is not natural” (Per, 53, computer consultant). The idea of belonging “naturally” to some locations and not others was notable as Grethe (61, secretary) spoke about black people she met in London: “Among other things in London, there were many people with dark skin. There, well, they belonged in some way, right, since I was in a foreign country and there it could not be any different.” Speaking about the Somali refugees in Denmark, Grethe appealed to the self-evident when she said, “What I can understand is that our own people, so to speak, Europeans and Asians, who are not so far from us, but I don’t think the Somalis belong in Denmark” (emphasis in original). It is not clear whether Grethe was referring to phenotypic feature development when she used “not far from us” to refer to other Europeans and Asians rather than the Somalis. A third informant spoke about adopted children as she debated, “They grew up like Danes, right? With Danish culture, it can be very difficult for immigrants. Arriving here is like landing on a different planet” (Charlotte, 29, unemployed). According to the metaphor “landing on a different planet,” immigrants arrive as aliens from outer space. Their cultural difference is beyond questioning and regarded as insurmountable. The next interviewee met a Turk in Turkey, about which she explained, “I grew very fond of him and think he is a nice, sweet, friendly guy, who belongs where he belongs” (Vibeke, 54, civil servant). These illustrations from the pool of interviews help to establish that the idea of unbridgeable cultural differences has become a salient feature in people’s reasoning about multicultural issues. Moreover, the informants’ statements make it clear that the out-group does not “naturally” belong in

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Denmark. This view underscores Malkki’s concept of the natural order of things (Malkki 1992) and Stolcke’s notion of cultural fundamentalism (Stolcke 1995). Both of these authors show a dominant strategy of reasoning that ties culture to place by emphasizing their natural relationship: People and cultures belong naturally to certain territories and possibly climates. When they are uprooted and brought to a new environment, they cause trouble. The basic assumption that immigrants and refugees are widely different and thus do not belong in the company of Danes in Denmark resonates with those right-wing newspapers and political parties who have consistently used de fremmede (“aliens” or “strangers”) as their chosen discursive artifacts in campaigns against immigrants and refugees (Jørgensen and Bülow 1999; Hervik 1999a). This view of culturally diverse immigrants and refugees indicates that the relationship between these people and Danes in Denmark will always be unequal. This asymmetric, distinct relationship between “us” and “them” is a precondition for understanding the figured world that informs the Danish interviewees’ talk about cultural diversity. In the next section, I look more closely at features and operations of the relationship between “belonging Danes” and “intruding others.”

At Home: Hosts and Guests Many of our informants speak as if Denmark is a home. Immigrants are seen as guests in our home and as away from their own home. Some illustrations from the pool of interviews: If you want to stay here, then you have to behave as if you are visiting someone. So, when I am going on a visit, then I also try to follow the norms of that home. (Charlotte 29, unemployed) I don’t think they belong [lit. “are at home”] in the Danish society. (Grethe, 61, secretary) Some have turned up voluntarily, who could go home at any time. (Vibeke, 54, civil servant) Sometimes, I think that they can get information from home about how much they can make from the welfare state. (Vibeke) A Chinese doctor that I know well has his education paid so he could go back to his home country. (Vibeke)

The talk about home makes it clear that the “anonymous” de (they) have a home different from that of the speaker. This is a first step in establishing a legitimate ground for social and national exclusion.

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Vibeke goes on to explain at length the rules for visiting someone in their home: If I am in a foreign country, let’s say Iran, and I have to take a bus, and the whole bus smells of the kind of food I don’t like, or it smells of perspiration, or garlic, or whatever, but it is some kind of foreign smell, and you can’t avoid it, if you enter a bus, then if I meet this in the country, where I am a guest, then I would not say it is pleasant, but I would feel that in some ways it is exciting. (Vibeke, 45, civil servant)

Another interviewee echoed her sentiment: You have to live like we do here [lit. “at home”] or you will get lost. (Martin, 30, rescue worker) [A “good” immigrant] is someone who gradually emerges as a Danish person, right? (Martin) Then you should also be careful not to integrate them too much in Denmark, since then they may not wish to go home again, right? (Martin)

The agents involved in this particular figured world of immigrants are residents and newcomers. Residents are “we,” “the Danes,” “the indigenous Danes,” “those who were here to begin with,” or those who belong “naturally” to the territory and imagine themselves as a homogeneous cultural community. Danes are at home in this cultural sameness. Newcomers are those people who arrived for various reasons, as refugees or guests, and have settled, becoming the target of official programs of integration. An additional feature of these definitions is that Danes associate newcomers as refugees and immigrants rather than as other Scandinavians, EU citizens, or North Americans (see Hervik 1999a). Since the geographic distances to the homelands of Americans and Australians are similar to those of the Sri Lankan Tamils and Somalis, then it must be the perceived cultural difference that is in play when Danes argue that immigrants and refugees do not naturally belong in Denmark (see also Fadel 1999: 238–39). In the figured world of romantic relations, a man and a woman of equal attractiveness meet in an ideally symmetrical, harmonious relationship. This is unlike the relationship between residents (the hosts) and the newcomers (the guests). An entirely different scenario would come into effect, for instance, if the guest threw out the host rather than the host expelling the guest for intolerable behavior. The event schema that frames the resident-newcomer relationship is the arrival of the newcomer from a different part of the world as the result of an ordered series of events. Embedded in this schema are the smaller segments and the actors’ different goals, which deserve study in their own right. Thus, Danish observers see newcomers as arriving with the intention either to improve their economic situation, or to flee from some threat to their lives.

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Each intention is accompanied by an interpretation of the travel route taken by the newcomers: In the case of the non-true refugee, flight is assumed to have been preplanned and perhaps expensive; in the second case the “true” refugee is at the mercy of fate. In short, the event is the relocation of a person from a foreign sociocultural space to Denmark, regardless of whether this was recent or occurred decades ago. It is this event schema of arrival that shapes the social role of the newcomer and orients the impending interaction with the local hosts. The residents sustain a handful of social expectations about the arriving “guests” (refugees, new immigrants, and more established immigrants). According to this simplified figured world used in their reasoning, residents anticipate that the newcomers have arrived with little money and few personal belongings and that someday they will return to the country of origin where they naturally belong. Since newcomers have arrived seeking aid in the form of work, or for protection, they are like guests and are thus dependent on the hospitality of the house (Denmark). They are supposed to be humble, undemanding, at best invisible, interested in Danish ways of living and willing to conform to these ways of living and thinking.

Unruly Guests In a home, literally, as well as in the metaphorical extension of home as nation, the host is in control. He or she owns the home and has expectations as to the behavior of the guest, even if this guest is known to be widely different. But what happens when the guest does not act or think like a guest? This, of course, is the most common situation, as ethnic minorities do not see themselves as guests (Hervik 2002a: Hervik and Jørgensen 2002). One informant answered a question about how many immigrants Denmark can take by arguing that the country should shut its doors “when you reach a level where it [the cultural difference] becomes more visible” (Anders, 27, public administration), thus indicating that visual (racial and ethnic) features pose a problem. The next informant was more outspoken, saying, “That headscarf annoys me, but you can’t really do anything about it. Still, I think that you have to adjust according to the customs of the country to which you flee. We must do that, if we flee or travel to another country” (Abelone, 83, retired). Other similar remarks included: I can’t really tolerate it when I think about how they kneel five times a day during work. They should follow Danish customs (Abelone, 83, retired). When you are in another country, you should follow the rules and customs of that country, so that you won’t upset anyone. I do get offended when I see

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a group of girls on their way to school. Their headscarves, I think, are always nicely ironed with beautiful lace and look very clean in the mornings, but I must say it annoys me. (Grethe, 61, secretary) They have to know the norms as much as possible and then blend in as best they can, so that they don’t appear so provocative. (Marianne, 53, social worker) Learn the language and try to wear clothes that do not make you stand out too much . . . It [veil and robe] does appear abnormal, right? This is provocative, right? It does appear provocative to me. (Per, 53, computer consultant)

Asked if she could accept different cultural markers, Agnete said, “Danes experience this as provocative. That women wear headscarves is provocative for many Danes” (Agnete, 34, economist). Lola (32, editor) added, “Headscarves are provocative, either because they did not themselves choose to wear headscarves, or because they do not want to do anything else.” At this point, it is clear that the mere sight of foreign cultural markers annoys some Danish eyes. Commenting on this difference, the interviewees expressed their concerns and their wish that the immigrants and refugees should downplay, or somehow make up for, these annoying differences. In the uneven reciprocity between residents and newcomers, “Immigrants should give something back, right? And one such a thing could be to learn the Danish language,” said Jacob (20). The reciprocity comes out as requirements to be met by the immigrant guest—requirements set by the host, who owns the house and is thus entitled to exert a position of incontestable power and opinion. Other interlocutors explain that to be integrated, immigrants should neutralize their cultural markers: “Yes, they have to learn to eat pork and drink beer! Well, no, it depends on what we mean when we say they need to learn to adjust” (Rasmus, 20, politician); “Integration means not wearing the headscarf or practicing Islam” (Anders, 37, public administration); “They have to learn Danish; the Danish norms apply” (Anders). Several informants insist that if newcomers do not comply or show willingness to be integrated, and this means giving up certain cultural markers, the immigrants are creating their own problem. An example is Per (53, computer consultant), who expressed this to the point of saying, “If you are different, then that is what creates your problems.” In sum, some immigrants are real refugees, invited, and they are in real need. Some immigrants are invited to work here, and they too are perceived as proper guests. Non-invited immigrants are usually bad guests unwilling or unable to appear proper. As guests, they should be grateful for being invited and eager to comply and to learn. They should also be attentive to the ways of the hosts. According to the figured world, unruly guests are guests that do not comply. From the host’s viewpoint, the guest causes problems for him or herself (see figure 16).

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Good guests

Bad guests

Complying

Not-complying

Grateful

Abusive

Real refugees

Economic refugees

Humble

Provocative

Willingness to learn and downplay difference

Careless

Figure 16. Attributes of guests as used by the host Source: Hervik (2004)

Figured World of Host-Guest Relations The particulars of the cultural world in which Danes encounter immigrants and refugees have now been filled in (figure 17). The agents are the hosts and guests; the forces come from the asymmetric relationship of power, with the host being in charge; and the typical acts involve giving, receiving, showing gratitude, opening one’s home, and as we shall see, being taken advantage of, or exploited. Regarding the asymmetry of relations between hosts and guests in the figured world, in the figured world, it is likely that guests will eventually ameliorate any asymmetry by inviting the hosts to their homes. However, in cases where the guests cannot ever invite the hosts to their homes (because they are not going to return to their own homes), the asymmetry is permanent. In this cultural world, failure to compensate makes the guests unwelcome and may lead to their expulsion. When there is no reciprocity, and no good reason why the guest cannot compensate, the host becomes a victim of exploitation. Moreover, he becomes a foolish victim. After all, the host has the power and can presumably get rid of the now unwanted guest. The cultural world of hosts and guests was present in all the conversations we had with Danes on multicultural issues. I do not deny that alternative cultural understandings exist, but I claim that the cultural world of unbridgeable differences is overwhelmingly predominant in Danish society. It may be that a guest-host understanding persisted throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and that the frustrations generated by new interpretations of “unnatural presence” simply verify earlier suspicions that some people are too different to be proper guests in the home of the Danish nation. At this

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Visitors (immigrants/refugees) arrive at the home of their hosts (residents).

A The hosts (residents) ful
ill the basic need of the guests (visitors) until they are able to support themselves. The hosts (residents) set the terms for the encounter and expect the guests (visitors) to comply.

C

B

The guests must compensate since they depend upon the host in order to get that better and/or safer life. In compensating, the newcomer must avoid displeasing or upsetting the residents. Acts include being as invisible as possible (not displaying wealth or cultural markers), expressing a will to learn Danish, learning new ways of living and learning new ways of seeing the world.

The guests return home.

Figure 17. The narrativizing sequence of the figured world of host-guest relations Source: Hervik (2004)

point I have not found any research on earlier periods that shows the existence of latent host-guest understandings. According to schema theory, the cultural world of hosts and guests surfaces in the interviews without being explicitly articulated in language. Still, the conversations make sense against this interpretive framework of hostguest relations, which is the real world in the eyes of Danes occupying the position of hosts. In this manner, the host is seeing in terms of figured worlds, not simply the objects of his or her sight (Holland and Quinn 1987: 10).

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Conclusion The authors referred to at the beginning of this article noted that European forms of racism are undergoing a transformation from ideological racism to a more subtle discrimination on cultural grounds. These neoracist discourses are publicly accompanied by an insistent claim that they are not racist. Van Dijk, Solomos, Wrench, and Back argue that this claim is false: Subtle forms of discrimination, while they perhaps no longer are explicitly founded on pseudo-biological reasoning, are still racist. Van Dijk, especially, emphasizes that controlling elites must be regarded as the discriminators and not the discriminated-against. Obviously, when those who are normally regarded as the producers both of discriminatory statements and acts claim they are not discriminating, we need not fall for the argument. Van Dijk does recognize elite denials of overt, intentional, ideological racism, as in Nazism, but he sticks to his guns when it comes to the subtler forms of racism. Similarly, the powerful host cannot escape being racist by reverting to the relationship between discriminator and discriminated and claiming that the unruly guest has caused the host to become racist. The Danish popular consciousness as seen from our interviews differs from the publicized political discourse in one important respect. The political discourse repeatedly insists that it is not racist, and the figured world of host and guest relations does not incorporate any direct association with racism. Instead, discrimination and racism are naturalized and reduced to something that happens to the host as he or she is provoked or abused by guests who refuse to follow the etiquette expected of guests. The guests’ annoyingly visible cultural difference takes a heavy toll on the host’s tolerance, and eventually this leads to outbursts against the guests as a culturally and, in some cases, racially distinct group. The naturalization of hostile reactions in terms of the cultural world of host-guest relations is still, in effect, a denial of racism, yet it is different from the political discourse. The interpretation of immigrants according to the “host-guest” figuring and the resultant neoracism and logic of denial rests on two faulty assumptions: One is that racist reactions are somehow natural (rather than naturalized); the other is that the figured world is relevant to the immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and refugees who have entered the country. In relation to political science, illustrated by Togeby’s argument that tolerance increases as media coverage decreases, I argue that the host-guest figured world shows this view to be an oversimplification that falls apart under closer analysis. Togeby’s quantitatively based measurement of attitudes fails to fully capture the complexity of the figured world of host-guest relations, which informs Danes’ reasoning about immigrants and refugees. This figured world is the long-term result of repeated media readings of emotionally

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laden, nationalist-oriented treatment of Danish relations with foreign, all occurring as the Danish nation-state is under pressure from its EU membership and feeling the effects of the flows of labor resulting from globalization. Media messages began to contest foreign, unwanted presence in the country at a time that seems particularly opportunistic for politicians, due to the structural transformations of the European Union taking place with increasing speed in the post-1989 world. Through repeated experiences, readers, viewers, and listeners tacitly and unintentionally accepted the media coverage of immigrant-refugee relations in Denmark. This tacit and gradual acceptance begins to form the figured world of host-guest relations as a framework through which to interpret the flow of peoples into Denmark. Now the perception of these people is largely fixed and durably constructed in popular consciousness as unruly and unwelcome guests. The media coverage may later change, but the cultural world of unbridgeable differences, with its embedded assumptions of belonging and naturalness, cannot easily be dismantled.

PART III


 The Mona Sheikh Story of 2001   ’  in 1997 and the continuing nationalist overtones of the electoral debates, the media and politicians went into a kind of cultural arms race on the topic of “difference”—more specifically, on the incompatibility of cultural differences. There were stories about clothes (suggesting that wearing the veil is hazardous to one’s health), secondlanguage learning, mother-tongue learning, public school sports, food, sex, rape, incest, kinship, religion, crime, climate change, and development aid given to prevent terrorism, themes that all dealt with pinpointing the difference between the native Danes and the culturally different others. These acts of recording differences suggest a process where our alikeness defines others in terms of cultural pollution which again becomes the cause of their problems of integration. The more they are exposed by their difference, the more they appear as dangerous aliens, and the more difficult it will be for the indigenous Danes to accept their presence. The second of the three media events consists of a single Danish media story in the summer of 2001. I have called this the “Mona Sheikh story” because Mona Sheikh was one of the principal subjects that for the first time saw the mass media attacking Muslims for their beliefs, identity, and character. Unlike the first media event, which radiated from a single newspaper, in this case most of the news media joined together in the anti-Muslim rhetoric and at times demonization of young Muslims born in Denmark to Pakistani parents. The story broke on 17 May but had been in the making for some time. However, from the prime-time news of Denmark’s Radio Television,

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which spent thirteen of its thirty-minute news block on this story, nothing could stop the reporters. In the story the three Danish young Muslims coalesced to represent what was seen as the most despicable characteristic of Islam: the Taliban in Afghanistan (see also next chapter, this volume). We would understand later that they were also the same kind of people who had decided to fly into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House in September. Ekstra Bladet’s campaign and the Mona Sheikh story are crucial events establishing a background that one needs to know in order to understand the Danish national parliamentary election that brought the radical right-wing Danish People’s Party into a leading role in Danish legislation and politics. The Liberal Party and the Conservatives came into power but then married the Danish People’s Party, sharing much of their politics. In public political communication as well as in everyday talk, nationalism is a negative word, one that is avoided, denied, contested, and ignored. Nationalism can be employed abroad—for instance, as in talk about Serb and Russian nationalists—but as a self-categorization, it is avoided. From an academic point of view, where we dive into history as well as contemporary events, literature, and research, we find that nationalism comes in many shapes and sizes, and we would be irresponsible if we did away with the concept simply because people don’t like it. Indeed, when Danish politicians and the media discuss legislation on integration, family reunification, prevention of forced marriages, and mother-tongue education, the discussion is thoroughly framed by issues of who belongs and who does not, and by the assumption that those people who belong naturally to the Danish territory should have certain rights that newcomers, particularly those from non-Western countries, should not. This theme became stronger in the late 1990s and could be found on the top of the agenda during the election debates in 1997, 1998, and 2001. What party leader Uffe Elleman-Jensen had warned about became true with his successor, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Neonationalism—the reemergence of nationalism after 1989—was framing, and being framed by, the Mona Sheikh story. A nationalist prelude to the story popped up in the media in January 2001. The Conservative People’s Party began to pursue legislation that would force children into taking classes on Christianity (rather than simply on religion) in primary and secondary schools. Teaching Christianity, they argued, did not imply ambitions of religious conversion, or preaching, but referred to Denmark’s long history as a Christian nation. Never mind that the right to refuse participation in these classes had been in effect since the 1930s and that a survey showed that only 2.8 percent of the country’s Muslims in fact had asked for exemption from these classes in Christianity, casting doubt on the need for and purpose of this new legislation.

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Several commentators referred to Denmark’s nearly thousand-year Christian history, while others argued that such teaching would necessarily be based on the Bible and therefore constitute preaching in the schools. Brian Mikkelsen, spokesperson on education for the Conservatives, explained: “Danish culture is permeated with Christianity. Therefore it is important to know Christianity, if you want to know the Danes” (Bondesen and Vesterberg 2001). Christianity and Danishness seem to coincide; being Muslim is deviant and, as a point of departure, not Danish. In the aftermath of the Mona Sheikh story the theme was taken up again by the news media from 6 to 14 August. Brian Mikkelsen now suggested: “Muslim schoolchildren must be forced into received teaching in Christianity”; he argued that this is for their own good (Steensbeck 2001). Christianity is needed, he said, to generate a sense of national community (Mikkelsen 2001). Another conservative commentator, Connie Hedegaard, supported Mikkelsen’s idea: When we are talking about capturing the “unique Danish,” again and again we don’t get much father than “something to do with” tolerance, liberalism, the Danish language, folk high school movement, cooperative movement, participation in association, songs made for special occasions, small allotted gardens and so on and then in the end the Christian heritage. Yes, then Christianity has been the foundation of our more than 1000 years of our history, culture, literature, our music, our traditions. (C. Hedegaard 2001)

None of the commentators talk about preaching Christianity or the Christian faith. Children are to learn Christianity as heritage and passive tradition, detached from the Christian religious doctrine (E. Nielsen 2001: 3). Christianity is used as a tool, and at times is seen as being identical with Danishness. In the end, the conservatives turned compulsory teaching of Christianity into a political goal, where it appeared together with requirements to take authorized exams in the Danish language. A few weeks after September 11, the conservatives held their annual meeting in the sign of nationalism. The daily Berlingske Tidende published a series of articles from this meeting (“A Danish Denmark for both new and elder Danes” and “We have let too many people in. More that we are able to integrate. We have let the wrong ones in—poor rather than refugees”), along with queries such as whether “Denmark as a nation can manage the immigration we are experiencing at the moment” (Kassebeer 2001). From a strictly religious point of view, Danes are not very religious or very knowledgeable about Christianity. Several Christian experts believe that the Danes are illiterate when it comes to Christianity. There is no theological culture. There is a need, they argue, to re-Christianize the Danes. Bishop Niels Henrik Arendt explains, “We have used the last fifty years on unlearning

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Christianity and if the Danes mean anything of this talk about Christianity and Christian values, then we need to step in and remake the foundation” (Clausen 2001). A consequence of this illiteracy is that teaching Christianity in schools is unrelated to the Christian message and is based only on Christian heritage as habit and passive religion (Clausen 2001). A survey provides further support to the argument that teaching Christianity is used as a means to contain the Muslims in Denmark by shaping them in a way that doesn’t upset the Danish hosts (see table 2 for the number of Muslims in Denmark). A group of representatively chosen Danes were approached, according to the daily Politiken, and asked, “Do you believe that the state church [folkekirken] should try to evangelize Muslims?” Approximately 62 percent answered in the affirmative (Hervik 2002a: 170), while more than 50 percent of Christian ministers agreed (Clausen 2002). Such a high percentage cannot be founded in the Christian beliefs of the Danes, which in fact is very low. The only explanation is the desire to stop the enemy—that is, to try to fight Islam through the forced teaching of Christianity.

Afghanistan (98.1%) Algeria (96.7%) Bosnia-Herzegovina (62.9%) Egypt (84.4%) Yugoslavia (35.7%) Iraq (89.7%) Iran (57.2%) Jordan (93.5%) Kuwait (83.1%) Lebanon (98.9%) Marocco (98.3%) Pakistan (89%) Somalia (99%) Syria (89.3%) Tunisia (99%) Turkey (92%) Not provided (84%) Danish converts Third generation immigrants Other countries Total number of Muslims

Number

Percent

11,032 1,221

5.3 0.6

13,179 1,576 6,217 24,149 8,231 1,768 1,403 22,261 8,966 17,163 16,398 2,800 1,139 51,106 2,952 2,100

6.4 0.8 3 11.7 4 0.9 0.7 10.7 4.3 8.3 7.9 1.4 0.5 24.5 1.4 1

4,339 9,186

2.1 4.4

207,186

Table 2. Muslims in Denmark according to nationality in 2006 Source: Jacobsen (2007: 158)

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The Mona Sheikh story dominated the news media in the summer of 2001, and here Islam was cast as the main enemy of Danish nationalism. Christianity is used in Danish nationalism as a kind of protection against the enemy or unwanted guests. Danish neonationalism was at the time constructed through the challenge to Islam and the presentation of Muslims as the enemy. Hence it is the same process of neonationalism, which defines and excludes unwanted guests, and neoracism, which excludes on the basis of the cultural difference (see figure 18 for the evolvement of the basic right populist triangle in 2001 after the government change). When the story about the young Muslims broke on 17 May 2001, the Danish media did not seem prepared for how to handle the ever-growing and ubiquitous nationalist dichotomization of “us”/ the Danes and “they”/the foreigners in the coverage of ethnic minority issues. More than anything, this dichotomization, with its extreme generalizations, seldom does justice to the more complex forces in play when newcomers meet established residents. When stories break, journalists often seem to forget good intentions and what they learned in journalism school. A critical examination of the coverage of the Mona Sheikh story reveals a lopsided coverage that supports those who claim that journalism training should include two to four years of basic academic education. “Judges of taste” “Cultural war”

Elite Elite

Politicians/Voters “The people”

The “foreigners” in Denmark

In-group: The nation Those who belong Neo-Nationalism

Figure 18. The development of far right populism

Out-group The foreigners in DK Racialized foreigners Neo-Racism (Different and incompatible)

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Chapter 5 critically examines the outbreak of the Mona Sheikh story on 17 May in the national television news and a critical newspaper interview with Mona Sheikh on 19 May 2001. Chapter 6 looks at the newspaper, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, which featured more anti-Islamic coverage than any other news outlet during our three-month survey period in the summer of 2001. We looked at the frequent editorials on Islam and the three Muslim politicians; some featured articles on statistics showing how the Muslim population is growing rapidly, giving rise to fear of their numbers; the special role of the Jyllands-Posten’s political commentator; and finally a prominent politician’s representation of the Muslim threat. Besides being crucial for understanding the discursive construction of the Mona Sheikh story, chapter 5 also serves as a direct springboard to the Muhammad cartoon crisis, the third media event of this book, in which Jyllands-Posten’s anti-Islamic discourse traveled internationally. Where chapters 5 and 6 deal with the newsmakers and products as moments 1 and 2 in the cultural circuit presented in the introduction to this volume, chapter 7 enters moments 3 and 4 on the receiving side of the media circuit. In the seven focus groups we conducted for the analysis of this event, forty-seven critical media consumers discussed various salient themes and figures of the Mona Sheikh story.

CHAPTER 5


The Mona Sheikh Story, 2001 Breaking News at Prime Time



In retrospect, we can now say that the second major media event in the history of “the annoying difference” in Denmark began at 9:00 P.M. on 17 May 2001 with the prime time news of one Denmark’s two national public service stations, Denmark’s Radio’s daily news, TV-avisen (lit. “Television Newspaper”): “Young new Danes (nydanskere) are determined to get influence through political parties. At the same time they work for a Muslim movement whose purpose is to spread Islam to the whole world” (Denmark’s Radio 2001). With these words, TV-avisen introduced that day’s main news story. After presenting the evening’s other headlines, the anchorperson, Trine Sick, returned to the main story, saying: “More young new Danes work determinedly to be nominated by the political parties. At the same time they are members of a Muslim movement from Pakistan. And that raises the question about which goal they really pursue.” Coverage of the story that night took up thirteen minutes, or half of the news broadcast. In the first visualization, children were shown reading the Qur’an, while the journalist in charge of the story explained about the foreign religion of Islam. The journalist borrowed the formulations used by two tabloid papers (E. Svane 2001a; Eskholm 2001) which revealed that several young politicians of Pakistani background had recently been accused of infiltrating political parties, particularly the DRV. The party had now examined the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement—of which the young politicians were members—and found it to be fundamentalist (Denmark’s Radio 17 May 2001). As a transition from the news part to background, the narrator changed the story’s focus from young people who seek influence to the security scenario of dangerous foreign movements seeking influence in Denmark: “But let us look at what kind of movement is so actively working on placing its members on central positions in Danish politics” (Denmark’s Radio 17 May 2001).

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Several experts and key figures in the story were interviewed. One official of the Social Liberal Party and one of the young Muslim politicians, Babar Baig, exchanged views by an editorial mixing of the two interviews. The official accused Baig of being a member of a “Muslim fundamentalist organization,” while Baig denied the charges. The key source for information on the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an was introduced as another Pakistani Muslim “with no connections to Minhaj-ul-Qur’an” (Hervik 2002a), who had lived in Denmark for twenty-five years and worked for Denmark’s Radio. This source repeated several times that the movement was seeking to introduce Islam all over the world and that one could not trust this movement. The viewers were told that additional inside information had been obtained from members of the Minhaj who wished to be anonymous, but nevertheless explained that “in the beginning of your membership, you participate in the prayers on Fridays and if you win the confidence of the movement you are invited to evenings with videos showing the religious leader from Pakistan” (Hervik 2002a: 59). “These videos,” the reporter explained, “are copied over and over, but the message is clear. . . . In the movement’s many books and writings one can read how the movement celebrates the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and supports the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This is the movement that the young politicians have forgotten to tell their new political party about” (Hervik 2002a). After these news items and comments the cameras again focused on the anchor in the studio. The anchor had invited one of the young Muslims, Mona Sheikh, into the studio.1 Since Sheikh was not a member of Minhajul-Qur’an, she was presented as a member of an organization called Women Youth League and a university student. Due to the importance of the interview, I include the full transcription: Anchor: Mona Sheikh, you are a member of a subunit of Minhaj, who works for Muslim supremacy, and you are also member of the Social Liberal Party. How can these two things go together? MS: I am not a member of any movement that works for Muslim supremacy. Anchor: You are a member of Woman Youth League? MS: Yes, but . . . Anchor: Which is a branch of Minhaj? MS: Yes, but . . . ‘It works for Muslim supremacy’: I would like to see that documented. Anchor: But it actually says so on the Web, it says on the American Web site, which has been referred to in many places. MS: No, on the main Web site it says that that the movement works for the introduction of democracy, human rights, and to eliminate illiteracy in Pakistan, [improvement of the] educational infrastructure . . .

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Anchor: It actually does say that on the American Web site, which is being referred to in many places—that —it works to rebuild the supremacy of the Islamic belief over other ideologies. It says so. MS: In what context? Anchor: This is the goal given on the Web site. MS: Well, one thing is that there is known ideological agenda of the movement in Pakistan. Another thing is that I am a member of a branch called Women Youth league, which works in a Danish context and gives lectures and works for a cross-cultural dialogue and understanding, and I do not see how my membership in a youth organization that has worked for the last five to ten years . . . [Anchor tries to interrupt.] MS: You have to listen to what I have to say! So my political membership engagement is taken on insofar that I am a fellow citizen in the Danish society. A Danish society that I feel responsible toward. My Muslim religion and my affiliation with the Women Youth League are something else. I have never denied being a member of the Women Youth League, when I signed up to be nominated for the Social Liberals, which—by the way—is not something the movement has pressured me to do or anything like that. Anchor: But it is still a subunit of Minhaj, which one must assume is conducting the same politics as the main organization. MS: It is not a political organization; Women Youth League is not a political party. It [Minhaj] is a political party in Pakistan, yes, but that does not have anything to do with the organization that I am a member of. Anchor: But the leader of the Minhaj movement is the same, who is the founder of the political party also, and you are a member of a subunit. One would have to assume that the politics and the objectives are somewhat the same. MS: You shouldn’t assume anything but know! One thing is that a political party, which must be understood in relation to its political principles. I am not a member of any political party in Pakistan. I am a citizen in the Danish society, and I am a member of a Danish political party, and therefore . . . really, I don’t understand all this suspicion. Anchor: Indeed, it is an umbrella organization, right? MS: Minhaj-ul-Qur’an is an umbrella organization and a political party working for the implementation of some political principles in Pakistan, such as human rights, combating illiteracy and democracy, while Women Youth League is a youth organization that works in a Danish context. And one must focus on the initiatives that this league has taken, since my membership in the Social Liberals must be based upon . . . the context that I have worked in, and what kind of work I have done, which is supposed to be in opposition to principles of the Social Liberals. When I am a candidate for the Social Liberals then I will have time to tell about my associations . . . Anchor: Is it so hard to understand that there isn’t any link between the youth organization and the mother organization?

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MS: I don’t say that, but the political party is one thing, and— Anchor [interrupts]: But the leader of the political party and the movement is the same. MS: But, he is not working in Denmark. So, in Denmark we have an association with its own by-laws and description of objectives. That has nothing to do with my membership in the Social Liberals. When I am a candidate for a political party, then it is because my opinions, as I identify them, match those of the Social Liberals. The constituency can then nominate me or not. I have five minutes to explain what I would like to do. There is nothing secret to the fact that I am a member of a Muslim youth organization. And I believe that— Anchor [interrupts]: I have to stop you here. Time is up. Thank you for coming.

The story told on 17 May 2001 by TV-avisen made the media coverage literally explode in the following weeks. Much subsequent coverage revolved around the Muslims’ response to the death penalty. That theme and the discussion is the subject of chapter 5 in this volume. In the next section I deal with the original happenings leading up to the 17 May news story and after that, look behind the scenes to the actors and networks behind.

The Original Tabloid Story Based on a tabloid paper’s first coverage of a lurking conflict among the Social Liberals (Svane 2001a), various background analyses two weeks after the story was first published (including N. Christensen 2001) and my own analysis of this news media story (Hervik 2002a), we get a glimpse of a power struggle that involves more people than were dealt with in the stories of 17 and 19 May 2001. The struggle for power and political influence in the party revolved around who was to be nominated in a constituency in Copenhagen called Østre Storkreds, where a nomination as a top candidate would have given that person a good chance of being elected for the Danish parliament, the Folketinget. In 2001, Inger Marie Bruun-Vierø was a member of parliament, since she replaced resigning member Jørgen Estrup, but she lost the party’s top spot in the nomination to upcoming politician Naser Khader, a politician with a Syrian ethnic background. According to Elisabet Svane (2001a), Naser Khader was a popular figure among the leadership. But Khader was not popular in the ethnic community, especially among Muslims who felt that he was an apostate who denounced Islam and condemned his cultural background in order to obtain non-ethnic Danish votes (Svane 2001a; Hervik 2002a). Khader had declared himself a “cultural” but not a “practicing” Muslim (Hervik 2002a). Armed with this knowledge of Khader’s unpopular status among ethnic minorities (except some young

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nonbelievers) and her recent defeat for nomination, Bruun-Vierø teamed up with a Muslim member of the party with a Pakistani background, Tanveer Sharif, to compete with Naser Khader for the final nomination in the constituency. They brought along a twenty-two-year old university student, Mona Sheikh, a Muslim of Pakistani background, figuring that she would attract many ethnic minority voters and in the end perhaps be elected for Folketinget instead of Naser Khader. In the case of a deadlock between Sheikh and Khader, Bruun-Vierø would appear as a compromise (N.B. Christensen 2001; Hervik 2002a; Svane 2001a; see also Elkjær and Thomsen 2001b; L. Mogensen 2001). Fearing that Sheikh could mobilize a substantial number of young voters with ethnic minority backgrounds, Naser Khader—according to himself— told members of the party about Sheikh’s membership in a Muslim, fundamentalist organization called Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, implying that her view on the death penalty would be at odds with political ideals of the Social Liberals (N.B. Christensen 2001). Khader had received this knowledge from a member of the Liberal Party, Wallait Khan, who saw competition in his own constituency from another young Muslim with Pakistani background, Tanwir Ahmed. Khader’s word of caution had its effect, and members began talking about how they could change the party’s by-laws and to seek documentation to show how membership in Minhaj-ul-Qur’an was at variance with membership in the Social Liberals (Svane 2001a; N.B. Christensen 2001). In the end those whose who did the investigation into Sheikh’s background were part of Naser Khader’s own network, which further strengthened the analysis made originally by both tabloid newspapers. From the beginning it seems as if the result of the investigation was given beforehand. According to Politiken, Mona Sheikh had received an email from Jette Dali saying, “We have done a comprehensive research, and the result of this and our considerations in that regard will be broadcasted tonight” (Ellkjær and Thomsen 2001a). Dali was not working for Denmark’s Radio or a journalist or a trained researcher.2 Nevertheless, she sent this e-mail before TV-avisen went on the air. In addition, Dali sent out a press release about that evening’s news. Only later did it become clear that Jette Dali, cosigner Bjarne Nielsen, and Helle Merete Brix were three of the party’s investigators. I shall return to Brix later, since she is an eager contributor to the period’s anti-Muslim attacks, some of which bordered on hate speech. In the end, the Social Liberals’ investigation was taken over by the television news on 17 May 2001. The principal reporter, Thomas Alling, admitted that he was in contact with the party investigators, but claimed that he had made much more progress than they did. Nevertheless, when prime time came, he was using the same farfetched source that six months later was criticized by the Danish Press Council.

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Behind the Prime-Time Story The headline of the television news and the introduction to the story about Mona Sheikh reveal the assumption that it is not possible to be a member of a political party and a Muslim organization at the same time. In the introduction, the anchor described this double membership and then added: “And that raises the question about which goal they really pursue.” This assumption is further strengthened by the choice of calling these Muslim politicians “new Danes” (nydanskere), a term that embodies the assumption that one is not really from Denmark. The Muslim politicians are not immigrants, but born and raised in Denmark, where they have resided all their lives, going to public school, gymnasium, and university and then working and going into politics. As part of their portrayal as “new Danes,” however, their activities are referred to as “infiltrating” and “invading.” This narration is adopted from the two tabloid papers Ekstra Bladet and B.T., who had run the story a month earlier without the same attention that comes with the national public service station, Denmark’s Radio. The tabloid papers’ language and approach was taken over and appeared in the transition between two news items: “But let us look at what kind of movement that is so actively working on placing its members on central positions in Danish politics” (Denmark’s Radio 17 May 2001). The emphasis of the category “new Danes” (not really Danes, but foreigners), who are agents of a Pakistani Muslim movement, implies that they are not seen as independent-minded individuals. If the young politicians had been described without the marked qualifiers “new Danes” or “Muslim,” they could hardly be regarded as being directed by foreign interests. Only by the association with foreign interests does the focus of the story receive its sense of sensation. By representing the Minhaj movement as foreign, its activities as infiltration, and the members hiding their real (collective) goals, television news could present a spectacular image of a classic spy story, with foreign infiltrators working under cover and waiting for the right moment to take over the country. The story reveals a perspective that works only because the new politicians are presented as persons who do belong in the Social Liberal Party and in Denmark but are subordinated to the power of others and therefore suspicious and untrustworthy. By asserting—rather than documenting—that a person cannot be a member of a Danish political party and a Muslim organization, the relationship is presented as incompatible and even antagonistic. Accordingly, there is no reason to listen to the specific individuals in question or to initiate a dialogue. Mona Sheikh was further denied a voice via her membership in a subunit of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an. She was afforded the position of an agent of this or-

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ganization. The subject of the discourse is not a living, historical individual. As a member of Minhaj, she was taken to be a supporter of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Sunni leadership following the late Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and the death penalty. An irony is that a minimum of dialogue between the reporter and Muslim politician would have stopped one of several gross errors, such as noting that the young Muslims in Denmark were Sunni, while the regime of late Ayatollah Khomeini, which they were accused of supporting, is Shiite. The confrontational focus also comes out in the use of “experts.” One of the key experts used to talk about the real intentions of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an is Naser Malik, a journalist of Pakistani background and a colleague of the story’s principal journalist, Thomas Alling. Malik was introduced as an immigrant of Pakistani background and a Muslim. Viewers were not told that this source is an Ahmadiyya Muslim. Historically the relationship between Ahmadiyya and Minhaj-ul-Qur’an is antagonistic. Whereas Minhaj (and Islam generally) considers Mohammad (570–632) to be the last of many prophets, the Ahmadiyya movement considers Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908) a prophet (Religionsguiden 2000). First of all, it is highly questionable for the television news program to use other journalists as experts. It is even more questionable when the journalist/source is a colleague from the same institution as the reporter who writes and tells the story. Third, viewers were not told that Malik was an Ahmadiyya Muslim, although this was highly relevant to the case. Another source used in the television news story was anonymous but was referred to in this way in Denmark’s Radio’s report to the Danish Press Council: “A former member—with a profound knowledge of Minhaj—had described the strategies and considerations in detail behind the placement of the young political candidates in different political parties in order to gain quick influence and nomination” (Press Council 2002). Presenting the same information more articulately, a week into the story, was Wallait Khan, a politician of Pakistani background from the Liberal Party. Khan, a former member of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, claimed in several papers and on TV-avisen that Minhaj was a fundamentalist organization and that their followers were rooting for the death penalty (S. Nielsen 2001; Thomsen 2001b; Denmark’s Radio 17 May 2001). At the time Khan had been challenged by a young Muslim, Tanwir Ahmed (also a Minhaj member), who had been nominated for the City Council of Copenhagen by his party, the Social Liberals. By exposing Tanwir Ahmed’s membership in Minhaj, Khan could, according to the media analysis, pursue his political interest by discrediting his opponent. Moreover, Khan’s own former membership in Minhaj had been uncovered publicly, forcing him to denounce Minhaj in order to regain confidence among voters of the Pakistani commu-

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nity in Denmark, most of whom are not members of Muslim organizations (Christensen 2001). According to ethnic politician Naser Khader, he had been told by Wallait Khan weeks prior to 17 May that the young Muslim politicians (Mona Sheikh, Babar Baig and Tanwir Ahmed) were members of Minhaj. It was this information that Khader passed on to other party members, triggering an investigation to establish their membership in Minhaj and the implications for their future membership in the party (Christensen 2001). If indeed Khan was the anonymous source used by TV-avisen, then it illustrates the murky side of the media’s protection of its sources, since the media can use the protection to hide unpleasant facts about sources who have a personal interest in the story and the intent of bringing harm to others. This is not an argument against the protection of sources, simply a statement that there is an inherent weakness in this protection. The relationship between the people behind the story on the young Muslims and the Social Liberal Party investigators is a friendly, if not symbiotic, relationship. On the one hand, the journalist in charge of the story for TVavisen, Thomas Alling, and the politician Naser Khader met regularly to discuss politics in what they both referred to in the media as a club for drinkers of whiskey. Both denied that their friendship had been a factor in the presentation of the news story (Elkjær and Thomsen 2001a; Aabo 2001). Regardless of their relationship the news broadcast on 17 May, TV-avisen does take over some of the Social Liberal Party investigators’ sources and results. The close relationship between the Social Liberal Party and TV-avisen is apparent in the press release sent out to the Danish press a few hours before the story went on the air. The press release gave details of that evening’s main news story and its documentation. However, it was signed not by Denmark’s Radio but by two of the party investigators, Jette Dali and Bjarne Nielsen—the latter holding a local leadership position in the party. The investigation was antagonistic from the beginning, and the outcome predictable. In fact, the investigation was carried out by controversial investigators, who turned out to be part of an organized network of people— prominent politicians with Islam as their principal concern, if not enemy. What was not so predictable was that the journalists of Denmark’s Radio indiscriminately took over most of the investigation and used its dubious sources. The news broadcast did not mention or explain the relationship between TV-avisen and the Social Liberal Party investigators. Nor did it mention the prevailing struggle for power within the party, including the various interests at stake in the positioning of the young Muslims as fundamentalist supporters of the Taliban. Instead, the focus is exclusively on the Muslims’

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membership in the religious organization Minhaj-ul-Qur’an and in the Social Liberal Party. One crucial piece of information is taken over by TV-avisen directly from the Social Liberal Party investigators and also mentioned on the press release. Out of literally thousands of books, articles, and other publications by the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement, both the investigators and TV-avisen focused on a recently launched newsletter, The Revival, published by the British Muslim Youth League, a sub-unit of the Minhaj organization. In the newsletter an appeal is written to Muslims all over the world to support the Taliban against increased American military presence in Afghanistan (“Attack on Afghanistan” 2000). The Revival is used by the Social Liberal Party investigators, Denmark’s Radio, and others as a viable documentation for the Minhaj movement’s support of the Taliban. Nonetheless, a handful of sources had also been made available to TV-avisen stating that Minhaj did not support the Taliban, for instance, the various statements put forward by the Minhaj leader, Tahir-ul-Quadri. Instead, TV-avisen chose to believe the documentation presented by the Social Liberal Party investigators consisting of the newsletter of the British youth organization of Minhaj (“Minhaj og de radikale” 2001). A thorough, balanced journalistic investigation would normally disqualify the use of this single, debatable source. Six months later the Danish Press Council concluded that the TV-avisen had not provided adequate research for the alleged connection between the young Muslim politicians and the Taliban (Press Council 2002). The Press Council’s criticism covered the news broadcast on 17 May and the repetitions of the alleged Minhaj/Taliban connection by Denmark’s Radio until 27 May 2001, despite the Council’s declaration that harm had already been done to the involved Muslims. In addition, the Council’s ruling did not affect those journalists, politicians, and commentators who based their articles in the media on this connection; they were not forced to correct their mistakes. The TV anchor’s interview with Muslim politician Mona Sheikh provided another example of vague documentation. During the interview the host repeatedly referred to an American Web site as documentation for Minhajul-Qur’an’s objective to reach world supremacy. To begin with, the use of an American Web site as the reporter’s documentation for the Pakistani movement’s objective (and by implication using this to argue that members of a Danish branch of this movement are at odds with the program of a Danish political party) seems farfetched. Then, too, this documentation went awry when it turned out that the Web site, reached through a link on several Web sites of Minhaj, was made by a student in Florida (Hervik 2002a). One editor-in-chief, Peter Wivel, wrote about this documentation used by the TV newsmakers: “They have investigated obscure Web sites in the darkest cor-

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ners of the Internet, this global trash bin, in the hope of revealing what she [Mona Sheikh] was thinking as a private person” (Wivel 2001).

Berlingske Tidende’s Interview about the Death Penalty Throughout the Mona Sheikh story, newspapers referred to Sheikh’s ambivalent talk about the death penalty. Again and again this ambivalence was repeated. To the extent that stories specifically referred to a source that claimed Sheikh had been ambivalent, they all pointed to a single article that delivered the news of one candidate’s talk about the death penalty. This article consisted of an interview published in the nation’s third-largest newspaper, Berlingske Tidende, on 19 May. The interview can best be seen as a spin-off from the television news on 17 May. TV-avisen did take up the article in Berlingske Tidende on 19 May and now referred to the ambivalence toward the death penalty as a fact (Denmark’s Radio 19 May 2001).

Inventing a Supporter of the Death Penalty The press release on the Social Liberal Party’s investigations was sent out on 17 May before the television news program went on the air. It stated that one of the young Muslims, Mona Sheikh, was against the death penalty. Nonetheless, her membership in the Minhaj umbrella organization revealed that this could not be true. According to TV-avisen, Minhaj-ul-Qur’an was a fundamentalist organization, which was assumed to be supportive of the death penalty. On 19 May 2001 two reporters with Berlingske Tidende, Jens Jørgen Madsen and Jesper Termansen,3 followed up on the death penalty angle mentioned in the press release and covered on the television news in the interview with Mona Sheikh. In the next weeks of debating the death penalty, everyone referred back to this single interview in Berlingske Tidende. The following quote comes from an interview series called “Seven Live Rounds” (Syv skarpe skud) (Madsen and Termansen 2001b), which starts with the two reporters quoting Mona Sheikh—“I am not a member of Minhaj-ul-Qur’an. I am a member of Women Youth League”—to domesticate the prime-time news of two days earlier: I: But the organization that you are a member of builds on the same foundation as Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, right? MS: Well, we are Muslims in both organizations, that is all. It is an umbrella organization. I: On the Women Youth League’s Web site there is a reference to courses in the Sharía—the Islamic law. Do you support the Sharía law?

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MS: In Denmark I support the Danish constitution. I: But what about elsewhere? Do you ideologically support the Sharía? MS: It is not a package, that you either say yes or no to. Sharía is a question for the people to choose or not choose. You cannot say in this way: Do you support the Danish judicial system, or not, unless it is the people who have chosen these rules. I: To take something specific according to Islamic law, the death penalty, are you in favor of it? MS: No, and I have said so several times. I: Under no circumstances anywhere? MS: If a population decides in favor of the death penalty it is a democratic choice—like in the USA. If the people choose the death penalty that is fine, but personally I cannot accept it. Evidently, I have to answer this several times. I: You can just say that you are against the death penalty under any circumstance. MS: But not under any circumstance. Death penalty is a democratic choice. I: Why can’t you understand the fear that some members of the Social Liberals have accepting you as a nominee? That they may choose someone who supports the suppression of women and the death penalty? MS: Yes, if they had any reason to believe so. But I do not support these things. I am born and raised in this country and my political objectives are not suspicious.

Sheikh responded by claiming that her views had not been represented correctly. To meet her critique the two interviewers wrote a new story, published on 21 May 2001, “Historien om et fejlcitat” (“The Story about a Misquote”), wherein they provided additional quotes from their taped interview, because they wished the readers to understand that they wanted “to document that the newspaper had been meticulous in their interview” (Termansen and Madsen 2001) with Sheikh about her position on the death penalty: Berl: But you accept the overall objective of Minhaj-ul-Qur’an? MS: Yes, I support democracy and the human rights. And I support that Pakistan should develop its educational system. The movement does not support the Taliban or anything. Damn it, they do not. Why is it that I am being put into this connection which goes against how things are? Berl: You can just say you are against the death penalty? MS: Yes, and I have already said that. But it is not relevant, because I think it is the wrong question to ask from me. Just like it would be wrong for be to say that I am a democrat. This is not a question you would ask other people. . . Berl.: But then you are against the death penalty in an Islamic society? MS: So, you are asking me the same question, why?

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Berl.: But I am trying out your opinions, because I think you are avoiding these questions. MS: I am not avoiding your question. Indeed, I feel as if I constantly have to defend myself. Berl.: But, if you are against the death penalty under every condition, then you can just answer yes—I am an opponent also in an Islamic society. MS: Okay. I do not support the death penalty in Denmark or any other society, but I respect that democracy . . . that is, the people have the authoritative decision-making power to decide whether they support it or not, so if there is a majority, I will have to accept the death penalty. (Termansen and Madsen 2001)

Leaving Out the Context You don’t have to be a Pulitzer Prize winner to see that this is not a textbook example of a good journalistic interview. The interview with the headline “Syv live rounds” (Madsen and Termansen 2001b) and the article of vindication, “The story about a misquote” (Termansen and Madsen 2001), showed a tense relationship between the two confrontational reporters and their interviewee. The interview goes against the criteria for good reporting outlined in textbooks of journalism, for instance: “Be attentive. Listen and try to understand what your source is saying,” and “No discussion: Maintain your position as interviewer. Ask, but do not discuss with your source. A discussion can destroy the entire interview” (Mejlby 1999: 218). Three questions by the interviewers support the infringement of basic guidelines: “Why can’t you just say that you are against the death penalty under any circumstance?”; “You can just say that you are opposed to the death penalty”; and “If you are an opponent of the death penalty under any circumstance, you can just answer yes—I am an opponent also in an Islamic society” (Madsen and Termansen 2001b: 19; Termansen and Madsen 2001). In the interview Sheikh insisted that the issue of the death penalty was more complicated that a simple “yes” or “no” answer would reveal. Despite their expressed wish to be meticulous, the journalists imposed a simplified political and moral opinion on the death penalty issue. They ignored this complicated issue of the death penalty in democratic societies, where many states in the largest and most powerful Western country, the United States, have the death penalty because a majority of the populations in those states want it; another complicated issue is the possible reemergence of the death penalty during war. Instead, the interviewing reporters interpreted Sheikh’s response as an ambivalent reflection on her position as member of the Social Liberal Party, where she had to speak against the death penalty, and her membership in a Muslim organization, which in the journalists’ and the

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Social Liberal Party investigators’ eyes implied that she was in favor of the death penalty. Madsen and Termansen published two other news articles on the same day: “The Minister [of Church Affairs] Doubts the Young Muslims” (“Minister tvivler på unge muslimer”) (Madsen and Termansen 2001a), and “Social Liberal Leadership Warns against Fundamentalists” (“Radikal top advarer mod fundamentalister”) (Madsen and Termansen 2001c). In these articles the reporters wrote their interpretation of the interview with Mona Sheikh: “Mona Sheikh has shown doubts about her attitude toward the death penalty” (“Mona Sheikh sår tvivl om sin holdning til dødsstraf”) (Madsen and Termansen 2001b). They presented their interpretation of the interview with Mona Sheikh to a leading politician of the Social Liberal Party and spokesperson on this issue, Minister of Church Affairs Johannes Lebech, for a comment. They wrote: “And a lack of general opposition to the death penalty by for instance Mona Sheikh—who says she is not against the death penalty ‘under any circumstance’” (Madsen and Termansen 2001a). Lebech called Mona Sheikh’s statement an “elusive strategy to avoid the discussion of the death penalty” (Madsen and Termansen 2001a). The phrasing “not an opponent of the death penalty” was the interpretation presented by the two reporters. “Under any circumstance” is Sheikh’s wording. However, the context of the words “under any circumstance” refers to the American democracy, but is left out of the questions posed to Johannes Lebech. This is misleading. Lebech does not know that Sheikh is talking about the death penalty and democracy in the United States. Therefore his answer will also be misleading. The reader is left to speculate what the minister would answer, if he had been asked about the democratic right in the United States to choose the death penalty. Moreover, the reporters do not pose critical questions to Lebech about the role of the internal conflict in the Social Liberal Party that led other Social Liberal Party officials and TV-avisen to describe the Muslim politicians from the Social Liberal Party as fundamentalists and supporters of the Taliban, the death penalty, and so on. Lebech’s political strategy for dealing with the Mona Sheikh case could be read from a statement he made to two newspapers, Politiken and Ekstra Bladet, two days later. Lebech argued that when the media covers such a vital story, where members are presented as “invaders” and “infiltrators,” he—the Social Liberal Party spokesperson—needed to react to the story in the media. The question could not be solved through talking with the candidate but through sending signals in the media about what was acceptable to the party and what was not, and that in this case the young Muslim politicians needed to explain themselves (T. Nielsen 2001; Svane 2001b; Thomsen 2001b). According to him, then, the problem within the party between competing candidates for political office was now being solved externally in the media

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by accusations about what membership in a Muslim organization entailed. What began as a competition for the nomination became a moral question discussed in the media about what is right and wrong with Muslim values. Analysis reveals that the original interview conveyed in the article “Seven Live Rounds” was not an interview of particularly good quality. Yet this interview—as I have indicated—became the basis for an enduring assertion that the Muslim politicians supported the death penalty despite what they said. I would further argue that this powerful effect based on poor-quality interviewing could not have had such an impact if the journalists and commentators who based their publications on this one article to begin with were not biased by the omnipresence in Danish society of an enemy image of Islam. When other journalists afterward wrote that Sheikh had expressed ambivalence about her position on the death penalty issue, they referred generally to the 19 May “interview” in Berlingske Tidende. But since these writers also ignored the context (the democratic right to choose the death penalty), it is clear that they did not look at the original interview, only at the journalists’ interpretation of the interview in the two other articles that appeared on the same day. I wish to emphasize that this conclusion does not speak to the issue of what is right and wrong in terms of the death penalty. Instead, I focus on the interview—the simplified and distorted rendering of the interview and the uncritical use of other journalists’ interpretations to produce news coverage that is not only one-sided but also does not get to the bottom of the issue: From a Muslim point of view, what dilemmas do they face concerning the issue of the death penalty, and how is the issue discussed within Muslim groups?

Primary Actors and Driving Forces Politicians Representing the Social Liberal Party The first media event exploded when a newspaper launched its campaign against immigration policy and immigrants—a project that served as midwife for the Danish People’s Party in a process that got the rest of the Danish news media and politicians involved. In this media event, the media was the vehicle, yet the story began with politicians who held official positions within the Social Liberal Party, members of the City Council of Copenhagen, and representatives of the Social Liberal Party constituencies. These powerful figures included ethnic politicians Naser Khader and Minister for Church Affairs Johannes Lebech, who were gatekeepers regulating access to the party and by extension the larger political system, including the City Council of

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Copenhagen and Folketinget. At stake was the party’s image and the number of votes the party could attract. Khader was also a powerful figure, even though he had not yet been elected to the parliament but was only a favorite to be elected. However, Khader was powerful because he had close ties to the tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet. Every week he answered questions about Islam, ethnic minorities, and so on in his own letters to the editor column. Khader denounced his parents’ values, his cultural background, and the Muslim beliefs he was brought up with. In his correspondence column, he had an audience who were potential supporters in the pending election. He needed to be a builder of bridges, but sufficiently critical of his own background to be acceptable and even desirable to the Danish voting majority. Rushy Rashid also had a correspondence column (B.T.), but she was not— at least at the time—engaged in a political battle for votes and control of a constituency. Her strategy was closer to and more loyal to her own experience: to convey and stand up for what she thought was right. She was a strong, independent Muslim woman who had chosen to defy religious practice and marry a Danish man. Like Khader, Mona Sheikh also looked for a political audience. She didn’t have a correspondence column, but she was a regular writer for Information, one of the smaller national newspapers, from which she could reach readers and potential voters. Sheikh’s strategy was unlike Khader’s in that she maintained that she wanted to be a politician, a Danish citizen, and a Muslim religious practitioner. In other words, she insisted on being Danish and different.

The National Public News Media At stake was also control of public recognition of members of ethnic minority groups born in Denmark, who strive for political influence on the basis of their identities as Danish and Muslim, with their ethnic minority background. Public recognition was more forcefully denied by the second group of stakeholders: the national media. The national media narrowed down to TV-avisen, the news program of Denmark’s Radio, which took up the story on 17 May. At stake for this television news program was primarily competition for viewers. Second to the struggle for the competitive edge was credibility. The Mona Sheikh story was an ideal story for the media because the newsmakers could highlight spectacular elements and conflict. Furthermore, representing the case as one of penetration of foreign interests contained a nationalistic and sensational appeal. For this reason the loss of credibility was hardly at stake. Viewers had little in their experience that would contradict the media presentation (Hervik 2002a).

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However, TV-avisen presented its version of the story in a manner that clearly suggested a close relationship between the Social Liberal Party investigation and the focus and use of sources. In the 17 May coverage, TV-avisen did not question this relationship, or focus on the internal struggle for power within the Social Liberal Party for the nomination in the Copenhagen constituency and Folketinget, thereby giving a distorted story that emphasized instead the dangerous and infiltrating Muslims. In other words, the media was doing the dirty work of the Social Liberal Party politicians.

New Muslim Politicians The third group of actors consisted of the political candidates in the Social Liberal Party with ethnic minority and Muslim backgrounds. These are not part of powerful institutions or more broadly the political system, such as Naser Khader, the publishing house that produces newspapers, or the national television news, but are outside seeking political influence as Danishborn citizens. What is at stake for them can best be described as the opportunity to gain influence at the top levels of politics. However, their access to political power in the Danish democratic system and to public recognition were discredited through media-borne allegations that they were fundamentalists whose goal was to bring about a Muslim state by seeking influence through politics. They were, in other words, denied by reason of their perceived foreignness. If Mona Sheikh, Tanvir Ahmed, and Babar Baig’s political and personal strategy is compared with Naser Khader’s, one can tentatively conclude that the first three insisted on being Danish and Muslim practitioners and had to, in the end, leave politics, while Naser Khader adopted a “be as Danish and ‘democratic’ as possible” strategy, denouncing his cultural and religious background, and accordingly became a successful politician: He was elected to Parliament in November 2001. In addition, the three groups of stakeholders—viewers, voters, and ethnic minorities in general—are also involved as consumers of the media. Once the media got involved, the story gained momentum and followed its own paths of development that could not be reversed, regardless of the Press Council’s declaration that the original story was based partly on undocumented research. At first the story seemed to treat a specific relationship between a few named Muslim politicians, born in Denmark of Pakistani parents, who had joined the Social Liberal Party and now wanted to be candidates for political office. Through the involvement of journalists, commentators, and others, the level of abstraction moved up and became an issue of Muslim values against Danish ones. In the end this dichotomy was taken to a global scale when it was explained as a specific case of Islam against the

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West. Muslims of the Social Liberal Party became linked not only to Islam more generally but also to political fundamentalists and terrorists.

Why the Story Got Out of Hand In a narrow sense the Mona Sheikh story began with the initiatives of ethnic politicians Wallait Khan of the Liberal Party and Naser Khader of the Social Liberal Party. After being tipped by Khan, Khader and the Social Liberals used anti-Islamists Helle Merete Brix and Jette Plesner Dali to conduct a hostile (pseudo-)investigation of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement that could be sold to the media and used to contain the new Muslim political competition. Through network connections to the media and the media’s appetite for stories that disclosed what was believed to be the true character of Muslims in Denmark, the story broke and then dominated the news media for several weeks. The Danish news media did not seem prepared to handle the rigid nationalist dichotomization of “us”/the Danes and “them”/the foreigners, and the enemy image of Islam that mushroomed in the last weeks of May 2001. Once the television story aired on 17 May, it exploded, initiating a “schismogenetic process” (Bateson 1978; Brox 2000). Within a few weeks there were hundreds of articles and hours of TV coverage based on the initial accusations by TV-avisen and Berlingske Tidende. According to Gregory Bateson, a schismogenetic process is the heightened dialectic between two or more sides which develops into a vicious or regenerative circle that continues until the relationship breaks out into open fight or exit. Other dialectic processes embed a self-corrective mechanism that allows for the recognition and degeneration of the mounting schismogenesis (Bateson 1978. On the one side, the news media and Danish society brought out stories about fierce Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq in connection with the 1990 Gulf War. Muslims in Denmark received critical attention, as they were the target not only of radical right-wing political rhetoric but increasing anti-Islamic rhetoric from much of the political spectrum including Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (Social Democratic Party), who talked about the members of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement as “rats”: “If you try to legislate your way out of these problems [with Muslim organizations like Minhaj-ul-Qur’an], it is a historical rule that rats always find new holes, if you cover up the old ones” (Hervik 2006: 92). At the same time these Muslims were often born in Denmark and were trying to exert their democratic influence in Danish politics. Another mechanism set up within the field of journalism to prevent stories from entering a schismogenetic process is the Danish Press Council.

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According to its ruling, Denmark’s Radio violated the criteria for documentation, which reverberated into most of the Danish news media. However, the Council appeared in this case as inefficient and ineffective, with a ruling that came six month after the damage was first done. Even then the ruling only concerned Denmark’s Radio and was hardly visible anywhere in the news media. The tacit acceptance of the journalists writing Denmark’s Radio primetime news broadcast and Berlingske Tidende’s contentious interviewers by other news journalists suggest the kind of close in-group connections that produce what Irving Janus has called “groupthink,” by which he means “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action” (1972: 9). According to Richard A. Clarke, groupthink is the phenomenon where the bad detective decides beforehand who is guilty of the crime and then sets out to prove it, unjustly ending up accusing the wrong man (2008: 130–31). Once the prime-time TV news had launched what was to become the Mona Sheikh story, other journalists followed trying to get a bite of the story. In the process “groupthink” took place. Mona Sheikh was guilty regardless of what she said and did. The story was not really about her. She only became a symbol of the unwanted presences of Muslim “guests” (Hervik 2002a). Journalists did not go back to check their colleagues’ sources or analyses, such as the use of an obscure British source, Revival, for documenting Mona Sheikh, Tanwir Ahmed and Babar Baig’s alleged support of the Taliban, or to re-check Berlingske Tidende’s questionable interpretation of Mona Sheikh’s opinion on the death penalty, which was based on an interview of poor quality. Journalists in such situations are in a catch-22 position. If, on one hand, they check the sources carefully, they risk criticizing colleagues and bringing the story to a close—a story that may create indignation and moral panic and sell papers. On the other hand, a critical analysis of the stories would easily be ignored or simply run over by “groupthink” journalists, who felt they were onto a successful story, or simply could not allow their media institution to keep the story alive. In the end, the five largest nationally circulating newspapers spent long work hours and pages on the story throughout a three week period. Although the media did at times provide articles with solid background information and critical analysis about the Muslim “infiltration” and “invasion,” the original news prevailed. Critical and balanced news reporting vanished, and the schismogenesis continued. After the death penalty issue, the media turned to Muslim views on homosexuals to keep the story alive. People have little in their experience to counter what they are told by the media. For instance, the audience doesn’t know that the Muslim politicians

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are Sunni and the alleged support of the regime of late Ayatollah Khomeini doesn’t make sense, since he is a Shiite Muslim. This profound, enduring, antagonistic, and somewhat ignorant view of Muslims inevitably makes the public recognition of people who are Danes, ethnic, and Muslim more and more difficult. More specifically, the Muslim interviewees in our focus groups responding on the Mona Sheikh story explained that one of the most serious consequences of the media coverage that they had experienced was that it had become almost impossible for politicians with ethnic/Muslim minority background to enter the national political realm while maintaining identities as both Muslim, Danish, and ethnic.

Conclusion The Social Liberal investigators, the mass media, and the many commentators that contested Mona Sheikh’s presence in Danish politics can best be seen as making an attempt to evoke the moral outrage at the global level in order to underscore the danger of Muslim presence and thereby provide legitimacy for the ousting of the young Muslims from the Social Liberals. The moral outrage is produced through a global level of information and is associated with danger, spying, infiltration, people placed by evil organizations, and so on. Obviously, a story about politicians in double roles is interesting and newsworthy. But why did the poorly prepared Mona Sheikh story with false accusations based on the work of anti-Islamist investigators working for rivaling politicians run amok? Why did it become such a “successful” media story, yet six months later garner criticism by the Danish Press council for being built on unjustified sources? The answer, I argue, lies not solely with journalists, their story teams, or how publishing institutions operate. Instead, I argue that it wouldn’t have been possible if the journalists hadn’t resonated with the readers. Without the cultural world of unbridgeable hostguest relations saturating the audience, journalists would have been unable to create the Mona Sheikh story. Mark Allen Peterson has shown how media is a form of expressive culture meaning: “the public display of symbols or enactment of symbolic action for performative effect” (2003: 18). Following William O. Beeman, “expressive culture” refers to “those institutions and practices through which people enact, display, and manipulate symbolic materials” with the intention that other individuals will be directly affected by them (Peterson 2003: 18). The efforts of journalists and their institutions therefore both produce and reflect dominant values of the Danish society, when they prioritize conflict and disorder in a process that often leads the society to restore order (Peterson 2003). Restoring order here meant marginalizing and ousting the Muslim

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politicians from the national political scene. In collective memory the news story about the young Muslims in the Social Liberal Party is remembered not only for their characterization as fundamentalists who supported the Taliban, but also for their stand on the issue of the death penalty. Although the journalists and the news agencies claimed their good intentions of strictly following journalistic criteria for reporting, these intentions and the criteria vanished as everyone strove to get a piece of the pie. The story as first presented embraced a “global” aspect of local and global “infiltration” of a political party. The use of “infiltration” as shown borrows from the mass media’s representation of how an international Muslim organization relates to Denmark. My assumption is that the local event in question cannot also not be understood without including a global level of analysis (see Kearney 1995), where the production of the culture of non-Western others seems to be one crucial aspect.

CHAPTER 6


Mediated Muslims: Jyllands-Posten’s Coverage of Islam, 2001



In the emergence of the new Danish nationalism and new anti-Islamic discourses, the largest Danish newspaper, Morgenavisen JyllandsPosten, plays a significant role. Whereas tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet sat in the front seat during the rise of the Danish People’s Party, Jyllands-Posten took over the seat in 2001. A survey of news articles about religion in Denmark’s five largest newspapers in the summer of 2001 found that almost all of them dealt with Islam. One newspaper could be singled out as having more articles, opinion pieces, and editorials than anyone else—Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s largest nationally circulating newspaper, with approximately 800,000 daily readers. More men than women read Jyllands-Posten, more Danes in the western, provincial part than in eastern Denmark read it, and its readers are wealthier (typically small independent business owners) than readers of other national newspapers. In addition to having the most items on Islam, Jyllands-Posten’s official voice was more critical of Islam than anyone else, often speaking about Islam and Muslims as an enemy. According to Elkjær and Bertelsen (2006b), Islam was strategically chosen to represent the newspaper’s profile—a profile that was continued when Flemming Rose was hired as cultural editor. This chapter therefore deals with Jyllands-Posten’s coverage of Islam that revolved around the Mona Sheikh case, but starting earlier, with the fear of small but rising numbers of culturally threatening non-Western refugees and immigrants. The young Danish Muslims in the Social Liberal Party are represented in relation to “other Muslims” such as the Taliban of Afghanistan, and the regime in Iran through the use of a single monolithic category of “Muslims.” This category is used in telling what Jack Lule has called a master narrative of “the Other World” (2001), where all Muslims

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represent danger, the Middle Ages, and darkness, which Danes must defend themselves against. Thus, I continue the argument that there is an intimate relationship between rising attacks on Islam, Danish neonationalism and Jyllands-Posten’s omnipresent warnings against the politically correct elitists who accuse Jyllands-Posten of being racist. In the wake of Ekstra Bladet’s campaign and the rise of the Danish People’s Party, newspapers reported a dramatic heightening of Danish fear of immigrants, refugees and descendants. Two years later the production of fear came out in Jyllands-Posten’s featured article based on new statistics about immigration. This chapter takes up Jyllands-Posten’s frequent editorials on the young Muslims, which represent the official views of the newspaper. I then move on to the political commentator, which is another growing institution in Danish news journalism. Jyllands-Posten’s commentator, Ralf Pittelkow, commented on the Mona Sheikh story with attacks on Islam that he narrated as a clash of civilizational values. An article by a prominent politician of the Liberal Party, Bertel Haarder, is used to show another link between Islam and terrorism, which takes on historical parallels including Denmark’s relationship to Germany.

Nativism and New Dangerous Immigration In the middle of the summer news period, on 29 August 1999, JyllandsPosten published a major article that the authoring journalist, Orla Borg, argued was one of the most important stories since Denmark entered into the EEC (later the EU). The story immediately became the top story both on the national television and in other newspapers. The front-page headline read “Immigration Will Change Denmark,” and the front page of the section “Insight” (Indblik) was titled “Multi-Denmark” (see figure 19). The article took up two pages of that section. Half of the first page was a graphic illustration with three columns, each containing 100 people. The white people are the Danes; immigrants and descendants are black and hold a suitcase in their hand. In 1980 there were 3 blacks in every 100, in 2000 there were 7, and in 2020 there will be 14. On closer inspection, behind the columns you can see a woman covered in a white veil. Obviously, she is supposed to represent a Muslim. Orla Borg writes: “In a few decades Danes will cease to be a uniform population with roots in the same religion, culture, language, tradition and value norms” (1999b). The stories were prompted by some new numbers on Denmark’s demographic composition, and the grand old man of demographics in Denmark,

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Figure 19. “Multi-Denmark,” Jyllands-Posten, 29 August 1999 Source: Borg (1999b)

Professor Emeritus Poul Chr. Matthiesen, was the major source for the story. He was quoted as saying: I don’t think that the Danes have been told the truth. The contemporary immigration is without historical precedence. It will have consequences, which no one really wants to discuss, but strikes right in the middle of the Danish people’s culture, religion and way of living. . . . Many Danes are not aware about this historically unique situation. They have been reading that we have taken in immigrants earlier. But this is a new situation because of the number, and because there is a cultural and religious difference. And that is not something that will go away. (Borg 1999a)

An editorial in Jyllands-Posten on the same day endorsed Matthiessen’s concern and warnings, the most important aspect of which was that a growing number of immigrants have a widely different culture and religion, which will be difficult to assimilate, unlike the group of people the country has received in the past: This summer we have only scratched the surface and as a warning about conflicts of coming years, experience the so-called headscarf case and the discussion about halal meat in schools and institutions for children. However, no politician has seriously paid attention to these cases as symptoms of an underlying, almost silent revolution; the Danish society is already changing its character vitally. (Jyllands-Posten 1999)

These annoying differences, such as wearing the headscarf and eating halal food, are in themselves causing conflict. This logic assumes that cultural

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difference generates conflict, and the more “other” cultural markers, the more conflict. Those who wear the headscarf and eat halal food were creating problems for themselves and risking evoking negative feelings among the Danish hosts. They were seen as unruly guests, thereby creating their own problems, including racism. Racism in this construction is a result of the immigrants’ insistence on being different. According to Matthiessen’s statement in Borg’s article and JyllandsPosten’s editorial, the solution for the majority to cope with the (imagined) threat of increasing numbers of culturally different people is to strengthen Danish values, which again is a code word for the negatively loaded “nationalism.” Jyllands-Posten assures readers that such an enforcement of Danish values cannot be racist since it is simply a question of maintaining sovereignty: “No one becomes a racist by demanding and enforcing development within his own house” (Jyllands-Posten 1999). To carry forward this project, Jyllands-Posten and Matthiessen called for a think tank that could “think through” the consequences of this evolving danger of encroaching cultural and religious differences. A few months later, Minister of the Interior Karen Jespersen (Social Democratic Party) issued a press release about the establishment of a think tank, one that would look closer at “the future development in the number of foreigners in Denmark and describe the social consequences of this” (Ministry of the Interior 2000). Among the members of the think tank were Professor Poul Chr. Matthiessen and ethnic politician Naser Khader. In the summer of 2001, Jyllands-Posten published another major article by Borg, called “The New Denmark,” which reinvigorated the fear of small numbers as outlined by Arjun Appadurai (2006). According to the article, the arrival of historically new migrants (read: Muslims) negatively transforms the development and composition of the Danish people. Again a Muslim woman with a headscarf was pictured in the middle of a graphic illustration (see figure 20). Further racialization of cultural difference can be seen in Borg’s summary of the new prognosis: “That mousy hair and blue eyes does not necessarily signal that you are standing in front of the average Dane. It could as well be black hair and brown eyes” (Borg 2001a). A second article by Borg on this day ends with a quote by a historian: “Immigration will change the Danish national identity. Immigration is of a different kind than earlier immigration, since many people arrive with a different culture and religion” (Borg 2001b). On the following day, Jyllands-Posten asked a number of politicians to comment on Borg’s article. Birthe Rønn Hornbech (the Liberal Party), a spokesperson on legal issues who in 2007 became minister of integration, said, “If this tendency goes on, our country will be battered” (Langager

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Figure 20. “The New Denmark,” Jyllands-Posten, 15 July 2001 Source: Borg (2001a)

2001). Discussing the prognosis for an increase of refugees, Hornbech saw a threat to national identity in asylum-seekers from the Third World coming to Denmark. Another quoted politician was political spokesman Lene Espersen (Conservative People’s Party), who in 2001 became minister of justice, and later party leader. Her neonationalist appeal was direct: “We must hold on to Denmark as a nation-state and those values that bond us together. If we can do that, then it doesn’t matter if people have a different ethnic background. They only need to understand the Danish culture, language, and religion” (Langager 2001). A third politician responding to Jyllands-Posten was political spokesperson Jytte Andersen (Social Democratic Party). For her it was not the number but the contours of an enemy image that surfaced: “No Islamic teaching shall decide what Denmark is going to look like” (Langager 2001). Evidently, none of the three politicians asked for the basis of the new numbers. But they readily drew on the rhetoric of the nation and its enemy, Islam, which shows the ideological rootedness of a neonationalistic us/them division. This division was also reproduced by Borg and the statistics, the premise of which was “Once ethnic, always ethnic”—that is, it is not possible to shift between categories (Espersen 2001; Ølgaard 2001). The argument assumes not only that immigrant values are the same everywhere, but that

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they do not change according to how long immigrants have lived in Denmark, and that Danish-born children of immigrants continue to have these monolithic alien values (Espersen 2001; Ølgaard 2001). Accordingly, the number of cultural others can only increase in the future, unless of course, these others leave the country. The two articles written by Orla Borg, the work of the think tank, and the political commentators’ words illustrate the belief that widely different other cultures and religions pose a threat to Danish cultural identity. Moreover, the ideological dichotomy between Danes and the visibly different nonWestern foreigners is presented as dangerous, since these differences are unbridgeable. Thus the clash of differences is unavoidable unless the Danes stop the culturally threatening others at the border. Within the borders of Denmark, “we” need to “contain” the others in any way necessary, maybe by ridiculing, intimidating, and racializing. During the peak of the Mona Sheikh story from 17 to 31 May, hundreds of articles and opinion pieces filled the news papers. Jyllands-Posten published more editorials devoted to this issue, and since the editorial can be seen as the official voice of the newspaper, I will look closer at how JyllandsPosten chose to represent the Muslims in the Mona Sheikh story.

Islam in Jyllands-Posten’s Editorials Jyllands-Posten’s first of many editorials devoted to the Mona Sheikh story was “A Question About Belief” (Jyllands-Posten 2001g). The heading suggested a story about religious belief, but was instead about whether the three Muslims were telling the truth. According to the newspaper’s editors, they were not. The editorial used the language of TV-avisen, the prime-time news of DR 1, when referring to the Muslims “being placed” in Danish politics and Ekstra Bladet’s “infiltration,” which were asserted but not documented. “The Muslims are lying and the Social Liberal Party is too naïve to discover it” seemed to be the core of the editorial message. In other words, the Muslims in the party were like spies. In “Islam’s Dirty Face” (Islams beskidte ansigt) (Jyllands-Posten 2001d) the author treats the claim that the Taliban wished to mark (or brand) all Hindus. The Taliban is described as engaged in a practice of “human degrading,” expressing an approach to human life that can hardly be distinguished from that of Germany’s Nazis, “the most despicable in the world,” and who represent a spiritual darkening of such abomination that the regime has become an international pariah—only officially recognized by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan. Only military invention could change things, the editorial claimed, but who would offer a drop of blood on this land of no value?1

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To bring the story home to his Danish readers,2 and to make a political point, the author built a series of links with Pakistan. He emphasized that this country “gives weapon to the Taliban, but also indirectly via the organization Minhaj-ul-Qur’an moral support to the extreme suppression that the Taliban is using against the Afghani people.”3 By linking Minhaj to Pakistan and Pakistan to the Taliban the editorial suggests that the three young Danish Muslim politicians of Pakistani parentage are the same kind of bad Muslim stock as the Taliban. In this process the internally suspicious minorities in Denmark are consubstantiate with the imagined globally threatening terrorists. The neonationalist rhetoric of contestation draws on global threats to enhance the seriousness and the danger of having the domestic space polluted with foreign contamination. In the end the politicized media gave a hand to the foreigners’ assumed predatory effort to fend off the three Muslim Danes’ chance to run for political office. The Danish Press Council’s ruling six months later that TV-Avisen had to retract this alleged connection between Minhaj and the Taliban did not extend to cover Jyllands-Posten. The Taliban provided a powerful tool for Jyllands-Posten as a way to show the world the dirtiest side of the dirty face of Islam. Although the Taliban regime was not recognized by the governments of most Muslim majority nations, and although its theology has been widely criticized within the Muslim intellectual tradition (Olesen 1998, 2001), Jyllands-Posten’s two editorials in three days (“A Question of Belief” and “Islam’s Dirty Face”) imposed upon the reader a series of connections that equated the fundamentalists of the Taliban with the three Muslims in Denmark. “Forces of Darkness” (Mørkets kræfter) came five days later on 27 May (Jyllands-Posten 2001f). Without revealing a name, this editorial writer appropriated and domesticated a point of view presented by Helle Brix on the previous day in Politiken. Brix, who worked for a subgroup within the Social Liberals looking for evidence against the young Muslims’ activities (Svane 2001a; Eskholm 2001, see also chapter 5, this volume), had asked why feminists do not get involved in fighting the repressive values of Muslim men. In its editorial, Jyllands-Posten called on Danish feminists to Why don’t they protest against foreigners, who come to our country to argue noisily and self-righteously that women should wear the headscarf and preferably be mummified behind a veil, that girls should be circumcised, and young women should be married in “forced” marriage to unknown cousins in foreign countries, and that women in all aspects are inferior to the men? (. . .) Why don’t they stand up and let their voices be heard, when representatives of foreign cultures readily pronounce young men’s unlimited right to sexual intercourse with women, while the women should be virgins at the night of the wedding, knowing that such an argumentation can only make sense, when you feel entitled to distinguish between women and whores? (Jyllands-Posten 2001f)

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In this editorial there is—at first—no direct definition of the “representatives of foreign cultures,” but Jyllands-Posten alludes to them as being despicable to such an extent that it refers to them in an insulting and moralizing way, calling them “noisy” and “self-righteous.” Yet this enemy image of people with indulgent norms and practices later becomes a “fundamentalist Muslim group” and finally Babar Baig, Tanwir Ahmed, and Mona Sheikh, the three principal actors targeted in the Mona Sheikh story. They are then described as being aggressive and “unknowingly doing Danish culture a big favor by appearing too self-justified, so darkened, so aggressive, that they evoke an open discussion about the values this country has achieved in the centuries after the Reformation.” At this point the editorial writer has engaged in direct personal attack on three Danish-born, Danish-educated young Muslims and expressed an abhorrence of Islam. The next editorial, “Muslim Demands” (Muslimske krav) (Jyllands-Posten 2001e), conveyed comments in an ongoing debate about whether public schools should teach Christianity or religion. Again there is a “we” and the problematic “other” present. The editorial seems to suggest that if a student does not receive teaching in Christianity, the Big Bang Theory, and Darwin’s theory, then the student is not meeting the public schools’ requirement of civil education. The same type of message was continued in the following months, with new attacks on Islam on 17 and 21 August. One explained that Islam is not “necessarily synonymous with being reactionary and [accepting] Middle Age mystification,” because exceptions can be found in Turkey and Egypt, where the editorial writer said that Islam easily can “function in the same relaxed way, as Christianity does in Denmark” (Jyllands-Posten 2001a; Jyllands-Posten 2001g). The very establishment of such exceptions implies that most Muslims are reactionary and “mystical,” and it is telling that the author found these exceptions only in distant Mediterranean societies rather than among the tens of thousands of Muslims and mainstreamed Muslim immigrants in Denmark. Muslims were thus not only essentialized as the same category of people, whether Taliban or members of the Social Liberal Party in Denmark, but the category was also rhetorically placed in a different phase of development. The loaded vocabulary applied by Jyllands-Posten to capture the activities and ideologies of Islam and Muslims showed both antagonistic categories and an enemy image.

The Threat from the Middle Ages While the previous editorials embraced a dichotomization with a positive in-group and a negatively represented out-group, the relationship between the two was only indirectly present. In the next set of editorials, inferiorizing, racializing, and culturalizing the out-group is more direct, as the writers

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try to find possible publicly circulating explanations or draw on collective memory to find understandings of the relationship between the in-group and out-group. I will show how this is a hierarchical relationship. Some of the most frequently used words in Jyllands-Posten’s editorials and articles about Islam are “abomination” (vederstyggelig), “darkening” (formørkelse), and “Middle Ages–like” (middelalderlig)—for instance: “Taliban represents a spiritual darkening of such abomination” (Jyllands-Posten 2001d). In “Forces of Darkness” the young Muslim “fundamentalists” are said to speak from the platform of “Middle Ages religious value norms,” and the Danes, in all their obvious naiveté, let “darkened forces work freely work on introducing Middle Ages conditions in this country” (Jyllands-Posten 2001f). The term “Middle Ages conditions” was used several times in this one editorial. The Muslim resistance against the Big Bang theory “is ominous talk that evokes the thought of obscurantism (åndsformørkelse) and dark Middle Ages” (Jyllands-Posten 2001e). Muslims let themselves be represented in Denmark by “active debaters, who demand basic changes, so that Denmark is adjusted to Muslim groups, who wish Middle Ages–like, close to Afghani conditions, even though Islam is not necessarily synonymous with reactionary and Middle Ages darkening” (Jyllands-Posten 2001a). In Denmark we have “made it beyond the Middle Ages phase and the accompanying scientific and legal mentality” (Jyllands-Posten 2001i). In “Islam’s Dirty Face” the editorial writer describes unnamed three Muslims in Denmark as wanting “near-Afghani conditions,” since they allegedly support the Taliban. Thus the editorial describes their presence in the Social Liberal Party as people whose values belong in the Middle Ages but not have come to Denmark. Again and again, the editorial places the three domestic Muslims outside of Danish society and in a dark and distant past. A consequence of representing Muslim minorities as belonging to the past (to a different phase of development) is that dialogue is not possible. Modern Danish values are represented as being relaxed, open-minded, common sense, rational, and extroverted, while Muslims are evil, backwards, in favor of “Afghani conditions,” have no will to be integrated, have learned “from home” the words “demands,” “rights,” and “social welfare,” and generally leave no room for Danish values. Their differences are represented as incompatible with Danish values. In other words, Muslims are inferiorized, and Denmark and the Danish society are placed on a higher level of development in Jyllands-Posten’s socio-evolutionary and ethnocentric scheme.

Political Correctness “Pathetic Clowning” (Ynkeligt klovneri) (Jyllands-Posten 2001j) shows a certain refinement on racism in an article about the founder of the Progress Party in 1973, Mogens Glistrup. Glistrup is associated with “a xenophobic

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mantra about throwing all Muslims out of Denmark, regardless of whether they are born and raised in Denmark and have Danish citizenship or not” (Jyllands-Posten 2001j). Considering that prior editorials’ treatment of the young Muslims, who were also born and raised in Denmark, are similar to the ones sparking comments about Glistrup’s racism, a double standard appeared to be in play. The named three Muslims were somehow excluded from Glistrup’s abstract “Muslim” category. In other words, racism is what others do, not what I do. Another argumentative strategy runs through almost all the editorials. The editorial titled “Forces of Darkness” (Jyllands-Posten 2001f) argues that the reason feminists have not criticized Muslim suppression of women is political correctness, a correctness “that forbids us all to utter anything that can be interpreted as denigration of foreigners and religions.” It goes on to ask whether we “have become so afraid to touch this subject that we fear being accused of xenophobia and maybe even racist motives” that “we don’t dare to take an open and unbiased discussion.” And let us “throw away any disgusting political correctness and any self-staged fear and rediscover one of the nation’s most basic values: the ability, the will and the right to call things by their right name” (Jyllands-Posten 2001f). Jyllands-Posten was relentless when it came to any criticism of its being racist, xenophobic, or discriminatory, which was called a “cheap argumentation” (Jyllands-Posten 2001a). In the following month the editorial author was more direct: “It is unbearable to be the target of suspicion and be accused of xenophobia,” “since we will be accused of being to vulgar and simplifying the debate!” (Jyllands-Posten 2001i). According to another editorial, “We must stop letting a necessary debate be sidetracked by disgusting political correctness and sweeping fear of touching this subject” (Jyllands-Posten 2001c). In these editorials Jyllands-Posten does not explain what “political correctness” or “racism” are. Accusations of racism can easily change a debate, since the concepts are filled with historical shadows. Lacking a definition, the connotations of political correctness was up for grabs. Political correctness was used more as a weapon of attack than anything else. According to Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad, accusations of political correctness stop any serious discussion and understanding of the characteristics and nature of racism and take attention away from one’s political character. You can defend yourself against racism, but political correctness is a weapon brought forward when serious arguments are lacking (Gullestad 2002). The segments of Danish society that are regarded as politically correct include liberals, who are thought to be sitting in a high post as elitist opinionmakers. In Naser Khader’s words they are also “halal hippies,” who are blueeyed, ignorant traitors for supporting a cosmopolitan ideal of approaching

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culturally different people. Opposite this elite is Jyllands-Posten, which insists on “serious discussion” and “telling the truth,” and which is not afraid to use common sense in telling about the dangers of the historical new threats of migration and Muslim invaders of Danish political parties. The point is that the Jyllands-Posten’s anti-Islamic discourse builds its strength also from defining an internal Danish political enemy, the elitist left-winged. During the last decade political analysis has been steadily expanding. Newspapers have hired political commentators, who analyze and comment on the political scene, which helps to give them a profile based on opinion. Political commentators do not write the official editorials, but they are easily associated with their specific newspaper. One such prominent commentator is Jyllands-Posten’s political commentator, Ralf Pittelkow, who began his political work on the left wing, then served as a personal adviser to Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen of the Social Democratic Party. But Pittelkow finally disavowed this relationship and began working for Jyllands-Posten, critically scrutinizing the Social Democrats and the Social Liberals.

Political Commentator Ralf Pittelkow Jyllands-Posten’s political commentator, Ralf Pittelkow, wrote and wrote about Mona Sheikh and the Social Liberal Party and also participated in television news programs as an “expert” and “analyst.” More than most commentators, he placed the situation in a global context and called on an emerging understanding that Islam and the Western world were incompatible in order to explain the case. In the “Social Liberal Iceberg” (Det Radikale Isbjerg) (Pittelkow 2001b), Pittelkow tries to explain his version of the story, which starts with this logic: The young Muslims are not fundamentalists (radicals), according to themselves. Supporting the death penalty is not an extremist position for a Muslim. Therefore, they are not fundamentalists. Pittelkow ignored the internal battle for power in the Social Liberal Party and instead focused on the contestation of Muslim presence in the Social Liberal Party, in which he saw a clash between fundamentally different Western and non-Western values—“between a humanism with a background in the Danish society and then the authoritarian values, which some of the immigrants are bringing with them from their homeland” (Pittelkow 2001b). To support his views he makes use of two Orientalists, Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. “The Qur’an’s Path in R [the Social Liberals]” (“Koranens Vej I R”) (Pittelkow 2001a) appeared on a day that brought more anti-Islamic comments and hate speech than any other day. Again the sweeping dichotomies characterize the personal comments, such as Islamic religious instructions vs. West-

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ern traditions of freedom, which has moved beyond and freed itself from the state and politics from religious overrule. Islam becomes the same as Sharia rule, which is reduced to its inclusion of “death penalty, use of stoning, cutting of limbs, attributing a lower status to women, a ban on homosexuality, persecution of minorities, and other elements that a human society must fight.” Without putting Islam, Sharia, and the hostile selection of attributes into a historical context, but instead keeping them in a timeless, ahistorical eternity, Pittelkow is able to let the three Danish Muslim be absorbed into a universal Muslim archetype: supporters of despicable, anti-human, antiWestern practices (Pittelkow 2001a). Pittelkow also uses his commentary to put down the three Muslims, arguing that it is their ethnic minority background (in popular Danish, this means skin color, different clothes, and a language accent) that gives them a change to become members of the Social Liberal Party. In other words, he is not judging them on equal footing as “Danish” politicians according to their “qualifications,” but by their ethnic color. By placing the logic of the Danish event within a global clash of civilization scheme, Pittelkow is saying that the explanation of the Danish case lies at the global level. Whatever Sheikh herself is saying, we cannot trust it, according to him, because underneath it all is a clash of her non-Western Muslim values with Danish Western ones. The clash is larger than her and the circumstances of her entrance into Danish politics. A few days after 9/11, Pittelkow published “The West and Islam” (“Vesten og Islam”) (2001c). He wrote: “The potential of terrorism lies first of all in the political development in the world. Especially the relationship between the West and Islam”—again, he was not attentive to the Muslim diaspora or to Muslims “in the West.” Support for his viewpoints comes from nonIslamic experts, such as Bernard Lewis, whom he is paraphrasing: The fight between the two striving systems [Christianity and Islam] has now lasted fourteen centuries. It began with the birth of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued practically until today. It has withstood a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests. In the first thousand years Islam was marching forward, Christianity was retreating, and today the threatened Muslim world is again caught by an intense—and violent—anger toward the West. (Pittelkow 2001c)

However, Pittelkow leaves out Bernard Lewis’s emphasis on Islam’s humanitarian and peaceful side: Islam has brought comfort and peace for countless of millions men and women. It has given honor and meaning to sad and deprived lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different beliefs to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It has inspired a great civilization in which

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other people than Muslims lived created and constructive lives and through its deeds enriched the world. (Lewis 1990)

Pittelkow further boosted his introduction of a global narrative of explanation in the first Danish-language book on 9/11, After 11 September: The West and Islam (2002). The book endorses a Huntington and Lewis perspective, serving to introduce moral outrage and the idea of incompatible Westerners and non-Westerners into the local Danish context. In a national radio interview, Pittelkow explained that his life changed when he was in Baghdad in 1990 with former prime minister Anker Jørgensen attempting to free thirty-eight Danish hostages taken as part of the first Gulf War. That is where he learned “what Islam was about,” he explained.4 On 27 May Jyllands-Posten, when the editorial “Forces of Darkness” and Pittelkow’s commentary on the Islam in the Social Liberal Party ran, another major force in Danish politics for more than twenty-five years, Bertel Haarder, commented on the Mona Sheikh story, again using the same information that linked the three Danish Muslims to the Taliban and the death penalty, and that was later rebuked by the Danish Press Council.

Bertel Haarder’s Battle against the Muslims When Bertel Haarder wrote his opinion piece “Wide Open ‘Social Liberal’ Gates” (Åbne radikale ladeporte) (Haarder 2001), he joined the choir that lampooned the Social Liberal Party for its wide-open doors and excessive, naïve, “unlimited generosity and self-justice”: “Around the coffee tables people giggled and laughed” when they realized there were limits to their generosity, he wrote. Even the Social Liberals have a limit. Instead they open up for “ordinary Danes’ natural wish to rule in their country and to protect their homeland and its values. After all, it is not only Denmark that needs to be protected” (Haarder 2001). Due to the “new ‘radikale’ candidates ambiguous relation to the death penalty and the fundamentalist Pakistani organization Minhaj-ul-Qur’an,” according to Haarder, Danish national identity needs protection. Later in this opinion piece Haarder likens himself to the far right Christian nationalist Søren Krarup, whom he admires and agrees with, except for his view of the European Union and more generally the international collaboration. Danes have the right to decide in their own country, and therefore have the option to decide who is a member of this Danish community. The young Muslims in the Social Liberal Party are not a part of Danishness and are therefore the enemy, which is emphasized further in the right to defend oneself against these strangers. Krarup and Haarder—both Christian

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nationalists—are part of the Danish community, and they agree that the enemy needs to be fought and the country defended. The question is how. Haarder writes about Krarup: “Like him I praise the solders and people of southern Jutland, who invested themselves so much in defending the homeland of the Danes. To those we are endlessly grateful. They deserve a special exhibition at Sønderborg castle [in southern Jutland]” (Haarder 2001). The people of southern Jutland (the civilians) and the soldiers fought against German soldiers. With this praise the analogy becomes clear: Muslims, like those in the Social Liberal Party, must be fought in the same way that Danish soldiers fought the Germans. Danish nationalism is obvious, but so is the new racism. They have in common that they are both ideological markers of who belongs and who does not. In this rhetoric game Haarder (and Krarup) conceptualized immigrants (descendants and their children as well), who are presented as invaders, which made the Muslims in the Social Liberal Party, and the party itself, look like traitors if they did not join the soldiers’ fight. Accompanying Haarder’s op-ed piece was a drawing that was supposed to illustrate the content of the article, on behalf of Jyllands-Posten rather than the writer himself. The drawing (figure 21) strengthens the message of the invading, distrustful Muslim, who is concealing his inner, real self, symbolized by the decapitated head under his arm. The figure is easily recognized as Babar Baig, one of the three Muslims that Haarder is alluding to in his opinion piece. The Afghani clothes and militant symbols allude to Baig’s supposed affiliation with the Taliban.

Figure 21. Kurt Westergaard’s drawing of Babar Baig Source: Haarder (2001)

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In terms used more recently, Baig would represent a terrorist. The cartoonist’s name is Kurt Westergaard.

Conclusion We can now ask if “racist,” or “neoracist,” are adequate analytical conceptualizations of Jyllands-Posten’s approach to the Mona Sheikh story. According to the three-element approach to investigating possible racist incidents, the exclusion of the young Muslim politicians was a (neo)racist act. In the course of the 1990s a strong wave of neonationalism and neoracism emerged, providing substance to a widespread dichotomization of “us” the Danes and the foreign “others.” A rough estimate said that 80 percent of the Danes considered the relation between Muslim practitioners in Denmark and the indigenous Danes to be incompatible categories (Hervik 2003a). This background combined with an omnipresent tendency in the media coverage of the case to present and discuss the three Danish-born Muslim as the same kind of people as the Taliban and Iranian Shiite was a “racialization” and demonization of the Muslims. To portray them as being from the Middle Ages, of the seventh century, and using backward socio-evolutionary thinking, even a dialogue was made impossible. So, both the first and the second element were present through what is best seen as an enemy image of Islam. The third element was also at hand, institutional power. The Social Liberal Party is part of the government and the parliament. Denmark’s Radio, the public service station played a not very flattering role in using its power to marginalize and exclude the Muslims and based on uncritical research (Hervik 2002a). Jyllands-Posten contributed less directly to the third element: the use of institutional power to keep people out on the basis of the inferiorized identity and Otherness. However, Jyllands-Posten contributes indirectly through its editorials, political commentator, and feature articles to create an enemy image that in consequence make it largely impossible for the Muslims to get a political nomination, or say a job with Jyllands-Posten. During the second media event, Danishness, or Danish cultural identity, is being played out in a dialectical but asymmetrical relationship between native Danes and others, who are immigrants, descendants, and refugees. Neonationalism and racial thinking does not have to be a problem itself. Power is needed before an act can be labelled racist. The problem for the romanticizing neonationalist is that the borderland between positive and negative associations of neonationalism is difficult, if not impossible, to draw. But the transformation from positive, banal, benign, relative harmless neonationalism to a negative one can, in the Danish case, be historicized fairly precisely to the moment when nationalism loses its relative innocence.

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In the mid-1990s—more precisely, in the early half of 1997—neonationalism was used directly to acquire voters and readers, fuelled by opposition toward ethnic minorities. Minorities who are culturally different, most of them with a different complexion, are created as an out-group, regardless of whether they were born in Denmark, had lived in Denmark and paid taxes for many years, or came from Somalia, Turkey, Sri Lanka, or Pakistan. The relationship became more and more polarized, and at a certain point, Ekstra Bladet, the Danish People’s Party, and on at least one occasion also JyllandsPosten, proposed national referenda on Denmark’s path to multiculturalism, which in practice was reduced to for or against cultural others. The country’s relationship to its minorities became framed by a narrative of resistance, where Christianity was mobilized to ward off Muslim influence, and powerful media institutions stereotyped and stigmatized dark bodies as misplaced and infiltrating, and supportive of the death penalty and Shiite leadership (although they are Sunni). According to this line of thought, all Muslims are fundamentalists, even if they do not act, drink, behave, or write as such, and consequently they should be taken out of the political arena. Moreover, the racial and cultural thinking was so powerful that it came to dominate the political scene for the next many years, and made the third media event somehow predictable. In this process where much of the media was caught up in neonationalism, there was little interest, insight, or perhaps will to be seriously concerned about issues of racism, even though everyone seemed to agree that racism is bad and should be avoided.

CHAPTER 7


The Response from Muslim Readers and Viewers



This chapter turns to the consumers of the Mona Sheikh story. In the cultural studies circuit outline in the introduction, the focus is on moments 3 and 4, the appropriation and long-term effect of the media coverage. The defining characteristic of mass media is that the communication between sender and receiver is disrupted, unlike in face-to-face discourse (Peterson 2003: 20). There is an immediate effect with mass media coverage, which means it functions as a transmitter with the audience as receivers and not as participants. But as argued in the previous chapter, journalists and their publishing institutions are also authors of expressive culture that is situated in social and political circumstances. As such they produce and reproduce popular consciousness at the same time. Their embeddedness into society’s norms and values comes to fore through the choice of master narratives (Lule 2001; Peterson 2003), their sense of what the audience wants, and the habitus—the unreflective common sense and habit that orients and naturalizes action and that is largely the result of the first fifteen to twenty years of a person’s life (Bourdieu 1977; Hanks 1990: 7). In such a view the writing of a narrative and the utterance of a statement to an audience is also an exertion of a social relationship. There is simply no way out of it. Accordingly, the news coverage selects, simplifies, generalizes, objectifies, and distorts so that we, as researchers, can never dismiss either the embodied practices or the response from the receiving audience that is distanced from the sender. In this chapter we present the outcome of our analysis of critical responses to major themes and dominant personas in the Mona Sheikh story, which was done through seven focus group discussions, with five to eight persons in each group. The purpose was multi-sided. First, the focus groups’ responses are important as comments and providers of deeper perspective to our initial analysis of the media coverage, particularly as presented in chapter 5. Second, we wanted to learn more about the direct and indirect consumption of the

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major themes in the media the summer months of 2001. Third, we wanted to know more about young Muslims’ consumption, and views of consumption, during that period, which other informal conversations had suggested was far more complex than the simple “us” vs. “them” division that saturated the Danish news media coverage. In terms of the larger issues addressed in this book, the analysis of these sub-purposes helps us to understand the extent of the critical viewer’s identification of the media’s biased coverage of themes involving Muslims in Denmark as the dominant Other; the character of the tone used in public debate; and to the emic version of word and concepts used to identify the evolvement of processes, which etically we have identified as neonationalism, neoracism, populism, anti-Islamic discourse and so on. The focus group discussions lasted 90 minutes and had several purposes. First, the participants’ experiences were used to get a critical constructive commentary on the media coverage of Islam during the summer months of 2001. Second, we wanted to illustrate that the participants’ perspectives on the dominant media stories and themes reflected a world that is far more complex than the simple “us” vs. “them” divisions that saturate Danish news media coverage. One easy conclusion is that there is not a homogeneous “them,” in which all ethnic minorities share cultural understandings, ideologies, and practices, just like there is no agreement on what Danishness is.

The Focus Groups If “Danish” is taken to mean that both of one’s parents are born and raised in Denmark, the seven groups consisted of two Danish groups, one group with Danish-Pakistani youngsters, one with Iranian immigrants, and three groups with mixed ethnic, Danish and religious participants. The response to the Mona Sheikh story and other stories in the summer of 2002 included 47 readers and viewers, 19 of whom were Muslim citizens of Denmark. Most of them were born and raised in Denmark; they know Danish history, language and culture far better than that of the countries where their parents immigrated from. Most of the participants identified themselves as Danish. Some were academics or students, from math students to theology, from first semester at the business school to the last semester at a university. Some were practitioners, some theoreticians, some unemployed. The youngest was 19 years and the oldest 63, the second oldest 43. Since the research was commissioned by the Board for Ethnic Equality, time and resources were limited. Therefore, we decided that one criterion for choosing the participants was that they were expected to show some minimum level of media critical awareness, so that they could relate to and problematize the media coverage. We have not included individuals who did not

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watch television, read newspapers or knew about the Mona Sheikh story, the death penalty debate, Jyllands-Posten’s coverage and so on. In the end our criteria were: 1) generally younger participants; 2) generally people who had an ethnic minority background and or were volunteers in associations, some political and some not; and 3) people with a certain minimum of education, from gymnasium to university. The 47 focus group interviewees included 28 men 17 women; 19 identified themselves as Muslims (Sunni, Aleve, and Shiite); and two were Christian practitioners. Of the 47, 19 had Danish backgrounds, and 32 had ethnic minority backgrounds, which could be divided into three Bosnians, 1 Indian, 10 Pakistanis, 1 Arab, 7 Turks and Kurds, 1 Moroccan, 1 Tunisian, and 1 Pakistani/Afghani. Most identified themselves as Danish, either because they simply were born in Denmark or had arrived at a very young age. Sessions were filmed and recorded on tape to facilitate transcription since discussions were intense and lively, often with overlapping voices. At the beginning of each session, we talked about Mona Sheikh to see how much the group remembered. Then we showed the original 13-minute footage from the prime-time news coverage starting the story, media event number 2. After a discussion of this coverage, the group discussed different themes that we found in the analysis of the coverage aided by photographs, quotes, and headlines.

Comments on the Mona Sheikh Story The brief talk before we showed the footage of the prime-time news on 17 May revealed two interesting observations. Most of the group members recalled the Mona Sheikh story as a case where she had expressed ambiguity about her stance on the death penalty. They remembered that she was saying one thing but then meant something else. Obviously, this memory can be tied to Berlingske Tidende’s interview on 19 May and the subsequent use of this interview. The other tentative conclusion was that her membership in both the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement and the Social Liberal Party did present a real problem that had to be dealt with.

Prime-Time News, 17 May 2001 A Danish academic explained that this was not “the most objective broadcast, I have seen . . . . It looked like Denmark’s Radio had a hidden agenda to trash this organization” (Simon, male, 29, not a religious practitioner (NRP)) One Muslim student found that most viewers of TV-avisen’s coverage on 17 May were unable to see the differences between political fundamentalists

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and ordinary Muslim practitioners. “The message of the prime-time news was given beforehand. This news piece began with the conclusions about ‘fundamentalism,’ ‘infiltration’—the big, dangerous, horrifying, and then the interview began.” (Kaamil, 26). Listeners would believe almost everything. People in Denmark are already so afraid of Islam that just a few sentences will seem terrifying (Kaamil, 26). Another Muslim found the use of visual news disturbing, pointing out that while the viewers heard a description of Islam, they saw footage with militant images from Pakistan (Karim, 22). A third Muslim claimed that the Muslim politicians seeking influence in the Social Liberal Party were simply pawns, whose case—if they had not been Muslims—would have been solved within the party (Sarah, 25). Bosnian Rasim (24, NRP) explained: “They should edit the film differently. Maybe they could show Mona working with Muslim women in different surroundings. You receive it differently, when you see 500 men reading the Qur’an. It might be that she is doing something good for the Danish society.” Other viewers criticized the poor research, pointing to specific erroneous claims—for instance, the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement’s association with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran in the early 1980s. At the time this would have been almost impossible for specific political reasons, since the Minhaj represents Sunni Muslims and Khomeini the Shiite Muslims. For instance, Stefan (male, 31, academic, NRP) noticed a monolithic description of Muslims: “They say that Minhaj has supported the revolution in Iran or the Iranian clergy and Pakistan. Well, the Iranian clergy consist of Shiite Muslims and the Pakistani communities in Denmark are Sunni Muslim. They don’t even want to be Shiite, since they don’t like them very much.” At the time this would have been almost impossible for specific political reasons and since the Minhaj represents Sunni Muslims and Khomeini the Shiite Muslims. Moreover, the Iran-Iraq wars of 1980–1988 between Shiite-dominated Iran and Sunny-dominated Iraq were only a decade away, even if this protracted conflict certainly had other roots than Shiite-Sunny difference. One Muslim explained that it seemed strange to him that the Minhajul-Qur’an was accused of being fundamentalist and supporting the Taliban. After 9/11, Minhaj turned out to be the most moderate organization in Pakistan, and their supporters went against Osama bin Laden and the political party. Minhaj did not, like other religiously based parties, demonstrate against the United States after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon (Ahmed, 22). During the interviews many argued that membership in both Minhajul-Qu’ran and the Social Liberals was a real problem that had to be dealt with—but internally, within the party, and not in the mass media.

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Sources and Documentation The group contained 11 persons of Pakistani background. Most of them were born in Denmark, and spoke only Danish fluently, but several were fluent in the language of their parents. They were quick to note the obscure nature of the black-and-white video footage of the Minhaj leader in Pakistan, Tahirul-Qadri. The translation, Osman and others noted, was literally poor and misunderstood. “The rhetoric in Eastern countries is very harsh. When you talk about ‘blood’ as they did, then it does mean blood is going to flow, right? It just means ‘through hard work.’ Just like ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ in Danish does not mean ‘blood,’ but just sweat and hard work, right? So, it is a bad translation,” said Osman (male, 20, Pakistani, student, Muslim). The use of Nasar Malik as a key source was criticized repeatedly. Almost every Muslim noted and condemned the use of journalists and colleagues from the same workplace as a reliable source. It is not a “reliable” source, said Osman (male, 20, Pakistani, student, Muslim). There are theological and ideological tensions between Minhaj and his Ahmadiyya Muslim background. “Journalistically, his presence gives the news larger credibility, finding someone from Pakistan and making aggressive statements about Minhaj. Then people will think: This must be true then. This comes from one of their own,” added Stefan. Farid (41, male Iranian, academic, NRP) found the choice of words “being placed” and “infiltration” as undocumented. “There is just their own journalist. He is a Pakistani? What is going on?” he asked. Some of the focus group participants noted the use of an American Web page, which was used by the news anchor in her interview with Mona Sheikh. Niklas (male, 24, student, NRP) noted that the Web site is not an official page; we are just told it is a home page. Bülent (male, 29, Turk, student, Muslim) explained: Mona Sheikh says: “It is not the movement’s official page.” . . . Then, the anchor says, “Yes, on the American Web page it says this and that about world domination.” And the funny thing is that the American Web site is some kind of university Web site. It is a subpage, a student’s page, where he could write about his cat and dog—and then he wrote a page about “Minhaj—America” or something like that. Following that, TV-avisen says: “Oh well—it must be an official statement.” And it isn’t! It is an arbitrary Minhaj fan’s own formulation about the Minhaj organization.

One participant knew some of the activities carried out by the Women Youth League, which Mona Sheikh is a member of. She didn’t understand why there should be “a deeper” purpose to work for than the Youth League’s work for women’s integration and education, which is a noble cause in itself (Nadia, 25, Pakistani, academic, Muslim).

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The mismatch between the images of Mona Sheikh and her alleged fundamentalist persuasion puzzled many, including Angül, who fled from the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. A woman like Mona Sheikh could never stand out in public in the TV news, even without a headscarf. It is a paradox that she is presented as Muslim and fundamentalist. She is turned into a representative of an extremist Islamic movement, without any questions about how she could be a fanatic Muslim and dress in Western clothes (Angul, male, 40, Iranian, academic, NRP). Ahmed (male, 22, Pakistani, student, Muslim) commented on the same mismatch in his conversation with Sharida (female, 21, Pakistani, student, Muslim): Ahmed: If you think of Minhaj—it was accused of being totally extremist— and it turns out that six month later it was actually one of the most moderate organizations in Pakistan. Really, this is the one that supports the war against Osama bin Laden. Minhaj is one of the few religious parties in Pakistan who did not go into the streets to demonstrate against the USA. So there is a lot of ignorance about Minhaj [that characterizes TV-avisen’s news story], and where you turn to an unofficial homepage, and quote it. Sharida: Yes, and now when they assert that Mona Sheikh is so fundamentalist, why does she not wear a headscarf? That is not taken into account, because, they draw on an American homepage, where it says, Minhaj supports Islamic overrule. When I heard this the first time, I thought, “Good grief, this is an exaggeration!” Because you see the picture, and Minhaj is an association, where you come in and are almost being manipulated with, and see this footage, where he speaks about blood. It seems soon insane, because it isn’t really like that . . . Ahmed: Precisely that Mona Sheikh does wear the headscarf, but wears Danish clothes, is active in volunteer work in an association and participate in the public debate—that is not something you will find many Muslim girls doing. It is atypical that she participates actively, that men are being ignored.

Sarah (female, 25, Pakistani, academic, Muslim) added that she had seen a lot of men being accused of fundamentalist inclination, but never before had she witnessed a woman with an ethnic minority background being represented so negatively. They too can be evil and dangerous, she observed. In all seven focus groups, participants noted that the news anchor was unusually aggressive, constantly interrupting, and that the interview was not a good interview. Bjorn (male, Danish, 30, student, NRP) said, for instance: “This news anchor is not usually so aggressive, so now they have gotten her on board,” referring to the expanding anti-Islamic network. Laura (female, 19, Danish, student, NRP) found the anchor’s interview inept, while Ahmed saw the entire program as outrageously bad journalism (stinkende dårlig journalistik).

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Naser Khader as Muslim Spokesperson Politician Naser Khader was one of the most dominant individuals in the coverage of Islam in the summer 2001. He is a key figure behind ousting the young Muslims from the party. We therefore found it necessary and relevant to discuss his media appearance in the focus groups. Everyone agreed that he is skilled in staging his political career and that he tries to convey the everyday life of immigrants, although he is not always successful, and that many would often disagree with his views. In the Danish and mixed groups, his strategy and appearance was described in short descriptive statements. From one group alone, he was called “Uncle Tom ‘perker,’” “coconut,” “cunning,” “modern,” “doing well,” “is not responsible to his own roots,” “says exactly what many foreigners say,” “is very direct,” and “provocative.” Most participants believe Khader’s strategy is to present himself as Danish rather than ethnic. “He is the way Danes want immigrants to be,” said Zoran (male, 25, Bosnian, academic, NRP). “More royal than the king,” added Stefan. Being as Danish as possible is a political strategy, according to Niklas (male, 24, Danish, student, NRP): For me he is completely Danish; he is just a bit more dark-skinned. He is harmless; he is nice to look at. He says what we want to hear; therefore we don’t need to think about it. One can only hope that through his letters-to-the-editor slot in Ekstra Bladet he can help make elements of the Danish society have a bit more positive view of ethnic minorities, since there is actually someone who looks so much like them, who tries to give them an explanation they can accept.

His popularity may help to create a more relaxed view of the ethnic minorities and of Muslims. Really, he is both Danish and Muslim, and that is possible, added Victor (male, 24, Danish, student, NRP): So in a way he can be a representative of ethnic minorities . . . And it will even help his popularity that he is sometimes in open conflict with other immigrants, that’s for sure. According to Niklas, Khader is saying “what we want to hear.” Emre (male, 21, Turkish, student, NRP) said he prefers a person like Naser Khader and his Danish style: “I don’t fully agree with him. In some areas he is very Danish. Some says he has thrown his culture overboard, that he is ‘assimilated.’ . . . But I would rather see someone like Naser Khader make it than a religious fanatic person, an imam, like Fatih Alev. He is a Turkish imam. Then I prefer Naser Khader. His opinions are more modern.” Khader knows his ethnicity and Islam-critical views are what make him popular with the Danes, according to Lisa (female, Danish, 31, academic, NRP). On the one hand, he is as Danish as he can possibly be; on the other hand, he is still dark and different-

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looking. The combination makes him the Danes’ naturally preferred “spokesperson” for the Middle Eastern ethnic groups, and accordingly the Danes do not need to think about the diversity of ethnic minorities and religions. Helle (female, 37, Danish, Christian) noted the importance of ethnicity: “If [the Mona Sheikh story] had been about Danish Muslims, then the coverage would have focused more on the internal conflict among the Social Liberals, and not about Muslim world domination. Then it would have been about Danish values.” Again and again participants with ethnic backgrounds talked about the contradictions in Khader’s appearance: Since he appears so Danish, he cannot represent any heartland; he is a “cultural Muslim.” Bülent (male, 29, Turkish, student, Muslim) explained that a cultural Muslim is not a confessional Muslim, which is a person associated with an imam: “Instead it is certain values, Muslim values, you have grown up with, yet not believing in the Prophet and Allah.” Nadia (female, 25, Pakistani, academic, Muslim) embodied a nuanced negative and positive view. She said she had heard Khader once and found he was good, particularly because he is talking to people. Sometimes those with ethnic minority backgrounds take too much for granted about what others know about the minorities, and he is good at drawing parallels to the Danish culture to make himself understood. On the other hand, she argued, “the way he apologizes for his religion, I don’t like, since he gives a backing of associating Muslims with something negative. He is constantly stressing that he is a non-believing Muslim. Now it has become positive to say, ‘I am a moderate Muslim.’ Why is it necessary to define what kind of Muslim you are?” Some of the oppositions can perhaps be summarized in these statements: “Khader provokes,” “He is very politically correct,” and “He is not controversial.” “He takes things from Islam,” “He is not religious,” and “He is not a visible Muslim.” “He has a background” and “He has nothing do to with his ethnic and cultural background.”

Most of the participants found that being a supporter of the death penalty and member of the Social Liberal Party was irreconcilable, which is not to say that they saw Mona Sheikh as a death penalty supporter. Some argued that the whole talk about death penalty was very hypothetical, as we saw earlier. To facilitate the discussion, we asked focus group participants to comment on a statement made by Naser Khader: “To be a Muslim and a Dane is not incompatible. I have acquired a relationship to Islam, like most Danes

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have to Christianity. Therefore I like to drink beer, but I don’t touch pork. Not because I am a Muslim or a vegetarian, but because I feel this inner disgust about pork.” Asif (male, 27, Pakistani, student, Muslim) said that Khader likes to see himself as a “builder of bridges” (brobygger), but in reality he is not: “Building bridges is an act of balance, where you build from both sides. However, he has burnt down the bridge from one side completely.” Zoran and Niklas agreed with Asif that Khader’s handling of his multicultural background could not be seen as a coalescence of the Danish and an ethnic background. Kaamil (male, 26, Arabic, student, Muslim), who considered himself a “conservative Muslim,” was provoked by Khader’s statement: “You are not a ‘practicing Muslim’ when you say things like that. It is provocatory when you say, ‘pork I don’t really touch, but it is not because I am a Muslim.’ . . . That is to say that the rest of us, who don’t drink, we are stupid. We haven’t been able to combine Danishness and Islam.” Bjørn (male, 30, Danish, student, NRP) saw Khader’s statement as a smart maneuvre: “I think that it is a cunning statement. Islam has this religious language, but with this ‘inner disgust’ the whole thing becomes a personal relation to God, which is very Danish. You don’t pray in bright daylight, and it has nothing to do with religiosity. That is exactly what the Danes fear, and therefore I think it is very smart.” Sofie (Danish, 24, student, Christian) was critical, like the Muslims, about Khader’s way of uniting the Danish and the Muslim: “The way he presents being Danish—that you don’t take your belief seriously or at least do not give it an explicit expression . . . then there is also no place for Christians or other communities of faith. This is what it really is about, if you show it to someone else or just keep it to yourself.” Helle, another Christian student, agreed: “Generally, I am confused. I get the impression that he is both a cultural Muslim and a cultural Christian even though is in fact neither of them, since he lumps these items together in the same category [alcohol and pork].” Naadir (male, 34, Pakistani, academic, Muslim) saw Khader as simply speaking to the stereotypes of Islam: “Many Muslims may look up to him, since he has an education, and they believe that maybe he is one of our own, who can explain those things that we can’t through with. But then I just think he comes in and strengthens those biases about ‘what Islam is’: Is Islam about not drinking or smoking? What about all the other things?” The ethnic participants argued repeatedly that Khader is not able to unite the Danish and the Muslim. Therefore they continually asked for a more nuanced representation, one where their own everyday life and handling of multicultural identity is reflected in the media coverage, and not these constructions of a distancing dichotomization between “us” Danes and “the foreigners,” where all ethnic minorities and Muslims are seen as one single category of people.

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Fighting Rigid Dichotomization The focus group interviews showed a dominant tendency to react to what was perceived as the media’s negative representation of ethnic minorities generally and Muslims specifically. There was a broad agreement that the Danish news media coverage of Islam—particularly as seen through the eyes of young people with ethnic minority backgrounds—is unserious and onesided and has emotional consequences for many. In the following section, I deal with reactions to the media’s rigid “us/them” division. Fatima (female, 25, Pakistani/Afghani, student, Muslim) said: “When you hear about Islam in the media, it is always presented as a problem. Either it is about graveyards problems, halal, or headscarf. Always with ‘problem’ as the entrance . . . This has definitely not helped the integration of newcomers in any way.” Laura (female, 19, Danish, student, NRP) said she had become “immune” to this debate: “Every time I hear that it is an immigrant who has attacked someone in a disco, then I cut off. It is simply always immigrants, who are blamed. I can’t take that seriously any longer. The media loses its credibility.” Muslims are treated differently in the news media, pointed out Stefan: “If a Dane says in public that he cannot accept homosexuality, then others can disagree, but if it is a Muslim, then the media focus on the underlying clash of values.” Focus group participants sought to emphasize the social and religious differences among the ethnic minorities, which the media is not willing to convey or is not capable of conveying. As such, this response can be seen either as a political strategy of resistance toward a politicalized, discriminating news media, or as an attempt to reduce the knowledge gap between the media representation of the Muslims and the participants’ experience of a much more nuanced and complex world—a world that can differentiate, for instance, between Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as Muslims born in Denmark, Bosnia, Pakistan, and Somalia. “It is so complicated,” said Sarah. “There is one group, who are refugees, and one group, who are immigrants. Then there are children of immigrants. And there are immigrants with Danish citizenship. There are so many differences, but they prefer to use one category for everyone.” Günes (27, Turkish, pedagogue, Muslim), an Alevi Muslim, sought to break down the complexity further: “When I went to a Turkish school, people said: ‘You are not a real Muslim, since you don’t pray and you can eat pork.’ We can do that. I had a Turkish girlfriend and they [her family] were Sunni Muslim and deeply religious. During the Ramadan she came home to us and ate—among things—pork. She did it willingly but in secret.” Toke (male, 26, Danish, student, NRP) responded directly to the belief in the news media coverage that democracy and Islam cannot be combined:

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“There are in fact Muslim countries where the majority is Muslim but that is not based on Sharia and has a Parliament? You can then ask, who is sitting in the parliament?” Ahmed addressed the absurdity of the death penalty discussion in Western countries: Right now not one of the 56 Muslim countries is ready to implement the Sharia laws. How can you often think that the Western world would ever do it? Those countries who have fought for this in 1,493 years have not be able to do this, which like many things in Islam are so idealistic that people living today will not live to experience it. You cannot take a single element out, such as the death penalty, and separate it from an [ideal] Muslim society.

Sarah emphasized that social status is important: “My father says that when he came to work here, and said that he didn’t understand what was written on the machine, they told him, ‘Doesn’t matter, you just need to push this button. You don’t need to learn the language.’ But then suddenly you were caught up by a lot of mistakes.” Jarni (male, 19, Bosnian, student, Muslim) said that the Bosnian refugees are more Western-oriented than the people from the Middle East: “It is easier to socialize with the Danes if you drink. Much easier, since there are after all quite a few Christmas parties where you drink.” Nowhere did the gap between focus group participants and the Muslims constructed in the media come out stronger than in discussions among the 19 young Muslims who had parents from different countries. The previous chapters showed that the young Muslim politicians Mona Sheikh, Babar Baig, and Tanwir Ahmed, through membership in the umbrella organization Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, were represented as Islamic fundamentalists and representative of Islam generally. The Social Liberal Party’s basic value system became synonymous with Denmark and the West. In the following exchanges during the focus group sessions, the young people’s own identity-work is in focus. Growing up in a country where the parents have no experiences with schooling, education, or critical questions about cultural traditions and religious activities meant that the young people had to find their own synthesis, together with other peers. That synthesis came out in discussions about the differences between their own generation and their parents’. The Pakistani group distinguished themselves from Naser Khader, who came as an immigrant child, whereas they were born in Denmark: The new generation makes demands and wishes to be accepted, but I just see him as someone who has adapted himself . . . . Most of us are born and raised in this country. He, however, came at an early age, so instead of holding on to his background, he has seen it as a disadvantage, something wrong, but we see ours as ballast, something good. We want to be recognized. Generally speak-

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ing many of the first generation’s way of doing things won’t work today. And they could never represent us, since we are a different group. We are born and raised here, which already changes things. But I have respect for [Khader’s] ways, since he was one of the pioneers; he was active early on, when nobody else was. (Sarah)

Even if Khader was recognized as a pioneer, his political contribution to the better understanding of immigrants in Denmark was associated strictly with the parent’s generation. Naser Khader’s letter-to-the-editor column in Ekstra Bladet took up many pages in the news coverage. But his was not the only such column. Competitor B.T., another tabloid paper, had its own ethnic icon, Rushy Rashid, a former radio host, with her own correspondence column. The young Muslim women in the focus groups knew her story from the tabloid paper, from her radio show, and from her book. Rashid also has a Pakistani background, she is a Muslim, and has—against the wishes of the family—married a Dane. Nadia commented: When it came out that she had married a Danish man . . . , it was a disgrace. All families discussed it, since this was the first time a girl had done it. And then a girl! Islam does allow Muslim men to married Christian and Jewish woman, but not the women. This was something big, what she did. You see, she was a disgrace. “How could she do it?” And then there was my generation of girls saying: “We understand that she did it. We cannot accept it, but we can understand it.”

And Sarah added: We discussed it on our Web site, where many boys wrote that they thought it was scary that the girls accepted it. Following an Islamic point of view, she was not supposed to. Islam forbids a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man. The girls wrote, “That might be, but I can understand that she did what she did . . . . We accept it.” That is also since we will not take the axe and commit honor killing, right. One would have to say, every human being must be permitted to live her own way. And she has chosen to live her life like she does.

The young girls could not have done what Rashid did, but they express a need for a path breaker like Rashid, whose actions according to dominant Pakistani values are unacceptable and therefore not supported, but at the same time are needed since arranged marriages are enforced upon both sides of a marriage. None of the people identify with Naser Khader or Rushy Rashid; they emphasize aspects of their belonging to Denmark, while their parents’ background is far less present in their thinking and reasoning.

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Abdel (23, male, Tunisian, student, NRP) was one of those who pointed out the importance of the Danish influence. In relation to Mona Sheikh he said that young descendants of immigrants are so influenced by schooling and growing up in Denmark that it follows she could not have “been placed” in Denmark by foreign interests: “Simply because they were members of an organization does not been they have to be responsible for everything this organization does here or in Pakistan or around the world. They grew up in Denmark and are most influenced by Denmark, undoubtedly. And I do not think, they are so stupid to enter politics in this way.” Nadia explained that in the current time of racism, “We are being ascribed the same role as our parents. It is a problem much deeper than simply being a Muslim.” Nadia’s experience was that the media did not differentiate between the generations and therefore ignored the developments that were taking place. Young people seek an independent platform as they move through the education system and start professional careers. Bosnian Zoran also explained the importance between the first and second generations of immigrants: “Muslims are widely different, and so are the towns and countries they come from, even social backgrounds. But there is also a struggle going on within the families and within the girls. It is an identity issue, while for many of the parents it was only religion that ruled. Religion is their identity. When you question that, you run into problems.” Being a problem in the eyes of the media will prompt responses and even solutions. Nadia explained that reading the Qur’an would give children an advantage over their parents: “Parents respect the knowledge of Islam. Not because they are naive, but since they are aware of the religious inculcation they were exposed to through generation. Their children have gained Muslim insight themselves, since they live in this part of the world. I experience that many parents respect their young people, since they have a basis for talking about religion.” Bülent explained that “the requirement that a woman should be virgin” when they marry is one of the immigrant parents’ biggest concerns. Immigrant parents seek greater control of women than of men. Most of the focus group participants of ethnic background talked about how girls (both female immigrants and daughters of immigrants) live under more restrictive conditions than guys do. Günes, for instance, referred to this condition when she stressed the necessity of the young Muslim girls to fight against this: There are some issues when it comes to being woman and man. It has been like that at least in our traditions. The boys can go to parties; our life has been restricted. We [young Muslim women] have had to rise against this. The boys don’t need to. It is as if we need to take the first big step, every time big steps have to be taken. We have to help the boys get started. You see, in our home,

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the tradition is that when men and women get married, the woman must be a virgin.

Sarah agreed with Günes but saw the revolt as already going on: “Girls are well on the way, no doubt about that. It is typical in families where you have an elder brother, where the sons, even in traditional families, have been allowed to do all kinds of things, and the girl has watched this. Then you often see the girl follow along.” But even if the girls begin to follow their brothers, and even if they wrestle themselves free of parental control, that doesn’t mean the girls necessarily replace Muslim values with sexual freedom. In the following focus group exchange in the Pakistani women’s group, the revolt was just as much about gender equality with the same rules for both sexes, which means stronger sanctions against men with double standards: Nadia: Why don’t you ask these boys: “Why are you drinking, when Fatima is not allowed to drink?” . . . “Why can you have a Danish partner, when Fatima cannot?” The boys need to get challenged; they are freewheeling. I don’t know if I can explain this clearly, but why doesn’t anyone want to discuss this? Why doesn’t anyone protest and say: “What does this boy do with a Danish girlfriend in a television show?” Why do you have to accept it happens, why is it okay, that he comes forward, why can’t a Muslim girl come forward with her boyfriend? Sarah: She can too, that is what Rushy Rashid did. Interviewer: Is the problem that it is only the boys that do it, as you see it, or is the problem that more and more people practice their religion less and less? Nadia: The fact that they [the boys] are so sassy at appearing so on television. This is our people, our culture, sitting still and watching. They should be allowed to. They should have so much shame in their lives that they didn’t do it. They should not be so spoilt or grown up with such a strong double standard. Sarah: That is very idealistic, Nadia. Nadia: Yes, damn it. If our guys can do it, but our girls cannot do it. The only that is frustrating me is that if a girl did the same thing in our “culture” and stood out and made all this havoc, like the boys do, she would be so trashed by her surroundings, whereas a boy would get away with it. She would be slandered, her honor would be disgraced . . . . A boy can be on TV and become famous and everything. If he shows remorse someday and says: “Oh, no, I have lived in sin, now I want to be a Muslim again.” Well, then the doors open up for him: “Ayah, my son has come back home.” But for a girl, that won’t be possible. That is a double standard . . . . [That it is a] double standard is confirmed by it being accepted that guys go out in public with things like that, while it would never be accepted if a girl did it. But I don’t say that the girls should be allowed to do it, which is not it. I just see the double standard in that we accept that our boys do it. That is what annoys me.

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Sarah: This is precisely a sign that one is not practicing religion. It is not religion that is being practiced; it is just cultural values.

The young Muslim girls were trying to revolt. Their revolt is not against their parents or against Islam; even if the young Muslim girls break away from both and are often punished for doing so through marginalization and exclusion from the ethnic community. The revolt is directed at the traditional double standards for girls and boys and the incremental slide away from those values that are associated with Islam. In my interpretation, the groups’ shared goal—in an otherwise set of individual identity-projects—was to live out the position of “Danish Muslims with ethnic minority backgrounds.” In these historic circumstances that position is a delicate one, since they are the target of suspicion, at times regarded as enemies, by the Danish society—for instance, the news media and politicians, who try to keep the “annoying differences” out of sight. In addition, it is difficult for them because they need to do a balancing act between being considerate to their parents, their traditions, and values, and also doing away with some of these values.

Consequences of One-Sided Media Coverage of Islam In response to the footage of the interview with Mona Sheikh on 17 May, Muslim participants said that they were always treated as the villains and constantly had to prove themselves and be more correct than anyone else. The omnipresent feeling of discrimination had an impact on their self-esteem and self-identification. Therefore, I will also look closer at the consequences of one-sided media coverage of Islam as they came out in the focus group conversations. Emre (male, 21, Turkish, student, NRP) dealt with the consequences by referring to his own emotions: The amazing thing is that you begin to gloat over “Danes” doing illegal things. It is always this about foreigners are criminals and doing gang rapes and then Nørrebro. When I heard about this gang rape the first time, I felt dejected and thought: “Ohh no, not again.” Then, when I heard that Danes were the perpetrators, “Wow!” I have ambivalent feelings, since obviously this is outrageous, tragic, and brutal, but now that it did happen, it shoots down entirely Pia Kjærsgaard and her arguments.

For Imran (male, 32, Indian, student, Muslim) the consequences were direct and embodied: Every morning, in the radio, in the newspaper, you are made the target of investigation—of suspicion. The incessant treatment of the same topic. Always

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being the object of discussion. This treatment is inhuman in many ways. You can’t have a stable life. You cannot be an ordinary human being. This Maria Hørby,1 she is a role model for us Muslims [more so than Rushy Rashid and Naser Khader], since she is a meteorologist, but she is black, and it might be that she is a Christian or a Muslim or whatever, but she has a job.

Sarah wondered if the news media and politicians know how much damage they were causing: It is like shooting yourself in the foot, since there are so many well-functioning Muslims in Denmark, who practice their religion, but who also manage well . . . . What now—now we have a new government, who has achieved what it wanted, what now? . . . Maybe there has been much more damage than anyone thinks. Even the well-functioning young people, who in fact tried to participate in a democratic process, went out to vote. Will they still believe that they have anything to say in this country? Have we yet to see the worst?

Naadir used a former colleague to illustrate how bad the situation is in Denmark: His colleague had come from Pakistan as a two-year-old and didn’t speak very much Urdu. He had turned away from his family and not seen them for ten years, since they wouldn’t accept his marriage to a Danish girl. So, he is 100 percent Danish (fordansket). But if he is sitting there and tells me after this television news, that he feels offended, then something is wrong . . . . Even if he does what it is in his power to show he is integrated, then he has this sense of being targeted.

For several of the young Muslims, not identifying themselves with the Muslims represented in the news media was followed by a tendency not to call themselves Danish anymore. Shahida (female, 21, Pakistani, student, Muslim) said: When people don’t want to call themselves Danish anymore, there is an explanation. And I know this explanation; it is just like “We are never really accepted, so we don’t feel we are part of the society.” If they were accepted—if the image of them were positive—then it would be easier to call themselves Danish, since there would be something to be proud of.

Naardir and Shahida found that ethnic minorities are fixed in the negative role as “foreigners,” excluded from the Danish “we.” Regardless of how Danish the person is, the negative representation includes them. Everyone else expresses their agreement. An Iranian, Farid (male, 41, academic, NRP), went on to address directly the consequence of Mona Sheikh and Babar Baig’s marginalization in Danish politics as illustrated by the TV-prime news on 17 May:

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This news broadcast took place right before the election and had consequences for how the votes were falling. It wasn’t just about Mona Sheikh. And not only this guy Babar. It is also about everyone who is sitting here. It becomes much more difficult to be a candidate for any party. The possibilities are reduced. The problem is about all those foreigners in Denmark, who at any point wish to be elected at the local or national elections.

Farid was talking about the consequences not only for Muslims in Denmark but far beyond. Farid and four other men in this focus group fled from Khomeini’s regime and were not Muslims. They saw the consequences of the media coverage as hitting them as well. Another Iranian in the group made a statement that illustrates a process of categorizing, culturalizing, and even racializing, insofar as it is the appearance, both the physical attributes of the body (racialization) and the clothes (culturalization), that is the basis for drawing conclusions about who they are. Mina (25, female, Iranian, academic, NRP) said: “People look at me and say, ‘Hey, that is a Muslim girl.’ And honestly, I have never learned how to pray. I don’t even know how to say a prayer,” and Shahla went on to explain: The younger generation knows about how their parents lived in places where they could not participate democratically. Therefore the children insist on not being marginalized in the democracy by the media and politicians. The young people of ethnic minority background want the media to portray the world is it really is.

Precisely since immigrants have lived in totalitarian repressive regimes, it may even be more important that the media represents reality more accurately. The media has a huge responsibility for not creating polarization and carelessness. But this is precisely what the media is at risk of doing when the representation of minority politicians is so one-sided that minorities conclude that they might as well not participate in the political, democratic debate. In other words, the media is a marginalizing and excluding factor in the everyday lives of these young ethnic minorities. Lack of nuance in the news media coverage can be seen from various angles. Here are three examples. Focus group participants, like Kaamil, were quick to point out that the sweeping generalizations of the “Muslim” category were unable to distinguish between fundamentalists in Afghanistan and ordinary Muslims in Denmark. Secondly, the representation of the Pakistani-based Muslim organization Minhaj-ul-Qur’an was distorted. In retrospect four months later, Minhaj-ul-Qur’an turned out to not to be the Taliban-supporting, Ayatollah-friendly extremist organization it was depicted to be. Unlike many other organizations and movements in Pakistan, Minhaj did not demonstrate against the Americans after the World Trade Centre attacks on 9/11 and even opposed the Taliban in Afghanistan and

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Pakistan. Finally, the news coverage did not bring out documentation of the three young Muslim politicians’ actual support of the death penalty, a topic so central to the Mona Sheikh story. In fact representing the death penalty as being incompatible with Danish voting behaviour also turned out to be a simplification. Rejection of the death penalty is somewhat idiosyncratic to the Social Liberal Party and not a value Danes support unanimously. A survey found that whereas more than 20 percent of the Danish voters supported the death penalty (55 percent of the Danish People’s Party’s voters), there was no support among the Social Liberals (Levine 1999). Instead, the discourse of incompatibility is imposed upon the audience with the force of repetition, evaluations of right and wrong and emotional language that portray Danes positively and Muslims negatively. This is done to such an extent that the focus group participants remember the Mona Sheikh story as a story about Mona Sheikh’s ambiguous stance towards the death penalty. Nuances disappeared in the negative presentation and representation of Muslim others. With the Mona Sheikh story “Muslims” took over the position of principal cultural other of Danish neonationalism. This role was previously occupied by the Bosnian refugees in the early 1990s and Somali refugees in 1997. By 2001 the “Muslim” category fills this slot, which also means that the Muslim background of most Somali refugees thus encompassed the new cultural and racial others of Danish national identity. However, the Muslim background of most Bosnians never seems to become an issue, which further suggests the racialized aspect of the “us” and “them” divide. Almost all of these Muslims found that the television coverage was inadequate, subjective, and poorly researched. They did not recognize themselves in the way the young Muslims were portrayed. The Muslims insisted that they did not see a contradiction between being Danish and Muslim. Several remarked that for these same reasons they no longer read newspapers or watched news on television. One implication of this profound, enduring, and antagonistic view of Muslims inevitably makes the public recognition of people who are Danes, ethnic, and Muslim more and more difficult. Instead of public recognition, misrecognition becomes the order of the day. This act of public misrecognition will, according to Charles Taylor, eventually lead to a person or group’s suffering real damage: “Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Taylor 1994: 25). More specifically, the Muslim interviewees responding to the Mona Sheikh story pointed out another implication. They explained that one of the most serious consequences of the media coverage that they had experienced was that it has become almost impossible for politicians with ethnic/Muslim minority backgrounds to enter the national political realm while maintaining identities as Muslim, Danish, and ethnic.

PART IV


 The Muhammad Cartoon Crisis T     in the Danish news media throughout the summer of 2001. The story ended abruptly with the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, which absorbed all attention from the domestic scene. The results of the parliamentary election two months later, on 20 November 2001, echoed the dichotomization of native Danes vs. foreigners, particularly non-Westerners and Muslims, and brought a shift toward the radical right, with eighty percent of the voters agreeing on the necessity of a tough stance toward foreigners in Denmark (Davidsen-Nielsen 2001, Hervik 2002a; J. Nielsen 2002). The Social Democratic Party lost eleven seats in Parliament and was no longer the largest party, a position it had held since 1920. The Liberal Party gained fourteen seats under its chairman, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He then became the new prime minister in a coalition with the Conservative People’s Party, supported by the radical right Danish People’s Party. This party gained nine seats in the Parliament and, though not part of the government, had a powerful position as provider of support to the government coalition. The new government’s politics, its reliance on new forms of political communication, the evolving values-based journalism, and the continuous formation of radical right networks were some of the significant characteristics that followed from the Mona Sheikh story and led straight to the third media event, the Muhammad cartoon crisis. This crisis broke out shortly

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after Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons on 30 September 2005 as the result of its own project testing, what cultural editor, Flemming Rose, saw as cartoonists’ looming self-censorship. The publication, the government’s insistence on a non-dialogue position, and the networking of Danish imams eventually exploded in violent global reactions as well as news coverage of these reactions, which again was not exclusively caused by Danish acts. Negative statements about Islam, safeguarding Danish values, and calls for a stricter policy toward foreigners coming to Denmark and minorities with foreign backgrounds (typically from non-Western or Muslim countries) dominated the political debates in the fall of 2001. Denmark’s first immigrant ministry was born out of the new government’s promises to the voters about a stricter integration policy. On 27 November the Ministry for Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs (Ministeriet for Flygtninge, Indvandrere og Integration) was established, with hardliner, Grundtvigian nationalist, and seasoned politician Bertel Haarder as its first minister. The Ministry of Integration can be seen as a manifestation of one of the government’s biggest priorities: not simply improving the “integration” of foreigners already living in Denmark but also, more importantly, reducing the number of foreigners coming to Denmark as well as the number of asylumseekers. In this context “foreigner” refers only to those people who come from “third countries”—that is, countries outside the Nordic countries, the European Union, and North America (Ministry of the Interior 2001), which was soon changed into “non-Western” countries.1 In 2002, Prime Minister Rasmussen proudly presented what he considered the world’s most restrictive immigration policy. Notwithstanding the laws of the European Union, the Family Reunification Act required spouses to be at least twenty-four years old, specified some breadwinner conditions in terms of money and size of residence, and added certain requirements in the couple’s total affiliation with Denmark, including what language is spoken, children from previous relations, number of siblings, and so on (Danish Institute for Human Rights 2004). Besides the obvious nationalist aspects of limiting the number of foreigners coming to Denmark, there was also an implicit racial aspect, which was denied. An example came out during the 2001 election campaign, when Birthe Rønn Hornbech (later named minister of integration) announced that a strict new family reunification act would target people from Somalia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Yet even if the law in theory covered all foreigners, there was common agreement in Denmark that the people who were unwanted by most of the political parties were people from “third countries.” The overwhelming majority of people in these countries do not share the skin color of most indigenous Danes. According to Rikke Andreassen, ap-

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proximately 6 percent (327,000) are “visible minorities” from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America, while 2.5 percent (136,000) are minorities from Western countries (2007: 23–25). Hence, there is a racial and cultural aspect to be addressed along with a nationalist and visible cultural aspect. According to the new Ministry of Integration, the effort of the state to integrate newcomers was directed primarily at non-Westerners, who were experiencing more difficulties to get a foothold in Danish society, which may be because they are economically and culturally different from the Danes (Ministry of the Interior 2005). According to the radical right triangle introduced in the beginning of this book, populism goes hand in hand with neonationalism and neoracism. Populist politics was all over the new government, not least when the government was taking a stance against foreigners, for the Danish people, and against the elite. Six weeks after the election the new Prime Minister’s populist rhetoric came out as a textbook example of populism: In recent years a budding process has generated a true wilderness of state sponsored committees and boards and institutions everywhere. Many of them have evolved into state authorized judges of taste, who define what is good and right in different areas. There are tendencies of a tyranny of experts, who risk suppressing the free popular debate. The people should not accept raised fingers from so-called experts, who think they know best. Expert can be good enough for conveying factual knowledge. But when it comes to making personal choices, we are all experts. The government will abolish unnecessary committees and boards and institutions. This will be a very comprehensive clearance. . . . We believe that humans are best suited to choose for themselves. We don’t need experts and judges of taste to decide for us. (Nævnet for Etnisk Ligestilling n.d.)

In early January 2002 Danes saw how far the new government would go when it struck an agreement with the Danish People’s Party about closing down the independent Danish Centre for Human Rights (CHR), the Board for Ethnic Equality, and the Documentation and Advisory Centre on Racial Discrimination. The Danish People’s Party was particularly critical of the two chairpersons, Morten Kjærum of the Centre for Human Rights and Keld Holm of the Board for Ethnic Equality, whom they accused of being politically correct on the basis of their criticism of the party’s politics. After intense discussion and foreign pressure, a new deal was struck. The Board for Ethnic Equality was closed, the Centre for Human Rights was closed as an independent institution, and state support for the Advisory Centre was discontinued. Instead, a new centre called Danish Centre for International Studies and Human Rights (DCISM), made up of five previously separate institutions, was established as a single institute under the Danish Foreign Office.2 One of these was the Centre for Human Rights, which in the new

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version changed its name to Institute for Human Rights. The new director would be found after a search. In the end, and much to the dismay of the Danish People’s Party, Morten Kærum was chosen as director of the Institute of Human Rights. Shortly after winning the parliamentary election in November 2001, Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen also launched what afterwards was coined a “culture war” (kulturkamp) or debate of the cultural values of Danish society. The culture war really started with Rasmussen’s New Year’s speech on 1 January 2002, which contained his attacks on the elite “judges of taste,” but it wasn’t until January 2003 that he fully articulated the ideology of “cultural wars” (kulturkamp): It is actually my opinion that setting the agenda in the debate of values changes society much more than those changes of the law. When I speak broadly about culture: It is the outcome of the culture war that decides Denmark’s future. Not the economic policies. Not the technocratic changes of the judicial system. What is decisive is who has the fortune of setting the agenda in the debate of values. (Hardis and Mortensen 2003)

Four years earlier Gerd Baumann had pointed out that “when using the rationalist language of cost and benefits state elites tell their citizens that they provide the best value for money. Pay your taxes, obey our laws, and you will get the best deal available anywhere. When this rationalist language will not do, state elites need to fall back on something nobler, and what can be nobler than a faith that binds all citizens!” (Baumann 1999: 42). At the same time, if “religion with its claims to ultimate truths and its social divisiveness is the oldest problem of the nation-state” (Baumann 1999: 42), what could be a better ideology to embrace and establish than nationalism, with its quasireligious character? Nationalism can fill some of the same centripetal functions that religion can (Baumann 1999). Rasmussen was an unlikely reader of Baumann, but he was undoubtedly inspired by the culture war strategy (that originally gained strength in the United States in the 1990s), when Rasmussen and his government attacked the values of its opposition, the 1968 generation, the elite judges of taste, and the politically correct, instead insisting on a long-overdue, uncompromising celebration of “Danish values.” As implied in Rasmussen’s statement, these values were expressed in policy, such as zero tolerance toward the unemployed, who were penalized for not trying hard enough to apply for jobs. Ensuing discussions about what values Danish society should rest upon were intimately linked to anti-immigrant statements and policies generally regarded as already among the most restrictive in Europe. Jyllands-Posten joined the “culture war” in the summer of 2003. With the new emphasis on values and culture, Jyllands-Posten decided to widen the

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concept of culture from high culture to include “habits, ways of thinking, and life ways” and to debate culture (Elkjær and Bertelsen 2006b). Journalistic editor-in-chief Jørn Mikkelsen was inspired by culture war stories based on the focal points of the government’s culture war: Denmark’s Radio (the oldest public service radio and television station), Islam, and ex-communists (Elkjær and Bertelsen 2006b). To carry out the shift from traditional coverage of high culture into value-based cultural journalism, in April 2004 Jyllands-Posten brought home its correspondent in Moscow, Flemming Rose, to serve as cultural editor. Rose’s promotion was a further shift to the right, noted in Jyllands-Posten’s internal survey in 2004. One hundred employees out of 167 answered the question “Do you feel that Jyllands-Posten has become more right-wing in its way of prioritizing journalistic stories?” Eighty-one percent answered in the affirmative. According to Bent Jensen, a member of the board of the Jyllands-Posten Foundation, Jyllands-Posten’s sharper profile on Islam and its support of private property rights explain this perception (Elkjær and Bertelsen 2006a). Facing increased competition from free dailies, Politiken and JyllandsPosten merged into a single media corporation, with two holding companies on equal footing. The activities of JP/Politiken’s Hus include the publication of the large morning papers Jyllands-Posten and Politiken, the tabloid Ekstra-Bladet, and the free daily 24timer (24 hours). The two papers ended up dividing the market between them and each pursuing their own political interests. Politiken took the “green segment” of the market, consisting of the Social Liberals and Social Democrats, and focusing more on the eastern part of Denmark. Jyllands-Posten covered the “blue segment,” supporting the ruling Liberal Party and focusing primarily on the western part of the country. Thus, Jyllands-Posten supported the government’s proposal to send troops into Iraq, while Politiken furiously opposed it. A study of the front page and editorials of Politiken and Jyllands-Posten during the Muhammad cartoon crisis confirmed this division. From 5 to 28 February 2005 Politiken carried twelve leading front-page stories and nineteen editorials critical of the government’s handling of the crisis, while Jyllands-Posten published only one front-page story and no editorials (Barfod 2006). In short, the administrative collaboration solidified the polarization between government-supporting and government-critical papers. A key issue for Minister of Culture Brian Mikkelsen (Conservatives) was the “Cultural Canon Project” announced in late 2004. Committees were formed in seven areas: Architecture, Visual Arts, Design and Crafts, Film, Literature, Music, and Dramatic Arts. Each was to produce a set of indispensable works that shape Danish cultural heritage. Among the reasons given by the Ministry of Culture for compiling the canons were these:

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Give citizens an easy introduction to Danish art and culture and hopefully also inspire them to immerse themselves further in the individual art forms. Present a competent, qualified suggestion of the elements of Denmark’s cultural heritage that are valuable, of good quality and worth preserving for our descendants. Make us more aware of who we are and give us more information on the cultural history of which we are a part. Give us reference points and awareness of what is special about Danes and Denmark in an ever more globalized world. Strengthen the sense of community by showing key parts of our common historical possessions. (Ministry of Culture n.d.)

Mikkelsen repeatedly linked the cultural canons issue to the culture war’s debate on values. In his speech at the annual meeting in September 2005, he argued that both projects served in the shared fight against Muslims fundamentalists. It thus became explicit that the project also had national conservative assumptions (Fibiger 2005) meaning that national interests, limitation of immigration, and the inculcation of Danish values to immigrants were core areas for application of the canons. The Cultural Canons were published on 24 January 2006 (Ministry of Culture 2006). The Mona Sheikh story, 9/11, and the parliamentary election of 2001 also brought about a professionalization in the use of the news media by a radical right-wing network. In late 2003 newspapers reported that around twentyfive people who were known for their active role in the public debate had coordinated their effort to influence the news media on issues concerning Islam and Muslims in Denmark. Former editor-in-chief of the newspaper Information, a writer for Berlingske Tidende, Lars Hedegaard,3 and two investigators in the Social Liberal Party for Naser Khader, Helle Merete Brix and Jette Plesner Dali, were members of the semi-secret society calling itself the “Giordano Bruno Society” and referring to each other “Brunos.” Members of this society are known for their many radical right opinion pieces in the Danish mass media. Hedegaard explained: “We don’t believe that the academic discussion in this country is satisfactory. Many of the books that we have read are not part of the public debate in Denmark. Therefore we have been sitting down educating ourselves and each other in what is being written around the world.” The feminist and anti-Islamist Jette Plesner Dali goes on: “We are concerned about whether our open democratic society is becoming a paradise for organizations with a different agenda” (Demos Nyhedsbrev 2006). The society included Jyllands-Posten’s political commentator, Ralf Pittelkow; Liberal Party Member of Parliament Karen Jespersen (Minister of Social Welfare); and the spin doctor for the Minister of Church Affairs, Henrik Gade Jensen (Demos Nyhedsbrev 2006; French 2003; O. Olesen 2003a,

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2003b). The members are critical of Islam, which they claim is threatening to take over the world. The group has its own Web site, with offshoots on all sides, and members are behind hundreds of articles in various genres in the news media, as well as a dozen or so books. Members of this group joined the radical pastors Jesper Langballe and Søren Krarup, members of the Parliament since 2001, to establish the Free Speech Society (Trykkefrihedsselskabet) and the magazine Sappho (http:// www.sappho.dk). By the mid 2000s, the community of people around the Bruno Giordano Society and the Free Speech Society had succeeded in establishing a well-organized, radical right-wing group with tremendous influence in the media. Their polarizing approach had a great impact, and they were represented by well-known figures such as cartoonist Kurt Westergaard (the cartoonist who drew the bomb in the turban); cultural editor Flemming Rose, who commissioned the cartoons; neoconservative Daniel Pipes; Dutch member of parliament Geert Wilders; and Somali-Dutch member of Parliament and author of the manuscript for the film “Submission,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yet their role in the Muhammad cartoon crisis is little known. To a large degree the negative image of Muslims in Scandinavia is intimately linked to media coverage and Danish politicians’ anti-Islamic rhetoric. A study by Håkan Hvitfelt of the Swedish news media of themes relating to Islam from 1991 to 1995 illustrated the lopsided nature of the coverage. More than eighty-five percent of the time, when the terms “Muslim” or “Islam” were used by the media, they related to violence, crime, and terrorism. Or, to put it differently, only fourteen percent of the coverage of these topics did not contain any form of reference to violence (Hvitfelt 1998). A decade later, another Swedish survey revealed that most Swedes associated the features of a terrorist with that of a young, poor, fanatic, male, dark, nonSwedish Muslim (Knutagård and Scaramuzzino 2005). Later still, in 2007, Sveriges Television (Swedish public television company) went out to redo Hvitfelt’s survey and found, much to their chagrin, that Hvitfelt’s numbers were also true for media coverage in 2007. Since the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Sweden are unconnected to violence and crime, the outcome of the three different studies confirm that the majority of Swedes’ fear of small numbers is appropriated from the media coverage. There is no reason to believe that these numbers would be much different in neighboring Denmark, where terrorism and Muslims are intimately associated in popular consciousness, as the result of the news media’s coverage, which can, for instance, be seen in Westergaard’s drawing of Muslim madmen and ticking bombs. Even the bomb-in-the-turban cartoon reflects this Scandinavian bias, where all Muslims are most often lumped together in the one category of “fundamentalists,” since they take the words of the Qur’an literally, and regarded as potential terrorists. Some of the less outspoken

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Danish imams saw the depiction of the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist as the most offensive element of all the twelve cartoons. Shortly before the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, JyllandsPosten published a series of articles and editorials that explicitly linked the dangers of immigration with Muslims and Islam. On 11 September 2005, four years after the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon Jyllands-Posten published a new front-page story by Borg: “Islam the Most Belligerent [Religion]” (see figure 22). The subhead reads: “A Danish linguist has during three years analyzed 10 religions’ basic ancient texts and concludes that the texts of Islam encourage terrorism and violence more than in other religions” (Borg 2005c). The story is based on a Ph.D. dissertation by Tine Magaard, whose dissertation, the journalist explains, had recently been approved at Sorbonne University. Borg ignored the historical foundation of Magaard’s research, which doesn’t automatically apply to contemporary Islam: For instance, Magaard had looked in the Qur’an and counted words referring to violence and compared the result with other sacred texts. For the story Borg also got

Figure 22. Front page of Jyllands-Posten, 11 September 2005 Source: Borg (2001c)

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statements by imams in Denmark rather than by experts in the ancient text analyzed by Magaard.4 As a result, the story explicitly yet misleadingly ties contemporary Islam to violence. Two days later Jyllands-Posten’s editorial, “The Words of Islam” (Islams ord) officially supported Magaard’s findings and Borg’s story, tying the issues raised by their work to fundamentalism and to the danger that cultural others pose to urban Western life: Today the fundamentalists have gained influence. They have acted in the shadow of the wish for new Arab greatness, and they have succeeded in demonizing the Western world. Fundamentalists must at any cost be isolated and fought down. Here and elsewhere. Their opinions are only making the problems worse, and they are the architects behind the parallel communities that beset Western cities. The Qur’an must also be discussed. It has been so earlier, and it must be today. In Western society it is common to interpret the Bible. Some read it literally, but that is not the majority. That is the way it should be in Islam, but that is a long way off. (Jyllands-Posten 2005a)

Gone is the historical foundation of Magaard’s research. Enduring is the contemporary anti-Islamic priority of Jyllands-Posten’s editorials. JyllandsPosten’s anti-Islamic discourse can also be seen in the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists. A few weeks earlier, on 21 August 2005, Borg had again appeared as frontpage news with an article titled “Appealing for a Female Muslim Revolt” (Appel om muslimsk kvindeopgør) (Borg 2005a) that fuelled the fear of unlimited numbers of dangerous new migrants coming to Denmark. As in the previous articles on demographics (see chapter 6, this volume), Borg used retired professor of demography Poul Chr. Matthiessen to promote the fear: “For the first time in the history of Denmark we have witnessed an immigration of people, who now turn out to hold elements that are hostile to the Danish society and distance themselves from Danish values. If this is not opposed by an improved integration, it can become serious. And increasingly the women carry the key to this integration” (Borg 2005a). In the article’s subtitle, the professor is paraphrased as warning that “Muslim women must free themselves from their present pattern of gender relations. Otherwise thousands of immigrant families will end up in a lower class, and more and more will distance themselves from Danish norms and values” (Borg 2005a). The journalist and the professor do not tell the readers what precisely they mean by gender roles, and how those may be different from gender roles in the rest of Danish society, but they talk indiscriminately about all immigrants as if this were a problem for all of them and specific to them. In feminist circles, Rikke Andreassen has noted, in regard to a large compara-

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tive European project on the use of veils, that this must be the first time in history that such elder males of the white middle class have begun showing an interest in women’s rights (2007). Chapter 8 takes us through the first months of the cartoon story. In particular, the chapter deals with the political spin of the Danish government, which helps explain how the Danish government succeeded in framing the Muhammad cartoon story as an issue of freedom of speech. The next chapter presents a study of the Danish news media coverage in the early months of 2006, when the cartoon story took off globally. Three different frames of understanding appear in the Danish media, but only the government’s and Jyllands-Posten’s framing around the free speech issue made international news.

CHAPTER 8


The Original Spin Freedom of Speech as Danish News Management



How do the media influence the writing of history? What will be remembered in the future about the Muhammad cartoon crisis? How will the history of the cartoon affair be written in ten years? When is history as collective memory actually written? These were some of the underlying questions that might well have been raised in Denmark in late March 2006. After the cartoon affair had burst upon the international news scene, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen went out into the media, scolding corporations, some large Danish newspapers, and public intellectuals for not standing up for freedom of speech. His proactive attack in the media created some debate, yet there was little attention paid to his underlying aim. He wanted the cartoon affair to be remembered specifically as a free speech issue and not as a reaction to the ideology of an increasingly anti-Islamic government. In this chapter I examine the role of the Danish government in the cartoon crisis from the perspective of news management, a process of management that began in October 2005, when the cartoon publications became the center of the government’s political spin—namely, to insist that it was a free speech issue. This original spin successfully transformed the issue of possible self-censorship of cartoonists into stories about the struggle between the “good countries” with free speech and the “bad ones” without it. An important factor behind the success of the spin was the repoliticization of the journalistic field, where newspapers increasingly are becoming political actors. In this environment, the correspondence of the views seen in newspapers editorials and news articles becomes more and more direct, and journalists become targets of political spin strategies, often crafted by spin doctors who themselves are trained as journalists. In the case of the Muhammad cartoons, the main Danish newspapers clearly chose their sides and thereby strengthened the repoliticization of the news media. Before I

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look at the original spin, I will look at the character of the evolving cartoon story that forced the government to react. Therefore, I address the roles of Kåre Bluitgen and Jyllands-Posten as provocateurs and purveyors of anti-Islamic populism, since their project gave rise to the interpretation that the publication of the cartoons was an expression of a racist newspaper. With growing international media attention, the government stepped in, using political communication to put a different item on the media agenda, and a successful spin effort diverted attention from troublesome issues, controversial relationships, and political blunders (Gould 1998; Høybye et al. 2007; M.F. Nielsen 2004; Press 2002). This was precisely the goal of the “insist it is a free speech issue” campaign. Contrary to what many people and most media narratives regard as the story’s origin—Bluitgen’s problems finding an illustrator for his book—I argue that there isn’t a real-world problem outside the news media that explains why Jyllands-Posten initiated its cartoon project.

The Beginning of the Cartoon Story The Author Kåre Bluitgen Kåre Bluitgen was unable to find an illustrator for his forthcoming children’s book in Danish on the story of Muhammad, The Quran and the Life of the Prophet Muhammad (Koranen og profeten Muhammeds liv). According to Bluitgen, every illustrator he contacted refused to work with him for fear of repercussions given the fact of the customary ban among Muslims against drawing the Prophet. Bluitgen believes in—and actively supports—aggressive provocations, arguing that we, the Danes, should approach multiculturalism in a revolutionary way and overturn Muslim religion. We should be daring and aggressive, maintaining that we have the right to make fun of and reject “all religious crap” (Thøgersen 2003). Marxist skepticism is crucial in his socialist orientation, yet he is critical of socialism in Denmark and wishes that it would openly support Danish ideals such as open-mindedness, tolerance, and democracy (Bjørnvig 2002). Bluitgen narrated his own identity as a socialist, atheist, and as someone who can tell the true story of Islam for Danes and Muslim immigrants without irony and in an informative, exciting way (Ravnø 2006). He positioned himself as being neither racist nor Islamophobic, subscribing to the (pseudo)logic that if you “know a Muslim,” then you cannot be prejudiced against Muslims. Rather than a communicator of sober information for schoolchildren about the history of Islam, an alternative way of casting Bluitgen’s position is as a man who provokes Muslims and combats Islam and any other religion. “If you want to understand the third world, there is only one way: to under-

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stand religion,” he has said. “All social and political conflict in the third world originates in religion. And the third world has come to Denmark” (Ravnø 2006). His writing the history of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad and insisting on drawings of the Prophet’s face gives further substance to Bluitgen’s role as a provocator. In an earlier publication, he went a long way in order to make a wake-up call to the left wing about what he saw as a naive and politically correct stance toward Islam. Among other things, he suggested: “The Left needs to go on the offensive. Stage a procession down Nørrebrogade in Copenhagen wearing burqas, chadors, and long, dragging jackets, with strollers and baby carriages, all the way to Blågårds Plads. Then they should throw everything into the trash and splash the Quran with menstrual blood” (Bluitgen 2002: 70). A journalist with the national news agency Ritzau wrote a story titled “Danish Artists Fear Criticizing Islam” (Danske kunstnere bange for kritik af Islam) about Bluitgen’s problems, which Politiken (and Information) chose to print on 17 September 2005 but with a different headline: “Profound Anxiety about Criticizing Islam” (Dyb angst for kritik af islam) (C. Andersen 2005a). From a traditional journalistic point of view the story was weak and probably should never have been released by Ritzau’s bureau. The story was based on Bluitgen’s statement at a dinner party three months earlier, and by the time the story was written Bluitgen had already found an illustrator, though the illustrator wished to remain anonymous, since he feared a similar fate to Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh, who was killed as a reaction to the film “Submission.” One other illustrator had begun to draw the Prophet Muhammad, but since Bluitgen insisted that the face of Muhammad should be drawn with more detail, the illustrator withdrew. Bluitgen was the only source used for the article. The author never crosschecked by, for instance, talking to any of the illustrators in question. Later, other journalists attempted without success to verify Bluitgen’s claims. Politiken’s headline is misleading, since there was only one illustrator, not three, who was afraid of what would happen if she or he took up the assignment. Nevertheless, the story caught on. Several newspapers picked up it up, and moral panic was about to break out. Five months later, during the days of violent global reactions, two editorials in Danish tabloid papers summarized this entry to the cartoon crisis through sweeping generalizations and exaggeration, lifting explanations out of the historical context and into a standardized narrative: The fear spread when no illustrator dared to illustrate the children’s book by Kåre Bluitgen concerning the Prophet Muhammad—fearing to lose their lives. Was Freedom of Speech threatened? Jyllands-Posten tested this by inviting cartoonists to draw Muhammad in the paper. Some dared, others did not—struck by self-censorship. (Ekstra Bladet 2006a; emphasis added)

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It was exactly this self-repression, diffuse fear to speak of Islam which JyllandsPosten wanted to throw light on with the invitation to draw Muhammad. The problem is especially connected to Islam because violence stemming from claimed offenses of Islam has dominated the media picture in the last couple of years. (Carlsen 2006; emphasis added)

That the story grew so dramatically on such thin ground suggests that this topic was already highly politicized. We must also conclude that the explanation of this story’s energy lies beyond Bluitgen’s overstated problems of finding an illustrator for his provocative writing project. Another important actor in the narratives of the cartoon story’s origin is Jyllands-Posten, with its decision to publish twelve cartoons as a sign that these twelve cartoonists didn’t back down from fear of Muslim intimidations.

Jyllands-Posten’s Project Few narratives could ignore Bluitgen’s contributing role to the cartoon story, but Jyllands-Posten plays the decisive role when it published its reaction to the outcome of its own project testing the self-censorship of Danish cartoonists. The Danish media coverage and literature treating the cartoons are filled with discussions of Jyllands-Posten’s testing project, whereas much of the foreign writing spends little space on the invitation to draw the Prophet Muhammad. In this section I argue that the original cartoon publication story is entirely media-instigated. As such, it must be understood in relation to the politicized Danish field of journalism, with its values-based competition for readers. On the basis of Politiken’s story Jyllands-Posten decided to launch its own project, fearing that what journalists had termed “a creeping self-censorship” was at play. Jyllands-Posten didn’t ask whether the cartoonists chose not to participate because they disapproved of Bluitgen’s project; rather, the paper moved forward with its own story using freedom of expression as a provocation to find out whether cartoonists in Denmark held back on their decisions to draw the face of the prophet Muhammad. Flemming Rose’s letter to the cartoonists emphasized that Jyllands-Posten is “on the side of free speech. We therefore would like to invite you to draw Mohammed, as you see him. The result will be published in the newspaper in the coming weekend” (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 15). The test produced a negative result, as Rose had foreseen: twelve cartoonists submitted cartoons to be published (on 30 September), which indicated that self-censorship wasn’t taking place. There are twenty-five active cartoon-

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ists in Denmark. Of these, twelve did the assignment; of the others, some didn’t answer for contractual reasons, and others were engaged in other assignments or simply didn’t answer. Three answered and did not draw. Two of them were critical of Jyllands-Posten’s project. According to Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s cultural editor, only one person (of the three) declined to draw referring to fear of violent reactions from Muslims (Rose in KjersgaardHansen 2006). But because Rose “sensed a broader phenomenon” due to the instances mentioned in the story about Bluitgen’s problems, he went on with the story (Kjersgaard-Hansen 2006). The editor-in-chief, Carsten Juste, admitted that the survey lacked validity and the story fell short of sound journalistic basis. Rather than abandoning the project, though, he chose to publish the cartoons in the opinionated cultural section appearing on Fridays, since “the project was more a manifestation of an ideology than a journalistic story” (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 18). So at this point there was only one illustrator who feared the consequences of drawing for Bluitgen, only one person who feared participating in Jyllands-Posten’s project, and Rose’s sense of a broader phenomenon. Six additional facts underscore the idea that Jyllands-Posten’s desire to provoke and insult Danish Muslims was more genuine than its wish to test the selfcensorship of Danish cartoonists. First, this can be seen in cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s associations of Islam with terrorism in his drawing of the bomb and the creed in the turban cartoon. On 27 August 2005 (see figure 23b), Westergaard had illustrated a co-ed piece written by Henrik Gade Jensen, a radical right-winger and member of the semi-secret Giordano Bruno Society. Gade wrote about the “‘meaning-parasites’ who paralyze public debate” by not telling the truth. Truth-tellers are the radical right-wing Danish People’s Party, Karen Jespersen, and Kåre Bluitgen, who are known for their anti-Islamic involvement. What the “truth” is is not told; it is the debate that Gade is addressing. This Westergaard drawing is of a religious madman, or terrorist, with a concealed bomb. Presumably, the man is a Muslim, and “the truth” is represented by a ticking bomb. If unstopped, the bomb will explode. The cartoon’s caption illustrates the author’s core argument: “How immoral: The naked truth. How decent: The pure lie” (Gade 2005). Kurt Westergaard, who grew up in a Christian Right (Indre Mission) in Northern Jutland in the 1930s and during the Nazi occupation of 1940–45 (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 16), explained the bomb-in-the-turban cartoon: “The idea for the drawing was to illustrate that terrorists receive their spiritual ammunition from the fundamentalist part of Islam. It wasn’t directed at Muslims and Islam in general, but against that part which inspires to and exploits through death and destruction” (P. Thomsen 2006: 42).1

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Figure 23a. Kurt Westergaard’s illustration in Jyllands-Posten, 12 April 1997: “Theocracy in Iran as guilty of state terrorism.” This drawing was published in the opinion section, where it illustrated an opinion piece that finds the Iranian state engaged in terrorist activities. Source: Westergaard (1997)

Figure 23b. Kurt Westergaard’s illustration in Jyllands-Posten, 27 August 2005 Source: H.G. Jensen (2005)

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Unlike the earlier drawings, Rose’s invitation to draw “Muhammad as you see him” was a free illustration, where Westergaard did not have to illustrate a given text. Westergaard found the Arabic, Qur’an-style text for the turban—“Allah is great, Muhammad is his prophet” in a book about Islam (P. Thomsen 2006: 41). The text is the Shahada, the first pillar of Islam, “la ilah illa Allah, Muhammad rasool Allah,” and it means “No other God, only Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” One converts to Islam by saying the Shahada in the presence of witnesses. Moreover, this is also the one phrase Muslims use to communicate their Islamic faith to each other. Therefore, when the ticking bomb explodes the Shahada, it can be perceived as an attack on Muslims’ faith. In Egypt the saying is repeated daily as a way to say hello and goodbye, so when a person says, “Take good care” (“La ilah illa Allah”), another responds, “I will” (“Muhammad rasool Allah”). Egyptians use it everywhere—on the road, in schools, in the shops, and on the phone. Therefore Westergaard and Jyllands-Posten not only attacked the most important symbol of Islam (Muhammad) through publishing cartoons that were degrading to his personality and message, and by insisting that everyone accept the degradation by referring to free speech; they also attack the everyday greetings used as the announcement of Islam, which is contesting ordinary Muslims as well. Westergaard’s drawing connects the symbol, the religion, and the culture to terrorism. He therefore not only helped breed Islamophobia in Denmark but also succeeded in humiliating and disrespecting an important religion that is part of Danish society. The second fact that underscores the wish to provoke comes from Rose’s choice of participants for the project. Instead of repeating Bluitgen’s call for illustrators, Jyllands-Posten asked satirical cartoonists to draw caricatures of the prophet Muhammad “as they saw him.” Satirical cartoonists are by definition more provocative than illustrators. Third, two of the twelve cartoonists drew Bluitgen as an integrated part of their interpretation of the drawing assignment. Bob Katsenelson drew Bluitgen using an old Danish proverb for expressing excessive luck: “Receiving an orange in the turban.” Bluitgen’s orange in the turban bore this text: “PRstunt.” Cartoonist Annette Carlsen assigned him a similar role as the number seven in line-up of possible suspects of stirring up the claims of self-censorship. The suspect is obviously Kåre Bluitgen, who is the only one carrying a sign. The sign says “Kåre’s Publicity. Call and get an offer” (Kåres PR. Ring og få et tilbud). A third cartoonist, Peder Bundgaard, who drew the face of Muhammad with the Islamic star and crescent, felt provoked by the aggressive nature of those cartoons that were drawn by illustrators already working for Jyllands-Posten. “I feel that my colleagues and I have been lured into the swing by a newspaper whose motives have been self-assertion and provocation for the sake of provocation. Pushed to the extreme, it looks like as if

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mine and my colleagues’ harmless drawings have been used as hostages to legitimize Jyllands-Posten’s own permanently employed illustrators, who have delivered other widely different militant and provocative drawings” (Tuxen and Lerche 2005). The three interpretations emphasize the cartoonists’ recognition of the provocative nature of Bluitgen’s claims and Jyllands-Posten’s project. Bluitgen supposedly wanted to get attention about his forthcoming book on Islam, while Jyllands-Posten wanted to provoke Muslims. A fourth indication turned up when rival newspaper Politiken made a round of calls to the cartoonists. The journalists found that fifteen out of twentynine cartoonists who did not draw for Jyllands-Posten’s project said that they were against the idea itself and did not fear Muslim reactions. Some referred to it as “a campaign initiated by Jyllands-Posten” (Journalisten 2006). One cartoonist found it a bit suspicious that Flemming Rose gave little time to respond. He received the letter of invitation in the mail on Wednesday and was asked to respond by noon Friday—two days later. Cartoonist Lars Refn, who drew a second-generation migrant schoolboy named “Muhammed” pointing at a Persian text on the board—“The editorial team of Jyllands-Posten is a bunch of reactionary provocateurs” (Jyllands-Postens redaktion er en flok reaktionære provokatører)—felt that cartoonists were caught in a double bind. If they said yes they would offend Muslims; if they said no they would affirm “self-censorship” (P. Thomsen 2006: 34). A fifth indicator of Jyllands-Posten’s role in deliberately provoking Muslims can be seen in the fact that four cartoonists were tied in different ways to Jyllands-Posten. Three of them were directly employed—Kurt Westergaard (bomb-in-the-turban), Poul Erik Poulsen (man with turban with halo and possibly a pair of horns), and Rasmus Sand Høyer (man with gray beard, eyes covered by a black bar and flanked by two women in niqabs)—while a fourth, Erik Abild Sørensen, had retired from Jyllands-Posten (five times repeated schematic figures with the text “Prophet, you crazy bloke! Keeping women under yoke!” (Profet! Med kuk og knald i låget som holder kvinder under åget!). None of these responded to the assignment itself with any irony, and their cartoons are generally regarded as among the most controversial; five other drawings, on the other hand, to various degrees poked fun at JyllandsPosten’s initiative. Sixth, despite the dubious character of the project, the editor-in-chief of Jyllands-Posten decided officially to back up the project by devoting the paper’s 30 September editorial to the project. The editorial was called “The Threat of Darkness” (Truslen fra mørket): A provocation against one of these self-important imams or mad mullahs is immediately laid out as a provocation against the Prophet himself and the sacred book, the Qur’an and then we have the trouble. Then the Islamic spiritual leaders feel the need to grumble and from this follow an army of less

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spiritually equipped people that feel an urge to follow what is interpreted as the prophet’s commands and in the end killing the presumptuous. . . . Across the world satire is done on film, in theater and in books, but no one allows themselves to make fun of Islam. That is due to a horde of imams and mullahs who feel entitled to interpret the prophet’s word, cannot abide the insult that comes from being the object of intelligent satire. (Jyllands-Posten 2005b)

This editorial acknowledges outright that Jyllands-Posten wished to provoke Muslims who represent Islam in the Danish public. The twelve cartoonists dared to have their provocative cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten, not as a provocation of the Prophet and the Quran, but as a necessary provocation of “Islam’s hordes of imams and mullahs” and a good opportunity to make fun of them. Jyllands-Posten does not offer an explanation of how this distinction is meaningful. Moreover, the headline of the text accompanying the cartoons is “The Face of Muhammad,” and in Rose’s letter of invitation to the cartoonists the task is described as drawing Muhammad “as you see him,” which makes it difficult to maintain that the purpose is to insult imams, not the Prophet. In short, Jyllands-Posten was not covering a real-world event outside the media, such as an accident at a nuclear plant, a serious traffic accident, a politician caught lying, and so on; rather, it initiated and instigated the cartoon project itself and used it to make its own reproaching statements about Muslims and Islam.

Political Spin as Media Practice The phenomenon of political spin became germane in Denmark in 1998 after a stunning parliamentary election defeat that led the chairperson of the Liberal Party, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, to step down. Mesmerized by the new thought of overcoming the crisis of political communication between the party and its voters, the new party chairman, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, immediately hired a spin doctor, Henrik Quortrup, to help him get ahead of the opposition and be elected prime minister in the next election. Rasmussen had studied Philip Gould’s ideas (1998) and also visited Tony Blair’s advisers in London. Today, no other party in Denmark spends more money on political spin than the Liberal Party.2 Successful spinning helped the party to an overwhelming victory in November 2001 with a nationalist agenda and calls for tougher laws of integration of non-Western foreigners. One of the first steps for Prime Minister Rasmussen was to hire spin doctors for each of the cabinet members and introduce new practices for handling and feeding the press.

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Spin is not confined to politics; it refers more generally to representing or stating one’s case in a favorable light. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the United States, the use of spin increased dramatically as politicians tried to be efficient communicators in short sound bites. Spin communication evolved as a more systematic effort to proactively play on the media’s logic and actions (Høybye et al. 2007). According to Bill Press, “Spin is a variation on the truth; lying has no connection to the truth” (2002: xxxviii). More precisely, spin is the act of formulating rhetoric through a certain angle on the truth in the media by someone with a certain political interest to further (Press 2002). As such spin strategists are always aware of opposing views as they try to set the agenda, foreseeing how their case can be framed or associated with something positive, for instance, presenting themselves as heroes while opponents are villains or even terrorists (as in “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”). Spinning relates to the media and is a form of political communication, but usually refers to the strategy right behind the actual utterances in the news media (M.F. Nielsen 2004). One of the metaphors often invoked to explain spin is the baseball metaphor, in which putting a spin on the ball means adding that certain twist or rotation that gives the ball a curved path toward the receiver (Høybye et al. 2007: 12). The guys who work out the ways of spinning the ball, including the pitcher, would be spin doctors, or simply press secretaries, since they deal with a variety of political communication issues. Spin doctoring, contract policy, testing your message in focus groups, offering prepared statements, circulating talking points, priming, making sharp punch lines, planting histories, dividing journalists into a positively treated A team and a negatively treated B team, and weekly controlled press conferences are some of the many practices involved in this sort of political communication practice and preparation for the actual spin communication. In addition, there are the practices of choosing positive words rather than negative words, attacking your opponent rather than justifying yourself, and giving vague answers. These all relate to spin strategies that did not start with Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, but these were the political leaders who “broke the spinning wheel” (Press 2002). Spin is the actual communication, like the throw of the baseball, and is not to be mistaken for target group analysis, testing messages in focus groups. These activities are necessary preconditions for a working out a good political spin (Nielsen and Kock 2007:28). A recent example from the Danish political scene shows how government spin can try to shift what seems to be a losing political situation. In light of increasing criticism, the Danish government finally decided to withdraw approximately 500 Danish troops from Iraq. Upon their return in the summer

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of 2007, the media revealed that 330 million Euro had been wasted; several soldiers had died or were seriously wounded, while the security situation in Iraq had become worse since the Danes had first arrived. Iraqi men claimed in the television news that there was more terrorism now than when the Danes arrived. Faced with this negative scenario, Prime Minister Rasmussen launched a carefully designed spin to fend off the criticism. His spin on this issue made headlines even in the otherwise government-critical daily, Politiken: “We gave Iraq the offer about democracy that we had promised” (Davidsen-Nielsen 2007). Obviously, then, Iraqis were at fault for not wanting to accept the offer of democracy by the good, even heroic, Danes. In this chapter, spin is analyzed at the textual level, not through interviews with those people who were involved in the actual preparation and carrying out the spin strategies behind the scenes. The guiding methodological questions of my analysis have been the following: Where does the story come out? Why was this occasion used to say precisely this? Is it a single story? Who is coming out with what messages? Is the communication proactive or reactive? Who is to gain and who is to lose? (see M.F. Nielsen and Kock 2007). Answering these questions helps us to see how media coverage of the cartoon affair was managed.

Spinning the Cartoon Affair Cartoon Affair Initially, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the twelve cartoons on 30 September 2005, brought little coverage by domestic newspapers. Only with the emerging reactions from Muslim groups and others in early October did the media interest pick up. As such, this is not surprising. After all, Jyllands-Posten was following a pattern of provocations and Islamophobic news pieces that it had developed earlier (Andreassen 2007; Hervik 1999b, 2002a). Therefore, it was perhaps not surprising that the three most controversial drawings were drawn by three different cartoonists already employed by the paper itself (a fourth one, as noted above, had retired from JyllandsPosten); the accompanying text by cultural editor Flemming Rose, and the op-ed piece carried little news value for the rest of the country’s newspapers. The Muhammad cartoons were simply the latest step in a development that had taken place in the last fifteen years in Denmark. The Danish news coverage began with Muslim responses to the publication. Kristeligt Dagblad published the first journalistic coverage (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 31). Viewers in the Middle East and readers in Arabic could follow the Danish Muslim responses on 10, 12, and 15 October on both BBC’s Arabic Web site and Al Jazeera. Headlines included: “Condemning the

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insulting of a Danish newspaper on Islam,” “The Muslims of Denmark stand against the indignity campaigns toward Islam,” and “Demonstration by the Muslims of Denmark against Jyllands-Posten newspaper.” (BBC Arab.com 12 October 2005). One of the sources warns about the danger of violent reactions breaking out due to the contaminated Danish atmosphere: [Abdul Wahid] Pedersen—who also is one of the mosque imams of Danish origin—emphasized to Al Jazeera Net that such acts create contaminated atmospheres that could contribute in breeding animosity feelings and exacerbate violence and terror. Pedersen also said that even the moderate Christians refuse such drawings and consider it a misunderstanding in comprehending freedom of speech by crossing the red lines and insulting the sanctums. (BBC Arab.com 12 October 2005)

On 17 October, the Egyptian paper Al Faqr discussed six of the cartoons. Another example of international coverage in this early stage was French daily Le Monde, which published a front-page story on 18 October 2005, “Danish Cartoonists Threatened Because of Their Caricatures of Muhammad.” Journalist Oliver Truc explained the story: “By publishing this series of drawings, Jyllands-Posten wished to verify whether drawers are the victims of self-censorship. The newspaper sent an appeal to the cartoonists after a writer complained that nobody dared illustrate his book on Muhammad. Twelve drawers responded. Muslim organizations have asked the newspaper to apologize and to withdraw the caricatures. Unsuccessfully” (Truc 2005). Interestingly, Truc saw the event as symptomatic of the worsening of the situation for Denmark’s Muslims, who were already stigmatized in Danish media coverage. Truc also evokes Member of Parliament Louise Frevert’s comparison of Muslims to cancer and Muslim men as potential rapists. Frevert is a member of the Danish People’s Party who never “loses an occasion to ‘pour oil on the fire.’” (Boe, n.d). The government’s need for political spin came in October 2005. Eleven ambassadors from countries representing more than 730 million people had asked for a meeting with the government of Denmark to discuss concerns about the eruption of political violence following the cartoon publications. They wrote: Excellency, The undersigned Ambassadors, Cd’a.i. and Head of Palestinian General Delegation accredited to Denmark take this opportunity to draw your attention to an urgent matter. This pertains to ongoing smear campaigns in Danish public circles and media against Islam and Muslims. Radio Holger’s remarks for which it was indicted, DF MP and Mayoral candidate Louise Frevert’s derogatory remarks, Culture Minister Brian Mikkelsen’s statement on war against Muslims and

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Daily Jyllands-Posten’s cultural page inviting people to draw sketches of Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) are some recent examples. We strongly feel that casting aspersions on Islam as a religion and publishing demeaning caricatures of Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) goes against the spirit of Danish values of tolerance and civil society. This is on the whole a very discriminatory tendency and does not bode well with the high human rights standards of Denmark. We may underline that it can also cause reactions in Muslim countries and among Muslim communities in Europe. In your speech at the opening of Danish Parliament, Your Excellency rightly underlined that terrorists should not be allowed to abuse Islam for their crimes. By the same token, Danish press and public representatives should not be allowed to abuse Islam in the name of democracy, freedom of expression and human rights, the values that we all share. We deplore these statements and publications and urge Your Excellency’s government to take all those responsible to task under law of the land in the interest of inter-faith harmony, better integration and Denmark’s overall relations with Muslim world. We rest assured that you will take all steps necessary. Given the sensitive nature of the matter, we request an urgent meeting at your convenience. An early response would be greatly appreciated. Please accept, Excellency, best wishes and assurances of our highest consideration. (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 326–27; emphasis added)

The letter of concern is not exclusively about the cartoons but, rather, about three other separate incidents. A local radio station, Radio Holger, operated by neo-Nazis, had used anti-Islamic rhetoric on the air and was later closed by the authorities. Another racist incidence involved Member of Parliament Louise Frevert, who compared Muslims in Denmark with a cancerous tumor that had to be removed from Danish society (see R. Larsen 2005). A third incident referred to in the letter concerned cabinet member and Minister for Culture Brian Mikkelsen, who maintained that contemporary Muslims arrive in Denmark with Middle-Ages norms and anti-democratic ways of thinking. This is “the new front of the culture war,” claimed Mikkelsen (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 18). Mikkelsen was also responding to an increasing number of Danish groups who had voiced public concern about the degrading debate on immigrants in the Danish debate (see also Andreassen 2007). The prime minister ignored the ambassadors’ concerns and denied them a meeting. His decision was controversial, but at the time it was supported by several opposition politicians. Still, there was much debate and criticism, internationally as well as nationally. The meeting brought news media commentaries, many from the stunned ambassadors. Since the story could potentially become damaging for the government, it had to react. The ambassadors had written the prime minister, saying, “[We] urge your Excellency to take all those responsible to task under the law of the land in the interest of inter-faith harmony” (Jerichow and Rode 2006: 25; emphasis

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added). A similar letter was sent by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) a few days later. The Danish prime minister wrote back: Your Excellencies: Thank you very much for your letter of 12 October 2005. The Danish society is based on respect for the freedom of expression, on religious tolerance and on equal standards for all religions. The freedom of expression is the very foundation of the Danish democracy. The freedom of expression has a wide scope and the Danish government has no means of influencing the press. However, Danish legislation prohibits acts or expressions of a blasphemous or discriminatory nature. The offended party may bring such acts or expressions to court, and it is for the courts to decide in individual cases. I share your view that dialogue between cultures and religions needs to be based on mutual respect and understanding. There is indeed room for increasing mutual understanding between different cultures and religions. In this regard, I have personally taken the initiative to enter into a dialogue with representatives from the Muslim communities in Denmark. Furthermore, I would like to see the dialogue between Denmark and the Muslim world strengthened. Indeed, one of the principal objectives of the initiative “Partnership for Progress and Reform,” launched by the Danish Government in 2003, is to stimulate the dialogue between Denmark, the EU and countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The initiative explicitly aims to engage a broad spectrum of Danish institutions and organizations in partnerships with their sister organizations in the Arab world and Iran. The Partnership will in this way nurture institutional and personal friendships among our societies and increase mutual understanding of the values on which we base our societies. Yours sincerely, Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 329; emphasis added)

According to the spin interpretation, the ambassadors’ “taking to task under the law” became a request for a legal intervention and as such constituted putting a limit on the freedom of speech. Language experts looked at the prime minister’s response and concluded that the ambassadors’ letter was open to several interpretations and that the prime minister had chosen a negative one (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006; P. Thomsen 2006). Later the ambassadors responded by saying they were of course aware of the Danish legal system and they were not asking for legal interference. Nevertheless, the government spin—that the ambassadors were calling for legal interference—was repeated again and again by different politicians and in different media outlets. The spin was highly successful.

Damage Control From the time of the unfortunate rejection of the meeting with the eleven ambassadors, Denmark’s government continuously found itself in a situa-

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tion of crisis. The prime minister repeatedly referred to this as Denmark’s biggest crisis since World War II. The current crisis peaked in late January and early February 2006, with violent demonstrations and boycotts of Danish goods. From a spin perspective, throughout the crisis the assignment has been one of damage control, although with fluctuations of intensity. At least five major spin strategies can be identified in the media coverage, the aim of which was to put the prime minister in a favorable light and to portray the Muslims as the source of the problem. The first of the five strategies was the insistence that the cartoon issue was primarily about freedom of speech: you say either yes or no to free speech. I shall come back to this strategy in a moment. The second spin tactic was to personalize the prime minister’s disagreement with the publication of the cartoons.3 On 30 January 2006 Rasmussen did this and immediately made headlines. Third—and closely tied to the personalized statement—is offering an “apology,” a diplomatic opening, even though this apology lacks content. Instead, the message was: “We are sorry if your feelings are hurt. We had no intention of hurting them.” The underlying logic was: “If you are hurt, it is because you have misunderstood our intentions.” Fourth, spin doctors blamed and attacked the imams for stirring up trouble both domestically and in the Middle East. This spin turned out to be particularly strong and successful as a means of diverting attention from the troublesome offending cartoons and of not granting the ambassadors a meeting. In the fifth strategy, Muslims were told to solve the problems themselves, which is tied to the earlier spin of placing blame on the imams. They must take responsibility for the problems they have caused, and while they were the focus of attention, the prime minister’s role was diminished and gradually moved out of sight.

Free Speech as Political Spin The free speech spin was present throughout the media coverage, but it was particularly clear on 30 October 2005. Prime Minister Rasmussen chose Jyllands-Posten for a major interview: “Fogh: Freedom of Speech Must Be Used for Provocation,” which came as “a reaction to an explosive debate about the satirical drawings of the Prophet Muhammed.” The story was JyllandsPosten’s main feature on this Sunday, the day when the newspaper’s readership is highest. It was written by two journalists, and there were no signs of critical questions to the prime minister, who repeated the spin interpretation of the ambassadors’ letter as a request to “intervene with the press.” Rasmussen framed the emerging cartoon issue by saying: “What is fundamental in this case is that enlightened and free societies are more successful than un-enlightened non-free societies, exactly because some dare to provoke and criticize authorities, whether they are political or religious authorities.” He then let readers of Jyllands-Posten know that it is necessary

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to use free speech for provocation: “I will never accept that respect for people’s religious convictions should lead to constraints on the possibilities of the press for bringing critique, humour or satire” (Svane 2005). Terrorism is evoked twice in the interview in connection with the critical voices in the Danish debate: “I must say that the terrorists’ aim is to make us all so scared that we give up the fundamental values of our society” (Svane 2005). Svane wrote: “The prime minister strongly warns about selfcensorship, because it limits freedom of speech” (Svane 2005). Svane went on to quote him as saying: “It is thought-provoking that an author wanted to publish a book where cartoonists refused to be named. One can easily conclude that someone has reached their goal whether we call them terrorists . . .” (Svane 2005). In short, here the prime minister indirectly endorsed Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the cartoons and at the same time maintained his enduring spin, his twisted answer to the ambassadors’ request for a dialogue. The prime minister’s spin is part of the first frame (“Free speech is the issue, and it is a Danish issue”) that he expressed by declaring: “Certain countries lack basic insight into and understanding of what a true democracy is” (Svane 2005). Moreover, the spin can be seen from the response giving to a critique of Jyllands-Posten. A Palestinian political representative expressed the opinion that the drawings were an attack on Islam and Muslims. Rasmussen responded to the criticism by condemning the representative for not understanding what the principles of a true democracy are and what free speech is about (Svane 2005). In this way he managed to use the spin to transform the issue from an internal Danish question to a question about who understands free speech and who does not. Any criticism of the government was equated with not understanding the nature of democracy and freedom of speech. In our analysis of the Danish media coverage of the cartoons (or in any of the six journalistic and popular books that have come out in Danish on the cartoon affair)4 we have yet to find anyone who denies Jyllands-Posten the constitutional right to publish the cartoons. In this respect the story is not about free speech as a legal issue. According to classic liberalism, free speech is necessary for a well-functioning democracy. “Counter-arguments can and should be heard and learned from, so that in subsequent dialogue it is possible to achieve rational grounds for decision-making, public administration, and civilized citizenship. No one is complete or perfect; therefore a free and open debate based on credible information is necessary” (NOU 1999). The core of liberalism lies in the “idea of a free marketplace of ideas with its mechanism of self-righting truth” (Nordenstreng 2007). Free speech is not absolute, but regulated, and the principle that regulates the free speech in the public sphere is based on the confirmation of citizens who are socialized and educated into participating

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in public debate. The state is responsible for safeguarding a certain minimum quality of the debate by providing some rules. These rules come out via general education and through laws on racism, blasphemy, and libel (Information 2006). The legal aspects of free speech were only occasionally debated. Arguments about the offending character of the cartoons or some of the cartoons, their necessary or unnecessary provocative disposition, and their premature nature are themselves expressions of the functioning of free speech. They are also political statements within a politicized Danish news media. The person who criticizes, or even condemns, a certain utterance is not challenging free speech. You cannot, argues a Danish professor of law, defend this criticism of specific utterances or the depictions of Muhammad as a terrorist by referring to free speech. When one makes a response, one should stay within the same discourse to which one is challenged to respond (Zahle 2006). There is no reason for the prime minister not to involve himself in the (political) debate about the cartoons. Nothing prevents him from stating that he disagrees with the cartoon link between Muhammad and terrorism (Zahle 2006). Once the prime minister shifted the emphasis from the ambassadors’ concern to his own preferred spin (that he cannot interfere with the editorial process of a newspaper and that anyone who could not understand this did not understand the nature of free speech), then he has passed the point of no return. The denial of dialogue is unquestionable and will make any later “apology” appear to be insincere, which is precisely how, for instance, Pakistani and Indonesian news media interpreted the prime minister’s response (Daniels 2007; Shaukat 2006). In January and February 2006 the free speech spin took on a more polarized and Orientalist character at the expense of a debate over the growing concern about the negative effects of the rather fierce statements in the Danish news media. Instead of targeting individual imams in Denmark, countries whose governments criticized the cartoons were accused of not having free speech. In an interview with Al-Arabiya the prime minister explained: “I have a very important message to you: The Danish population has defended free speech and the freedom of religion for generations. We have a deep respect for all religions, including Islam, and it is important for me to tell you, that the Danish people have no intentions about insulting Muslims” (A.F. Rasmussen 2006).

Writing History The free speech spin reappeared domestically at a moment when the cartoon issue seemed to have peaked. On Sunday 26 February 2006 the prime minister gave an interview to Berlingske Tidende—another government-friendly newspaper which also has a larger readership on Sundays. Again, there were

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two journalists and no explicitly critical questions. Rasmussen’s prepared message was delivered as an unusual chastisement of Danish authors, newspapers, public intellectuals, and the business community. He explained that while violence was occurring around the world, Danes were navel-gazing—if, that is, they insisted on tying the response to the cartoons to the Danish immigration and integration politics. In the Muhammad crisis, Rasmussen maintained, “we” have found ourselves up against uncontainable forces. “We” implies Denmark, Danes, and the Western world against an Other composed of the Muslim world. This came out in Rasmussen’s blunt statement: “There is a crisis between Denmark and the Muslim World” (T. Jensen 2006). This much-reiterated spin statement insists that the issue is either supporting or suppressing free speech. As such, it is not unlike the Bush statement, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” (N. Thorsen 2006), which again is the same slogan used earlier by the Danish prime minister when he was criticized for Danish military engagement in Iraq. First, the prime minister established the dichotomy of two unassailable categories: “us,” the Danes who have free speech and have done nothing wrong, and “them,” the Muslim countries who do not have free speech and have done much wrong. Then he launched his critique against “certain intellectual circles,” “authors,” “newspapers,” and “parts of the business community” for not standing up for free speech during the crisis. Rasmussen went on and offered his own explanation for this failure: The failure resulted from an erroneous framing of the cartoon issue. Those people who do not stand up for free speech are those who do not want to align themselves with the Danish People’s Party, Jyllands-Posten, and the government—the alleged true defenders of free speech. The debate is not about whether Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the cartoons is a case of free speech. But by insisting that it is a free speech issue, the government can save face by deflecting attention from itself and blaming Muslims and Muslim countries. A former spin doctor, Lotte Hansen, explained the logic of the prime minister’s persistent and proactive emphasis on free speech as a question of history: “The interview is an attempt to write history. He is telling those who are going to write the history about this story that it was about free speech. . . . It is his attempt to make sure that the history of this case is written as an ideological question about free speech, where he stood firm while others hesitated” (N. Thorsen 2006; “Jersild og Spin” 2006). In this long-term political spin, Fogh Rasmussen wants the story to be remembered as a free speech issue and not as an expression of a government or a Danish newspaper with a neonationalist and an anti-Islamic agenda and a government with ambivalent diplomatic capabilities. And not surprisingly, many Danes subscribe to the free speech explanation and do not want to see

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their country in this light, which makes it easier to locate the source of the problem, and lay the blame, outside Denmark’s borders. According to Le Goff (and many other historians), “[T]here are at least two histories: that of collective memory and that of historians. The first appears as essentially mythic, deformed, and anachronistic. But it constitutes the lived reality of the never completed relation between present and past” (1992: 111), and collective memory is the dominant way of writing and rewriting history (Sturken 1997). Le Goff argues that there must be a second time around when historical information should illuminate collective memory and help it rectify its errors (1992). The collective memory of the Muhammad crisis as a free speech issue, between “us” who have it and “the Muslim Others” who do not, stems primarily from the news media’s coverage, which again has become more and more politicized in the recent decade. It seems as if the free speech argument has become the most successful political spin argument, with its inherent transformation of the debate. In fact, the debate in the Danish news is marred by this repeated assertion that “freedom of speech is a Danish freedom” and that foreign events such as demonstrations (violent and peaceful), burning of Danish flags, and boycotts are not examples of freedom of expression. The moral anger of some Danes is tremendous when it comes to the foreign reactions, but when it comes to the cartoon publications, the right to publish is the first thing invoked. Hence, the debate suggests that the free speech response is not much more than a reflection of the powerful, hegemonic dichotomization in Danish society of a positive “us” and a negative “them.”

Conclusion In the early phases of the cartoon story, free speech (or freedom of the press) was not the key issue, with two exceptions: Flemming Rose argued that free speech was used by Jyllands-Posten to ridicule and mock Islam, and the prime minister defended Jyllands-Posten and argued that it was necessary to use provocations. During the media debate no one ever denied Jyllands-Posten its right to publish the cartoons. Criticizing the cartoons was not a criticism of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are seen as cornerstones of Danish democracy. The fact that we were not able to identify one newspaper or individual person who denied Jyllands-Posten’s legal right to publish the cartoons demonstrates the unambiguous support that freedom of speech and freedom of the press enjoy in Danish society. But free speech became the issue with the spin launched in JyllandsPosten on 30 October 2005 Jyllands-Posten. After the unfortunate rejection

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of a meeting with the eleven ambassadors, the government found itself in a situation of crisis. The major spin strategy for the purpose of damage control was to insist that the issue was about free speech—who has it and who does not. The message was repeated and repeated, using the advertisement technique to hammer through the theme. Thus, when the day came, the issue would be perceived as one of free speech and not one of criticizing a neoracist, neonationalist, and anti-Muslim government and newspaper. In the process, the government, as well as the cultural editor, Flemming Rose, shared the arguments, and in the process, I argue, the issue was transformed from possibly discussing the limits of free speech (as expressed in JyllandsPosten’s unwillingness to publish cartoons of Jesus) to one of having free speech or not. In the frame “Freedom of speech as a human right with limitations,” the limits of free speech and the responsibility to test free speech were emphasized; however, attention was directed toward Islamists, who, the public was repeatedly informed, were the threat to be addressed. But this still was not really about free speech. The material we have looked at shows that few, if any, have defended Muslims’ (or others’) freedom of speech to criticize the cartoons or the freedom of expression to demonstrate against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish government, and Denmark. True free speech would involve demanding that the Muslims’ rights to free speech be underscored or defended, but they are not, as if Voltaire did not apply to Muslims. In general, the purpose of the spin-oriented government news management was and is: To hold the support of voters Save face in the presence of obvious blunders Control history as collective memory Be on the offensive, rather than being defensive and justifying Divert attention away from troublesome areas

The handling of the cartoon crisis showed clear signs of fulfilling these aims. Public attention was diverted from the ideological bond with neoconservatives, which, if it came out too strongly in the media, would be highly unpopular, since the Danish voting majority is anti-Bush (heavy reliance on neo-conservatives). Justification of government action (damage control) with free speech discourse also made it difficult to talk about the limits of free speech without turning it into an issue of having or not having freedom of expression. This continues to be the frame that dominates the controversy. Thus discussion about the limits of how far freedom of speech should be allowed to go tend to get drowned in the discourse of passionate, selfexplanatory, armchair absolutists (Gates 1993). This is the price we have to pay for the spin.

CHAPTER 9


A Political Struggle in the Field of Journalism



Denmark is a small nation of 5.5 million people. The state has often promoted itself as a lively democracy grounded in a wealthy society with open-minded and tolerant citizens. Rapid changes in the past decade, however—including an accelerated flow of immigration—have challenged this portrayal of Denmark (Hussain, Yilmaz and O’Connor 1997; Nannestad 2001). This challenge reached a new climax with the cartoon crisis. In this chapter I wish to move away from politicians’ use of news management to show how the Danish news media used the idea of freedom of speech in its coverage of the cartoon crisis. Everyone agrees that it was part of the newspaper’s constitutional right to freedom of speech in Denmark to publish the cartoons. Yet there is a wide range of opinion about just how to define the crisis and the concept of freedom of speech in regards to this issue. The debate on the cartoons, as it played out in the media, was highly political, and laden with sharp lines and colors that reflected conflicting interests in Danish society. My analysis reveals the tense relationship between Danish journalism and politics. The basis of this chapter is a study of the Danish media coverage from 15 January to 15 March 2006. These days were chosen in the collaboration with partners representing fourteen different countries and their coverage of the Muhammad cartoons, when the cartoons, the stories told about the cartoons, and the responses to them became a crucial part of the global news coverage (Kunelius et al. 2007). This is of course not to say that nothing happened on the Danish media scene in November, December of 2005, and early January of 2006. In October 2005, foreign news coverage of the cartoon story had increased. Dutch papers Elsevier and De Volkskrant were two of the first European papers to reprint one or more of the cartoons. On 4 November the Danish weekly Weekendavisen published an article on its petit journalism page called “In

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the Beard of the Prophet” (I Profetens Skæg) that pokes fun of the debate on Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons, along with a series of illustrations by artists from Weekendavisen. One example is the picture of a chair with the text: “‘This is the prophet’ it says in a short note from our designer of furniture, who also wanted to be part of the project” (Weekendavisen 2005). In the fall of 2005 an increasing number of Danish groups, such as Christian ministers (Hervik 2009; see also M. Mogensen 2008), former ambassadors (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006; Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006; P. Thomsen 2006), pedagogues, psychologists (French 2005), doctors, and authors (Brøgger et al. 2005; C. Andersen 2005b; Lerche 2005; for a general treatment of these protests see also Information 2005; Borg and Olesen 2006; Nicolaisen and Abdullah 2006) raised their concern for the development of the Danish debate about immigrants, descendants, and refugees. Strongest, perhaps, was the criticism by twenty-two retired ambassadors. One of them was Niels Ersböll, a prominent former ambassador to the European Union, who said: “It would have been reasonable, if the government at least had listened to the Muslim ambassadors. This could be done without in any way to sympathize with the spokesman’s threats. You can show an understanding for how people feel uneasy with their beliefs and persuasion without agreeing with them” (Davidsen-Nielsen, Hans and Emborg 2005). A protest by 12 authors also made headlines and continued to do so, as the number of protesting writers grew to more than 250 (Brøgger et al. 2005; Andersen 2005b; Lerche 2005). The eleven ambassadors did not succeed in getting a dialogue with the Danish government. But others did. The controversial Dutch-Somali Member of Parliament Hirsi Ali had more success. On 18 November she received the Liberal Party’s freedom prize during the annual meeting. Two Muslim delegations from Denmark travelled to the Middle East in December 2005 and immediately became the subject of a heated debate in the Danish media regarding their loyalty to Denmark and their role in mobilizing the support of Muslim institutions and government against Denmark. By late November the Danish embassy in Saudi Arabia had already received e-mails with threats of boycott of Danish goods (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006). In addition, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) had already organized its meeting in December 2005, with the cartoons featured as an intensely discussed issue. Newspapers began republishing the cartoons in January and February 2006. For many foreign newspapers, the republication functioned not as news coverage per se but as the media’s political statement of sympathy and solidarity with the Danish newspaper; several Danish editorial offices enthusiastically welcomed the new support.

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A Study of Danish Media Coverage in 2006 The purpose of our study was to analyze how the principle of freedom of speech was used by the media in covering the cartoon crisis and stories about the cartoon crisis. We used a “frame analysis” method inspired by Claes de Vreese’s (2003) “critical” approach: “Scholars in the critical tradition see news selection and news framing as intentional exclusion of some information and intentional inclusion of others. Within the critical approach much emphasis is placed on sponsors of frames suggesting that, for example, elite frames dominate media coverage” (de Vreese 2003: 10). Hence, we were searching for different framings of freedom of speech in order to disclose what interests were at stake for the individual newspapers. We began with the intent to sample all articles between 15 January and 15 March 2006 that referenced the cartoon crisis. A search for our keywords in the Danish newspaper database resulted in a formidable 12,115 articles that included the name “Mohammed” and 6,295 articles that included the phrase “freedom of speech,” confirming the intensity of the Danish media’s response to this event. We limited our sample by selecting seven newspapers and by analyzing editorials, columns, feature articles, and op-eds by Danish intellectuals and politicians directly related to the publishing of the twelve cartoons. We selected five mainstream newspapers—the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, the Politiken, the Berlingske Tidende, the Ekstra Bladet, and the B.T.—and two other papers targeted at more narrow audiences—Kristeligt Dagblad and Information. We ended up with a sample of 232 articles. Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten was established in 1871 and is now the largest newspaper in Denmark (see figure 24 for an overview of newspapers sold in 2006). Jyllands-Posten has declared itself an independent liberal newspaper, although it can be characterized as a government-friendly newspaper. Only in the late 1960s did it begin to be circulated nationally (Jensen 2000). Politiken was established in 1884. Today, it is known to oppose the present government and, as such, is closer to the Social Democratic Party and the Social Liberals with a leaning toward the latter. Berlingske Tidende, established in 1749, is a conservative newspaper that attempts to keep an unbiased position toward the present government. Ekstra Bladet was established in 1904. It is the largest tabloid in Denmark, known for its provocative and aggressive journalistic research. B.T., established in 1915, is the second-largest tabloid in Denmark. It categorizes itself as a popular family newspaper. Kristeligt Dagblad was established in 1896 and focuses (as its name indicates) on religious and existential questions. Information was established in

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Figure 24. Number of sold and read copies of newspapers during the peak of the Muhammad cartoon conflict Source: Berg and Hervik (2007)

1945 on the night of the end of German occupation. It can be categorized as a liberal newspaper. Nearly half the Danish population reads newspapers every day (Lund 2001). Newspapers aiming at immigrant readership or a Muslim readership do not exist in Denmark, although the need for one has recently been articulated (Rosenfeldt 2006).

Editorials Columns Feature article Op-eds Total

JyllandsPosten 10 7 7 30 54

Politiken 10 3 2 17 32

Berlingske Tidende 6 6 8 22 42

Information 11 3 2 18 33

Kristeligt Dagblad 3 1 3 22 29

B.T.

Ekstra Bladet 10 1 0 8 19

12 3 0 8 23

Table 3. Editorials, columns, feature articles, and op-eds by newspaper Source: Berg and Hervik (2007)

First we divided the 232 articles into those presenting views for or against publishing the cartoons. Then we conducted a content analysis, coding each article according to its use of keywords and chains of argumentation. We then grouped the material into three groups of articles, each representing a main frame of interpretation.

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News Coverage, 1–15 February 2006 First, we present a short overview of the news coverage during the first half of February 2006, during what later turned out to be the peak days in the unfolding of the cartoon crisis. For the sake of clarity, we limited ourselves to the coverage of the two largest newspapers, Jyllands-Posten and Politiken, which represented opposing views. During this period, both Politiken and Jyllands-Posten devoted a section of the paper to articles related to the cartoons. Both newspapers had, on average, ten articles on the topic, spanning three to four pages. Politiken used the entire front page between 1 and 15 February for news about the cartoons and reactions around the world. Jyllands-Posten gave space to other news articles on the front page and, on several occasions, placed a short extract of its editorial beside the news on the front page.

A National Crisis From 1 to 5 February 2006, the perspective of both Politiken and JyllandsPosten was largely domestic, focusing on the apologies offered by JyllandsPosten and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The global perspective was visible mostly on the front pages of both newspapers, which presented large pictures of angry protestors burning Danish flags. These actions were presented as something “out there”; the paper’s real focus was on domestic events. Articles discussed whether the apology by Jyllands-Posten was adequate or too vague. When Politiken referred to Jyllands-Posten’s apology, journalists wrote, “With Jyllands-Posten’s attempt of an apology . . .”; Jyllands-Posten itself wrote, “With the apology of Jyllands-Posten . . . .” Bomb threats against Jyllands-Posten were also reported, along with declarations of sympathy from fellow journalists. After February 2 the domestic perspective was widened to include a European perspective, as papers all over Europe published some or all of the cartoons. Politiken reported on this event on the front page with a government angle, with a large picture of the face of a rather stressed prime minister: “Action taken by European press might ease the pressure on Anders Fogh” (Munck, Ringkøbing and Cordsen 2006). Jyllands-Posten presented the same news on the front page with the headline “Newspapers All Over Europe Print Mohammed Cartoons” and a photo of France Soir (Munck, Ringkøbing and Cordsen 2006). Its second article on the front page ran under the headline “Fogh—Conflicting Views Are Being Spoken,” referring to Muslim extremists who supported freedom of speech when speaking to the Danish press, but expressed the opposite view to the Arab press.

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On the following two days Jyllands-Posten’s articles concentrated on freedom of speech and the support from European newspapers. “Defense” and “support” were keywords in these articles. The news in Politiken was, to a higher degree, focused on the prime minister’s interview with the Arab press and the Muslim reactions after Friday prayer. Politiken included articles criticizing the prime minister and the Danish government’s handling of the case. This critique, visible in the headlines in Politiken, was missing in Jyllands-Posten.

Muslim Voices Imam Abu Laban and Ahmed Akkari, from the Islamic Society in Denmark, were the dominant Muslim sources in coverage of domestic events by both Jyllands-Posten and Politiken. Apart from these so-called “extremists” in the media, the liberal politician Naser Khader, representing the moderate Muslim view, was quoted frequently in both papers. Abu Laban and Akkari were frequently presented as criticizing Naser Khader for not being a true Muslim and for being unsupportive. Naser Khader was presented as criticizing Laban and Akkari: “If the imams do not like the smell in the bakery they might as well find another place to live” (Borg 2006). Other Muslim voices were presented as well. Politiken printed the diary of a Muslim resident in Basra, giving his opinion of the cartoon crisis and its development. Both newspapers included micro-level stories about Muslims in Denmark. Thus, a limited number of Muslim voices, but mainly those on the extremist end of the spectrum, were heard in the news.

A Global Crisis Between the Arab and the Western Worlds On 5 February, both newspapers ran large photos of the Danish embassy set on fire in Damascus. From that point forward, both papers referred to the crisis as a global crisis between the Arab and the Western world. Denmark was in the middle of a global crisis. The dominant explanations provided for why this crisis exploded differed significantly in the two newspapers. Next to Politiken’s news reporting on the revolts in Syria on 5 February appeared articles exploring why the Syrian people reacted this way. One was written by the former editor-in-chief, Herbert Pundik, a regular columnist at Politiken, who argued that Denmark is a symbol of the West and that the violent reactions reflected Arabs’ frustration with the West (Pundik 2006). Politiken regularly printed articles by Danish journalists, university professors, and Arab journalists arguing that the crisis was a result of the West’s mistreatment of the Middle East. Another article in Politiken on 5 February, “Syrian Dictatorship Threatened from Within,” was written by the journalist Anders Jerichow, who explained the reactions by pointing at the internal

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frustrations with the regime in Syria (Jerichow 2006). This explanation was dominant in Jyllands-Posten’s news as well. Politiken reported on a meeting, where 500 “moderate Muslims” showed up with their leader, Naser Khader. This initiative was meant to show another picture of Muslims in Denmark, rather than the one represented by the Danish imams. On its front page, Jyllands-Posten also noted the responsibility of the Syrian government to get the demonstrations under control. Inside the newspaper, the article continued with quotes from Naser Khader (Syrian-born) and a Danish university professor in international relations. Below a photo of the burning embassy on the front page ran the bomb-in-the-turban cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed (one of the original twelve cartoons) with a big red line across it, symbolizing a ban due to the violent reactions.

Hatred of Denmark On 6 February, the headline on the front page of Politiken ran: “Hate against Denmark: The Danes Started the Fire Themselves—Now They Have to Take the Consequences,” quoting the words of angry demonstrators in Beirut (Flamand, Seidelin and Jarlner 2006). This headline was followed by a photo of the streets of Beirut in fire and a man in distress. Another smaller article dealt with the Danish forces in Iraq and a dispute among politicians about whether they should stay. The section on the Muhammad cartoons had a new name: “Hatred against Denmark.” It showed a map illustrating the reactions across the Middle East. An interview with a Christian Arab journalist in Beirut, Rami Khouri, explaining the danger of making generalizations about the Arab response, ran under the line “If you choose freedom of speech as the most important, then you must know that it causes repercussions.” Jyllands-Posten ran the same photo on their front page with the headline “The Fire Is Spreading.” The day’s editorial suggested that the development of the crisis seemed to be in the hands of extremists who did not want dialogue. A large part of the section on the crisis covered Danish dialogue initiatives. It included a large photo of a Danish demonstration that was advocating dialogue. The news articles argued that the cartoons were not the real reason for the reactions—that they only catalyzed Middle Eastern frustrations against their regimes. Two articles reported on the United States, which was supporting Denmark and NATO and linking condemnation of the riots in the Middle East with supporting freedom of speech.

Freedom of Speech or National Security In the following week both papers reported daily about demonstrations and ongoing violence throughout the world in reaction to the cartoons. The gen-

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eral theme of Jyllands-Posten’s coverage between 5 and 15 February was that the violent reactions confirmed that the West needed to defend freedom of speech. The newspaper interviewed three prominent religious persons in Denmark (a priest, a bishop, and a rabbi) between 8 and 11 February, all declaring that it was time to stand up for freedom and democratic rights. It ran an interview with Dutch writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali on 9 February under the headline “The Caricatures Ought to Be Shown Everywhere.” The subtitle was: “Idealist. You cannot just like that sell your freedom of speech.” The news coverage in Politiken did not link the violent reactions to freedom of speech. It framed the story in terms of national security and focused on the actions taken by the Danish government. The tone was clearly critical. For example, on 9 February a headline on the front page read: “Syrian Minister: Fogh Only Makes the Crisis Worse,” quoting Syrian minister Bouthaina Shaaban. A front-page headline on 13 February read: “Severe Muslim Critique of Fogh’s Meeting with Democratic Muslims.” Jyllands-Posten covered this story as well, but with a much shorter article on an inside page. Overall, during this peak period of coverage in early February, Politiken ran twelve front-page articles and ten editorials on the government’s handling of the crisis; Jyllands-Posten ran only one front-page article, and no editorials on the government’s response.

Misinformation or an Intentional Smear Campaign against Muslims? A picture of a man with a pig’s nose created considerable debate in the Danish press. Danish imams had brought this picture with them to the Middle East as part of the material supposedly connected to the original twelve cartoons. Further investigation revealed that the picture had never been printed in the Danish newspapers in relation to the prophet Mohammed. It was originally from a totally different context—a French festival celebrating pigs. When this was discovered, Jyllands-Posten accused the Danish imams of being partly responsible for the violent reactions in the Middle East. Politiken launched its own investigation about why the imams had this picture with them. They discovered that the imams had used the picture to show that a smear campaign against Muslims was going on in Denmark. Several Muslims in Denmark had received the picture in the mail from anonymous senders, along with a note telling them to pack their bags and go home. These notes also denigrated the Qur’an, saying that it should be used as toilet paper. Jyllands-Posten ran three front-page articles and three editorials on this story between 5 February and the end of the month. Politiken put considerable journalistic effort into understanding the Danish delegation’s travel to the Middle East and in so doing countered the negative framing of the story in Jyllands-Posten. For instance, on 21 October

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2005, after Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refused to meet with eleven ambassadors from Muslim countries, Politiken translated the letter to the prime minister from the ambassadors to reveal their intention for the meetings. The newspaper concluded that the ambassadors wanted dialogue with the prime minister, as they were concerned about a “smear campaign conducted Muslims and their religion in the Danish public circles and media.” (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 328). Jyllands-Posten and Politiken framed the news differently; their response to the government’s handling of the crisis was the point where the biggest disparity in coverage can be seen. Politiken used its translation and coverage of the story to criticize the prime minister and the government’s handling of the crisis. Its editors cited the prime minister’s refusal to meet with the ambassadors as a main reason for the global reactions. Jyllands-Posten attacked Politiken’s research as a campaign against the government (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006). Freedom of speech was the dominant frame for making sense of the cartoon crisis in both papers, which may be based on the political statements of the Danish prime minister, particularly in the interviews given to JyllandsPosten on 30 October 2005 and to Berlingske Tidende on 26 February 2006.

Danish Frames of Interpretation We identified three different perspectives or frames in our content analysis of the articles in the seven papers selected for the study. Thus we have a quantitative basis for exploring how the seven newspapers and public intellectuals responded to the crisis. Starting from Entman’s (1993) account of what goes into frames of references, we have set up some fairly simple operational questions to help us answer our research question and identify the different frames: What is the problem? Who created the problem? What actors are presented in what roles? Who are the good ones; who are the bad ones? What can be done? What is the language of the frame—what wording is used to create it?

Three frames emerged from the answers to these questions: “Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom,” “freedom of speech as a human right, with limitations,” and “the demonization of Muslims, not freedom of speech, was the core.”

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Frame 1: Freedom of Speech as a Danish Freedom Those writing from the frame of “freedom of speech as a Danish freedom” saw the publication of the twelve cartoons as a fight for freedom of speech against rigid Islamic rules (as illustrated in Carlsen 2006, quoted in the beginning of the previous chapter). We find this reasoning in political commentator Ralf Pittelkow’s columns in Jyllands-Posten: “The case of the Muhammad cartoons is in fact quite simple. It is a matter of: Are we supposed to introduce restrictions in the Danish freedom of speech out of consideration to Islam?” (Pittelkow 2006b). The radical right-wing political leader Pia Kjærsgaard also supported this understanding, saying, “[T]his crisis has never concerned cartoonists or cartoons. Not at all. This crisis is a battle between values—between on the one side a dogmatic, dictatorial way of society without room for democracy and diversity, with forced faith for some and forced infidelity for the rest of us, and on the other side our free, democratic, tolerant, and developed society” (Kjærsgaard 2006). The authors who wrote in this frame argued that Jyllands-Posten printed the twelve cartoons to test whether there was self-censorship in Denmark due to fear of Islamic rules. The cartoons themselves are portrayed as innocent; the global reactions confirm the existence of this fear and self-censorship. This confirmation led them to the conclusion that freedom of the press was threatened in Denmark. The dominating discourses on Islam in these articles are violence and intolerance. Islam and Islamic societies were seen as negative, while “our Danish society” was seen as positive. The frame is constructed as using freedom of speech against the self-censorship rising as a result of fear of Islam. References were made to other events of purported religious persecution, presumably to stir up stronger feelings of fear. These events included the fatwa on Salman Rushdie; the killing of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh; the beating of a Danish professor by Arab men after he had read phrases from the Quran to his class; the difficulties that author Kåre Bluitgen encountered when he sought drawings of the Prophet Muhammad for his book; and the beating of a Jewish professor from the Carsten Niebuhr Institute by three Arabic-speaking men for having read aloud from the Qur’an. According to an editorial in Ekstra Bladet on 2 February 2006: The new oppositions in our country became visible when a Jew—that is—infidel—professor from the Carsten Niebuhr Institute was beaten up by three Arabic-speaking men. The Jew ventured to read loud from the Qur’an! The fear spread when no cartoonist dared to illustrate the children’s book by Kåre Bluitgen concerning the Prophet Muhammad—for fear of losing their lives. Was freedom of speech threatened? Jyllands-Posten tested this by inviting cartoonists to illustrate Muhammad in the paper. Some dared, others did not—struck by self-censorship.

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Minimal cues to the context of these individual events are given. The professor mentioned in the quote from Ekstra Bladet’s editorial was categorized, for instance, as a “Jew” and later as “the Jew.” This labelling was a simplification of facts, since the professor was of Jewish origin, born in Morocco of Jewish and Arabic parents. The example shows how this framing leaves no room for nuances. In addition, the quote represents Kåre Bluitgen’s difficulties as though they were facts. Other reporters have explored these “difficulties” further and found that none existed; Bluitgen had communicated with only three cartoonists (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006). “Threat,” “fear,” “pressure,” and “self censorship” are keywords used in articles framed from this perspective to justify the printing of the cartoons. This fear was presented in opposition to the value-laden words “freedom,” “trust,” “democratic,” and “Danish.” B  W W

Articles written from this frame positioned the cartoon crisis in black and white terms, with dichotomies of good versus bad, and “us” versus “them.” This dichotomized framing is illustrated below in a quote from a column by a former minister from the Social Democratic Party, Karen Jespersen, who became a regular columnist at Berlingske Tidende, and who joined the prime minister’s party, the Liberal Party, for a period as minister of social welfare: “[W]e have to acknowledge that a considerable number of versions of Islam simply do not support rights of freedom, such as we know them. This has been stressed quite strongly by the current conflict concerning the Muhammad cartoons” (Jespersen 2006). Added Pittelkow in Jyllands-Posten, “This [freedom of speech] is a basic feature of our society and not some arbitrary matter of secondary importance, which we could give up. The Danes’ free debate and critique of authorities is contributing strongly to our world record in mutual confidence and existential satisfaction” (2006b). These quotes illustrate how “we” were portrayed as the “good” who supported freedom in opposition to Islam. “We” were presented in a positive light, which left the reader to see the “other” as purely negative (Wodak 1996). Such presentations constructed a simplified worldview, with the Danish society representing an ideal, while the Muslim societies represented fear, repression, and submission to strict rules. This black and white perspective is further strengthened by the presentation of stories with other examples of repression from the Muslim world or Islamic societies, such as decapitation, female repression, and stoning. Asger Nørgaard Larsen, chairperson for the Jyllands-Posten Foundation, made use of such examples early on in his op-ed: “One feather quickly becomes a whole chicken farm of misunderstandings and bizarre lies in that part of the world, where democracy and thereby freedom of speech only concern the infidels,

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and where the religious guideline in society often demands extreme suppression of women, stoning or beheading for adultery” (Larsen 2006). An editorial on 1 March in Ekstra Bladet did the same: However, it is simply abuse of language to expect that Danish Christians, Jews, or pagans have to show respect toward a religion whose practice goes against human rights. In Islamic model societies such as the Saudi Arabian, women are held in herds as veiled slaves. People are decapitated on the main square. Whipping is an ordinary penalty. Stoning of infidel women is an accepted sanction. Other religions are banned. A free press does not exist.

It is a portrayal of a world we readers can only fear. Such writing preys upon our fear—fear of a world that is different from our own. In this dichotomized “black-and-white” worldview, only “we” and “they” exist; if you do not identify with “us,” you must be one of “them.” “They” are portrayed as against “freedom” itself. The story is framed as a battle between values or a clash of cultures. D  “A”

Freedom of speech is seen as a fundamental freedom in Danish society. Limitations on that freedom would mean that “our freedom” is being threatened. An example of this is demonstrated in a 28 February editorial in Jyllands-Posten: Everybody protects freedom of speech, it is said. However—then it comes: We have to show consideration. We have to show consideration toward religious feelings, say the “sole” defenders of freedom of speech. No, we only have to show consideration toward freedom of speech. It stands above religion. If we say “freedom of speech,” but then we have renounced the most important basis of democracy. That is why we have to repeat the judgment toward the failing writers: It is pathetic. It is without honor. It is despicable.

Here we see a discourse of absolutes, which is also present in the interview with the prime minister. Words and phrases such as “care for religious feelings,” “consideration,” and “apology” are labelled as “naïve,” “ridiculous,” and “despicable.” The people who are noted for using them are seen as Islamist supporters. They directly challenge the logic beneath the frame. Those who use such language are referred to in a condescending way. Those defending religious rights are made to appear ridiculous through the exaggeration of some elements of their arguments (Wodak 1996). T “G”   “B”

The main actors in this story were the Danish imams, the Islamist dictators/ sheiks/rulers, the eleven ambassadors, left-wing politicians, intellectuals, writers, government critics, newspapers, and the prime minister.

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The prime minister was portrayed on the good side in the battle because he defended Jyllands-Posten’s right to print the cartoons, because he did not criticize the character of the cartoons, and because he stood firm in his defense of freedom of speech. Those who wrote from this frame often referred to his 26 February 2006 interview in Berlingske Tidende, lending his authority to their arguments. Words associated with the prime minister were “right,” “strong,” and “firm.” His refusal to meet with the eleven ambassadors was used to demonstrate that he stood firm on his principles. Different newspapers were also seen as either good or bad. Ekstra Bladet, B.T., and Jyllands-Posten were portrayed as good. Jyllands-Posten was often portrayed as a pioneer of good journalism, while Politiken and Berlingske Tidende were seen as bad, as exemplified in an editorial in Ekstra Bladet: “The large morning papers joined the choir of worried, know-all, and frightened monkeys” (Ekstra Bladet 2006d). Politiken and Berlingske Tidende did not support the cartoons because they saw them as an unnecessary provocative disposition. Therefore, those papers were seen as enemies. A key element in this frame was the idea of a “battle,” which involved identifying the “other” as one’s enemy. These kinds of personal attacks on newspapers, their editors, intellectuals, and businesspeople were, for the most part, seen in editorials. Critics of the cartoons were categorized as “left-wing,” “cultural relativists,” and the “politically correct elite.” Although they all agreed on the right to print the cartoons, their criticism of the motive to publish or the character of the cartoons placed them in opposition to freedom of speech. Publishing the cartoons was turned into an issue of freedom of speech, while criticism of those criticizing the cartoons was not an issue of freedom of speech, as is seen in the following statement: The controversy is not about the right to print the cartoons, but about the use of freedom of speech. The core of the controversy was and still is that we as non-Muslims have to conform to the Muslim prohibition against pictures, not at least satirical pictures of Muhammad. To a newspaper the natural way to show solidarity with Jyllands-Posten’s refusal to follow such a restriction on freedom of speech would be, as many newspapers luckily have done: print the cartoons. (Pittelkow 2006a)

T D I

The Danish imams were the ones who were held responsible for instigating the global reactions through “lies and misunderstandings.” Historian and journalist Lars Hedegaard furthered this perception of the imams: “Shortly after the travel team of the imams had been to the Middle East to spread lies about the country, which had opened its arms to them, the message was that the Muhammad case would be part of Danish press history” (L. Hedegaard

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2006b). The word “imam” was often paired with words such as “lies,” “scary,” “slimy,” and “deceiving.” The dramatic development of the crisis globally, the violence, and the boycott of Danish products were seen as resulting from their actions. The imams were often seen in connection with the Middle East, “dictators,” “Islamists,” and “Sheiks.” A L  F

The fuel of this frame is fear: fear of Islam, Islamists, and the Middle East. The strategy is to be aggressive at first, attacking the global reactions as disproportional. The cartoons are then presented as harmless. All responsibility for the crisis is placed on the Muslim response, particularly the Danish imams and the rulers in Muslim countries. Critics of the cartoons are marginalized as not understanding or upholding freedom of speech. The Danes are presented as upholding the truth. At times the truth is coupled with the portrayal of the Danes as a free and happy people. Stories written in this frame portray the threat to this happy life if Islamists took over the country: We might as well get rid of the scientific study of history and most of the human sciences as well as most aspects of exact sciences that oppose the holy writings of Islam. The curriculum of primary school has to be adjusted to fit to Islamic instructions in centers of knowledge. Artists will need to watch over their shoulder, before they become too naughty. Because beneath the Muslim culture it is tradition to cut the throat of liberal people. (Hedegaard 2006a)

Hedegaard’s article portrays a most unlikely scenario, but from the perspective of this frame, it makes sense, since only good and bad exist, and nothing can be in between. There is no room for dialogue.

Frame 2: Freedom of Speech as a Human Right, with Limitations In this second frame authors positioned their coverage within the understanding of freedom of speech as a human right, limited not only legally but also out of consideration toward others. The frame emerged as the global reactions to the publication of the cartoons escalated, particularly after the prime minister’s interview in February 2006. The authors in this frame initially saw the printing of the cartoons as a way to test the existence of self-censorship in Denmark. Their argument was that freedom of speech gave them the right to publish the cartoons, no matter how provocative they might seem to some. The editor-in-chief of Berlingske Tidende, Niels Lunde, put it this way: It all began with Jyllands-Posten’s wish to test the Danish self-censorship. The newspaper was entitled to publish the cartoons, as other papers were entitled

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to assess that it was an unnecessary provocation which could be experienced as offensive. Jyllands-Posten has cried out for support from other Danish newspapers. The newspaper has, of course, all the time been given this support. . . . Freedom of speech is however not a new religion, a sacred thing, which we have to hit other people with just to show that we have it. Our free word is our inalienable right. However, this does not prevent you from thinking before you speak. (Lunde 2006)

Niels Lunde and his paper, Berlingske Tidende, supported the right to publish the cartoons, but did not want to publish the drawings which they believed exceeded the limit of what was decent and socially responsible. Writers made little mention of the national context of the crisis. They identified the problem from a global perspective as the threat of Islamism. This perspective is seen in two editorials from Berlingske Tidende and Information, the former of which stated, “The Muhammad crisis is something entirely different and more fundamental: A global confrontation with fascism in the shape of Islamic extremists and the mistreated people in Middle Eastern dictatorships, which is a safe place to follow religious fascism” (Berlingske Tidende 2006). The point is that the fight against totalitarianism in the current context has to be conducted as a fight against the specific forms of repressions of the totalitarian thinking rather than against a diffuse “Islamism.” The fight has to include the repression of women, of speech, faith, and freedom of assembly, of other human rights (Information 2006b). The editorials frame the crisis as a “global confrontation,” “a global fight” against repression, submission, and a lack of human rights. The cartoon crisis is linked to human rights issues around the world, particularly oppression related to “totalitarianism” and a “diffuse Islamism.” R   V  I

The threat of Islamism necessitates a defence of freedom of speech and, more generally, universal human rights. Those writing from this perspective remind us that freedom of speech is a universal human right that all newspapers are entitled to, not just Danish papers: “When we defend freedom of speech we have to at the same time be aware of the fact that it is also the freedom of speech of the Jordanian newspaper publisher we are defending” (Information 2006a). At the same time, many of the articles belied a “we versus them” mentality, pitting defenders of freedom of speech and human rights against the victims: repressed people, repressed women, and victims of Islamism (see Said 1978; Wodak 1996). Although most sponsors of this second frame are careful to distinguish between being “Muslim,” “Islamist,” and “fundamentalist,” they easily slip into generalized statements about Islam as a religion. One fundamental di-

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chotomy appearing in these articles was one between Islamic and Christian worldviews: Islam is the opposite [of Christianity]. Islam is almighty and infallible, a religion of law, a system, where faith and the law are connected, where the answers to all existential questions are to be found in the holy book. They are not to be discussed and they are definitely not to be mocked. We must understand that some Muslims in this country too have a fundamentally different way of thinking than us, and some of them simply will not accept our way of life and our democratic values. (Lunde 2006)

The author, chief editor Niels Lunde, went on to portray Islam as a unified religion always practiced in the same way, without recognizing that it is much more complex. When he mentioned Muslims, he used the qualifier “some,” stressing that he was not talking about all Muslims. However, he did not distinguish whether he was speaking of fundamentalists or Islamists. These “Muslims” were simply portrayed as different from “us” Danes. T N  R

As global reactions to the cartoons became more violent, this second frame emerged more clearly. Some of this reaction can also be tied to the February 2006 interview with the prime minister. Here is one example of the connection: The situation is now this: the prime minister, Jyllands-Posten, and several other commentators attacked those who do defend freedom of speech but who attach this small word “however.” All of them who attach [this word] are, as far as one understands, a step away from reducing freedom of speech. The prime minister has categorized these people, media, and businesses as goats, those who failed, because they—and we—attach a “however.” But we are not the only ones. Freedom of speech is actually in the Danish law provided with several “howevers.” (Sørensen 2006)

This editorial argued that freedom of speech has to be limited out of respect for others, noting that these limitations are written into the Danish law. However, this point was often overshadowed by the frame’s focus on Islamism as the real threat. T G I

The main actors in this crisis were the prime minister, Jyllands-Posten, the Danish imams, Islamists, and mistreated populations. The prime minister and Jyllands-Posten were portrayed as admirably stubborn in their fight for freedom of speech, in categorizing these limits on freedom of speech as a betrayal of freedom of speech. According to an editorial in Information, the Danish imams were held partly responsible for the global reactions: “It has

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to be stated that the globalization of the conflict with the following mass hysteria, which has much to do with the pertinacious intervention by the Danish imams, has outlined some boundaries and fundamental differences’” (Information 2006). Assigning responsibility for the development of the crisis to the imams deflected responsibility away from the Danish government. It belied the persistence of the divisive “we versus them” thinking. Islamists and Islamism were portrayed as representing a threat to freedom of speech. A L  S

The language of sympathy and respect for human rights characterized the articles of the second frame. Articles were grounded in notions of human rights, understanding, respect, and sensibility. Authors argued that the real problem was Islamism and submission to this kind of totalitarianism. Arguments were presented from a global perspective, with a sense of responsibility toward everyone, whereas the opponent’s point of view was not represented. Freedom of speech must be limited to respect the rights of all. Yet many of these articles belied an underlying bias toward freedom and rights based on ethnocentric terms.

Frame 3: The Demonization of Muslims, Not Freedom of Speech, Was the Core The third frame that emerged in our analysis of the articles—the demonization of Muslims—can be seen as the opposite of frame 1, or even a reframing of frame 1. As Lakoff reminds us, negating a frame also evokes and reinforces it. Those writing within this frame were well-known Danish public intellectuals. Most of these articles were op-eds, editorials, and feature articles. Even those authors in this frame defended Jyllands-Posten’s right to print the cartoons: At Politiken we have from the beginning defended Jyllands-Posten’s right to make a fool of themselves. An inalienable part of freedom of speech is to make a fool of oneself and write, draw, or say the wrong thing. Often it is not until we end up in the encounter between right and wrong that we can identify what is right, as John Stuart Mill has expressed it. That is why we do not support a resignation of the editor-in-chief. (Politiken 2006b)

In her op-ed in Politiken, law professor Eva Smith described this climate of criticism as ordinary: “Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons were just a brick in an everyday climate of criticism and disbelief toward Muslims. ‘That will give them a lesson.’ And that is why nobody made protests. . . . The cartoons were the last straw” (2006). The cartoons were repeatedly portrayed as the straw that broke the camel’s back:

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Islam is under attack in Denmark and has been for some time, especially after September 11. Muslims have been prevented from building Mosques, from making burial places, from wearing scarves and holding meetings. Muslims have been pestered in the streets with words and with slaps. Muslim stores and clubs are vandalized. Muslims are kept under surveillance, are being arrested, and are being portrayed in the press as uncivilized and “abnormal,” if not terrorists. The cartoons were the last straw. Let us kick those who are already lying down. Islamophobia is raging. Muslims in Denmark must react; anything else would be unnatural. (S. Thorsen 2006)

Thorsen explains that the drawings reveal how Islam and Muslims are perceived and treated in Denmark. They are portrayed as a suppressed religious group. Accordingly, writers often paralleled the persecution of Muslims with anti-Semitism. The cartoon crisis was portrayed as evidence of a growing Islamophobia. The crisis was portrayed in these articles as one of religious intolerance rather than one of freedom of speech. An example is seen in historian Rune Engelbreth Larsen’s regular column in Politiken: The editor-in-chief at Jyllands-Posten, Carsten Juste, has once again chosen to pick on the paper’s favourite victims, the Muslims. Several times he has drawn attention to the fact that Danish Christians in opposition to Muslims have “experienced” indignation from witnessing religious symbols being demeaned and mocked. But where was Juste’s fight against self-censorship in the case concerning Jesus’s sandals? (2006)

The case in reference was one in which sandals were taken off the shelves of a department store in response to critical voices in the Christian community. This became a news story, but was soon forgotten. Freedom of speech and self-censorship were never mentioned in this case (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006). Some argued that freedom of speech had emerged in the Muslim issue due to political spin and in reaction to the two interviews with the prime minister. M S

Although an important intention of these articles was to frame the crisis as something other than a case of freedom of speech, freedom of speech was included in the discussion. An example of this was offered by former foreign minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen in Berlingske Tidende: However, this is not a case of jurisprudence; it is about moral stance. The question is solely where to set the limits in practicing freedom of speech. JyllandsPosten has clearly demonstrated that limits do exist. This was demonstrated as the management turned down publishing caricatures of the Holocaust. In my opinion, it was a correct decision. However, it proved that limits do exist, and therefore the discussion ought to go into whether these limits have been

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broken with the publishing of the Muhammad caricatures. (Berlingske Tidende 2006)

Arguments for morals, respect, and limits are pitted against the principle of freedom of speech. Articles in this frame demand more complexity and responsibility in understanding freedom of speech. Self-censorship is explained as part of a civilized way of life. A F P

When freedom of speech was discussed in these articles, the question that was raised was whether Denmark has a truly free press. Professor of International Relations Ole Wæver raised this question in his feature article in Kristeligt Dagblad: “If the publishing of the most rough contributions is a given right, then it will also be much easier for the government to criticize a newspaper. Fogh could have distanced himself from the cartoons far more effectively. Because it will not be seen as censorship. This will only happen in a semi-authoritarian regime, where the press nervously listens to signs of the government’s good will or displeasure” (2006). Authors questioned Jyllands-Postens’s motive for publishing the cartoons, the prime minister’s agreement with Jyllands-Posten, and his handling of the eleven ambassadors. Why was it was not possible for the prime minister to criticize the cartoons? A S L  H H H

These articles portrayed the prime minister as arrogant and stubborn. He was accused of manipulating the truth and was held responsible for the drastic development of the crisis. Jyllands-Posten and right-wing politicians supporting the Danish People’s Party were also seen as responsible for the crisis by drumming up nationalism and anti-Islamic attitudes. Columnist Georg Metz explained it this way: Not so few of the banner leaders supported by the majority are former leftwing people—to give the phenomenon a face—with bigwigs such as B.T.’s arrogant mouthpiece for the government, editor Erik Meier Carlsen; former Marxist historian Lars Hedegaard; former VS-candidate, later to be social democratic Minister of the Interior, Karen Jespersen; and former Marxist man of literature, later to be social democratic spin doctor to the prime minister, Ralf Pittelkow. These people and a lot more, plus a smaller brigade of younger (female) theologians . . . have by themselves and together in the conservative press and in the conservative universe of opinions legitimized opinions and actions stemming from the Danish People’s Party. They have worked persistently at preparing the mainstreaming of the party and have this way secured solid positions for themselves in the new fundament of power, as the prime minister with effort has molded to the conservative culture battle and maintenance of power. (Information 2006a)

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These articles personalized their attacks. They blamed a newspaper editor, former politicians, and others as being responsible for the mainstreaming of the extreme right-wing party opinions in the Danish society. This mainstreaming was coupled with a political battle that the prime minister was fighting. These arguments were framed in the context of anti-Islamic, racist opinions and the desire to boost political power. Danish Muslims were portrayed as co-citizens in these articles. The Danish imams’ travel to the Middle East was explained as a natural and foreseeable reaction to a denial of dialogue with the Danish government. The imams were portrayed as the politicians’ scapegoats. This portrayal was seen as part of everyday life. These articles provided a more nuanced and complex picture of the crisis. They opposed the “us versus them” polarization and placed responsibility for the crisis on society as a whole and on ethnic Danes themselves in particular. A D L

Often the arguments in this frame began with an emphasis of the legal limitations to freedom of speech. Once the legal point was made, moral arguments were presented. Words such as “respect,” “dialogue,” “civilized behavior,” and “co-citizens” were used. The us versus them dichotomy was not present. However, another dichotomized worldview was presented through moral arguments framing the government as the good against JyllandsPosten and the Danish People’s Party as the bad. These articles argued that freedom of speech was not the issue. Indeed, they presented other instances in which freedom of speech had been limited without such a strong reaction—the sandals of Jesus, the Holocaust drawings that Jyllands-Posten refused to print, and the criticism of the controversial movie about Jesus by Danish provocateur and filmmaker Jens Jørgen Thorsen. Such articles were didactic. Sometimes they were even a bit aggressive, revealing frustration with a worldview characterized by racism, nationalism, and demonization of Muslims. They did not use words such as “battle,” “fight,” and “defense.” Rather, they argued that the solution to the problem would come through dialogue and mutual respect.

The Three Frames—a Struggle of News and Views Who Sponsors Which Frames? Articles in our analysis fell within three fairly clearly delineated frames (see figure 25). Politiken wrote from the perspective of frame 3, criticizing the demonization of the Muslims, as evidenced in its editorials and columns. Articles written by Danish intellectuals and politicians in Politiken also fit within frame 3.

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FRAMES

Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom

Freedom of speech; A Western universal human right threatened by Islamism

What is the problem? Islam, Islamism, the dark Islamism with a lack of and uncivilized Middle East human rights such as freedom of speech

Demonization of Muslims and political spin is the case; not freedom of speech Demonization of Muslims in Denmark and political spin, not freedom of speech

Who created the problem?

Islamic rulers and the Danish Imams

Islamists in the Middle East Jyllands-Posten, the Government and the Danish People’s Party

What actors are presented in what roles; who are the good ones, who are the bad ones?

The Danish “we” are the good ones defending freedom of speech, the ones limiting the freedom in any way are the bad ones

“We” in the “West” are the good ones; “the rulers in the Middle East” are the bad ones

What can be done?

Fight, be provocative and stand firm in the fight for freedom of speech

“We” can fight the fight for The solution is dialogue and the oppressed populations in co-existence the Middle East

What is the language A language characterized by Orientalist language of the frame? dichotomised terms: “us” and “them,” a “black and white” world perspective

There exists no “we” in this framing, it is rather “moral” who is put in this position, whereas Jyllands-Posten, the Government and the Danish People’s Party are the bad ones

Didactic, aggressive, frustrated

Figure 25. The three frames—a struggle of news and views

The editorials and columns of Berlingske Tidende, Information, and Kristeligt Dagblad revealed a perspective within frame 2, arguing for freedom of speech with limits. Individual articles in Berlingske Tidende fit within frame 2; a large number of these were written by Danish politicians from the political center and by Danish businesspeople. Individual articles in Information and Kristeligt Dagblad were written from all perspectives. The editorials and columns in Jyllands-Posten and in the tabloid papers Ekstra Bladet and B.T. fit within the first frame, arguing for complete freedom of speech. The largest part of the articles in Jyllands-Posten were written within frame 1 as well. They were written by right-wing politicians and individuals known for their anti-Islamic views. Articles written by intellectuals and politicians were not common in Ekstra Bladet or B.T.

A Political Struggle in the Danish News Media The articles were diverse in argumentation, language, and ideological conviction. From our analysis we found that articles written within the perspective of frame 1 were dominant. Articles written from the perspective of frame 3 often directly opposed those in frame 1; those written from the perspective

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of frame 2 fell somewhere in the middle, focusing on the global perspective and on defending the position of the media. Most of the op-ed articles and opinion pieces in Politiken were written by Danish intellectuals and politicians who sponsored frame 3. Authors were prominent Danish lawyers or politicians from the left of the center, except the former head of the Liberal Party, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen. Jyllands-Posten’s articles were dominated by frame 1. The articles were often written by people known in Denmark for their anti-Islamic attitudes and by politicians of the radical right. The second frame was particularly dominant in op-eds and opinion pieces in Berlingske Tidende. Writers were often Danish politicians of the center or Danish businesspeople. Articles in Information and Kristeligt Dagblad, the two smaller nationally circulating papers, conveyed all of the three frames, with no one dominating the other. Tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B.T. published far fewer opinion articles. Instead, the letters to the editor showed frame 1 as a dominant frame for understanding the cartoon story. Struggles over journalistic principles were heavily influenced by the political sympathies of the press. News coverage and editorials appeared to depend more on the political opinion of the paper than on professional journalistic principles. The editors took on the role of political actors, proclaiming their points of view in the editorials, portraying themselves as struggling over whose view was right and wrong. Articles written by intellectuals and politicians also reflected this political bias. Admittedly, the leaning of these contributors may reflect the readership as much as intentional editorial selection. Readership and views are closely interlinked in Danish newspapers (Hjarvard 2006). Our analysis of the cartoon crisis coverage reveals an increasing political bias that harks back to the days of the political party press and the four-party-system in the late nineteenth century.

Mainstreaming of Right-Wing Opinions? Our analysis found a clear relationship of mutual negation between frames 1 and 3. Articles written from the perspective of frame 1 employed a “we versus they” discourse that pitted the Danes against the Muslims. Muslims were portrayed as responsible for the drastic development of the crisis, and Islam was portrayed as “repressive,” “strange,” and “medieval.” Those writing in Jyllands-Posten, Ekstra Bladet, and B.T. as well as the Danish political leader Pia Kjærsgaard and some of her political colleagues from the Danish People’s Party subscribed to this point of view. An article in Politiken portraying the cartoons as “only a piece in an everyday climate of criticism and suspicion toward Muslims” (Smith 2006) was clearly pointing toward those

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who held such views. The cartoons were seen as the final act that clarified or made visible the growing anti-Islamic sentiment. Other media research and this book have shown that in the Danish media Islam is often portrayed in connection with extremism. Islam is coupled with repression, dark ages, and Middle-Ages conditions and is described as a strange and dangerous religion—a religion that does not belong in Danish society. The word “Muslim” is set in opposition to the word “Dane,” and violence and crime are associated with ethnic minorities. This violence and crime is furthermore described with adjectives such as “dangerous” and “full of consequences” for Danish society (Hervik 2002a; Hussain 2000, 2002; Hussain, Yilmaz and O’Connor 1997; Madsen 2000). This broader discourse can only be understood in the larger context of an existing system of nationalistic framing identified partly in the Danish media coverage on Islam and ethnic minorities by different researchers (Andreassen 2005; Hervik 2002a; Hussain, Yilmaz and O’Connor 1997). Witness the view of the political leader of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard: The largest part of the present groups of immigrants originates from the third world and is primarily Muslims, which do not present any motivation in becoming part of Danish civilization. On the contrary, these people arrive with their luggage packed with something quite different. They arrive with the most intense hatred against all that is Western, against all that is Danish and all that is Christian. They arrive with their luggage packed with male chauvinism, ritual slaughtering, female circumcision, and female repressive clothes and traditions, which belong in the darkest Middle Ages. And, above all, many arrive with their luggage filled with religious fanaticism, know-all attitude, and arrogance. (Dansk Folkeblad 1999)

This quote dates to 1999. The logic beneath it resembles that found in articles in frame 1. Stig Hjarvard argued that the media had the power to make already existing frames more dominant. Was the media debate on the cartoon crisis an example of mainstreaming political right-wing opinions? As our analysis demonstrates, the answer to this question depends on the newspaper you are reading.

Re-publication of the Cartoons in 2008 and the Convergence of Frames 1 and 2 The two frames “Freedom of speech is a Danish issue” and “Freedom of speech: A universal human right threatened by Islamism” have recently merged in blaming imams, Islamists, and bad Muslims as the reason for the dramatic development of the cartoon story. In February 2008 three men

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were arrested for having specific plans to kill cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who had been under police protection since the fall of 2005. Most Danish newspapers republished his cartoon on 13 February 2008 as an act of resilience and solidarity. Chief editor Lisbet Knudsen of Berlingske Tidende was interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) and sounded much like a government spokesperson when she explained Berlingske Tidende’s wish to defend Danish values such as free speech. In 2005, before she became a head, Berlingske Tidende had refused to publish the cartoons, arguing that it was an unnecessary provocation on the part of Jyllands-Posten. In the meantime, Knudsen had become the new chief editor of Berlingske Tidende, and now the paper wanted make a statement about free speech. In her blog Knudsen evoked the clash of opposites which has taught us “that we could not maintain the illusion that we, with our more than 5 million Danes and perhaps 400 Christian-cultural friends in Europe, sail in a different boat than the 1.2 billion Muslims.” She continued: Berlingske Tidende did not print Kurt Westergaard’s drawing recently in order to ridicule or mock anyone’s religious feelings. We printed it to emphasize that we insist on living in a country with free speech, where Kurt Westergaard has the right to draw like he does, without his life being threatened, and where we as a newspaper, in the name of freedom of the press, can choose to print the drawing, knowing that we can risk being met by debate and criticism for doing it. We insist that religion and religious questions not being exempted from being challenged and debated, when they are used for political purposes. (Knudsen 2008)

American journalists and others that I spoke to abroad, who heard the NPR interview, argued that Knudsen’s message could equally well be interpreted as “We insist on the rights to insult, mock and ridicule ordinary Muslims and treat them as potential terrorists,” which once again underlines the political nature of the Danish news editors and newspapers regarding Muslim and migrant issues. More than seventeen newspapers chose to republish the cartoon on 13 February. Also, government-critical Politiken published one of the cartoons, but remained critical of the original publication of 30 September 2005. In the following, I will show how competing blames have been played out in the news media by looking at the blame on imams, on the Danish government, and on Jyllands-Posten for shaping the story’s violent path as it did.

Blaming the Imams Again and again the adherents of first and second frame blamed the imams for causing the cartoon crisis. While all imams are blamed, only four are

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treated at any length. Already prior to 30 September 2005 Jyllands-Posten and tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet had criticized some of the imams with personal attacks. Jyllands-Posten, for instance, ran news articles critical of the radical and controversial imam at the Grimshøj mosque in Århus—Raed Hlayhel, a Wahabist scholar with a degree from the Sharia Faculty in Medina.1 Journalist Orla Borg quotes him as saying in a Friday prayer that “women can be the instrument of Satan against men” and that he encouraged the listeners to take the message home to teach everyone to follow the Sharia laws (Borg 2005b). The “blame the imams” strategy is played out in a 2006 publication by John Hansen and Kim Hundevadt, “The Troublemaker and the Prophet: The Muhammed Crisis behind the Scenes” (Provoen og Profeten. Muhammed krisen bag kulisserne). The authors were journalists working for Jyllands-Posten; the book was published by Jyllands-Posten’s own publishing company; it received financial support from the Jyllands-Posten Foundation and was referred to as Jyllands-Posten’s official version of the Muhammad cartoon crisis. “Provoen og Profeten” is a subjective account of two journalists who are committed to putting their own stamp on the larger debate. The subjective quality of their character depictions can be seen in at least two ways. While the bad guys, the Danish imams, are described through their more or less “bizarre” statements and portrayed as suspicious characters with personal flaws, the key actors then working for Jyllands-Posten are described in positive terms. These characterizations precede the event to be described, providing them with a loaded value frame, another artifact of their discursive strategy: “Most people in Copenhagen had not until Friday 14 October [2005] been thinking about Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons, but those who coincidentally passed by the big demonstration in the Town Hall Square and read the banners realized that lines in a newspaper can evoke strong feelings” (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 40). At this point reactions to Jyllands-Posten’s publication had been exposed in the Danish press for at least eight days. But Hansen and Hundevadt write that only the sight of the Muslims led by the imams made the people of Copenhagen wonder what went on behind the scenes: “The big demonstration revealed that in only two weeks the imams had succeeded in mobilizing a broad band of Muslim organizations, and Abu Laban and other imams, who initially hesitated, were now more or less forced to throw themselves into the Muhammad case in order to keep their position and meet head-on any accusation that they did not defend the Prophet with sufficient enthusiasm” (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 42). Powerful imams recruited other imams and formed alliances that organized their protests against Jyllands-Posten. Danish opinion-makers, it was argued, began to criticize Jyllands-Posten only after the demonstration in Copenhagen, and the imams were to blame. Hansen and Hundevadt also

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tried to provide some nuances to their approach to Muslims in Denmark. “The debate showed that there were others on the Muslim side besides ‘a few hypocrites’” (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 44), that there were a number of “Muslim believers and cultural Muslims, who supported directly or indirectly the publication of the cartoons” (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 44). The use of this strategy is widely used in Danish politics. During the cartoon crisis, a new organization emerged called Democratic Muslims in Denmark, headed by a controversial chairperson: Naser Khader, an ethnic politician in the Social Liberal Party. As explained earlier, Khader was severely disliked by many immigrant Muslims for being a religious and cultural apostate, yet was popular among many Danes for his enthusiasm for Denmark and his hard-line criticism of what he saw as radical Muslims in Denmark. The association was shadowed by a supporting association which included a number of anti-Islamic personalities. The idea of “good” Muslims, whom “we” will talk to, and “bad” ones, who are undemocratic and undesirable, is all over the Danish debate. “Bad” Muslims were responsible for the cartoon crisis, just as they were responsible for terrorism against the United States, England, Spain, and elsewhere. As Mahmood Mamdani argues, however, “this could not hide the central message of such discourse: unless proved to be ‘good,’ every Muslim was presumed to be ‘bad.’ All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘mad Muslims’” (2004: 15). Another example of the “blame the imam” strategy appears in an account of the cartoon crisis written by Pernille Ammitzbøll and Lorenzo Vidino titled “After the Danish Cartoon Controversy” (2007). The authors’ chief scapegoat for the cartoon crisis is Raed Hlayhel. With reference to JyllandsPosten’s spring 2005 series, they say, Hlayhel “had an axe to grind with the Danish press and with Jyllands-Posten in particular” (2007: 3). Another imam, Ahmed Abu Laban, is branded as a terrorist because he had connections to Osama bin Laden and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.2 The authors rely on Tine Magaard’s analysis of a sermon delivered by Hlayhel in which he said he saw his position in Denmark as similar to that of Muhammad in Medina when he was doing alliances with tribes of polytheists and Jews. Moreover, the story goes, Hlayhel was visited in Århus by wealthy Saudi businessmen, indicating that big money, as well as radical Islamism, was behind the crisis. This article appeared in the journal Middle East Quarterly, published by the Middle East Forum, which is devoted to promoting “American interests in the Middle East”; neoconservative, anti-Islamic historian Daniel Pipes is its director and publisher. Pernille Ammitzbøll is a journalist with JyllandsPosten. It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that the article is uncritical of the government’s October 2005 rejection of a meeting with ambassadors and of Jyllands-Posten’s role in turning the cartoons’ publication into a crisis.

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The Danish press spent many pages covering the anger and criticism of two Muslim delegations to the Middle East. Politicians—mostly from the right— demanded that the imams have their residence permit scrutinized. “I feel bad about people to whom we have given residence permits in our country going out and doing harm to our country in this way” (Denmark’s Radio 1 March 2006). Kjærsgaard, the leader of the Danish People’s Party, called the imams’ activities “treason” (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 151). The commentary of tabloid Ekstra Bladet was relentless, stating, “We ask the devil to punish every dishonest Muslim, who travels around with false messages about the Danish nation. And we ask Allah to export all evil Muslims, who have taken shelter in the Danish democracy, while the use their efforts to smear it. Let them get some space in one of the 56 Muslim dictatorships, which they are so busy travelling to—even if they once fled them” (Ekstra Bladet 2006a). The success of the “Blame the imams” strategy can also be seen in the film Bloody Cartoons, made by Danish journalist Carsten Kjær and shown worldwide in the fall of 2007 as Denmark’s contribution to the Why Democracy? series. Bloody Cartoons is presented as” “a documentary about how and why twelve drawings in a Danish provincial paper could whirl a small country into a confrontation with Muslims all over the world” (Why democracy n.d.). To open the film, Kjær says, “Here is the man who started it all.” According to most narratives that would be either author Kåre Bluitgen; cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten Flemming Rose; cartoonist Kurt Westergaard; or even the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. But the man in question is Imam Raed Hlayhel, who, Kjær notes, is no longer in Denmark. The point of departure for the documentary is the imam, whose collaboration with other imams and their travels to the Middle East is what caused what is called a “sudden” outburst of violence. “How did it happen to Denmark?” asks Kjær, framing Denmark as an innocent victim. Most of the documentary is filmed outside Denmark. Only at the end does the Danish prime minister speak, and he is exempted from critical questions like those posed to the foreign Muslims of the Middle East. He is approached as a high-level commentator, not as an active participant in the crisis. Instead of covering the story from several perspectives, this documentary presents the cartoon crisis from a politicized platform that represents Jyllands-Posten’s and the government’s strategy for handling the crisis: to blame the imams and insist that free speech was the issue, while neglecting the role played by the newspaper and government. The “blame the imams” strategy centers around the claim that nothing occurred domestically until the imams went to the Middle East. Troels Lund Poulsen, spokesperson of the Liberal Party, claimed, for instance, that there were practically no international reactions during the first three months after the cartoon publications, until the two imam delegations travelled to

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the Middle East to stir up support (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 62). Such statements ignore the facts that Al Jazeera followed the story in early October; that Saudi paper Al Hayat mentioned the cartoon publications shortly thereafter; that a letter of concern came from the eleven ambassadors from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in mid-October; that Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) began to cancel joint activities; and that the cartoon story received international coverage in various newspapers in November. The story was more domestic than global in the beginning, but the international engagement and coverage was present soon after the publication of the cartoons. In January 2006 additional blame went to the Norwegian paper Magazinet, which published Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons at a time, Hansen and Hundevadt argue, when the story was quieting down and considered mostly a domestic issue; then this re-publication took place by Magazinet (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006:127). Blame is also put on the powerful imam Abdul Rahman Alsidis, who spoke in Mecca on 10 January, on the Eid al-Adha, the conclusion of the pilgrimage. The authors referred to the large television audience on Arab satellite channels, which, they estimated, enabled him to reach more than a hundred million viewers. Without mentioning Denmark or Jyllands-Posten by name, the imam encouraged Muslims to oppose what he called “an intentional campaign against the prophet Muhammad.” It was hardly noted in Denmark, but it constituted the first ill omen that strong interests would breathe new life into the case of the twelve cartoons: The religious priesthood in Saudi Arabia has an enormous influence in the entire Muslim world (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006: 126–27). Mixing a powerful imam’s speech to a large audience in Mecca and in the Middle East with the background information that the priesthood in Saudi Arabia is influential is interesting; It places the blame on the religious priesthood’s “strong interests” and its power to influence people in the Muslim world and deflects attention from Jyllands-Posten’s media-instigated “insult, mockery, and ridicule” and the government’s rejection of dialogue (Hervik 2008). Danish newspapers, Danish books on the cartoon issue, global news, and Wikipedia used the publication of the cartoons by the independent Egyptian newsweekly Al Faqr, based in Cairo, to blame the imams and to suggest Arabic double standards. On 17 October 2005 Al Faqr analyzed six of the cartoons with the headline “Continued Boldness: Mocking the Prophet and his Wife by Caricature.” Most sources that refer to Al Faqr note that this republication of the cartoons did not provoke any uproar or protests, which inadvertently is taken as evidence that nothing happened until the Danish imam delegations came to the Middle East.3

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Most overviews and timelines of the cartoon crisis in the news media were written in January 2006 and onward; four to five months after the original publication and after the Danish prime minister denied meeting the eleven ambassadors about the public debate concerning ethnic minorities in Denmark. The cartoon story wasn’t called a crisis from the beginning. And, strictly speaking, the publication of the cartoons by Jyllands-Posten was not in itself the cause of all the reactions. Jyllands-Posten’s publications were interpreted and communicated through various filters. The popular Middle Eastern news channel Al Jazeera followed the unfolding story by publishing short news pieces on 10, 12, and 15 October. Al Jazeera also published news about the Danish prime minister’s refusal to meet with the ambassadors, again as part of the same story. From the vantage point of the Middle Eastern audience, I argue that interpretations of what the publication of the twelve cartoons represented and the Danish government’s rejection of a meeting that would have included talking about the cartoons were missed in the puzzlement about why Egyptians didn’t react violently to Al Faqr’s analysis of the six cartoons. The mixture combines a publication that represented Muslims as terrorists and a government that refused to talk to concerned citizens and ambassadors about these representations. It is this mixture that enabled the cartoon crisis to reach global proportions—a mixture that did not occur until five days after Al Faqr had published its analysis. There is no doubt that the imam delegations to the Middle East did play a significant role in shaping the trajectory of the cartoon crisis. However, their travel was also used to further boost the “blame the imams” strategy that blows the imams’ actual importance out of proportion. And, more important, it served to deflect attention from the domestic events that led them and the eleven ambassadors to consult their country’s authorities and network for support. Prior to the publication of the cartoons, many Muslims in Denmark felt disrespected and aggressively attacked in the media, in governmental policies and public intimidation.

The Hostile Danish Debate on Minorities According to Rune Engelbreth Larsen and Tøger Seidenfaden—adherents of frame 3, “The demonization of Muslims, not freedom of speech, was the core”—Denmark became the site of publication of the cartoons because of the Danish government’s “lack of basic respect and recognition” of Muslims. The anger felt in the Muslim world cannot be reduced to domestic circumstances in Denmark, and accordingly the Danish government cannot be made responsible for this (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 318). According to Larsen and Seidenfaden:

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But the fact that it became precisely Danish newspaper cartoons that triggered this crisis has entirely specific Danish causes. Jyllands-Posten is first and foremost responsible for this and second to that the government and the prime minister have a considerable and more fatal responsibility—but the self-scrutiny should not stop with that: We were and are as Danes and voters not just innocent and arbitrary victims of a global storm—we have as Danish citizens and voters precisely a co-responsibility as to why things went as bad, as they did. (2006: 318–19; emphasis in original)

Tøger Seidenfaden was chief editor of Politiken, Denmark’s third largest newspaper, and Rune Engelbreth Larsen was a historian of ideas writing for Politiken. In 2006 the two authors published The Caricature Crisis (Karikaturkrisen), which included much of their writing in Politiken on the cartoon crisis. They were core exponents of the third frame, which was not well covered in the foreign news coverage. Their comprehensive book was written in a polemic, argumentative style—critical of the government, the supporting Danish People’s Party, and Jyllands-Posten. The Caricature Crisis meticulously follows Jyllands-Posten and the government’s arguments on a day-by-day basis, countering them throughout the different phases of the cartoon crisis. One example of Politiken’s effort to produce detailed investigation and counter-arguments is the Muslim delegation’s dossier, which they brought with them to the Middle East.

The Muslim Delegation’s Dossier One Muslim delegation travelled to Egypt on 5–11 December. Another left on 17 December and spent the rest of the month in Lebanon and Syria. Only one imam among the five travelled to Egypt. Mohamad Al-Khaled Sambad is imam of Odense and the prison in Nyborg. Zeki Kocer is head of the Turkish Muslim umbrella organization, Coalition of Muslim Immigrant Associations (DMGT). Sarwar Shoudri leads Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, which is based in Pakistan. Egyptian-born businessman Ahmad Harbi and Nour-Edin-Fattah of Danish Islamic Society (Islamisk Trossamfund) completed the five-person group. Members of the delegation that went to Lebanon were all of Lebanese background: Kassem Said Ahmedd and Mahmoud Mansour of the Islamic Society in Denmark in Copenhagen, and Imam Raed Hlayhel and his righthand man Imam Ahmed Akkari from Århus. While the debate was heated and the statements confrontational, only one politician invoked the democratic rights of the delegations to travel. “It is their right and their freedom of speech to travel around agitating their case. That is a condition of democracy” (Politiken 2006c; Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 153).

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The experts consulted by Politiken concluded that even if there were some errors in the forty-three-page dossier, they were mainly sloppy mistakes, not making up any serious misrepresentation or spreading false information. One of the more critical assessments was this: “It is clear that the dossier and newspaper writings in Egypt make an effort to push the case to the border without crossing the border, which is called misinterpretation, but they take it as far as they can” (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 153). The dossier contained images that were not published in Jyllands-Posten, provoking a heated debate. One such image was a man with a pig’s snout and pig’s ears and represented as Muhammad. Tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet called the material “fraud,” and Jyllands-Posten was also upset. Larsen and Seidenfaden explained that the photograph was part of the hate material that the Muslim organizations received after the publication of the cartoons. The photograph itself had nothing to do with Islam, except that it was mailed to intimidate Muslims in Denmark; it was a photograph from a ritual celebration in a village in southern France (Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006: 153). Larsen and Seidenfaden counter the blame on the imams by emphasizing the circumstances that made the imams travel to the Middle East. This travel was facilitated by the ambassadors. They argue that it was only natural for the Muslim ambassadors to turn to their home governments for consultation when the Danish government declined to meet with them and listen to their concerns, and natural for Muslims to network with Muslim organizations to gain moral, theological, and political support. Sponsors of this strategy seek to resist antagonistic, mutually exclusive categories that generally treat Muslims as enemies; instead, they humanize their activities and identities, for instance, by emphasizing their obvious and rightful wish to find support for their case, wherever they could. The reason for acting as they did must be seen more broadly, against the background of those who do not recognize Muslims as co-citizens in Denmark and deny them the chance for dialogue.

Conclusion Our analysis reveals that the three frames’ parallel political ideological convictions and the debate are framed in different ways, depending on the papers’ political opinion. The media debate on the cartoon crisis became an explicit example of a repoliticization of the Danish press, a repoliticization that has created a political struggle in the journalistic field. In this debate, traces of nationalistic and racist language can be seen. The media debate during the two-month period in this study was to a certain degree more aggressive, more provocative, and more polarized in

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character than the cartoons themselves. Rather than a test of self-censorship, the cartoons became an icon of the conflicting political views in Danish society and a sign of the conflicting understanding of freedom of speech in a democratic society. The Danish media discourse “Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom” is the source used globally and appropriated by much of the foreign media; it happens also to be the version employed by the Danish government and Jyllands-Posten, not the versions of Berlingske Tidende or Politiken. Choosing one rather than the other misrepresents and simplifies a story that is far more complicated and nuanced than the news media has conveyed. It also tells us that some stories achieve success in the global public sphere more readily than others. We perceived the three discourses in the Danish media coverage in early 2006, when the cartoons and stories about the cartoons had travelled internationally. These discourses involved not only telling the Danish audience about how millions of Muslims felt and responded to the cartoons and the government’s refusal of dialogue but also telling the readership about Muslims’ response to the global events and global coverage connected to the cartoons. Narratives of the origin of the controversy frequently begin with author Bluitgen’s assertion that he couldn’t find an illustrator for his book, since illustrators were afraid of Muslim anger. Bluitgen’s story was only another inspirational source for Jyllands-Posten’s already divisive and polarizing approach to Muslim practitioners and Islam, an approach that treats Muslims more like enemies to be fought rather than co-citizens to be lived with peacefully. On 30 September, when Jyllands-Posten explained its project, Bluitgen’s quandaries were co-opted by the newspaper’s larger discourse. The inflammatory rhetoric of politicians’ speech reported by the news media (Muslims are like cancerous tumors; we need to approach Muslim culture as if we are in a culture war) became a problem for the government in mid-October 2005, when it refused to meet with eleven ambassadors to talk about their concerns about the derogatory anti-Islamic rhetoric. As the government began attracting the media spotlight, a set of spin moves were launched to move the focus away from the bad image of anti-Islamic discourse to a winning spin image of a government that heroically stood firm on free speech without giving any acknowledgement to the enemy, who either hadn’t understood democracy or wanted to impose censorship (Hervik 2008). Instead of participating in free speech arguments about JyllandsPosten’s cartoons and the constitutionally established limits of free speech, the government successfully transformed the debate into a question of having free speech as such or not having it. The free speech spin was accompanied by an equally successful “blame the imams” spin. With the transformation

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of the issue to free speech, the prime minister’s endorsement of JyllandsPosten’s publication of the cartoons on 30 October, and the embracing of the “blame the imams” strategy, the government and Jyllands-Posten sponsored the same discourse, “Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom.” The tone of debate and the government’s handling of the cartoon crisis are intensely criticized in the discourse “The demonization of Muslims and political spin is the issue not freedom of speech,” sponsored chiefly by Politiken. Politiken’s counterdiscourse seeks to document that the imams and Muslims should not be blamed as solely responsible for the evolution of the cartoon story. Instead, the tone of debate that Jyllands-Posten is seen as contributing to, the government, and the supporting cast of the Danish People’s Party create the cluster of agents responsible for the violent response abroad and the boycotts of Danish goods. Both of these discourses must be accounted for if distortions are to be minimized. This is particularly relevant for news coverage and academic treatment that entered the story five months after the domestic course of events and interpretations had taken place. One way to summarize the layers of arguments of the discourses and analytical counterarguments is to answer some simple questions about what came first and second: —Would there have been a cartoon story if Bluitgen had not had problems finding illustrators for his book? Definitely. Bluitgen’s problems were not much more than a pretext for Jyllands-Posten’s political engagement and anti-Islam discourse. —Without the publications of the Muhammad cartoons, would there have been a diplomatic call for a dialogue meeting with the prime minister? Certainly. Several other items were raised by the ambassadors. The ambassadors’ concern reflected the concerns expressed by other groups of people, who have argued that the Danish debate had gone too far long ago and that the Danish government had been discriminating against and intimidating the ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims and migrants of non-Western origin. —Without publication of the cartoons, would there have been a globalized Muslim protest? Unlikely. Protests were already taking place in Denmark in all kinds of ways, yet they were not featured prominently in the Danish news media. A couple of the cartoons, the accompanying text, and JyllandsPosten’s editorial were too controversial. The editorial and political leadership of Jyllands-Posten pushed their own story too far. Had a meeting between the prime minister and the ambassadors taken place, would the ambassadors have consulted their home governments, and would the imam delegations have travelled to the Middle East? Most likely

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not. In this regard two cartoon-related news stories in Denmark and Sweden are particularly interesting. In October 2006 the free daily Nyhedsavisen published images from the meeting of the Danish People’s Party’s youth organization. The meeting included an internal competition to see who would go furthest in vulgar representations of the prophet Muhammad. A member of a group of artists called Defending Denmark had infiltrated the group and documented the competition. One of the drawings depicted Muhammad as a beer-drinking urinating camel; another drew him as a terrorist attacking the capital, Copenhagen (Nyhedsavisen 2006; see also Press Council 2006). In this case, unlike in the Muhammad cartoon crisis, the Danish Foreign Office immediately invited Muslim ambassadors in Denmark to a meeting about the issue. The prime minister sent out a press release in which he distanced himself from the drawings (Politiken 2006a). When another controversial cartoon was published as a provocation by Swedish artist Lars Vilk, the story didn’t develop, since the Swedish government was quick to consult and engage Muslim leaders in dialogue.

CHAPTER 10


The Narrative of “Incompatibility” and the Politics of Negative Dialogues in the Danish Cartoon Affair



The first frame, “Free speech is the issue, and it is a Danish issue,” is the frame that most often appears in the foreign media coverage of the cartoon crisis. Its simplified “black-and-white,” “good and bad,” “clash of values” rhetoric may be particularly suitable for the news media (Peterson 2007). Elsewhere, we have shown that the sponsors of the discourse were operating with the militant rhetoric of war—a battle of values that employed abstract divisions such as “Muslims” vs. “Danish civilization,” “Muslim” vs. “Western,” “our” society and “their” society; “we” as “free,” “democratic,” “tolerant,” and “developed,” and “they” as “dogmatic” and “dictatorial,” with forced faith and no room for democracy and diversity; “we” are “good” and “support freedom,” while “they” are “bad” and “against freedom.” The means of fighting “Islam,” “Islamism,” and the “dark and uncivilized Middle East” are “provocation,” “confrontation,” “standing firm,” and not “apologizing” or “going into dialogue” (Boe and Hervik 2008). Given the plurality and cultural and geographical diversity of languages, cultures, and ethnic groups under the headings of “Islam,” “Muslims,” or “Muslim society” and comprising approximately 1.25 billion people, the majority of whom live outside the Middle East and who happen to be Muslims along with many other things, it is clear that we are dealing with a high level of abstraction. Much the same can be said for the terms “West” or “Western,” often referring to European origin. On top of those abstractions, the free-speech frame tends to separate the “West” and “Islam” as if they were two clearly separated entities, although they share a tremendous amount of history and have much more in common than they have differences. With these considerations I argue that this first of the three Danish frames of

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understanding used in the Muhammad cartoon story did not arise out of an analysis of historical events and processes. It is a pre-existing, transnationally circulating narrative that was evoked and reproduced and perhaps refined in constitution of the cartoon crisis. I want to look closer at the portrayal of Islam as a negative ideology and the accompanying confrontational approach, which was a quintessential feature of the frame “Free speech is the issue, and it is a Danish issue.” Negative dialogue is destructive in that it relies on a belief that certain conflicts are unavoidable and certain cultural encounters are impossible to resolve. It is destructive because it constitutes an active refusal to engage in dialogue, even in those instances when it employs a dialogical vocabulary only to mask what is actually a monologue. This can be illustrated by the ideology and politics of zero tolerance. Originally, developed as a strategy to pursue and punish even the smallest offences in order to prevent the spread of crime—the “broken windows theory”—zero tolerance is now used to persecute ethnically defined minorities (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Wacquant 2004). In the Danish news media zero tolerance is now used as a euphemism for intolerance. During the cartoon crisis, the Danish government adhered to a staunch zero-tolerance policy. There would be no apologies, no compromises, and no dialogue with concerned Muslim citizens or with ambassadors from Muslim countries. Instead, a public strategy of negative dialogue was used in which Muslims in Denmark were ridiculed, mocked, and insulted. The consequences of these views and statements that we have seen throughout the cartoon event and even earlier are that Muslims in Denmark are seen as enemies who must be challenged. Not all Danes embrace this view, but a large segment of the news media and the government adheres to a negative ideology of this sort. In this chapter I look closer at this idea of incompatibility that fires up confrontational speech and identity politics. Is the incompatibility in reality something that refers to incompatibility between civilizations (or cultures), or between segments within society? Does it have to do with the reemergence of a type of politics in which opponents are treated as enemies? To do this, I turn to the authors of news articles within the frame “Free speech is the issue, and it is a Danish issue” and trace the origin and diffusion of the idea of incompatibility. Showing the network’s bond to American neoconservativism enables us to see shared values about how to approach a political opponent as an enemy regardless of whether this opponent is another person, “culture,” or “civilization.” Surveys have shown that enemy images may appear in countries where the “enemy” is not really present. According to David Smith, anti-Jewish feeling is largely detached from the presence of Jews within the country. Slovakia, Romania, and Poland, for instance, show a high degree of anti-Semitism

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even though the countries are virtually without any Jews (D. Smith 1996). Complex historical trajectories and the explicit role of the news media and its intimate relationship to political power come to mind, but rather than going into these, I wish to emphasize the socially constructed nature of antiSemitism (see also Lentin 2008). What does this possibly teach us about the origin of incompatibility? Does the assumed incompatibility and the enemy image of Muslims come from a factual reality, such as something Muslims say or do? Smith goes on to ask: “Are these Jews pure phantasmagorical constructions? Or are they, perhaps, distorted but still recognizable reflections of real Jews? . . . If anti-Semitism is partly a reaction to the conduct or character of living Jews, then Jews may be able to reform anti-Semites by self-transformation” (Smith 1996: 205). Although Smith found that Jews one hundred years ago would discuss this among themselves, the historical answer was clear when World War II brought the Holocaust. Nothing the Jews did, or failed to do, made any difference—and this answer holds a more general truth about enemy images (Smith 1996). Likewise, we can ask: “Does the enemy image of Islam and Muslims and the alleged incompatibility with Danish cultural values have anything to do with things Muslims do or say, in Denmark or more broadly?” Obviously, anti-Islamic rhetoric directed against Muslims in general may be inspired by terrorist acts done by people in the name of Islam, but to take a handful of terrorists as the metonymic representation of 1.25 billion dangerous people is absurd. This is nevertheless often seen in the media and in populist statements by politicians. Likewise, acts of terrorism done by Christians or Marxists do not similarly lead the media to put forth enemy images of Christianity and communism. The enemy image of Muslims in Denmark is older than the Muhammad cartoon event. In the Danish debate even prior to 9/11, the Danish People’s Party declared that Islamic and Danish Christian ways of thinking were incompatible. So did the political commentator for Jyllands-Posten, Ralf Pittelkow, who argued that Islam in its present form was irreconcilable with the West. Author, journalist, and investigator for the Social Liberal Party in the Mona Sheikh case, Helle Brix, has been outright predatory, saying that Islamists—by which she means all Muslim believers—should be fought at any price. Former Minister for Welfare Karen Jespersen1 also claims that Islam cannot exist side-by-side with Danish culture. In these four cases Danish values and Islam are presented as incompatible. As mentioned earlier, a negative mediatized image can be seen in how the categories “Islam” and “Muslim” are associated with violence, terrorism, and political activism in 85 percent of the news media coverage (Hvitfelt 1998) in the early to mid-1990s—a statistic that was repeated in 2005 and 2007, and in our focus groups.

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We therefore need to look at the enemy image from the perspective of the producers of negatively described out-group more than we have done previously. Maybe Smith is right when he argues that the enemy image of Jews is better understood as “a figment of social imaginations that supposedly sees the enemy as evil personified” (D. Smith 1996). We can certainly rewrite Smith’s use of Rosenberg by saying that a researcher looking for an objective basis for Islamophobia in the traits of the Muslims is like a police officer who solves the crime by arresting the corpse. In other words, if you want to understand anti-Semites, you should analyze the anti-Semites, not the Jews (Smith 1996). We need to look at the inner demons of this group and find the source of their supporters and their continuous production of antagonistic relationships (Smith 1996). This chapter argues that the confront-theMuslims narrative tells us more about its sponsors and their non-Muslim opponents than about the actual relationship between the categories “West” and “Islam.” We shall see, for instance, how opponents work as part of a transnational, cross-Atlantic network of anti-Islamism.

The Neoconservative Bond In February 2006 Christopher Bollyn of the American Free Press wrote: “The International Herald Tribune, which reported on the offensive cartoons on January 1, noted that even the liberalism of Rose had its limits when it came to criticism of Zionist leaders and their crimes. Rose also has clear ties to the Zionist neoCons behind the ‘war on terror.’” Rose travelled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes, the neoCon ideologue who says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes, who compared “militant Islam” with “fascism and communism” (Bollyn 2006). In early February 2006, culture editor Flemming Rose’s relationship to Daniel Pipes became the target of scrutiny and conspiracy theorizing in different news stories across continents. Rose had published an article based on a friendly interview with Pipes (Rose 2004). The conspiracy claimed that if Muslims were provoked, they would again emerge as a violent threat—resulting in a clash of civilizations that would lead to the wished-for outcome in the Middle East: military victory. Rose’s sympathies with the radical rightwing, neoconservative historian Pipes were toned down by both Rose himself and Pipes; afterward, the story slowly vanished.2 Conspiracy theories usually involve the role of a foreign state, but the news media were unable to provide such a link. (The highest level state-to-state relationship based on neoconservativism is of course the Danish prime minister’s friendship

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with the government of George Bush, a relationship that has resulted in Denmark’s military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Calling something a conspiracy immediately renders it suspicious and dismissible. However, looking more widely than the Rose-Pipes connection and Rose’s years in Washington, D.C., what other actual relations are there between Danish journalists and opinion makers and American neoconservatives? To answer this question I turn primarily to some of the actors within frame 1: “Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom.” Radical Danish right-winger Lars Hedegaard has been an active participant in the news media for many years. In August 2002, he and Daniel Pipes coauthored a commentary that appeared in several countries, including Canada, the United States, Israel, and Germany. The commentary was called “Something Rotten in Denmark?” More than anything else, the article is a sensationalist attack on Muslims in Denmark, with misleading statements like the following: 1) “A Muslim group in Denmark announced a few days ago that a $30,000 bounty would be paid for the murder of several prominent Danish Jews, a threat that garnered wide international notice”; 2) “Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark’s 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country’s convicted rapists”; and 3) “Muslim violence threatens Denmark’s approximately 6,000 Jews, who increasingly depend on police protection” (Pipes and Hedegaard 2002). One of Hedegaard’s friends on the radical right is Helle Brix, who wrote opinion pieces during the cartoon crisis. She has acknowledged that she and Hedegaard exchanged points of view with Daniel Pipes.3 Hedegaard, Brix, and other frame 1 writers have been working together in the semi-secret Giordano Bruno Society mentioned earlier. Hedegaard and Brix are also cofounders of the Free Speech Society (Trykkefrihedsselskabet), where radical Christian minister and Member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party Søren Krarup can be found. Krarup is a true devotee of the clash of civilizations thesis. In speaking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he explained in the Parliament: “[I]n the end, this war is about the opposition between Christianity and Islam, between the West and Islam” (Krarup 2004). In the Danish parliament and elsewhere, he compared the fight against Islam with the fight against Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. The Free Speech Society, of which he is one of the founders, is supported economically by the JyllandsPosten Foundation.4 Recently, the Free Speech Society granted a new annual free speech prize—the Sappho Prize—and awarded it to a skilled journalist working intrepidly in the cartoon affair for free speech and without compromise. The recipient was Flemming Rose (Tidsskriftet Sappho 2007). In addition, the society gave its Free Press Prize to Daniel Pipes for “his fight for free speech, resistance to the spread of Islam, his work for academic freedom in American Universities (Campus Watch) and his support for Muslim dis-

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sidents, who speak directly against Mecca” (Brix 2007; Trykkefrihedsselskabet 2007). Hedegaard continues to translate texts that are written by Pipes and published on the society’s Web pages. In 2008 the approximately 7,000 Euro Freedom of Speech Prize was given to cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, “who has integrated journalistic excellence with a fearless uncompromising stance” (Tidsskriftet Sappho 2008). In the aftermath of the violent reactions around the globe to the cartoon story (as depicted in the media) and the prime minister’s rejection of a dialogue with the Muslim ambassadors, pressure mounted on Flemming Rose. He left Denmark around 9 February and went to the United States, where he had a speaking engagement with the Brooking Institution. But rather than relaxing, Rose did a series of interviews for Jyllands-Posten that were later published as a book called American Voices, sponsored by the Jyllands-Posten Foundation (Rose 2006a). Some of these interviewees are either part of the epistemic neoconservative community and/or anti-Islamic, such as Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Sam Harris, Wafa Sultan, Christopher Hitchens, Fouad Ajami, Newt Gingrich, Charles Murray, and David Brooks. What several of these people share, and also share with Flemming Rose, is their historical origin as left-wingers who have been “mugged by reality.” Today that implies taking an uncompromising stance toward Islam, seeing it as the most dangerous religion. Rose also engaged himself in a series of public engagements, often with neoconservative institutions—for instance, the Ayn Rand Institute’s day-long conference in Boston called “The Jihad against the West: The Real Threat and the Right Response.” Besides Flemming Rose, Daniel Pipes was another of the “Middle East Experts” who spoke on that occasion (“Yaron Brook” n.d.). Recently, frame 1 writers Hedegaard5 and Brix have also joined Benedor Associates, a company run by Eleana Benador that serves as “a principal neoconservative marketing agency” (Right Web n.d.). Among the neoconservatives it promotes are Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and now also Lars Hedegaard and Helle Brix. Benador’s former director was Daniel Pipes (Right Web n.d.). In short, frame 1—defining the issue as a Danish and later a transnational issue of free speech—emerges from a network of actors reaching from Jyllands-Posten to the neoconservative radical right wing in the United States.

Sharing Core Values? Another angle of the actual relationship—its frequency, nature, and overall importance—is the question of how the frame “It is about free speech, and it’s a Danish issue” relates to neoconservativism in its view of the nature of the relationship between Danes/Westerners and Muslims/Islam. “Muslim”

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could be substituted with “Islamist” (an idea promoted by Daniel Pipes) to include the second frame, “Freedom of speech is a human right with limitations,” since Islamists are far more encompassing than, for instance, their Egyptian denotation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even though one needs to be careful with news stories that may be copying the mistakes of others, journalists who comment on the Rose and Pipes relationship again and again repeat that the publication of the cartoons by Jyllands-Posten was nothing but a calculated provocation meant to create or strengthen an image of Muslims as evil and dangerous, hence keeping the “clash of civilizations” ideology active. Although talk about the clash of civilizations throughout the international coverage is filled with denials of this ideology, this narrative has still become a dominant narrative circulating in the global public sphere. The nature of the opposition between Danes/Westerners with free speech and Muslims/Islamists without free speech as portrayed in the Danish rightwing media coverage has a significant resemblance to neoconservativism and the “clash of civilizations” narrative. What is particularly interesting is that the narrative is seldom properly historicized; the concept originated in a particularly dense historical period, but this is seldom pointed out. Properly historicizing the narrative makes it more difficult to maintain the entrenched division of the cultural differences between the West and the Muslim world, since they are so interwoven to begin with. Prior to the mega-events of 1989 under the presidency of Ronald Reagan and aided by Donald Rumsfelt and Dick Cheney, the neoconservatives’ plan had been to destabilize the southern border of the Soviet Union by supporting radical and militant Muslims who would fight against the Russians. This “arc of instability” idea was developed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under the Carter administration, and popularized in Time magazine’s cover story, “The Crescent of Crisis,” on 15 January 1979 (Time 1979). When President Carter took office in 1977, Lewis became a key adviser to Zbigniew Brzezinski. When he coined the phrase “clash of civilizations” (Lewis 1990)—which three years later was taken up by Samuel Huntington (1993)—he was arguing about what would be the biggest source of conflict in the era after the Soviet empire had fallen. “Culture,” “civilization,” and “identity” were the answers.6 And civilizations are basic “and far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes” (Huntington 1993: 4). When identity is in play, danger lurks, since “enemies are essential” and you cannot love what you are unless you hate what you are not: In the post–Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people.

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People are discovering new but often old identities and marching under new but often old flags which lead to wars with new but often old enemies. One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian national demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.” The unfortunate truth in these old truths cannot be ignored by statesmen and scholars. For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations. (Huntington 1996: 21)

Huntington cites Dibdin’s novel Dead Lagoon as the source of the idea of hating who you are not in order to know who you are, but a more likely source for this maxim is Carl Schmitt, the prominent German ideologue during the Nazi decades and an ancestor of neoconservativism. Schmitt wrote this constitutive statement for his approach to the political: “We don’t know who we are, if we don’t know our enemies” (Schmitt 1996). For Huntington and Lewis the major enemies in the clash of civilizations were Islam and China, and since the two could not be fought at the same time, Islam was selected as the opponent to be delegated as the primary enemy. Lewis argued after 9/11 that attacking Iraq couldn’t be initiated soon enough. Only if you treat your adversary as an enemy and you are ready to die for your politics does politics become responsible and real, said Schmitt, echoed by the second academic father figure of neoconservatism, Professor Leo Strauss. In this view compromise, negotiations, and apologies were signs of weakness, originally a critique of the liberal democratic Weimar Republic, which was unable to stop Nazism. But Strauss and Schmitt were not talking about civilizations or cultures; they were addressing the responsible way to treat a political opponent and enact the political. In our times, this critique of liberal democracy has been used about the left-wingers, the multiculturalists, the liberals, the relativists, conflict-resolvers who used dollars rather than guns, and the politically correct who stood in the way and hindered the just fight against the threatening and dangerous Muslim enemy (Rasch 2000; Schmitt 1996). Another assumption associated with this viewpoint can be tied to the same neoconservative ancestor, Leo Strauss, and is seen in Donald Rumsfeld’s and Dick Chaney’s clash with Henry Kissinger, realist par excellence, in the mid 1970s. To put it roughly, Kissinger sought a reality based balance of power as a key to manage conflicts regardless of what means it would take to reach the balance, whereas the neoconservatives would declare again and again that there can be no moral equivalency between West-

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ern democracy and other forms of rule. Western systems of government are believed to be morally superior in this view, and it is the duty of Western democracies to spread them to the rest of the world. The military should be used for this purpose, since we have the strongest military of all. In short, morality is a legitimate way for deciding who is good and who is evil. Your political opponent should be treated as an enemy, with zero tolerance. You should even seek to injure, overthrow or confound the opponent, sometimes in harmful or deadly ways (Coll 2004; Mann 2004). For Schmitt’s concept of the political, there must be a clearly defined opponent and a final consequence: “‘concrete opposition in view’ and ‘bound to a concrete situation, the final consequences [are] a grouping into friends and enemies ‘which expresses itself in war of revolution’” (Meier 1995: 5). Strauss expresses these principles of his philosophical interpretation to be “radical probing, going ever deeper, and bringing things to a climax, with the goal of driving the discussion to a confrontation over the very foundations of the political” (Meier 1995: 4–5). The public sphere is not for dialogue but an area for serious battling and confrontation. Within this scheme, spinning is a weapon on the battlefield, a field where your enemies are known and attacked, since you fear the final outcome. With the philosophy of Strauss and Schmitt in your arsenal, there is no limit to how far your uncompromising stance can go and how radical your language can become, since you seek a confrontation, which is the responsible way to do politics. In the Danish media coverage of the cartoon crisis—particularly in frame 1 (“It is a case of free speech, it is a Danish issue”), and frame 2 (“Freedom of speech is a human right, with limitations”) (Hervik and Berg 2007)—Muslims or Islamists are treated as the enemy to be contained, while at the same time national identity is being built through this enemy imagery. As I pointed out earlier, a large majority of the Danish voters see the relationship between native Danish and Muslims as incompatible. This enemy is needed for the construction of Danish national identity in a project that has been emerging in Denmark since the mid 1990s. In this period a number of studies have demonstrated a rigid dichotomization between the morally superior Danes (with free speech, for instance) and who they see as “Others”: non-Westerners and particularly Muslims, who do not have free speech and whose static, unevolving culture is hundreds of years behind. This view is present in Jyllands-Posten’s editorial on 30 September 2005. I showed that this was also present in the editorials throughout the summer of 2001. Within this dichotomization it has become legitimate to treat newly arriving immigrants as different from native Danes (Holm 2006 Hvenegård-Lassen 2002). Just as both Schmitt and Strauss have stressed, liberal democracies are weak because they rest on the willingness to compromise. In frames 1 and

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2, including the Danish prime minister’s rejection of a meeting with the ambassadors of Muslim countries, compromising was not a possibility; zero tolerance was the only solution. Therefore one can argue that to refuse to meet with the Muslim ambassadors from a neoconservative perspective is not a blunder, but part of a fight to beat the opponent. An apology (or dialogue) is also not an option. The so-called apology offered on 30 January 2006 by the prime minister, saying that he personally would not have published the cartoons, was interpreted by most Danish commentators as only a pseudo-apology.

Conclusion Government politicians made frequent references to the “clash of civilizations” narrative, which suggests that they had in mind abstract and essentialized notions of “Islam vs. the West,” rather like George Lakoff reminding us what to think of when he says: “Don’t think of an elephant.” For these politicians, true dialogue with Muslims is not on the agenda, at least while the Danish government maintains its policy of keeping Muslims out of Denmark. That the government does not seriously want dialogue is also supported by Andersen, Hansen, and Sinclair’s argument that the Partnership Program for Reform and Progress (a body that funded sending a Christian delegation to Egypt (see Hervik 2009)) is too much of a “one position, one truth” approach, where the political idea is to diminish the chances of terrorist recruitment among the deprived poor by supporting various dialogue projects in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Dialogue seems to end up falling back on the neoconservative premise that our democratic values are superior to yours. By failing to distance itself from (and in fact endorsing) Jyllands-Posten’s project, the government accepts the popular association of Islam with terrorism, as seen in Kurt Westergaard’s bomb-and-creed-in-the-turban cartoon, which makes dialogue virtually impossible. The Danish government stood fairly firm on the negative dialogue position, although it vicariously tried to calm down tensions in Egypt and the Middle East by sending a group of high-level, dialogue-oriented Christian delegates. Maintaining the negative dialogue as a political strategy is in accordance with the neoconservative philosophy as originally advocated by Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. Claims about the incompatibility of “Danish” and “Muslim” societies and ways of living did not start with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the cartoons. But the debate following from it brought more entrenched and uncompromising positions that used other incompatible bi-

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polar division of absolutes such as “democracy” and “enemies of democracy,” “free speech” and “enemies of free speech.” In Denmark politicians continue to vie for stricter zero-tolerance measures, such as banning the headscarf from more and more places (although so far not from sidewalks), to solve social problems. In popular consciousness, Muslim ways of living are increasingly seen as provocative and creating fissures in Danish society and therefore often meet with confrontation. Yet the ideas that “there can be no moral equivalency,” that “our system is morally superior,” and that “the public sphere is not for dialogue but an area for serious battling and confrontation” do not come from the “clash of civilizations” narrative itself and are not directed at the relationship between the “West” and “Islam” as cultural or civilizational entities, although it is also applied to them. In fact, the ideas of confronting your political opponent as a foe or friend comes from Schmitt (and is practiced by Strauss) in the furious critique of the overly democratic and weak Weimar Republic, which so strongly shaped both men’s academic approach to the political.

CHAPTER 11


“We Have to Explain Why We Exist”



The interviews used for the host-guest scenario analyzed in chapter 4 were carried out in 1998 and 1999. Although culturally constructed worlds or figured worlds do not change easily, everyday encounters and vicarious experiences clearly indicated changes were taken place after the turn of the millennium. Dinner parties, family gatherings, café discussions, train conversations, talks connected to public lectures, e-mail exchanges, and the daily news flow with its end-of-tolerance rhetoric, signalled an understanding of immigrants, refugees, and descendants in Denmark as being incompatible with Danish values; a raw, uncompromising intolerance was regarded as the only language extra-European immigrants would understand. Informal conversations with Muslim citizens revealed that they felt contested for their identity as Muslims, which denied them any proper dialogue. Consequently, many Muslims said they avoided entering into any public debate or conversation about the cartoons or their Muslim identity. The study of the figured world of host-guest relations can be seen as an attempt to fill the need in cultural studies, anthropology, and elsewhere for insight into how people make sense of public discourses and media products. This chapter continues this effort by asking how ordinary people in Denmark talk about Muslim identity markers and ongoing changes in the relationship between being Danish and being Muslim in Denmark after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Jyllands-Posten. The purpose is to identify and analyze these different everyday impressions of change relating to the Muhammad cartoon crisis through semistructured conversations in three focus groups and additional naturalized conversations. The focus groups allowed a more systematic questioning, discussion, and rendering of some key themes relating directly to participants’ sense of change; the incompatibility of Danish values and Islam; what they remembered from the Muhammad cartoon event; and the impact these representations had on the Muslim population, according to Muslims.

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In the earlier work we did a comprehensive team research effort to carry out fifty-five in-depth interviews, which led us to the host-guest frame of reference (chapter 4, this volume). With a smaller budget and fewer interviewees, for this chapter we decided to turn to young students in their twenties, most of whom saw themselves as tolerant. One interviewee expressed it this way: “Among young people in their twenties in the higher education system it is difficult to find anyone who votes for the Danish People’s Party.” The assumption was that if we were to discover the ending of tolerance and the insurmountable binary of us/them among the presumably most tolerant, informed, educated groups, we could conclude that most other people would be even less tolerant. During the interviews participants actually placed themselves in the category of cultivated people, for instance, by consistently referring to elder family members, colleagues, neighbors, marginal students, and people living outside Copenhagen as outspoken if not semiracist people. Moreover, participants explained that at their institution of learning any association with the Danish People’s Party and its chairperson, Pia Kjærsgaard, were treated with disgust and even contempt, followed by attempts to make such persons come to their senses. “If they could only gain some positive experiences, for instance, by dining with an immigrant family,” one participant suggested. Another had previously voted for the Danish People’s Party. After admitting this affiliation, fellow students treated him as a person to be avoided. In one incident at a party a new dance partner abruptly left him upon finding out his former political association. We held three focus group sessions with a total of fifteen people, equally divided between the sexes. Two groups of six and five people were composed of indigenous Danes. Two represented themselves as Christians, one as agnostic, and the rest as not religious but with some Christian values. All of the groups were successful in the sense that they produced lively, relevant discussions. The homogenous “Danish”1 groups turned out to be surprisingly polarized, most notably in the second group, where the former Danish People’s Party supporter and a former campaign worker for the Liberal Party dominated the discussions. The third group, a “Muslim” group consisting of four people, was eventually split up into a two-person session merging into two individual sessions. This two-person interview allowed ample time for interviewing and naturalized conversations. Since ordinary Muslim voices are hardly represented in the news media or in academic media studies, their perspectives are given some extra space here, with the additional individual interviews adding more perspective. Interviewing a fairly small set of fifteen people allows only a tentative rendering of ordinary people’s sense-making, but working with qualitative methods such as in-depth interviewing that reaches fundamental perceptions or “cultural models” requires a smaller sample and is never meant to

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be representative (Quinn 2005; Strauss and Quinn 1997). At the same time, the interviews add supplemental information to observations and experiences in everyday ethnographic interactions across the inner city of Copenhagen. To guide the discussion we used photographs, footage of a television debate, quotes, and other devices to obtain a focused, lively discussion.2

Senses of Change In the interviews we asked participants whether they felt that any changes had occurred in the way minorities were treated and represented in the last five years. Ann (student, 23) responded: In my experience you find xenophobia in the general population. It has become more acceptable today to say immigrants are a nuisance and should simply be sent home. This has become more acceptable.

Erik (teacher, 28) added: I have the same image as you, [Ann]. There is no tolerance in society. There is no altruism or warm feelings among people. People don’t talk in the street. . . . It is okay to be xenophobic. Then again eyes are being opened up for seeing something we should have seen before, which means that it isn’t just the Danish People’s Party who is carrying out a fascist smear campaign. Because we do have a problem.

In the Muslim focus group, Nadia (student, 24) explained that earlier, she was treated as someone exotic toward whom people would be friendly; however: recently, Muslims have been represented in the media as people who are threatening freedom of speech and other values in the Danish society. The talk about freedom of speech and democratic values has created a wide polarization, to such a degree that people feel their life may be in danger. If Muslims do not defend these values, then they are considered to be traitors. . . . In the old days people didn’t say things straight out. You would be stabbed in the back all the time. Today, verbal exchanges have become much more direct. That is to say, this sentiment has been there all the time, but now it has come out in the open.

To elaborate on her statement, Nadia told us about a class that discussed society’s democratic formation. On being asked for examples of people who defend democratic formation, one student mentioned Villy Søvndal, chair of the Socialist’s People’s Party,3 and his recent rhetoric, which was seen as something positive, since he was defending Danish values. Most students agreed, but no one discussed the purpose of using the rhetoric, such as showing that the opposition was not approaching Muslims in a saccharine manner. Nobody questioned his reason for using this rhetoric.

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Denmark’s strict requirements for citizens who wished to marry a foreigner were challenged and became the topic of much discussion, since they could no longer be upheld legally after a judgment of the European Court of Justice in the summer of 2008. The court ruled in the Metock case: “In the case of a married couple, irrespective of when and where the marriage took place and of how the spouse entered the host State, a non-European Union spouse of a citizen of the European Union can reside with that citizen in the European Union without having previously been resident in another Member State” (Judgment of the Court of Justice in Case C-127/08 2008). In the opinion polls Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen stood to lose seats in the parliament on this ruling. The debate itself became a wake-up call for Nadia, she said, “because it showed how much we changed. People would have shaken their heads, if anyone had said this before. It seems surreal that people lose confidence in politicians because they introduce restrictions, which can influence people with another ethnic minority background. It would have seemed strange, but now it was used as the very explanation for why the prime minister was losing votes. That is very strange to me.” Implementing restrictions may be criticized; not implementing restrictions has come to imply losing votes. In one group we asked for examples of situations where limits of what participants could accept had been crossed. The given examples speak indirectly to the growing acceptance of hostile communication with visibly different minorities. Erik told the group of a recent incident where his personal limit of tolerance had been exceeded and given way to what he called a “racist moment”: Last week a friend and I were attacked by a guy from Blågård in Nørrebro [considered the very center of Nørrebro a neighborhood with many immigrants]. One of those who had a lot to say. Attack and attack. Well, we came driving in a car. We are blinded by the sun and use the windshield washer. On the window, of course. He comes with too much speed in a big open Swedish Capulet and drives right up to the rear of our car. We hadn’t seen that. If so, we obviously would not have sprinkled the windshield. But we did so, since we hadn’t seen him [giggles]. He gets sprinkler fluid right in his face in his open Capulet. Then he drives up on the side of our car, and we don’t know what is going on. He rushes out yelling and screaming. And he will beat us up and he will kill us. And all kinds of things. In the end he spits into the car and hits my partner, who is driving the car. It was out of the ordinary, since how can you reach him, and afterward he yells that he has now lived in Denmark for thirty years and why can’t we behave properly. We have to live together in a good society [laughing]. That exceeded all my limits, also for Danishness. I was ready to—do you [know] what, you are a “perker,” get out of my country. So I was a racist for a short moment.

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Niklas (student, 24) also had a personal story to tell: “I went out and had scored this guy, whom I brought home with me. We went into a taxi. When we entered, we were holding hands, but when we began to kiss a little, we were thrown out of the taxi, [ehh]. I became really racist. I got so . . . you know, you can’t just come here to my country. I do so much to make it possible for people to be integrated and this exceed a limit of what is acceptable in Denmark.” Niklas came across as a well-meaning Danish student who saw himself as someone who does much to make integration possible (for immigrants and their descendants), yet he admitted a racist slip. Riding in the taxi as a homosexual, a minority group member, he encountered a member of another minority group, an ethnic minority group, who tells him what he can and cannot do in the taxi. In response to this instruction Niklas takes a majority stand according to which an ethnic minority member cannot tell him what is morally right or wrong in Denmark. On the basis of his emotions during the incident and the choice of retelling the story, this is an important value for Niklas. His threshold of tolerance had been exceeded. The car and taxi stories are just two out of countless others one can experience as part of informal conversations around Denmark since the turn of the millennium. In the course of the storytelling, the narrator justifies and trivializes his thoughts and potential actions. The migrant’s action and discourse generates the racist response, which only lasts a few minutes, until it gives a way for a discourse of tutelage. In the first story, it is noteworthy that the teller uses “we” and “us” throughout the story, even when it comes to observations which under normal circumstances would be regarded as individual. A chauffeur notices that a car is approaching fast and then stays disturbingly close. “We hadn’t seen that” does not reflect a primary observation; it comes across as the standardized version that reduces two people’s observations to a single story about how “they” (migrants) acted strangely and what that did to “us.” In addition, the estimation “He drove too fast” is an individual subjective judgment, but here the statement serves to underscore the driver’s bad character. Erik explained that he was particularly provoked by the offended driver’s framing of his verbal attack in a discourse of belonging and shared responsibility. If people who claim to be tolerant and understanding, and perhaps even to hold cosmopolitan views of fellow citizens with culturally diverse backgrounds, are to be tested for their depth and seriousness, then such encounters can be seen as social spaces where these well-intended claims come to be tested. Erik didn’t allow for alternative reasons for the upset and aggressive chauffeur. The car was idle when the driver used the sprinkler, which could easily be interpreted as an intentional act against the driver behind, who in his turn may also be prone to react. Erik’s story did not reveal an understand-

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ing for the driver’s acts or allow for a reconciliatory gesture, for instance, by insistently apologizing for the unlucky unintended use of the sprinkler. Niklas’s taxi story didn’t reveal details about the driver’s appearance. But it does disclose an easy slip into racist mood based on the racialized cues assigned to the driver’s phenotypical features and cultural markers. In both cases racialization takes place, then blame is added and used to explain what “their” actions have done to me. Such basic perception echoes the figured world of host-guest relations. Interestingly, Erik and Niklas saw racist thoughts as the dislike of persons with racialized features, which categorizes people on the basis of characteristics that are assumed to be innate (Gullestad 2006: 25). This is another recognizable feature of our previous study, which showed that most Danes perceive cultural features (of others) as innate and therefore literally impossible to change except through mixed marriages and time. Not liking a person and telling him that he doesn’t belong in Denmark and should go home does not qualify as racism in the analytic sense, although the elements of dichotomization and racialization allow for racism to slip in through the backdoor and leave no possibility for dialogue. Sofie (student, 23) told of a situation where her personal limit of tolerance was tested, but unlike Erik and Niklas, she was the concerned bystander and not directly involved: This is not a story about an attack or anything like that, but I was just so disappointed with Denmark. There was this really talented young girl playing soccer. She had superior talent and would like to play on the national team, the youth team, but she was not allowed, because she wore a headscarf. I was upset and offended. We want to integrate people and everybody should be involved. And still we say, you are so damn good, but you can only be part of the team if you take off the scarf. I got so angry . . . I can’t accept this . . . of course she should be allowed to keep her headscarf.

Erik objected. At first he suggested that maybe wearing the headscarf was too risky. But Julie, a footballer herself, explained that at a certain level you use other means than pulling the headscarf to stop your opponent or to influence the official in your favor. But Erik didn’t give up: “But why is it such a big thing for Muslim women to go out and defend the headscarf and make a media stunt like this girl is doing? . . . Instead of saying, ‘Here I come, I am a woman, and regardless what I do, or have to do, and what I believe in, I am here to play soccer’ [i.e., she should do whatever it takes].” Laura (student, 24) shared some intimate reflections about certain burkaclad women she occasionally encountered: I wasn’t attacked in any sense. When I lived in Nørrebro, some inner moral limit was exceeded when I saw women wearing the burka. I don’t know if it has

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anything to do with Islam. I think it is more an element some people ascribe to Islam saying that women are of less worth. There are so many symbols of oppression around women that I can’t stand. I just think . . . I feel like tearing that thing off. I won’t do it. I know well enough that for her not to wear it would make her feel as if she were naked. And I can understand that she has a different view of the burka. But I also know that it is only since her mother, her grandmother, her father and uncles have told her: ‘When you are out, you have to wear it,’ right? I can’t stand that someone has to be hidden in this way because other people demand it. People who have told her that she is not worthy of walking in the street without being fully covered.

The group members were in complete agreement that today, being xenophobic and telling migrants point-blank that what they are doing is wrong is morally acceptable to the point of being expected and even necessary. The Muslim participants in the third group and in the two individual interviews said they were the object of reprimands and verbal attacks in public. Nadia, for instance, found that the Metock verdict led the government to lose votes—that not being able to uphold Denmark’s strict immigration policy will be a concern for the voters. Erik and Niklas’s stories show how the racialization and blame of two drivers in Copenhagen for their racist moments continues a tendency noted in the figured world of host-guest relations of trivializing racism and blaming it on outside forces and circumstances. What is new since the host-guest interviews were conducted in the late 1990s is that Erik and Niklas were two students, considered by others and by themselves to be in the most tolerant and cosmopolitan category of people in Denmark. Yet they also end up unconsciously articulating exclusionary enactments. Unlike the old racism, the new racism would not regard Erik and Niklas as “racists” but would focus instead on specific utterances, acts, and incidents as racist. In Erik’s objection to Sofie’s story about a young, gifted headscarf-wearing player, his suggestions that there may be a health issue, a media stunt, and finally talk about a secular state do not come from an analysis of this incident, but related to a narrative that Erik subscribed to and provided Sofie with a different interpretation of the incident with the headscarf-wearing soccer player. In the talk about personal limits Erik and Niklas narrated two incidents about negative feelings evoked by immigrants in Denmark. Both of them found justifiable racist moments by reference to the immigrant drivers’ verbal and gestural confrontations. This again led them to think or say that the drivers should get out of the country. On the other hand, Sofie and Laura told stories recounting inner states of emotion in two situations. For Sofie, the discriminatory treatment of another footballer evoked her justifiable anger and called for restoring justice, whereas Laura detailed her strong feelings about what she saw as unreasonable practices, though the anger was

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directed not against the women themselves, but against the coercive social relations afforded by powerful family members. Yet she did not resort to claims that these women should leave the country. On the basis of her experiences living in Turkey, the problem for Laura was not where burka-clad women live, but the pressure they receive from family members. In the discussion of “senses of change” all participants agreed that expressions of xenophobia had become normalized and that the forthright, confrontational style of talking about and to immigrants and their descendants had become conventional and was even considered necessary.

The Incompatibility of Danish and Muslim Values In all the groups we discussed the issue of how Danish and Islamic values in Denmark interacted. Again and again the participants either commented on the existence of an antagonism, according to which a Muslim could not be Danish at the same time, or subscribed themselves directly to the idea of incompatibility. Erik exemplified the “incompatibility” view: Right now we can say, “We are a Christian country,” or we can say, “We are a country with freedom of religion.” I don’t think Christianity and Islam are compatible. At least not the way things are right now in the world. In Islam, Allah is the highest; he must be followed according to the doctrines he prescribes. Therefore I don’t think Islam is compatible with our culture and democratic attitudes. Yes, 90 percent possible. “Denmark is for democracy, the crescent is not.”

Laura argued against Erik’s binary scheme. She drew on her working experience in Turkey in order to provide substance for her argument and said: “I just don’t think it is right. I have a different sense of this, since I have been in Turkey for half a year. For me it is odd to say that the crescent does not stand for democracy. I have met many Turks who have explained that there isn’t so much difference between Islam and Christianity. What is written in the Bible, what is written in the Qur’an.” Erik responds by using a backing strategy to support his argument: “I have a friend who is a Muslim scholar. It is not that I have a problem with Muslims. On the contrary. I am capable of taking a critical approach to it . . . . If you arrive and rate Islam to such an extent that this is what you follow, then this is where the problem lies.” Erik seems to make an exception out of Muslim’s rating Allah higher than Danish democracy and values, albeit most religious practitioners to some degree would place their ultimate loyalty elsewhere than democratic values. Niklas simply finds any religion is a problem, since religion in his view only serves to displace responsibility from the individual to the collective.

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By reference to a certain percentage of the Muslim population as good and the rest as problematic, Erik simultaneously conveys an image of tolerance and formulates the problem in a binary way: “If eighty percent of those people in Denmark were sweet and nice people, but still had another cultural orientation, then I would either have to change culture and sooner or later to adjust to the new culture. The question is which culture do we want? What kind of values do we want to keep?” The answer to the choice is a given. Who would abandon Danish culture in favor of the culture of newly arrived foreigners? Erik acknowledges the “nice and sweet” people, but is relentless when it comes to the residual percentage, which represents the very core of what he does not like.

Racialized Integration According to Etienne Balibar, the category “immigration” functions as a substitute for the notion of “race” in the sense a collectivities of immigrants, who are discriminated against, for instance, as the target of specific policies and who are racialized in rhetoric and thinking about integration (Balibar 1991: 20). This section addresses the issue of racialized integration. Mikkel (24, student) offers an elaborate interpretation of what integration is and discloses a profound incompatibility between Muslim migrants and Danes, which draws directly from hundreds of years’ evolvement of the relationship between “Danes” and “Jews.” Lissi (24, student) and Simon (29, unemployed) immediately questioned him about his uncompromising stance. Here is a part of their dialogue: Mikkel: Right now I am much influenced by a lecture I attended last Monday by a retiring professor who has worked on the relationship between Christians and Jews in Denmark since the Middle Ages. The integration of Jews has been so successful in Denmark that it is more or less complete—there are no problems. He gave three reasons for their success: 1) Exercise the will to learn to speak Danish. 2) Exercise the will to feel a desire for being Danish. But of course you can follow your religion. That’s how it is. Religion has nothing to do with nationality as such. 3) Exercise the will to never at any time put the Torah law above [the Danish constitution]. I think this is reasonable. This would be the recipe for integration. You learn the language, you feel like you are a part of the country you reside in and live out your life, and personal belief, the rules for such a life, never, at any time, is placed above the state. Lissi [puzzled]: Well, I have a friend who is a committed Muslim believer. She follows Islam in a Shiite Muslim way. Actually, I believe she does most of the

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things you mentioned. But this thing about feeling herself to be Danish, how then would one define what Danish is? Mikkel: Yes, real feelings [of Danishness] and not consciously feeling oneself as something. That may perhaps require these generations of identifying themselves with the country and the country’s culture. . . . I want to add one thing to the professor’s criteria. That is the number. There were never 200,000–300,000 Jews in Denmark. It is completely different. That difference needs to be reckoned with, since the large number creates the possibility of building parallel societies. Now, you must think about the Jewish case that has taken many generations to get that sense of being Danish . . . . [Now] we are all equally much Danes. . . . When Denmark plays soccer against Turkey, then there are many second- and third-generation immigrants siding with the Turks. That is not necessarily a problem, but it reflects a situation where the integration and precisely that of feeling oneself as Danish, that has not happened—that is not right. . . . It simply expresses that they haven’t reached the same point as that of the Jews.

In Mikkel’s view, “feeling oneself to be Danish” may take many generations or hundreds of years to accomplish. Danes are to be judges of this process, which is not a symbiosis but a one-way responsibility for the newcomers, but not in their own lifetime. According to a social constructionist view, ethnicity, like all identities, can best be seen as the outcome of practice, negotiation, representation, and resistance, whereas the primordialist view sees cultural as innate, or deeply rooted, giving rise to strong sentiments deriving from descent, represented as natural and almost flowing from nature. The primordialist view has been deconstructed to pieces and is easily dismissed as an idea more than a materiality, yet the primordialist argument is strong, especially in the Romanticist view of the nation and the idea that people cannot be part of more than one nation. From a lecture he attended Mikkel borrowed the idea that to be fully integrated includes the willingness to feel Danish “unconsciously,” which seems to mean that rooting for Denmark during test matches lies out of awareness in the habitus. In fact, it appears that this criterion cannot be defined or fulfilled by any standard. In a different part of the focus group interview, Mikkel brought up the distinction between being integrated into the state and into the nation. “The distinction between state and nation is important to bear in mind,” he said. “It is easy to become an integrated citizen [of the Danish state] and not so easy to become an integrated national citizen, since it is not simply a legal issue. There is all of this stuff about eating pork roast. All of these are part of the integration, which you in one way or the other can summarize as a ‘nation’ or a ‘people.’” Jesper (23, student) agreed with him: “I think this is an important distinction to make in a community founded on the rule of law and important for the public debate. Obviously, they are not the same.

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Clearly when you are a Danish citizen, then you are legally a completely equal member of society, but that does not mean that we accept all citizens behaving in a certain way.” Mikkel and Jesper make a distinction between state citizenship, where everyone is equal regardless of origin or background, and a national, or cultural, citizenship, which can be obtained only by people with a particular ancestry, culture, language, and history (see also Gullestad 2006: 27). Marianne Gullestad found a similar trend in Norway. People of ethnic minority background would be accepted equally and formally by the Norwegian state, but would not be recognized by civil society as Norwegian nationals (Gullestad 2006). According to Gullestad, the concept of culture is bounded and ahistorical, serving to essentialize and racialize diversity. The idea of cultural difference “is working to prevent specific categories of racially coded people from being included in the nation” (Gullestad 2006: 27). Mikkel said: You often hear someone say that Denmark is a Christian country. That is not because we have a Christian state. Returning to the distinction between state and nation again, you will be an equally good citizen and like anyone else obey the law and pay your taxes, but if you by definition have Denmark as a Christian country, then you will never ever be integrated as a Dane, if you follow a different religion. That’s just the way it is. Then you will never be part of the Danish nation.

When Mikkel argued earlier that integration includes the embodied feeling of being Danish, which could be realized even if you followed your own religion, he was talking about Jews in Denmark, and concluded: “Religion has nothing to do with nationality as such.” Later, though, when he was speaking about Islam and Muslims, he said that if you follow a different religion “you will never be part of the Danish nation.” The different position of Jews and Muslims is also present in the case of the soccer fans’ loyalty. In the soccer example second- and third-generation immigrants “from Turkey” rooted for Turkey in a match between Denmark and Turkey, implying that they were not feeling Danish, unlike the Jews, who are considered to be “further ahead.” But which country would the Jewish Danes support in a soccer match? Mikkel’s apparent use of two different standards, one for Jews and another for Muslims, may appear as a contradiction. But I argue that it is more likely that Mikkel has appropriated his perception of Jewish compatibility in one social sphere, whereas the Muslim incompatibility has been acquired in a different sphere, that is, on two separate historical moments that have not so far been linked in Mikkel’s reasoning (see Strauss 1997). Or, alternatively, that the unwanted presence of Muslims in Denmark is the point of

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departure for his reasoning. Any argument that can sustain this perception is brought forward regardless, if the arguments are internally inconsistent. In talking about the headscarf Mikkel and Jesper (32, student) argue that it is a problematic symbol, but as Jesper says, talk about banning it should not be harmful to the individual. Consequently, Jesper only wants to discuss this issue in a more abstract manner. He still insists that women should be banned from wearing the headscarf as judges in the courtroom, since it would signal subjectivity that she is not supposed to have by virtue of her legal office. Mikkel explains further that a public official cannot show personal symbols, and to avoid anyone feeling singled out (discriminated against), the Jewish Kippah and the Christian cross are also mentioned. The state must still be able to maintain its character of neutrality, he insisted. In the Danish parliament, the headscarf has been compared with the Nazi swastika. Jesper places the headscarf in that same category when he explains: “I also would like that anyone had a little swastika or hammer and sickle, thereby showing their political conviction.” Mikkel is opposed to the visibility of such symbols: “If you carry the cross underneath, and it is invisible, then fair enough. I believe that it is the display, the overt expression that makes a difference.” Ahmed (28, consultant) had numerous questions about the headscarf and even handed out an article he had written about it. He said: Wearing the headscarf is something the media takes up a couple of times a year. What has changed is that today you do not listen to the person wearing the headscarf. If you say, this is my own choice, then they go, ‘We don’t believe it.’ . . . If you ask the wearers of headscarves, they won’t give the answer that the critics want to hear. I had the same problem for a long time. I had to write a long explanatory article, which is used in many places. What the meaning is and why. Most Muslims also don’t know.

The fact that headscarf wearers are not talked to, while their headscarf is the object of derogatory comments, was part of Nadia’s story. “Part of my life I was completely covered. This was not religiously motivated, but actually emotionally grounded. I experienced really negative reactions. It was wild. Shocking. For instance, a father sitting in the bus with a child on his lap. Then he says to the child, pointing at Nadia: “Look, this is a burglar!” He is unaware that I understand perfectly what he is saying. I have also been threatened physically.” In my view, the following statements by Erik during a discussion are indicative of the identification of difference and the subsequent emphasis of incompatibility that defines neoracism and the “clash of civilizations” narrative: Erik: Too bad Maria isn’t here today. I know her. We study together. We have always had our discussions, since she is veiled.

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Ann: With a headscarf? Erik: With a headscarf or, that is to say, it is only her face that is unveiled. And, ehh, every single day when she comes I feel she steps on my toes. Laura: Why? Erik: Because she preaches Islam before she preaches public school and learning . . . . And I have really been thinking about this, and it isn’t that I don’t think Nadia is a damn nice girl [laughs], and I respect her 100 percent, but I can’t be reconciled with her headscarf. Niklas: But then you don’t respect her 100 percent either! (Student, 23). Erik: Naa, well, that is right, because [raised voice]. Yes—No, I don’t, if you see what I mean. . . . But I can’t not talk to her; I can’t be not-friendly toward her. Of course I am friendly. I can’t stand there grumbling and straight-out talk about her ways.

Erik wrestled with important issues, first adding a personal backing to argument in order to make it more convincing (“I know Maria”), but nevertheless ended up being critical toward Maria’s use of the headscarf. In his talk the headscarf became what generates the controversy, not his conviction that Danish and Islamic cultural identity markers are incompatible. Erik is identifying cultural difference and then seeing it (the headscarf), as incompatible to his understanding that you have to choose the dominant culture, where you live. At the same time, he is also taking the position of being on the home turf. If Maria showed up she would have to justify and defend her choice of wearing the headscarf. Yet unlike in the sprinkler episode, here Erik maintains a friendly, tolerant demeanor despite his inner turmoil.

Racialized “Guests” We showed footage of a debate on public television from 1998 about whether the largest city in Jutland, Århus, should grant permission to the building of a multicultural community center, including a large new mosque. On the one side is Osman Öztoprak, who represents the group working to implement the project. On the other is Preben Jensen, chairperson of the association formed against granting permission to establish a mosque in Århus. Throughout the debate Preben Jensen consistently talks about Osman as a guest in Denmark, subject to following the rules of the host. Osman, who arrived as a ten-year-old boy twenty-six years earlier, consistently objected to being framed as a guest in Århus. The students had the following reactions: Erik: I believe our perception of him is very clear. This man is just as Danish as the other one, who is standing on the other side of the table smearing him

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and insisting he is a “guest.” . . . I think the interesting thing is not whether we should have a mosque or not but a multicultural community center. What do they need a multicultural center for? To make culture in Denmark? It is a Danish ‘village hall’ [forsamlingshus]! Then all of a sudden there is no integration, but the opposite. There is a manifestation of what you bring along and stand for. And then you turn yourself into a stranger. Maria: Oh, no, no, no! I don’t agree at all. Rasmus (28, student): Since there are community centers that take the national church as its starting point, anyone should be able to go there with their children on Sundays and do all kinds of things. There are community centers for everything. There are also African community centers, Venezuelan—meetings every Wednesday. I totally disagree with you. Laura: I also think of Arabic and Turkish culture. There could also be belly dancing every Wednesday. That would be fun to come down and watch.

If you bring out your foreign cultural baggage in a cultural community center then you are turning yourself into a stranger or guest. Erik is rejecting the idea that Osman Öztoprak is a guest, yet he refuses to talk about him specifically. Instead, he shifts the discourse from the individual to collective, cultural level that where visible difference is targeted. This visibility and the reproduction of cultural difference are not to be allowed, because they represent the opposite of integration. Cultural difference is, once again, contested in front of national Danish culture. Osman Öztoprak is not considered a guest by the people in group 1. In this group, Preben Jensen’s talk about Osman as a guest was immediately booed during the footage, when Laura satirically reiterated the word “guest” in a despicable and questioning voice. Maria found it “provocative that the host, Reimer Bo, says: ‘I must say that you are originally from Turkey and been here for twenty-six years,’ which has nothing to do with the story. I can understand that it is an interesting piece of information, but it has nothing to do with the question of building a mosque. What is interesting is the fact he is a Muslim.” Jesper is the only person who states outright that he has no problem using the host-guest frame: Obviously, such a relationship must be in play. I can imagine if I moved to another country I would to some degree behave like a guest. At least for a long time and maybe we need several generations to stop feeling like a guest. . . . When you come to a new place, you adjust to a certain degree according to the rules and norms of that place. Maybe if you had the intention of staying, you can of course in the long run try to influence—and notwithstanding that you are Muslim—if you come as a stranger, or guest, and show off yourself and your difference, then I don’t think this is very polite or appropriate, whatever you call it. Then I feel you are somehow breaking the host-guest etiquette.

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Bente (24, student) disagrees and points to the ever-present “them” and “us.” She goes on: “If only one could begin to focus on some of the things that connect us. They are people with the same feelings. You may have different background and different cultural and religious persuasions, but . . . .” But Jesper insists: “If I heard the dialogue of the footage on tape [without seeing Osman], then I would, honestly speaking, not have noticed that he was not a native speaker of Århus. Obviously, he was someone who had learned to speak Danish as a second language, but very nice. . . . This is one of the requirements for a guest, if you come and want to settle. Learning the language. Making an effort at it, I mean this is a basic thing. Everything else is impolite.” Jesper places Osman in a situation where sight is privileged. Only by seeing him does he categorize him as someone speaking Danish as a second language. Being told “Imagine you don’t see him, only hear him” reminds us of his phenotypical and cultural features, which again frames and racializes him as a guest. But as a good guest. Nadia would be a guest according to this logic. She has been living in Denmark since she was a child, just like Osman, but she is twenty-four, unlike the thirty-six-year-old Danish-Turk spokesman in the studio. Nadia has this observation on the host-guest perception: When you perceive people as guests, then you have an idea that these people cannot make any demands, but have to subdue themselves to some values. If you perceive a person as an equal part of this society, then you will have to show more respect for what these people are bringing. . . . I have seen this panel discussion which Politiken held about the cartoons, where Søren Espersen [spokesperson on foreign policy issues for the Danish People’s Party and former spin doctor] discussed with some Muslim scholar, who had arrived in connection to the crisis. Søren Espersen says, “Get on with it,” accept being mocked, scorned, and ridiculed, since by virtue of arriving in this society, you have to subdue yourself to the values of society. It is the same tone. The foreign is not welcome. After this discussion I have a sense that people have come to a conclusion to how the situation can be solved. How to express disapproval, how to rebuke people, when they feel their own values are being threatened. Now it is as if this is something you must do, when you feel your values are threatened.

According to Alana Lentin’s definition of racialization (chapter 1, this volume), this focus on the visible aspects of the guest would be an example of this. Racialization provides justification for preventing certain coded people from being included into the nation. Manifesting difference reminds the Danish eyes that these different people can never become Danish and equal, since these characteristics are natural and innate.

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“It Is Not about Color”: Denials of Racism Earlier in this chapter Erik, Niklas, Laura, and Sofie told stories about how and when their personal limits of tolerance had been exceeded, at times causing them to slip into racist thoughts and racist moments of action. In Erik’s and Niklas’s cases, their “racist moments” were the outcome of situations where visibly different minorities were to blame for these outbursts of anger and indignation. Three interviewees in the two other groups spoke directly to the controversial issue of racism and likewise from the perspective of denial of racism. The interviewer asked when a guest ceases to be a guest and becomes a fully recognized co-citizen by society. Bente had just been talking about the dichotomy between “them” and “us,” urging people to look more at similarities than differences, when Jesper brought racism to the agenda by denying it: Jesper: This stuff about the black and the light [skin color], we have, to a large extent, stopped doing in the public space. We do not talk about skin color. Yes, we talk about ethnicity; we do not talk about skin color. Bente: But people are still talking about “them” and “us.” Jesper: That’s right. But all this about skin color has the idea of a superior race carried through descent [(bwadrrr)—expression of disgust], we can look back at it as a historical phenomenon, hopefully, although I know there are still people holding this view in Greve [village where Nazi leader Johni Hansen lives]. There is nothing in it. But when we speak about religion, culture, and ethnicity we are into something that is actually helping to define people. There are cultural clashes. That’s just the way it is. I think it is credulous to imagine you can just dissolve this cultural clash by pretending it is not there. That is an approach I don’t understand. I also think there is a “them” and “us” division, definitely. . . . Simon: How can it then be that Jews are not part of the “them” and “us” division? Jesper: There has been one such widespread division. If we begin to talk precisely about religion, there is a “them” and “us.” They are Jews, I am a Christian. . . . Two different communities. . . . Many people with longer academic education have been vaccinated against making any bombastic statements.

Mikkel made a similar statement, but took it further, saying he regarded those who evoke racism as people who attempt to cover up “the truth”: More than anything I believe that by objecting toward all this color division comes from my feeling of what I experience as a legitimate reservation toward Muslim immigration into Denmark, which is then connected to ordinary racism, ordinary thinking about people having one or the other skin color. This is

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so far from my beliefs. It is not about color, and probably this is why I react. . . . Honestly, I don’t care what color . . . Unfortunately some of those people who have carried out terror-attacks are converted Muslims, who are not dark. For me this has nothing do with color .

Jesper and Mikkel’s reactions concerning color indicate that—if nothing else—skin color is a sensitive issue in Scandinavia. Mikkel seems to allow color to pass through the cracks, when he tacitly takes Muslims to be nonwhite, which urges him to use “white convert” to make his point about how color is not a factor in his reasoning. This type of sensitivity was also noted by Marianne Gullestad in her treatment of the use of the term “Negro” in the Norwegian public debate (2006) and, not least, the heated public discussion following her work. Ahmed also talks about (old) racism, and, like Jesper and Mikkel, he is not familiar with neoracism, which has culture and ethnicity at its core instead of race. In a response to Erik’s story with the sprinkler incidents, which we summarized for this group, Ahmed says: A person who normally is a real happy, left-wing person, politically correct—oh oh ihh, that person has of course a limit. If such a person is attacked by a drug addict, who stole his mobile phone, would also start yelling and shouting at the drug addict. . . . His limit is exceeded. He is losing this balance . . . But he is not a racist. He may be racist for ten minutes. No, racism is when you support a pure-bred society. You can’t use it at all about someone who is angry with a person, and whom you have a conflict with. Now this man has dark skin, so you can call him something funny. If he hadn’t been dark, the confrontation would still have been there. Then he wouldn’t have been called a “perker.”

Jesper, Mikkel, and Ahmed’s talk about (old) racism allowed them a platform for stating that the ongoing public debate about Danish vs. Muslim values is not about racism. Jesper was disgusted with the ideas of superior and inferior races. Mikkel objected to those who bring racism to the table because he said he believed that skepticism toward Muslims is a legitimate concern. The concern, as we have seen earlier, is the racialized differences that take hundreds of years to overcome. For his part Jesper tied his thoughts about misplaced (old) racism with legitimate talk about differences in terms of “religion,” “culture,” and “ethnicity,” which inevitably also leads to cultural clashes. Ahmed downplayed racism to an individual pathology and the presence of color as nothing more than coincidental. *These three participants are the only ones who bring up racism as an issue; albeit, it is done by denying it. While they obviously have old form of racism in mind, the common thing for all of them is that they know little about “race” (the outcome of racism) or about neoracism and its intimate relationship to nationalism. More generally, lack of working knowledge of rac-

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ism and neoracism is widespread among Danes, in the same way that finding research-based race experts, or institutions that teach students about the lessons of racism and how to analyze it, is practically absent from Danish society (Hervik 2002a). The explicit denial of racism certainly brings racism to the forefront. Associating color and racism is strongly rebuffed, not least by Jesper, who finds religion, culture, and ethnicity to be the legitimate entities to be concerned about. In anthropology classes that I taught in Oslo, Malmö, and Copenhagen on ethnicity, nationalism, and racism, students agreed that the emic use of ethnicity had skin color as one of the most frequent associations. Associations with ethnicity can best be summed up as being with the visible (and audible) minorities, who have come to Scandinavia mostly from non-European countries. Moreover, old racism, of which anti-Semitism is one example, based its ideology on both social, cultural, and biological features (Lentin 2008). The shift from the category “race” to “culture” still refers to the same groups of people. Incompatibility of cultures is strongly marked in the statements above, particularly in Jesper, Mikkel, and Erik’s rhetoric. Differences are identified and then condemned as incompatible, for instance, in the cases of the headscarf in the courtroom and the cultural community house in Århus. In this respect difference is still annoying. Downplaying the visibility no longer suffices to satisfy the host, since the unruly visitor will never be able to leave this category and become an equal, national citizen within his own generation, or his children’s, or even his grandchildren’s.

The Muhammad Cartoon Story In the beginning of the cartoon story, Jyllands-Posten’s “test of self-censorship” project led the newspaper to publish twelve cartoons with the names and details of the cartoonists, showing clearly that they were not suffering from any self-censorship. The government entered the story in October 2005, insisting that the cartoon story was an issue of freedom of speech, while another strategic served to blame the imams for stirring up troubles in the Middle East. The spin-oriented prime minister also blamed business leaders, intellectuals, the opposition, and certain newspapers for not standing up for freedom of speech. As we saw earlier, he did so to control the cultural memory of the cartoon affair so that it was remembered as an affair not about Islamophobia and racism, but about free speech, where he stood firm while others backed down. We asked the focus groups what words came to mind about what the cartoon affair was about. Answers in the two native Danish groups were uni-

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formly “freedom of speech” and “personal speech.” The success of the spin in forming the cultural memory was strikingly clear in Mikkel’s answer in the subsequent discussion: Freedom of speech. My first impulse is also that I feel sad to notice how little people were willing to stand firm about something so fundamental, which again was so insane. I feel like, if you draw a cartoon juxtaposing their religion with a bomb and the reaction to that is violence and bombs . . . If people can’t think any farther, at least they should shut up! I simply don’t want to engage myself with that sort of thing. It was terrible all this resignation.

Nadia had given up participating in any discussion, because she said she felt she was not being listened to: I feel that the crisis started from this “us” and “them” thinking and it wasn’t so much about free speech . . . . It was a provocation for the sake of provocation. . . . What I have done is to mentally retreat in my studies. I don’t feel like expressing my personal opinion. Only what is directly relevant to the things we discuss, I will voice. But when I hear comments, which I think are really crass, I simply ignore them. I feel that the way of thinking has changed so much that to just talk about is like hitting a cushion. It does not add up to anything. You feel as if it is the whole atmosphere of the society. Or, at least the atmosphere which has blown up in the news media.

These two quotes by Mikkel and Nadia illustrate the polarization in the debate, which is so large that there is no dialogue with Muslims. Moreover, the media coverage hardly contains any concerned ordinary Muslim voices. Mikkel’s talk embodied two perspectives: an Arabic and Islamic world as such and an internal Danish perspective, which harbored the prime minister’s spin: Incredible that it is possible that a Danish newspaper, a bad one, prints a cartoon with such dire consequences. That is a causal relationship I don’t understand. Then, there is the other domestic perspective. It turned out that we have some politicians and pundits in this society, who evidently gave in when it came to absolutely fundamental principles for winning a practical agenda. Tøger Seidenfaden [chief editor of Politiken], for instance. He turned out to be a total hypocrite and then in fact ended up back on track [Politiken republished Westergaard’s bomb-in-the-turban cartoon in February 2008]. These are the two tracks I remember the best.

To explain the origin of the story, Mikkel turned to the author of the children’s book on Islam, Kåre Bluitgen, but then casually noted that nothing really happened until January 2006: There was all this play about whether the Danish government should meet with Arabic representatives or not and what those meetings should be about. Holding a meeting was rejected. Then again there is this principle of pragmatic

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politics, which the analysis has shown was the dumbest thing to do, since the Arab world put an enormous amount of emphasis on meetings for their own sake, even if you don’t agree to anything. So holding a meeting for the sake of expressing goodwill . . .

In this quote Mikkel emphasized the irrational character of Arabic meeting culture and used it to express a benign criticism of the rejection of a meeting. What is important to note is that most of the ambassadors were not Arabic, yet Arabic culture was used to explain why a meeting was important. This suggests that the image of Islam does not come from analysis of the actual historical events but draws on the salient, cognitive schema of Islam as Arabic and irrational. The schema is evoked in order to explain what is going on from a minimal set of cues. Saniyah (20, social worker) was living abroad when the cartoon story broke, but she returned in December 2005. Her entrance, besides what her family told her, was not until late, when the reactions had become particularly violent and global, in late January 2006. Rasmus’s entrance to the cartoon story was also the violent global reactions as shown on television in January and February of 2006. His statement can be read like a summary of the non-Muslims’ first entrance into the then-emerging cartoon crisis: “The reactions, not the cartoons! When you talk about Kåre Bluitgen’s book, retrospectively, that is correct when I think of how the whole thing started, but that is of course a rationalization after the event. What captured the attention to the Muslim countries was the reaction. It made people say, ‘Ohh ohh ohh.’” Most members of the two Danish groups agreed that the reaction caught their attention, while they didn’t follow the story as it unfolded in the fall of 2005. This contrasts with the Muslims interviewees (except Saniyah). The interviewer reports our indisputable finding that no one in our media study had questioned Jyllands-Posten’s right to publish the cartoons and that criticizing Jyllands-Posten’s publication is not an attack on freedom of speech. Jesper was skeptical and said: There is something odd in this discussion. Saying that nobody has denied their right implies that this is not about freedom of speech. That is a strange argument. There may be many ways of restricting your right to say something. It may be that you say something really stupid, but you can of course say what you want, but I don’t care to listen to it. . . . If some powerful political entity, such as the state, tries to prevent the publication it is necessarily a problem of free speech.

The Muslims in the third focus group did not enter the cartoon case through foreign reactions, but followed the case closely from the time the cartoons were published on 30 September 2005. Ahmed explained: “It was absolutely hysterical. Definitely. First of all, the press took a long long time to come up with any perspective that I could recognize. I was answering questions for

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a Web site. We were forced to take a stand all the time about what we were thinking about this and that.” Nadia said she also knows the pressure on Muslims to distance themselves from what Muslims were doing anywhere in the world. She found it, for instance, in politics: “Being a Muslim politician in a political party is perceived negatively. Something the party has to justify and document. That they are not Islamists or defending Islamists. Even among the Red-Green Alliance [Enhedslisten], the most leftist party in Parliament], . . . I don’t follow a specific political party, but I have noticed that even among the left-wing parties you hear that we have to justify ourselves.” Ahmed explained that since Muhammad was never the real issue, Muslims in Denmark referred to the Muhammad cartoon crisis as the “JyllandsPosten crisis,” and continued: As I see it the crisis started with a provocation, which then ran away. Then, somehow they ended up tying the crisis to freedom of speech, which it has nothing to do with. . . . The problem has never been that some non-Muslims broke Islamic laws. Muslims do not expect they do. In addition it is absurd, if Muslims should apologize to the Hindus every time they eat a cow, right? Since we have eaten their God. It is out of proportion. . . . What was really provocative, was the text [by cultural editor Flemming Rose], where it says, you should accept being ridiculed, mocked, and insulted, simply because you are Muslim. That means my children—well not that I have any, but my children to come—and my parents should be ridiculed, mocked, and insulted, because they have a Muslim background. That’s what I protested against. . . . People in Denmark and the rest of this earth shouldn’t be ridiculed automatically because they identify themselves as Muslims. That was the problem I had. That was the problem everybody had. Also, those who call for a court case against Jyllands-Posten, they had the cartoons only as item number 16 on their list of complaints.

Nadia never felt that the cartoon case had anything to do with freedom of speech: I remember from the beginning that I simply couldn’t understand why they made such drawings. For me that was not the prophet I followed. I couldn’t stand it. Of course I was upset, but not as much as I became later. Especially when I heard how the whole thing was justified by reference to freedom of speech. I thought it was absurd that you in the name of free speech could publish these drawings and add the text about “ridicule, mock, and insult.”

Ahmed explained: Back in October [2005] I noticed the prime minister’s media stunt. And the entire news media cut off any sense of debate. This is where it goes awry. It is as if we were told, that this is how we have decided to deal with it. We have decided to ridicule, mock, and insult all of you because you are Muslims. We

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have no intention of changing this. We do exactly what we want to do. There was no debate. There was no discussion. When you tried to say something, the door was shut by journalists sitting there babbling about free speech.

Fatima (31, Muslim journalist) extended this criticism to Politiken, which is otherwise known as critical of the government, and Jyllands-Posten’s handling of the cartoon crisis: Politiken joins every single initiative they can on discriminatory practices and welcomes journalists with ethnic minority background as temporary news journalists or freelancers. However, they do not want to hire anyone on a permanent basis. Rather than hiring promising journalists who may have worked as interns or substitutes, they prefer to keep them at arm’s length and collaborate with journalists with ethnic minority background as freelance journalists.

As mentioned earlier the media treatment, the public sentiment, and her peers at school led Nadia to retreat from expressing her personal viewpoints. Ahmed, Saniyah, and Fatima also followed the same strategies of withdrawal. They saw no alternative. Ahmed offered the most elaborate explanation: When one case has finished a new one is brought up. Again and again we have to sit down and explain things to people [journalists] who haven’t researched the new case. I haven’t met a single person who didn’t end up agreeing with me. The problem is, why do they not research properly? Why do they not use what they were taught in school? I think they are too lazy. . . . I would like to clear up misunderstandings, but I don’t want to waste my time with people who live by one prejudice after the other. You can explain things to a person, how things are connected, fine, then the negative sentiment is gone. A week later they have read something else in the newspaper and come back to you. Then you explain it to them and you continue doing this the rest of your life.

Asked directly about the consequences of relating to Kurt Westergaard’s bomb-in-the-turban drawing and the publication of the cartoons, Ahmed explained: Internally in the Muslim communities. You sit there and discuss with different groups whether violence is the solution. I don’t see this as a specific Muslim problem. I remember being in the youth group of a political party before I became religious, when we were asked to discuss this idea, some argued that under certain given circumstances they would use violent methods. They shouldn’t. Well, except at war, but not in the political program and we have to follow and support the law. The same thing here. When you find so many, I believe maybe eighty percent moves around randomly [(kegler rundt)—literally knocked around, as in bowling], who may want to be Muslims. Someone plays around a little with this and then we ask them about what Al Qaeda actually says.

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Impact on Muslims With the Muslim participants, we discussed explicitly the impact of the recent changes on the Muslim population in Denmark. Nadia explained: “The biggest consequence is that the law restricts people’s freedom. With the hostile atmosphere it is much easier to pass the laws. . . . There are only a few people among my acquaintances who have not in one way or another considered moving to another country.” Ahmed quipped: “We have to justify ourselves all the time. We have to explain why we exist.” The Muslim focus group discussed the political strategy and impact of ethnic politician Naser Khader, who played a significant role in the crisis and who came out as more popular than ever among native Danish voters. According to Ahmed: He is just using the cartoon case politically. After the crisis he has disappeared, After all, he was there from day one. I remember hearing him giving a speech. Half of the speech consisted of making fun of his father. He stopped doing that when his father died. My father did this and that. Here is someone who actually makes a living out of holding speeches where he is poking fun at his father, tells jokes about his father only to communicate that he is better than his father. ‘I have learned from my father’s mistake,’ so one may say ‘You have made a career out of it?’ Yes, you can [laughs and shakes his head].

For Nadia, Khader is used as a role model representing the polar opposite of fundamentalism, the ideal immigrant. In the public debate, Ahmed clarified, “You often hear people make anti-Muslim statements, but then they make a positive exception about the one Muslim they know at work, or one who lives in the same apartment building, or who owns a shop on the corner.” Ahmed evokes this observation during a longer reflection on Khader’s political strategy: What bothers me is that he makes a living out of being the “good” Muslim. But it backfires easily. I lived in this suburban village. There weren’t many immigrants besides me. We were told by those who knew us, “You are okay. You are not like the others. But this guy over there on the other side of the street, the Turkish guy, he is strange.” Then I can choose between two options. I can say, “Yes, you are absolutely right,” and then I will get more back-patting. This is what Naser Khader has done all his life. You could also ask, “But do you know this guy across the street? Why do you think I am better than him? The only reason why you think I am better than him is that you don’t know him.” What Naser Khader is doing is being the stooge, and evidently his success went to his head. I know he is so popular in the news media. He is the easy solution. He confirms people’s biases. . . . I think he has overestimated what people have told him such as he is good speaker, good writer, and so on. He was completely demolished during the last election.

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Nadia ascertained that there are certain people with a Muslim cultural background who do follow this strategy. “For me they only do it for personal gain. They don’t try to understand the ethnic groups. Hence, they create a distance between “the good Muslim” and “everyone else.” Nadia, Ahmed, and Saniyah were smiling leniently when we talked about Khader. Nadia explained: “The reason why I smile while we talk about him is that he may say some things in the media without being criticized for lack of any substance. He may start to laugh in the middle of an interview during a serious question, which shows his lack of critical judgment and that he is the “good example” to be focused on. Therefore it may be of secondary importance that he is unable to give a summary of the party’s economic policy.”

Conclusion The fifteen people we interviewed agreed on identifying the presence of a salient “us/them” division in Danish society; the normalization of xenophobic outbursts; and an unmitigated, relentless talk about Muslim identities and presence in Denmark. What seemed to be two homogeneous Danish focus groups in the beginning turned out to be two groups with strong internal polarization. This clash of opinion can be seen as a reflection of a general trend in society. Everyone can refer to such fierce discussions and how they try to avoid them. Three participants in the Danish groups adhered directly to the idea of incompatibility between so-called Danish and so-called Muslims values and symbols. Often these views on incompatibility were expressed as questions phrased as simplified binary choices, where the right choice is already given: “Which culture do we want?” Everyone else confirmed the dominant entrenched “us/them” dichotomy, yet they didn’t subscribe to the idea of incompatibility that comes with it. Racialization came out in a variety of ways (although this is not an emic term), for instance, in talk about the headscarf. As Lentin has reminded us, recent debates on the headscarf also embody racialization, where women are reduced to a single aspect of their outward appearance. Wearing the headscarf is understood as inseparable from her very nature, which shows a process of naturalization. For several participants the headscarf represented a symbol of “unwanted presence.” No one referred to any actual incidents where the headscarf had been a problem, which reflects that no researchbased evidence has come out to show any problem. Neither has the Danish Judges’ Association. The association has expressed its concern about the debate, which is paving the way into legislation (Den Danske Dommerforening 2008).

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What knowledge structures underlie the speech? In this natural discourse used by the participants to describe their private emotions in order to justify their racist outbursts, I will simplify these in terms of a general cultural schema: “If x happens, then emotion y,” or if a given rule is violated, then a certain effect or emotion is likely to emerge (see Lutz 1988). Although they talk about inner emotional stages, they draw on cultural understandings of the correctness of harboring these emotions as well as what proper action a justifiable emotion can, or should, lead to. For example, Nadia’s headscarf offended Erik. In a simplified cultural logic, the causality seems to be: Nadia is perceived as an unruly guest since she refused to stop wearing the headscarf. Therefore Erik (the host) is offended. Erik is justifiably xenophobic. Erik can confront Nadia directly about her use of the headscarf.

Another example is the idea of cultural background as innate with the consequence that it is impossible to be become a full part of Denmark as a monocultural nation. In Jesper, Mikkel, and Erik’s rhetoric, a Muslim can never be part of the Danish nation, since Denmark is a Christian country with a Christian state church. Yet the Jewish population is still Jewish, and 200,000 Muslims do live in Denmark. Erik, Niklas, Jesper, and Mikkel tacitly use racialization when describing the three individuals and the “culturally different” as a basis, when they justified their racist gestures and uncompromising stands toward the culturally different. Their choice of narrative was expressed with different intensities, enabling them to edit out other possible lines of action that would be more understanding and cosmopolitan, allowing persons a variety of reasons for acting or talking the way they do. The sprinkler incident could easily be mistaken for an act of overt provocation, which under normal circumstances would have led to a less confrontational response. Likewise, the taxi-driver story didn’t leave any option for negotiation of what was going on. Erik’s quibble about Nadia’s veiling edited out Muslim women’s right to wear the headscarf as freedom-loving individuals. Jesper and Mikkel did not talk about solutions to the problems faced by specific individuals, who were to stop exposing their overt markers of identity or leave the country. Again the causal chain seems clear in this instance of banal nationalism: The two different drivers (racialized guests) are aggressive, or demanding (unruly guests). Therefore Erik and Niklas (hosts) are offended. Erik and Niklas justifiably slip in “racist moments.”

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Erik and Niklas insist that drivers leave the country.

Sofie and Laura’s responses are different. In Sofie’s football incident the cultural logic does not allow the host-guest division: Footballer with headscarf is not permitted to play. A girl is a racialized by football association and the media (she is an unruly guest). Sofie is justifiable angry, because the girl is discriminated against (opposed to seeing her as a guest). Erik intervened: “Isn’t it rather a health issue?” “Isn’t it just a media stunt?” “Do we want a secular state or not?” Implication: Sofie’s anger is unjustifiable. Sofie is angry, but her anger does not lead to confrontational language or gestures; she is included as one of us.

Laura’s inner dialogue about her perception of burka-clad women revealed: Women covered in burkas are suppressed individuals. Therefore Laura is justifiably upset with suppression, anywhere suppression takes place (women are seen as suppressed victims, rather than as (unruly) guests). Women are suppressed by men, but also by other family members. Laura is justifiable angry.

Laura is angry, but her anger is not framed against a background of belonging in certain places. Whether in Denmark or Turkey, these women have directly or indirectly been forced to cover themselves up. Despite the ideas of incompatibility, people like Nadia, Ahmed, Fatima, and Saniyah do live in Denmark, attend school, write articles in various journalistic genres, and advise about cultural beliefs, identity markers, and issues concerning Islam. Migrant workers, their families, descendants, refugees, and so on have been an integral part of Danish society for decades. They vote, they commit crime, they work, they are unemployed, they are employed. Generally speaking, they are an embodied part of Danish society, regardless of the circulation of the incompatibility narrative, which explains that their culture and religion are incompatible to Danish society’s values. In practice, Denmark is multicultural. This incongruence between the narrative of incompatibility and the actual multicultural presence suggests in a powerful way that the two oc-

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cupy separate spatial and historical domains of insight. For his part, Erik talked about the reproduction of the “opposite of integration” every time immigrants perform or show cultural visibility in public places like a cultural community house, despite the frequent occurrence of such cultural manifestations in contemporary Denmark, which annoyed him. Mikkel used two different standards for being religious and a Danish national—one for Jews and another for Muslims. Muslims can never become equal national citizens if Denmark is a Christian county, even though Jews have become accepted as nationals. Rather than simply being a contradictive argument, the different standards indicate experience of two unconnected historical moments (Strauss 1997). The representation of Jews and Muslims must be understood generally, as occurring in two historically distinct ways. It can be argued that it is not entirely what the Jews or Muslims are doing and saying to integrate, but also the character of the Danish representation and perception of these groups situated in time and space. The government’s political spin of the Muhammad cartoon crisis played a crucial role. Participants entering the cartoon crisis retrospectively are particularly vulnerable to the spin narrative. With compelling coverage of global violent reactions against symbols of Denmark, they shop for explanations primarily in the news media. The Danish government’s powerful spin prevailed domestically and in most foreign media coverage and became hegemonic in popular consciousness. The spin succeeded in constituting the cartoon story as a crisis about freedom of speech, where Denmark has free speech and the countries protesting against Denmark do not. Although this is a nationalist frame, the prime minister also applied the spin domestically in an attack against everyone who did not stand up for freedom of speech at a moment when the cartoon crisis peaked. The domestic attack on anonymous groups in Denmark was explained and analyzed as an attempt to control how history was written about the cartoons. Some of the focus group responses seem like photocopies of what the prime minister was saying. Mikkel was particularly upset about people who didn’t stand up for freedom of speech, but more generally the two “Danish” focus groups did remember the cartoon story as an issue of freedom of speech and personal freedom. The four Muslim participants were in different ways and with different intensities closely monitoring the course of events from its very beginning on 30 September 2005, which is reflected in more accurate (spin-resistant) memories directly relating to the beginning of the cartoon story. Or, rather, their experiences from the time of the actual publication of the cartoons enabled them to deflect the government spin and Jyllands-Posten’s Islamcritical coverage.


Conclusion



Following the radical events of 1989, Europe witnessed a drastic increase in racially motivated violence and polarized attitudes towards migrants and refugees. This took place in an environment of ontological insecurity when internal borders within the European Union were vanishing and the external border was fortified. In all of the European countries immigration is now severely restricted and “Fortress Europe” is a fact. Outside the union borders took form rapidly, not least because the Iron Curtain had been dismantled and gave room for new ethnic and national borders to emerge from obscurity within the former Soviet Union and its allied countries. These and other changes as well as the intensifying (and unevenly distributed) globalization constitute some of the shared external circumstances forming the post-1989 world, which then articulate with the historical trajectories of each country, its government, colonial experience, demography, and political personalities. Denmark’s path differed from other European trajectories when it held a referendum in 1992 about whether Denmark should ratified the new Maastricht treaty that would move the countries’ collaboration one step closer to a political union. A referendum was held with Danes narrowly rejecting the treaty. Under a new government nine months later, the rejection of the treaty was transformed into an equally narrow acceptance. During the election debates, the focus shifted from negative reactions coming out of the ontological insecurity about the foreignness within a new borderless European to a more focused mixophobic reaction to foreigners already living in Denmark and a celebration of Denmark within the European Union and the soccer world. The process revealed a huge gap between, on the one side, the majority of politicians advocating for increased European political integration and collaboration, while, on the other side, the radical right Progress Party, and the left-wing Socialist People’s Party rejected the treaty on the grounds that it would take sovereignty away from the Danish nation-state. In a national political compromise the socialists were given assurances that no supranational authority would issue citizenship status to overrule Danish citizenship or decide matters of police work and asylum policy; and there would be no Danish participation in the final phase of the economic and

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monetary union, and no participation in any common defense strategy. All these assurances were sufficient to make the party support the treaty in a second referendum. The first major media event treated in this book appeared in 1997, when the new radical right-wing Danish People’s Party and the tabloid paper Ekstra Bladet teamed up in the same neoracist and populist effort, in which they were able to capitalize on the discrepancy between a majority of politicians supporting the Maastricht treaty and resistant voters, who chose to defy their political representatives by launching a campaign against the bodily presence of immigrants and refugees and against who they saw as the elite who had let it come to this multicultural havoc. Ekstra Bladet launched the controversial campaign. However, all the newspapers, with Information as an exception, covered the campaign intensively, thereby keeping it alive at the top of the news agenda. The nationalist upsurge reached a peak as immigrant and refugee presence became the dominant issue in both local and national elections in 1998. Masquerading as migration or integration policy, neonationalism was the real phenomenon in play according to conventional academic definitions, although the everyday use of the term is taboo among the Danes and reserved for issues in other parts of the world. During the campaign and the national parliamentary election debate, the distinction grew stronger between an in-group of seemingly open-minded, democratic Danes and an out-group of unbridgeably different cultural others. These cultural others were Bosnian refugees in the early 1990s, but the idea soon took a racialized turn with Somali refugees, who were represented and perceived as too different to be integrated. The nationalist othering of Somali refugees in 1997 became personalized in Ekstra Bladet’s key campaign story of Ali, who was accused of abusing the Danish welfare system due to his foreign and exotic family relations. Everyday conversations featured Ali, and Danes were upset, triggering a debate in their parliament. Little attention was paid to the journalist who wrote the story. A former radical feminist, Ulla Dahlerup wrote the story for Ekstra Bladet; she was soon to become a member of the Danish People’s Party, and in 2004 one of the party’s candidates for the European Parliament and co-author of the party’s book-length manifesto criticizing Denmark’s road to a multiethnic society. The populist strategy, the uncompromising confrontational representation of Somali refugees and other visible minorities, and the verbal attacks on those politicians, who were seen as responsible for the migration policy was flourishing during the campaign, but the anti-elitism, neonationalism, and neoracism triangle was still in its formative stage without direct political influence. The Social Democratic/Social Liberal government alliance escaped from the parliamentary election in 1998 with a hair-splitting margin of victory,

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keeping the further radicalization at arm’s length a few more years, even as the two parties themselves were contributing to the neoracist turn in the Integration Act of 1 January 1999, which featured a legitimation of differential treatment of newly arriving immigrants. Neoationalism showed its face in January 2001 in debates about whether to strengthen the teaching of cultural Christianity in public schools, only to burst open during the Mona Sheikh affair in the summer of 2001 in a process that chained it with neoracism and populism. Unlike the first major media event in 1997, the Mona Sheikh story was born within the Social Liberal Party and its radical antiIslamic investigators of the new inexperienced Muslims’ political background. The findings were sold to willing buyers, listeners of Denmark’s Radio and readers of leading newspaper Berlingske Tidende, which triggered the story on two set dates. From this point the whole news media played a direct role in the stereotyping, demonizing, and inevitable ousting of the Danish-born Muslims from politics. The Mona Sheikh story was also a domestic story, but arguments were drawn from the global sphere and used locally, as the formulation given earlier epitomized it: They have investigated obscure Web sites in the darkest corners of the Internet, this global trash bin, in the hope of revealing what [Mona Sheikh] was thinking as a private person. Muslims took over the “annoying other” slot for the constructions of Danish nationalism, which also forms part of a growing Western parochialism. At this time the enemy image of Islam was personified in the bodily form of Mona Sheikh, Tanwir Ahmed, and Babar Baig, who were represented as consubstantial with the despicable Taliban of Afghanistan. The affair and the coverage of the World Trade Centre attacks only weeks later provided the right atmosphere for a landslide victory of the right wing and radical right wing parties in the election of November 2001 in Denmark. With the new government of the Liberals and Conservatives supported by the Danish People’s Party, the basic radical right triangle became more solidified with its anti-elitist rhetoric; celebrations of so-called “Danish values;” an anti-immigrant policy rhetoric; a policy of zero tolerance; and a practice of negative dialogue, which took place in a society already politicized in the fields of politics, journalism, and academia. By the end of the second major media event, political development the notion of cultural relativism had completed what Etienne Balibar noted as a remarkable turn. From Franz Boas’ introduction of cultural relativism raised against the hegemony of evolutionism, cultural imperialism, and ethnocentrism to the advance of ideas of incompatibility and hostile relations between cultures (Balibar 1991). In this new meaning cultural relativism was used to situate the Western world on top of a socio-evolutionary hierarchy, which camouflaged historic relations of conquest, slavery, exploitation of

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natural resources, and so on. The social evolutionary and ahistorical view share a common basic structure: Human societies pass through a series of stages of organization on the way to a singular goal, which Westerners identify with contemporary Western political and economic systems. This law of progress allows us Westerners to know our past through the present of others, to know the present of others through our own past, and to know their future through our own present (Lutz and Collins 1993 154–55). Our culture becomes their solution. In this view Western values appear as universal and natural—for instance, the very idea of the nation-state, which is historically specific for Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Tambiah 1996). On the battlefield of contemporary news journalism and political spin, the Muhammad cartoon conflict of 2005–06 was global from the beginning, when eleven ambassadors petitioned for a meeting with the Danish Prime Minister (12 October); the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) sent its letter of concern (October 15); and Al-Jazeera on 10, 12, and 15 October covered the publication of the Muhammad cartoons and the responses to them, which was only a few days after the first journalistic treatment of the publications appeared in the Danish mass media. Obviously, the cartoon conflict started domestically but immediately expanded into a global issue that soon blurred the Danish origin. Most non-Muslim focus group participants associated the conflict, through the television coverage of globally reaching violence, with the publication of the cartoons. As we have seen, this conflict was not simply a local story but simultaneously global with many nuances, intensities, motivations, and stakes, including global influence on local Danish neoconservative values. Like the first media event and unlike the Mona Sheikh story, the Muhammad cartoon conflict also grew directly out of the news media itself. The cartoon project and publication and the argument that Muslims need to endure being ridiculed and insulted were media-instigated activities. In the course of the cartoon conflict the politicized fronts of Danish journalism stood out as newspapers rallied into three discourses: “Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom,” “freedom of speech as a human right with limitations,” and “the demonization of Muslims, not freedom of speech, is the core issue.” The first two would merge and form the discourse selling the most tickets among foreign correspondents and commentators. Because of its dominating position domestically and internationally, and since the weaker third discourse was a counter-discourse, the first discourse received special attention. This first discourse narrated the end of multiculturalism and the negative dialogue between the Western and the Islamic world. In this way the clash of two incompatible sides grew stronger during the Muhammad cartoon con-

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flict of 2005–06 and its aftermath. But the Muslim as cultural other of the previous years did take a twist, with the added ideas of good and bad Muslims circulating directly in the media coverage but mostly just beneath the surface of the coverage. So-called “civilized others” formed an association of democratic Muslims, whom the Danes supported, which allowed confrontational language against [“bad”] Muslims, since other Muslims already used such language to denounce radical Muslims. These new cultural others were the Islamists, often a simple substitute in the media and political rhetoric for Muslim believers, who by definition were seen as fundamentalists and potential terrorists. In this process the mobilization of Danes around Danish values, history, Christianity, and so on further polarized and challenged Muslim citizens, but also worked to incorporate some Muslims, who could be regarded as being Danes in all aspects (except in some bodily features and some exotic international appearances). With the opening of doors for the global flow of neoconservative core values, conflicts arising at the fault lines of different cultures grew stronger in Denmark. Antagonistic relations between cultures from far away places, where immigrants were thought to “naturally belong” implied that mixing of cultures could be seen as generating conflict and needed to be met with firm resistance. According to neoconservativism, there can be no moral equivalency between the Western democratic system and another. Awkwardly, this resembles in a very direct way the nineteenth century fears of the mixing of races and the claim there could be no moral equivalency among the races. Yet, the representation of Danish–Muslim incompatibility comes with an important addition that can be seen in the media discourses of the cartoon conflict. Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the academic forefathers of neoconservativism, were not talking about civilizations or cultures in their arguments for negative dialogue, but were referring to the responsible way of treating political opponents and enacting “the political.” In the last decades their critique of liberal democracy has been evoked against left-wingers, multiculturalists, liberals, cultural relativists, and conflict-resolvers within Western civilizations. The incompatibility narrative of the dominant freedom of speech discourse was not directed exclusively against Muslims but also against internal opponents as well, including “traitors” and “cowards,” and “civilized others” (Boe and Hervik 2008). Traitors are those who passed the liberal laws leading to foreign cultures “flooding” the borders and who did not see the danger as the neoconservatives did, while the cowards are people who did not stand up for freedom of speech and other values, when firm stances were needed to fight the enemy. However, the racialization of the “bad” Muslim others, who are not much more than those the Danes do not like is strong and salient in the Danish media and popular consciousness. One of these racialized others would be

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Mina, a 25-year-old Iranian academic. She found culturalization (one form of racialization) to be so strong that it went far beyond the actual beliefs and practices of women like herself. She noted people saying, “‘Hey, that is a Muslim girl.’ And honestly, I have never learned how to pray. I don’t even know how to say a prayer.”

Control of Collective Memory The study of figured worlds embedded within the larger multi-perspective media study enabled us to get a better comprehension of how an event is produced and distributed and what parts stick in experience and collective memory. Three chapters in this volume focused (in various ways and to different degrees) on the long-term effects of the lopsided media coverage and on younger media consumers’ responses to the dominant themes that characterizing each major media event(see chapters 4, 7, and 11, this volume). A few months after Ekstra Bladet brought a close to its campaign in June 1997, the mass media reported a rising fear of immigrants and their descendants, and refugees. This securitization concerned the perceived threat of the sheer number of arriving migrants and refugees; the economic burden for the welfare state; fear of loosing jobs; and finally, most importantly for my argument, a fear of new cultural difference, potentially giving rise to a multicultural inferno (Hannerz 1999). The successful fabrication of moral panic, for instance in the case of Ali, his wives, and many children, was part of a culturalist representation of the Somali refugees in Denmark that left them seen as irreconcilably different from the native Danish hosts. The largely out-of-awareness cultural construction of “host/guest” relations inferred from individual interviews revealed that guests were expected to stop insisting on being too visibly different, but generally failed to verify that the relationship was in fact unbridgeable. In this frame of reference, cultural difference was approached as the generator of problems and therefore incompatible, yet little action was taken as a result. The interviews also showed that interviewees had little factual knowledge of Islam. However, they did appropriate the idea, the popular knowledge, that Muslim cultural identity was incompatible with being Danish. An explorative scrutiny of the status of the host/guest relations among participants in the focus groups discussing the Muhammad cartoons suggested that the relations were developing into a predatory relationship, drawn from the conviction that Muslims can be equal as citizens, but they could never become part of the Danish nation. Their difference was acknowledged but declared incompatible with Danish values. Thus, the neoracist axiom is established.

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While the narrativized sequence of the host/guest scenario is the longterm result cemented in the minds of an overwhelming part of the Danish population that became what oriented and naturalized people’s action and talk, the Mona Sheikh event conveys insight into how the representation of this one salient actor in the media coverage is remembered in collective memory. Participants in the focus groups remembered Mona Sheikh a year after the event had come to a close as a person who appeared untrustworthy as she had revealed an ambivalent stance on the issue of being for or against the death penalty. The critical consumer reactions to the actual prime-time coverage by Denmark’s Radio and the controversial interview by Berlingske Tidende were edited out of the process of collective memory, which includes the memory of several other participants with a Muslim background. The designated support of the Taliban and ambivalence about the death penalty communicated by these two powerful media institutions quickly became facts that were repeated again and again, and consumers were afraid to dismiss the allegations, regardless of the fact that they were the biased outcome of anti-Islamic networking, the use of unreliable sources and questionable experts, and the routine of everyday news making. Framed as a story of foreign elements infiltrating the Social Liberal Party, the story became an irresistible master-narrative for both journalists and audiences—a great story, but not true. How collective memory is managed is more explicit in our research of the Muhammad cartoon conflict. In the production moment of the cultural studies circuit, the government promotes a spin in its emphasis on freedom of speech, which is repeated on many occasions and followed through in a last effort shortly after the conflict seemed to have peaked globally. In late March 2006 Rasmussen scolded organizations, companies, and public personalities for not standing up for freedom of speech when the country needed it the most. Two and a half years later, focus group participants declared that they remembered the cartoon conflict as being all about freedom of speech. Two participants were particularly upset about people not standing up for freedom of speech when it was most necessary. The collective memory of these individuals confirms what we had already experienced outside of the focus group gatherings. The focus group participants were chosen from among university students, who are normally seen as critical consumers. Yet, they too were caught in a web of spin, which shows how skilled the spin doctors are. Spin can be carefully prepared through focus-group interviews, market surveys, carefully selected positive language, and so on. When the production of spin is most efficient, as in the insistence on freedom of speech in the cartoon conflict, the reception phases of the cultural circuit seem to collapse into a single moment, where the outcome is predictable and controllable. The production

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unit is under as much control as the blockbuster movies with plots and effects adjusted through comprehensive, scientifically conducted pre-audience testing. Only negative pre-release information can punctuate the reception, just like talk about the spin as spin when the spin is articulated may produce some counter-effect and neutralize the message. The free speech strategy has become so ingrained today in the Danish news media that claiming the Muhammad cartoon conflict was not, at least in the beginning, a case about freedom of speech may seem utterly absurd. Nevertheless, this is the case. Jyllands-Posten found only one person out of twenty-five active cartoonists who refused to draw for the cultural editor, Flemming Rose. Rose acknowledged this and published the cartoons as documentation. Freedom of speech as an argument did not appear until the government spinned its hostile reading of a petition by the eleven ambassadors for a meeting to discuss their concerns about hate-speech, neo-Nazism, the cartoons, and a cultural war against Muslims, and Rasmussen chose to answer the petition by re-phrasing the intentions of the letter-writers into an appeal to interfere in the editorial process at Jyllands-Posten, which he couldn’t do legally. The answer infuriated the ambassadors, and Muslims in Denmark felt misrecognized and marginalized. Rasmussen’s spin was further evidenced in an interview given to Jyllands-Posten when the issue was transformed into a question about which countries had (and therefore were the good guys) and which did not have freedom of speech. Criticism of his government and Jyllands-Posten for being anti-Islamic was dismissed by a counter-spin that such a view revealed lack of knowledge of democracy. Refusing to distance himself from Jyllands-Posten’s argument that Muslims had to endure ridicule, mocking, and insults and instead endorsing this view further enraged Muslims in Denmark. Most of the responses were not about the principle of freedom of speech. By discursively constructing it as a free speech issue it became a free speech issue—a social fact. Only the third discourse, “the demonization of Muslims, not freedom of speech, is the core issue,” sponsored by Politiken, argued against it, although by its frequent denials this discourse too ended up keeping freedom of speech alive in the debate. The founding fathers of Danish democracy introduced freedom of speech as a protection device for vulnerable minorities. In the Muhammed cartoon case the government and the largest national newspaper used freedom of speech to lever a negative dialogue project while arguing that provocation of Muslims was a necessary thing to do, which was not what the founding Danish fathers had in mind when they institutionalised freedom of speech. Freedom of speech activists would also pursue the rights of freedom of speech for the small minority of Danish Muslims; however, Muslims’ right to

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criticize Jyllands-Posten and the government was rarely defended. Instead Muslim criticism was met with arguments that they should leave Denmark; they had misunderstood democracy; and if they didn’t like it in Denmark, they should leave, suggesting that rights were less applicable for these minorities than for other citizens who were thought to belong more properly. Moral panic was stirred up early in the conflict through the emotional appeals to the “we” feeling of the native Danes against the Muslim outsiders who were allegedly ignorant of democratic procedures and values. The cultural outsider was constructed in order to confirm the imagined cultural community. Once the news media began to show violent reactions in Muslim countries around the world, these reactions were interpreted as illustrations of the irrational, violent nature of Muslim cultural identities that the cartoon publications had set out to combat, as if no other language would do. With terms like nationalism, neonationalism, racism, neoracism, and populism being taboo, it is perhaps no wonder that the Danish power-holders were up front in trying to avoid these terms and introducing a new positively associated vocabulary, preferring to talk about integration. That is also becoming a negatively loaded word, along with “Danish values,” “connectedness,” “social cohesion,” “social glue,” and “solidarity,” but in the process, these words and concepts are denied, trivialized, naturalized, and toned down.

Denials of (Neo)racism The current racism in Denmark is neoracism rather than old racism that is based on a doctrine and associated with the Nazism of 1933–1945, white supremacism in the United States up until the 1960s, and apartheid in South Africa until 1994. This neoracism is—like Balibar noted for France—“racism without race,” centred on the immigration complex which is intimately linked to neonationalism’s idea of the incompatibility of (certain) lifestyles and traditions (Balibar 1991). One of the consequences of this neoracism is the destabilization of defenses of traditional anti-racism, since racism is denied. Racism is denied regardless of whether it is old or new racism. New racism is not popularly used or known, but is used by default. When 11-year-old Amin was expelled from school because he didn’t want to bathe naked with his peers, the issue was raised whether his ban from school was an incident of racism. Jyllands-Posten used an editorial to criticize the bringing of racism to the fore at all, since that would contaminate the case with a misplaced charge. Amin’s possibly racist banning from school was dismissed without further explanation, leaving the reader with an argument but no definition

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or insight. Instead, Amin’s religious background, his unwashed behind, and social inexperience received the attention (Toft 1999). Amin was expelled from school and blamed for creating a situation that gave the school no other alternative than to expel him. In fact the denial of racism often ends up including an accusation of the object of racism for not properly belonging or for being an unruly guest, evoking latent racists’ sentiments and ultimately causing his or her own misfortune. The unruly behavior reinforces the denial of racism, blurring who is discriminating against whom and the actual ejection from school by reference to his cultural and religious background. Couldn’t the school, like many other schools, have solved the problem in a simple, pragmatic way? Danes agree that racism is bad and should be avoided. But there is no center for research and information about racism or neoracism in Denmark. Courses are only taught sporadically in a few institutions of higher learning, which may be of little surprise due to the negative value associated with the research. For the last two decades the Danish government, supported by its voters, have development a tight control of immigration into Denmark and strict identity politics for those of ethnic minority backgrounds. One could therefore perhaps expect such legislation would be followed by measures safeguarding against the growth of any form of discrimination, such as the case is in Sweden. Racism and discrimination appear in the media primarily as denials of racism. Numerous reports and research have shown different forms of discrimination taking place in Denmark, including the crass and confrontational language leading to polarization, marginalization, and exclusion—for instance, when members of parliament claim that Muslim presence compares to tumors, Islam must be fought like Nazism, and the headscarf compares with the swastika. A complex instance of neoracism is the Mona Sheikh story of 2001, when powerful institutions prevented access of Danish-born Muslim citizens to political office, racializing and inferiorizing their religious and Islamic convictions and reducing them to a metonymic part of radicals in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This story was followed by 9/11 which immediately led to racialized attacks registered by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) and an election debate hinging on hate-speech against the country’s minorities. Immediately after the new government took office, the Prime Minister used time at meetings in Stockholm (and Brussels) to emphasize: “There is no xenophobia or racism in Denmark. We have a long tradition for free debate, and we insist on having a free debate” (“Fogh afviser” 2001). The previous Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance also denied criticism. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) expressed concern, as did many others, about the

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political propaganda with racist tendencies and anti-migrant media coverage that included statements such as: “They [the investigators, a Spanish and Croatian official] must have come at a bad time,” and “What do a Croat and a Spaniard know about Danish affairs?” In this logic the denial of racism appears more important than factual knowledge about racism and neoracism. The analysis of how the Muhammad cartoon conflict was covered in the news media revealed three Danish discourses (which in the 2008 re-publication of the cartoons by most Danish newspapers could be reduced to two discourses). When we looked closer at the dominant “ Freedom of speech as a Danish freedom,” which was sponsored by Jyllands-Posten, the government, and two tabloid papers, we discovered the evolvement of a powerful radical right group of people with network ties and shared values with neoconservatives abroad. Key figures in this network have been players on the Danish scene across the three events. Most players have several things in common: a history of moving from the radical left to the radical right, and anti-Islamism; and several appeared in the semi-institutionalized Giordano Bruno Society that was formed in the wake of the Mona Sheikh story, where members were playing an active and even aggressive role. The Free Press Society was also formed by this core group and consists of additional actors in the front seat of the Danish People’s Party; authors of numerous articles in tabloid paper, Ekstra Bladet in the mid to late 1990s; and a forest of interlinked radical right Web sites, where the network is hiding behind pseudo-scientific names such as “Institute for Religious Studies,” “Humanrights Service,” and so on. Yet, only with the Muhammad cartoon conflict did their influence as well as their neoconservative ties and inspiration come out in a more organized effort, which is not to say that they didn’t have influence earlier. They published close to twenty books, often supported economically by grants from the Jyllands-Posten foundation, and hundreds of newspaper articles and opinion pieces in which the uncompromising stance towards Islam is promoted again and again. The end of multiculturalism and moral superiority of the Western world are pursued stronger than anywhere else in Danish society within this group of perhaps 100 influential people from political newspaper commentators, journalists, government minister, former newspaper editor-inchief, government spin doctor and others who still prefer to be anonymous. At the same time it is also the conclusion of this book that their discourse of incompatibility and strategy of negative dialogue is not restricted to the West/Islam dichotomy or national borders, but extends to the a segment of the Western population that sees true dialogue, recognition, negotiations, and diplomacy as means to a more peaceful multicultural future, just like it includes transnational actors throughout Europe.

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Muslims in Denmark Twenty-five-year-old Danish Muslim girl Sara explained that she had never seen a woman with an ethnic minority background being represented more negatively than Mona Sheikh in 2001. At stake for the people with ethnic backgrounds and Muslim beliefs was the effort to gain a public recognition in national politics, in the media coverage, and by their fellow citizens of Denmark. We have experienced from the focus groups conversations, individual interviews, and informal talks, that many people with ethnic minority backgrounds are now withdrawing from consuming mainstream news media products as well as making themselves available as experts for journalists, due to the poor quality, stereotyping, and uncompromising coverage. They resign from fighting back, instead either turning to more radical news media or turn inward to regain dignity and self-respect (Gullestad 2006). Fighting back is too overwhelming, and focus group participants such as Ahmed and Nadia find that no one is listening. This resignation is a change from 2001, when people noted that they couldn’t identify themselves with the Muslims and minorities of the news media, yet they would still—as the focus group discussions indicated—fight for recognition. Now, they have given up fighting back and getting a voice.

Popular Resistance Simultaneously with the three media events treated in this book, small initiatives of protest and resistance have been brewing around the country. Individuals and groups have been quietly assisting some of the minorities in need and scores of initiatives have taken place. At a recent rally of approximately 7,000 people at the Copenhagen town hall square organized by the movement for a respectable Denmark author Kirsten Thorup argued: When a group of co-citizens because of religion and darker skin color than the Danes at the Parliament’s podium are portrayed as anti-social and lumped together as terror suspects, when headscarves are compared with the swastika, and when a certain religion is the object of hatred, then our humanistic tradition is sliding, then our democratic values, which precisely protects the minorities and the freedom of religion, are falling apart. Enemy images and xenophobia are spreading like wildfire, today it is the Muslims, tomorrow another group is chosen. The day after tomorrow every one can be the target of suspicion for meaning the wrong things and having the wrong opinion or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Thorup 2009)

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In the end, Thorup (2009) evokes a poem by the German minister and resister, Martin Niemöeller, which I here quote in a more original version assumed to be written in 1946: First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist; then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist; then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew; then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me. (Niemöller n.d.)


Notes CHAPTER 1 Chapter 1 has been partly published before as “The Emergence of Neo-nationalism in Denmark, 1992-2001,” Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, eds Andrew Gingrich and Marcus Banks (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 136–161. 1. “Folkeskole” is the common term for public school.

CHAPTER 2 Chapter 2 draws and expands from the edited volume “Den Generende Forskellighed. Danske Svar på Den Stigende Multikulturalism,” ed. Peter Hervik (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 1999). 1. Unless otherwise indicated, this chapter builds on Jørgensen and Bülow (1999), Hervik (1999a and 1999c). 2. Most of the material for the representation of Somalis in the Danish media, and their ethnogenesis, comes from Fadel, Hervik, and Vestergaard (1999) and Hervik (2003c). 3. A government in Denmark is elected for four years, but the prime minister can call an election at any time within the four-year period.

CHAPTER 3 A previous version of Chapter 3 was published as “Limits of Tolerance and Limited Tolerance: How Tolerant are the Danes?” in Racism in Metropolitan Areas, eds Rik Pinxten and Ellen Preckler (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 35–53. 1. The asymmetric relationship between those who practice the tolerance and those who do not is perhaps especially clear in religious tolerance. Religious tolerance, which is the father of the modern liberal forms of tolerance, also reveals the strong power held by the tolerators. A Catholic handbook defines religious toleration as: . . .the magnanimous indulgence which one shows towards a religion other than his own, accompanied by the moral determination to leave it and its adherents unmolested in private and public, although internally one views it with complete disapproval as a “false faith.” ([Catholic Encyclopedia n.d.)

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CHAPTER 4 A previous version of Chapter 4 was published as “The Danish Cultural World of Unbridgeable Differences,” Ethnos 69, no. 2: 247–267. (For the original source of publication http://www.informaworld.com). 1. . Figured worlds are much like Bourdieu’s concept of habitus; they tend to change at different speeds and follow different principles than discourses, although Holland et al. (1998) have convincingly shown that people do have a capacity for self-objectification and can change part of their figured world. On the other hand, it is important to see understandings not as things that necessarily move the actor in any one direction but rather as raw material from which actions develop. 2. This progression is not to be misunderstood as a standard that dictates rules for behavior but rather the result of experiencing regularities that then become first clues to understanding a given situation.

CHAPTER 5 Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are partly derived from my Danish-language report, “Mediernes muslimer. En antropologisk undersøgelse af mediernes dækning af religioner i Danmark” (Hervik 2002a). 1. According to Mona Sheikh, she was invited to the studio in order to talk specifically about integration, and afterward she felt ambushed (personal communication). 2. This information is based on the study of the media, not whether Politiken’s information is right or wrong. In a Web page, Dali has discredited the authoring journalist of Politiken and myself for this article in Politiken. However, Dali does not deny that she carry out the research. She later left the Social Liberals to join the Liberal Party and later the radical right-wing Danish People’s Party. Dali also continues to be a member of the Giordiano Bruno Society, where she cultivates close ties to other anti-Islamists. 3. Jesper Termansen later went on to become a press secretary for the right-wing government’s minister of integration, Birthe Rønn Hornbeck.

CHAPTER 6 1. The editorial about Afghanistan was written after 21 million Afghanis had been declared losers in the war with the Taliban. The Mujahedin was economically supported and militarily equipped by Western countries and Saudi Arabia (Coll 2004), including an amount from a Danish youth committee comprised of a leading minister of the contemporary government, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and the leader of the radical right Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard. 2. According to Rikke Andreassen, the editorial leadership, Jyllands-Posten’s foundation, the daily editorial authors, and the makers of the front page are all positions filled with men (2007). 3. Although fear of the Taliban’s disapproval of Sufism may have shaped the organization’s insistence on its orthodoxy, Minhaj is not in fact linked to either the Taliban or to any Pakistani political party, although it promotes student involvement in politics (Geaves 2005: 12).

284 t Notes 4. Pittelkow was the personal adviser for prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and was married to Minister of the Interior Karen Jespersen. At the time he was political commentator for the public TV station, TV2, and was accompanying Anker Jørgensen as a Middle East specialist—a “specialist” in the journalistic sense of the word, not as a research-based specialist.

CHAPTER 7 1. On 30 August 1996, the new TV channel DR 2 began broadcasting. New in the restructuring of DR 1 was meteorologist Maria Hørby, Danish TV’s first black host.

PART IV 1. Statistics Denmark began using the categories “Western” and “non-Western” on 1 January 2002. 2. There is a general agreement outside the center that it has lost much of its teeth in the process. One of the five institutions, DIIS (Danish Institute for International Studies) has been directly criticized by an international evaluation committee for not being politically independent (Denmark’s Radio, P1 17 December 2008) (accessed 2 November 2009). 3. In November 2008 Lars Hedegaard was fired by Berlingske Tidende (Dahl 2008). 4. Borg also fails to note that Magaard is a radical right anti-Islamic commentator.

CHAPTER 8 Chapter 8 is a revised version of parts published as ”The Original Spin and its Side Effects: Freedom Speech as Danish News Management,” in Transnational Media Events. The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Civilizations, eds Elizabeth Eide, Risto Kunelius, and Angela Phillips (Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2008), 59–80. 1. Westergaard offered these reflections in an interview several months after the publication and after the story broke on the global media scene (P. Thomsen 2006). Elsewhere, he admitted that his cartoon was the most controversial (Hansen and Hundevadt 2006). 2. Second in using these modernized communication strategies has been the radical right-wing populist party, the Danish People’s Party, which is known to have had the country’s most skilful, brutally efficient spin doctor between 2001 and 2005—Søren Espersen (M.F. Nielsen 2004). 3. This spin came about after an hour-long conversation with Naser Khader (P. Thomsen 2006). 4. Hansen and Hundevadt 2006; Hornbech 2006; Jerichow and Rode 2006; Larsen and Seidenfaden 2006; Rothstein and Rothstein 2006; P. Thomsen 2006.

CHAPTER 9 Chapter 9 is a revised version of a coauthored report published as a working paper, entitled “Denmark: A Political Struggle in Danish Journalism,” in Reading the Mohammed

Notes t 285 Cartoons Controversy. An International Analysis of Press Discourses on Free Speech and Political Spin, eds Risto Kunelius, Elisabeth Eide, Oliver Hahn, and Roland Schroeder, Working Papers in International Journalism series (Bochum/Frieberg: Projekt Verlag GbR, 2007), 25–39. In addition, parts of Chapter 9 are revised and translated from an extended Danish language version of the above report, “Muhammad krisen. En politisk kamp i dansk journalistik. AMID Working Paper Series (Aalborg: Aalborg, 2007). Both of these articles were written with Clarissa Berg. 1. In November 2006 Sheikh Hlayhel returned to Lebanon. 2. In another IT piece, Vidino includes the blame on the imam’s strategy already in the subtitle. On this occasion the imam in question it is not Hlayhel, though, but Abu Laban (Vidino 2006).

3. The absence of Egyptians offended by the cartoons in Al Faqr has not been researched. There are no indications as to what kind of responses, by whom, when, and even why not this is the case in any of the sources. The Danish Embassy in Cairo did register an increase of incoming protest mails of a different kind than earlier, though not in substantial numbers.

CHAPTER 10 Chapter 10 includes some smaller sections that were previously published as part of “The Original Spin and its Side Effects: Freedom Speech as Danish News Management,” in Transnational Media Events. The Mohammed Cartoons and the Imagined Clash of Civilizations, eds Elizabeth Eide, Risto Kunelius, and Angela Phillips (Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2008), 59–80. 1. Pittelkow, Brix, and Jespersen are member of the Giordano Bruno Society. Jespersen and Pittelkow are coauthors and are married. 2. Among Pipes’s controversial views is the claim that the only road to peace in the Middle East is total Israeli military victory. He also wrote this much quoted statement: “West European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene” (Pipes 1990). 3. See http://www.sharia.dk. Daniel Pipes also maintains a Danish-language Web site at http://dk.danielpipes.org. 4. David Gress, a member of the board for the Jyllands-Posten Foundation and its think tank, CEPOS, has his own neoconservative dimension: for example, he holds a John M. Olin Professorship at Boston University. The Olin Foundation has been a generous contributor to the neoconservatives in the United States. 5. Hedegaard goes far in his attack on Islam. Among many examples is this statement: “Beneath Muslim culture is a tradition for cutting the throat of free-thinking people” (L. Hedegaard 2006a). 6. According to author and senior editor of Newsweek Michael Hirsch, Lewis’s model for the Middle East is that of Kemal Ataturk’s imposition of puritanical secularism: “Today, that Epiphany—Lewis’s Kemalist vision of a secularized, Westernized Arab democracy that casts off the medieval shackles of Islam and enters modernity at last—remains the core of George W. Bush’s faltering vision in Iraq” (Hirsch 2004: 1–2). Lewis pressed the government to move on to confront Saddam Hussein in op-ed pieces in the Wall

286 t Notes Street Journal. He saw 9/11 as “the opening salvo of the nature of Islam.” Now it was time “to get on with it,” implying using military means to impose a one that didn’t compromise with any Islamized version of democracy (Hirsch [2004).

CHAPTER 11 1. I use “Danish” here with the same reservations I applied in chapter 7, i.e., to mean merely that both parents were born and raised in Denmark. 2. All sessions were recorded on tape and video and subsequently transcribed. Participants have been given pseudonyms, and statements that could be used to identify individuals have been altered. The quotes and paraphrases in this chapter are taken from the transcriptions and have been slightly edited for the sake of clarification. 3. When Villy Søvndal became the party’s leader in April 2005, he successfully adopted a tougher populist approach to immigrants and their descendants in Denmark.


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• Index Afghanistan, 28–30, 283n1 Ahmed, Tanwir, 117, 119, 128, 130, 140 Akkari, Ahmed, 3, 4, 202 Al Faqr (Egyptian newspaper), 12, 188, 224–25 Al Jazeera, 187, 225, 272 Ali, Ahmed Hassan, 59 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 173, 198, 204 Alien Act, 53 Alling, Thomas, 117, 120 Alsidis, Abdul Rahman, 224 ambassadors, 2, 188–92, 198, 205, 209, 222, 224–25, 227–30, 240, 261, 272 Ammitzböll, Pernille, 4, 222 Andersen, Jytte, 137 anthropology, 12, 16 Appadurai, Arjun, 21, 37, 136 Arendt, Niels Henrik, 109 authoritarianism, 45–46 B.T., 118, 199, 209, 217–18 Back, Les, 91, 105 Baig, Babar, 114, 128, 140, 146, 164 Baker, Martin, 35 Balibar, Etienne, 36, 250, 271 Banks, Marcus, 32 Barth, Fredrik, 64 Bateson, Gregory, 129 Bauman, Zygmunt, 27 Baumann, Gerd, 5, 170 Beeman, William O., 131 Behnke, Kim, 6 belonging, 67, 72, 98, 106, 246, 278 Benedor Associates, 236 Berlin Wall, 26, 29, 92 Betz, Hans-George, 44 Billig, Michael, 43

Blommaert, Jan, 86, 88 Bluitgen, Kåre, 178–81, 183–84, 206–7, 228–29, 261 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 33 Boas, Franz, 34 Bois, W.E.B. Du, 34 Borg, Orla, 134, 138, 221 Bosnian Refugees, 48–51, 69, 71, 159, 166, 270 Brix, Helle Merete, 129, 139, 172, 233, 235–36 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 28, 237 Bülow, Vibeke S., 58 Carlsen, Annette, 183 cartoon crisis (cartoon case, cartoon conflict, cartoon story, muhammad cartoons, muhammad crisis), 3–4, 7–8, 10, 167, 171, 177, 185, 187–98, 205–7, 209–15, 218–19, 220–37, 239–40, 242, 259–64, 268, 272–76, 279; beginning of, 178–80; Danish media coverage, 199–205, 239; and Jyllands-Posten, 180–85; re-publication, 219–20 Christianity, 40, 72, 108–10, 140, 148, 249 Clarke, Richard A., 130 clash of civilizations, 28–29, 234, 237–38, 253 Codina, Mónica, 3 cognitive anthropology, 94–95 Cohen, Abner, 65 Comaroff, John, 21, 26 Committee against the Policy on Integration (Komitéen mod Indvandrerpolitiken), 25

306 W Index Conservative Peoples Party, 39, 108, 167, 271 critical discourse analysis, 15, 17 Cultural Canon Project, 171–72 cultural fundamentalism, 35, 85, 87, 99 cultural homogeneity, 31, 44 cultural objects, 14 cultural racism, 35–36. See also neoracism cultural schemas, 91, 93–94 cultural studies, 12–16 Culture war, 170–72, 276 Dahlerup, Ulla, 62, 270 Dali, Jette, 117, 129, 172, 283n2 Danish Association (Den Danske Forening), 25 Danish Culture (Dansk Kultur), 6 Danish Education Act, 39–40 Danish Judges’ Association, 265 Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), 2, 5, 53–54, 62–64, 70–71, 78, 108, 166–67, 233, 284n2 Danish Press Council, 119, 121, 128–31, 139 Danishness, 109, 145, 147 day of hatred, 48–49 death penalty, 122–26, 130, 143, 156, 159, 166, 275 Defending Denmark, 230 Democratic Muslims in Denmark, 222, 273 Denmark, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 92, 109, 197, 202–3, 239, 269–70, 282n3; and Danish media, 7, 185, 187, 199–200; and the EU, 41–43; and immigrants, 24, 48–49, 59, 64–66; post-1989, 2–3, 30–31; racism, 8–9, 73–75, 78, 277–78 Denmark’s Radio, 113, 121, 130, 151 dichotomization of “us” and “them”, 8, 38, 49, 111, 129, 140, 147, 157, 167, 239 difference racism, 35, 36. See also neoracism Dijk, Teun A. van, 91, 105 discrimination, 5–6, 68, 88–89, 105

Donnan, Hastings, 26 Durington, Mattthew, 60 Egypt, 12, 140, 183, 226–27, 240 Ejrnæs, Morten, 70 Ekstra Bladet, 9, 55–56, 66, 199, 209, 217–18; Ekstra Bladet campaign, 53, 55, 58–60, 62–63, 71–73, 108, 134, 270, 274 Ellemann-Jensen, Uffe, 70, 108, 214 enemy image of islam, 29, 126, 129, 140, 147, 233, 271 equality, 53 Ersböll, Niels, 198 Espersen, Lene, 137 ethnicity, 64–65, 69, 251, 258–59 ethnicization, 65–66 European anthropology, 12 European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), 73, 86, 89 European Union, 40, 42 Fadel, Ulla, 97 Family Reunification Act, 22, 168 feminists, 139, 142 Ferguson, James, 12 figured worlds, 94, 283n1 France, 36, 277 Frankenberg, Ruth, 86 free speech (freedom of expression, freedom of speech), 177, 189–97, 199, 201–17, 219–20, 223, 225–26, 228–29, 231–32, 235–37, 239, 241, 244, 259–64, 266, 268, 272–73, 275–76, 278–79 Free Speech Society (Trykkefrihedsselskabet), 173, 235 Frevert, Louise, 1, 188–89 Fugl, Hanna, 27 Fyens Stiftstidende, 66 Gaasholt, Øivind, 68, 84–85, 89, 91–92 Gade, Svend Ove, 55–56, 62 Giddens, Anthony, 26 Gingrich, Andre, 32 Giordano Bruno Society, 172–73, 181, 235, 279, 283n2, 285n1

Index t 307 Gledhill, Christine, 15 Glistrup, Mogens, 24–25, 54, 141–42 globalization, 25–26, 269 Gobineau, Arthur, 33, Gogh, Theo van, 179, 206 Griswold, Wendy, 14 groupthink, 130 Grundloven (the constitution), 22 Gullestad, Marianne, 53, 98, 142, 252, 258 Haarder, Bertel, 40, 145–46, 168 habitus, 15, 149, 283n1 Hage, Ghassan, 77 Hansen, Erik Ninn, 41 Hansen, John, 221, 224 Hansen, Lotte, 194 Hastrup, Kirsten, 75 headscarf, 38, 75, 81–83, 96, 101–2, 135–36, 139, 154, 158, 241, 247–48, 253–54, 259, 265–67, 278 Hedegaard, Connie, 109 Hedegaard, Lars, 172, 209–10, 235–36, 284n3, 285n5 Higman, John, 45 Hjarvard, Stig, 7, 219 Hlayhel, Raed, 4, 221–23, 285n1 Holland, Dorothy, 94–95, 283n1 Hornbech, Birthe Rønn, 136–37, 168 host/guest relations, 8–9, 94, 96, 99–106, 242–43, 247–48, 254–56, 266–67, 274–75 human rights, 188–89, 196, 208, 210–11, 213, 219 Hundevadt, Kim, 221 Huntington, Samuel, 29, 143, 145, 237–38 Hvenegård-Larsen, Kirsten, 69 Hvitfelt, Håkan, 173 incompatibility, 35, 72, 232–33, 240, 249–50, 259, 265, 267, 271, 273, 277, 279 Information, 199, 211, 212, 218, 27 Integration Act, 50, 54, 62, 69–70, 72, 77, 271 International Herald Tribune, 5

International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER), 11–12 Islamic Society in Denmark (Islamisk Trossamfund), 226 islamophobia, 214, 234 Janus, Irving, 130 Jensen, Iben, 39 Jensen, Preben, 254–55 Jerichow, Anders, 202 Jespersen, Karen, 6, 54, 60–61, 72, 136, 181, 207, 233, 284n4 jews, 78, 232–35, 250–52, 268 Johnson, Richard, 13, 16 journalism, 8, 111, 124, 129, 167, 171, 180, 272 Juste, Carsten, 8, 181, 214 Jyllands-Posten Foundation, 171, 221 Jyllands-Posten, 2, 3, 4, 10, 66, 112, 199, 237, 240, 259, 261–63, 276–77; and the cartoon crisis, 168, 170–71, 174–75, 178–85, 187–89, 192, 194–96, 201–18, 220–29; coverage of islam, 133–43, 145–47 Jørgensen, Rikke E., 58 Katsenelson, Bob, 183 Khader, Naser, 116–17, 120, 126–29, 142, 155–57, 159–60, 202–3, 222, 264 Khan, Wallait, 117, 119–20, 129 Khouri, Rami, 203 Kipketer, Wilson, 96 Kissinger, Henry, 238 Kjær, Carsten, 223 Kjær, Kaj, 67 Kjærsgaard, Pia, 5, 25, 30, 54, 57, 62–64, 78–79, 206, 218–19, 223, 243 Knudsen, Lisbeth, 220 Kristeligt Dagblad, 199, 217–18 Kofoed, Jette, 39 Krarup, Søren, 1, 25, 62, 145–46, 173, 235 Kunelius, Risto, 10 Laban, Ahmed Abu, 3, 202, 221–22, 285n2

308 t Index Laden, Osama Bin, 29, 152 Laing, R.D., 26 Langballe, Jesper, 1 Larsen, Asger Nørgaard, 207 Larsen, Rune Engelbreth, 214, 225–27 Lebech, Johannes, 125–26 Lentin, Alana, 33, 256, 265 Lewis, Bernard, 29, 144 Liberal Party, 39, 108, 167, 185 Lule, Jack, 133 Lunde, Niels, 210–12 Maastricht Treaty, 40–43, 46–47, 50, 64, 270 Madsen, Jens Jørgen, 122, 125 Madsen, Kirsten, 48 Magaard, Tine, 174–75, 222, 284n4 Magazinet (Norwegian newspaper), 224 Malik, Naser, 119, 153 Malkki, Liisa, 31, 99 Mamdani, Mahmood, 222 Marx, Karl, 16 Matthiesen, Poul Chr., 135 media anthropology, 11 Memmi, Albert, 35 Metock Case, 245, 248 MetroExpress, 7 Metz, Georg, 215 Michelis, Gianni de, 28 Middle East Quarterly, 4, 222 Middle East, 3–5, 48, 159, 202–3 Mikkelsen, Brian, 109, 171, 189 Mikkelsen, Jørn, 171 Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, 113–15, 117–23, 129, 139, 145, 151–54, 159, 165, 283n3 Ministry of integration, 168–69 moral panic, 70, 179, 274, 277; definition, 60–61 Mudde, Cas, 44–46, 64 mujahedin, 29–30, 283n1 multiculturalism, 2, 272, 279 nation-state: crisis of nation-state, 28, 106; definition, 31–33, 36–37, 43, 45, 70, 87, 108, 111, 146, 170; nationalism, 21–22, 26; nationbuilding, 22, 31, 33, 272

nativism, 45 nazism, 34, 277 neoconservative, 236–38, 240 neonationalism, 9, 21–22; definition, 31–33, 36–37, 39, 40, 53, 71–72, 74, 86–87, 108, 111, 147, 169, 270 neoracism, 9, 21, 31, 34,35, 36, 37, 38, 45, 53, 71, 77, 79, 89, 105, 147, 248, 253, 277–78; definition, 35–38 new racism, 36, 38. See neoracism New York Times, 3, 4 Niemöller, Martin, 281 Nielsen, Bjarne, 120 Nielsen, Jørgen, 6 9/11, 145, 172, 278, 285–86n6. See also World Trade Centre Norman, Karin, 85 Norway, 252 Nyhedsavisen, 230 Operation Dagsværk, 30 Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), 3, 190, 198, 224 Öztoprak, Osman, 254–55 Pedersen, Abdul Wahid, 188 permissiveness, 89 Peterson, Mark Allen, 131 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 68 Pipes, Daniel, 222, 234–37, 285n2 Pittelkow, Ralf, 134, 143–45, 206–7, 284n4, 285n1 Politiken, 3, 79, 171, 179, 184, 199, 201–5, 209, 213, 216, 220, 226, 229, 256, 263 polygenesis, 33 populism, 9, 21, 25, 31, 46 , 50, 53, 64, 111, 169, 271; definition, 43–47; the elite, 43–44, 47, 56, 143, 169–70 post-1989 world, 22, 26–28, 30–32, 36, 87, 106, 269 Poulsen, Troels Lund, 223 practice theory, 11–12, 16–17 Progress Party, 25, 43, 47–50, 269 Prophet Muhammad, 2, 174, 179–80, 183, 189 public recognition, 77, 127, 131, 166

Index W 309 Pundik, Herbert, 202 race, 32–38, 250, 257–59 racialization, 38, 136, 265–66, 273; definition, 256 racism, 5, 6, 31–32, 38, 45, 73–76, 78, 83, 88, 136, 141–42, 247; definition, 32–35; denials of racism, 5–6, 91–92, 257–59, 277–79 Rashid, Rushy, 127, 160 Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 5, 60, 71, 108, 185, 201–2, 209, 212, 223, 225–26, 234, 240, 245, 262, 268; and the ambassadors; 188–90, 205; on the cartoon crisis, 167–69, 170, 177; on free speech, 191–94, 215–16, 229–30, 259–60, 275–76 Rasmussen, Lars Løkke, 30, 283n1 Rasmussen, Poul Nyrup, 50, 129 Reagan, Ronald, 28, 186 religion, 9, 40, 133, 138, 161, 170, 190, 193, 208, 219, 249, 252, 267 Revival (British newsletter), 121, 130 Rodríguez-Virgili, Jordi, 3 Romantic Movement, 33; Romanticists, 36 rootedness, 137 Rose, Flemming, 4, 133, 168, 171, 173, 180–81, 183–85, 187, 195–96, 234–37, 276 Sappho Prize, 235 Scandinavia, 35, 53, 173, 258–59 schema theory, 94, 104 schismogenesis, 129–30 Schmitt , Carl, 238–41, 273 Seidenfaden, Tøger, 225–27, 260 self-censorship, 177, 180, 184, 188, 206, 210, 214–15, 228, 259 Sharia, 144, 159, 221 Sharif, Tanveer, 117 Sheikh, Mona, 8–10, 107–9, 111–12, 114–28, 130–31, 133–34, 138, 140, 143–45, 149–51, 153–55, 156, 159, 163–67, 271, 275, 278–80, 283n1 Shiite Muslim, 119, 131, 148, 152

Simon, Bob, 4 Simonsen, Thorkild, 50, 54, 67, 77–78 Smith, David, 232–34 Smith, Eva, 213 Social Democratic Party, 49, 53–54, 67, 70, 72 Social Liberal Party, 39, 49, 53, 67, 72, 77, 114–18, 120–23, 125–26, 128–29, 131–33, 143, 145–46, 152, 159, 166, 171, 271, 275 Socialist People’s Party (Socialistisk Folkeparti), 269 socio-evolutionary development, 34, 78–79, 147, 271–72 Söderberg, Karin, 5 Solomos, John, 83, 91, 105 Somali refugees, 58–59, 64–69, 72, 88, 92–93, 98, 166, 270, 274 stereotype, 35, 60, 148, 175, 271 Stolcke, Verena, 85, 99 Strauss, Leo, 238–41, 273 Sunni, 119, 131, 152 swastika, 253, 278 Sweden, 22, 70, 173, 278 Swedish Act, 70 Søvndal, Villy, 286n3 Taggart, Paul, 44 Taliban, 29, 138–39 Tamil report, 50. See also Hansen, Erik Ninn Taylor, Charles, 166 Termansen, Jesper, 122, 125, 283n3 Thorup, Kirsten, 280 Togeby, Lise, 68, 84–85, 89, 91–92, 105 tolerance, 73–90, 92–93, 178, 282n1; limits of tolerance, 244–47, 257; zero tolerance, 46, 232, 239–41 Traube, Elizabeth G., 16 Turkey, 140 Tv-avisen, 113, 116, 120–22, 127–28 Urban, 7 Verschueren, Jef, 86, 88 Vidino, Lorenzo, 4, 222, 285n2 Vierø, Inger Marie Bruun, 116–17

310 t Index Vilk, Lars, 230 Vinther, John, 78–79 Walzer, Michael, 75, 76, 83, 85 Weiss, Birthe, 50, 54 Wellman, David, 86 Westergaard, Kurt, 146, 173, 181–83, 220, 236, 284n1 Wikipedia, 4, 224 Williams, Brackette, 65

Wilson, Thomas, 26 Wivel, Peter, 121 Wodak, Ruth, 27, 35, 82 World Trade Centre, 10, 108, 165, 167, 174, 271. See also 9/11 Wrench, John, 83, 91, 105 Wæver, Ole, 215 xenophobia, 6, 30, 45, 85, 90, 249, 278