Danish Demarcations: Welfare State,Middle Class Nationalism and Xenophobia

By Gitte du Plessis, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

gitte@hawaii.edu

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ABSTRACT:

This essay looks at the population of the Danish welfare state

as an affluent middle class that demarcates itself in relation

to a foreign proletariat within a global, neoliberal division

of labor. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek‘s psychoanalytical

conceptualizations of nationalism, the analysis begins by

tracing Danish nationalism and how it results in xenophobia

and racism, as the foreign other is simultaneously blamed for

any structural threats to the continued Danish affluence and

is deemed unwelcome in the Danish welfare state. In an effort

to critically question this blaming of the other, this essay

shifts the explanatory focus onto the dialectical relationship

between the nation-state and capitalism in securing the Danish

middle-class status in a global, neoliberal world order, and

suggests that the threat to the Danish welfare lies not in

multiculturalism but in the paradox of wanting at once the

Danish borders open for surplus-extraction and closed for

foreigners. The essay ends with a discussion of new

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perspectives on cohabitation and equality beyond state

borders.

Key words: Middle Class, Welfare States, Nationalism, Slavoj

Žižek.

AUTHOR BIO

Gitte du Plessis received her Master’s degree from Copenhagen

Business School. She is now a PhD student in the Department of

Political Science, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she

is specializing in Political Theory and International

Relations.

Danish Demarcations: Welfare State,Middle Class Nationalism, and Xenophobia

INTRODUCTION

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The Nordic welfare states are commonly celebrated for their

desirable combination of high levels of wealth, equality, and

individual freedom. In essence, the so-called “Nordic Model”

consists of a strong welfare state combined with free-market

capitalism. To describe the success of this setup, pictures of

friendly reindeer and Vikings decorate articles in which

excited commentators use terms such as “The next supermodel,”1

“northern lights,”2 and “cuddly capitalism.”3 As yet another

marker of the success of this system, Denmark has topped the

UN “World Happiness Report” in both 2012 and 2013, with the

other Nordic welfare states all in the top ten.

This essay seeks to nuance this enthusiasm, and does so

by analyzing the Danish welfare state and the Danish nation as

a privileged player in a globalized world. More specifically,

the Danish citizenry is here viewed as a middle class that is

demarcating itself in relation to a foreign proletariat. As

such, the middle class is an anxious class who puts a lot of

ideological energy (and in many cases also a lot of material

energy such as gating, fencing and as we shall see, bordering)

into protecting the middle class lifestyle and status against

the “poor hordes” threatening it from below. The affluent

demarcate themselves based on an anxious logic that middle

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class status cannot be shared; only stolen. Thus, the middle

class would prefer to be left alone, to live the life they

have worked so hard to create and maintain for themselves

without it being threatened from the outside.

Apart from relying on surplus-extraction from other

countries, the Danish welfare state is guarantor for the

continued middle class status of the Danish citizenry in two

ways: firstly, the borders between the middle class and the

proletariat are the national borders, which means the middle

class is protected by nation state laws and security measures,

and secondly, the social policies of the Danish welfare

ensures that no Dane is dropped below a middle class

lifestyle.4 Hence, nationalistic demarcations converge with

class demarcations.

The essay begins by introducing Slavoj Žižek’s

psychoanalytical concept of a “national Thing” to explain how

nationalism is tied to particular fantasies and ways of

enjoying. How these play out in the case of Denmark is traced

by describing how Danish nationalism hinges on participation

the Danish welfare state, a shared history of a certain

“peoplehood,” and the consumption of “Danish” design. The

essay then turns to a discussion of how struggles over

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possession of the Danish national Thing results in xenophobia

and racism. Taking the Žižekian viewpoint further, the next

part of the essay discusses how nationalistic demarcations

function to cover up antagonisms that have less to do with

differences between people than with fantasies of a

capitalist, democratic society without inherent friction or

conflict. I argue that what is blamed on the other in the

Danish context are the discrepancies that arise from a

paradoxical wish of wanting to be a part of the global

neoliberal economy whilst keeping the borders closed to its

excessive elements. The essay ends with a discussion of how a

shift from focusing on blaming the other for inconsistencies

in society to focusing on the problematic aspects of a global

division of labor and how it is sustained by nation-states can

bring about new perspectives.

DANISH NATIONAL “THING(S)”

In the chapter “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” from his book

Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek argues that nationalism

cannot be reduced merely to an understanding of symbolic

identification. The element holding together a community is

instead a shared relationship toward a “Thing,” toward6

enjoyment structured by means of fantasies.5 To Žižek, the

social constructivist understanding that a nation is not a

biological or historical fact but something made up of social

discursive constructions misses the point, because it

overlooks “the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of

enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive

entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency.”6 This

Thing appears as only accessible to people belonging to the

community, the others are unable to grasp it, yet they

constantly disturb it. Asked to explain what “it” is, the

answer becomes an empty tautology: the Thing appears as what

gives meaning and joy to the lives of people in the community

and is simply “our way of life.” Nationalism, as it is bound

in the national Thing, lies in how a community arranges feasts

and parties, language, clothing, and artifacts, “in short, all

the details by which is made visible the unique way a

community organizes its enjoyment.”7 Existence of the Thing hinges on

members of the community believing in it, more precisely,

everyone must believe that everyone else also believes. The

Thing “turns on the fact that ‘it means something’ to people.”8

A good starting point for charting the contents of a

Danish “way of life,” or a mainstream Danish organization of

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enjoyment, is the welfare state itself. Jacob Torfing

concludes that in Denmark, the welfare state has since the

1950s been “ideologized,” in that it now functions as a

complete horizon for social orientation and political action.9

Similarly, in his work on Danish nationalism, Lasse Koefoed

positions the welfare state as “one of the Danish community’s

crown jewels.”10 In the Danish case, the welfare society isn’t

perceived as the state per se, but as “us,” a “community of

identity.”11 Here, we take care of each other; the welfare

society is perceived as our narrative, our way of structuring a

society. It is carried by an ethos of strong bonds between a

population that doesn’t abandon anyone.12 There is thus a

particular Danish enjoyment bound in solidary participation in

the community of the welfare state. Part of this enjoyment is

a view of the state as “us”, rather than a view of the state

as an entity opposed to its citizens. This enjoyment of the

welfare state is indeed dependent on everyone believing that

everyone else also believes in it, because the continuation of

the welfare state depends on everyone working hard,

contributing taxes, and only receiving benefits as needed. The

“perverted,” and as we shall see later, “un-Danish” way to

enjoy participation in the welfare state is to lazily exploit

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it, reaping as many benefits as possible while working as

little as possible.

Mainstream Danish and other historians portray the idea

of Danish national homogeneity and a Danish national identity

with a strong focus on (enjoying) equality and solidarity as

historically rooted. The narrative describes how, from a

multicultural kingdom expanding over vast land areas, Denmark

was reduced to the mere 17.000 square miles it is today as a

result of continuous land losses during the 17th and 19th

century. This in 1864 left the remaining Danish territory

fulfilling the ideal requirements of a nation-state (or

perhaps merely the ideal requirements for an approximation of

the perfect national simulacrum), namely a complete overlap of

state, language and territory.13 Two main national ideologies

have been posited as those that consequently came to

characterize this very small, coherent country: One was what

scholars refer to as the “internal front strategy,” in which

different classes collaborated to “bolster the defense of the

nation by providing for the welfare of the population in ways

that would unite it as a people – encouraging a unity that

would help the nation resist future geopolitical threats

should they arise.”14 Consistent with this strategy, it is

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said, moderates from the Danish left and right agreed to

implement social acts as early as 1891 that for the first time

applied state expenditures on social programs in order to

reinforce political stability and further unite the people of

the nation. These policies eventually led to the establishment

of a strong set of national institutions designed to reduce

inequality and class differences.15 The second main national

ideology was based in the peasantry and inspired by Nikolai

Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), a Christian clergy,

writer, poet and priest who according to Danish historians

came to have a tremendous influence on Denmark and Danish

national identity.16 The Grundtvigian movement is described as

cutting across social classes in it’s impetus for the

importance of individual freedom, classical liberalism,

voluntarism, free association, popular education, and the

development of civil society and social solidarity.17

Grundtvigian “folk schools” emphasized the teaching of Danish

literature and served as a key mechanism for the spread of the

Grundtvigian cultural perspective and the development of a

Danish national identity, and “what is particular for the

Danish Grundtvigism is its underlining of the unity of land,

country, God, and people”18 Knud J.V. Jespersen writes:

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Although in essence the Danish model which was developed duringthe twentieth century is a system of welfare and socialsecurity, it is in fact much more than that. It actuallypermeates the whole of society in all its aspects, from thesystem of taxation to the way in which the citizens conductthemselves. It would not be an exaggeration to talk of a wholephilosophy of life, tightly linked to being Danish and aparticular Danish way of doing things.19

This national Danish narrative of course dominates at the

expense of other possible narratives. Ove Korsgaard writes

that after the 1864 war, Danish historians engaged in an

“active and conscious effort in a politics of remembrance,”

instigating a new version of history in which Denmark had for

centuries been a coherent power with a rich national history.20

Left out of the Danish narrative of modesty and solidarity was

for example the Danish colonization with enormous wealth based

on slave trade and sugar plantations across the Atlantic

Ocean, which was at its height in the second half of the 18th

century. Denmark sold its colony in the West Indies to the

United States as late as 1917.21

As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, statehood almost always

precedes nationhood, and the development of a national

narrative is as much pragmatic as anything else:

Once recognized as sovereign, the states frequently findthemselves subsequently threatened by both internaldisintegration and external aggression. To the extent that'national' sentiment develops, these threats are lessened. Thegovernments in power have an interest in promoting this

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sentiment, as do all sorts of subgroups within the state. Anygroup who sees advantage in using the state's legal powers toadvance its interests against groups outside the state or inany subregion of the state has an interest in promotingnationalist sentiment as a legitimation of its claims. Statesfurthermore have an interest in administrative uniformity thatincreases the efficacy of their policies. Nationalism is theexpression, the promoter and the consequence of such state-level uniformities.22

Nonetheless, the prevailing Danish notion of a homogenous

people is heavily informed by this Grundtvigian legacy of an

emphasis on a unity of land, country, God, and people. Despite

many Danes viewing themselves as thoroughly secular,

Christianity still frames Danish enjoyment. Public holidays

and the national traditions that go with them are informed by

Christianity, and Grundtvig’s hymns make up the backbone of

not only the hymnbook of Danish churches, but also of the

Danish national treasury of songs. The Christian cross

features in the Danish flag as well as on the traditional hat

that high school students wear upon graduation, and the

countless churches scattered around the country are not only

the center of celebrations and rituals such as baptisms,

confirmations, marriages and funerals, but also a

quintessential part of the Danish landscape. It may be that

Christianity is weaved so seamlessly into the fabric of

everyday life in Denmark that to a Dane, the country is

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secular, yet being “culturally Christian” is part of the

mainstream Danish organization of enjoyment. Celebrating

Ramadan or Passover is not particularly Danish, whilst

celebrating Christmas is.

Not surprisingly, Danish enjoyment is also related to

desiring and consuming certain items. For example, Thomas

Dickson’s book about Danish design displays Danish

exceptionalism represented in objects, where Danish design is

linked to a Danish “way of life”. The “internal front

strategy” is mentioned here as encapsulating the national

narrative of a population who after losing large areas of land

focused on working with what they had. With very few raw

materials (in fact, the author states, only wood, stone and

amber were available), “Danes soon learned to be creative and

make much of very little.”23

Perhaps this lack of natural resources more than anything elseis what has made the Danes a design-oriented society? Danishcommon sense certainly resulted in clean lines of design usingnatural materials.24

Also the landscape of the small area of Denmark is linked to

Danish design, both the landscape and design objects have

nothing sharp about them, “no cliffs, no gorges, no high

mountains, only rich and fertile soil,”25 and Danish furniture

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thus “reminds us of something familiar, something we find

pleasant.”26 Again, left out here is for example the many

buildings and churches ornamented with materials such as

marble and gold that were built with wealth gained from

colonization. Nonetheless, the ethos that informs Danish

architecture, clothing, interior design, and furniture is

characterized by a focus on modesty, simplicity, aesthetics

and functionality. A gallery selling Danish design furniture

describes on its website how “a circle of craftsmen,

architects and designers erased the distinction between works

of art and functional equipment for everyday life.” This

resulted, the gallery continues, in “truly modern furniture

that relied on beautiful materials, rather than applied

decoration, and finely-crafted details for its aesthetic

value.”27 The pride in historical roots of social inclusion and

welfare are also brought forth here in descriptions of the

architecture of public housing for low-income families built

in the mid-1800s, designed with a focus on health, outside

recreational spaces and communal facilities, that are still

today popular homes.28 Danish exceptionalism is also detectable

in the following quote, where the functionalism, reasonable

pragmatism, sense of aesthetics and an attitude contrary to

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that of a settler nation are celebrated:

When a motorway is going to be built, it might as well be donebeautifully by routing the road as gently as possible throughthe landscape. In the US as well as other countries with apioneer mentality, there is a tradition of using a ruler toplan roads and then let loose the bulldozers. You’ll often seea road that cuts right through a hill instead of going aroundit. In Denmark there is a tradition of letting major roads windbetween hills and go around bogs and hollows. Thus you don’thave to move as much earth, plus you get roads that are morevaried to drive on, which also makes it less likely that thedriver will fall asleep at the wheel on the long stretches.”29

Danish enjoyment is thus linked to putting this sense of

simplicity, minimalism, aesthetics and functionalism to use in

everyday life. How one dresses, what bicycle or car one

drives, and how one decorates one’s home is a showcase of

one’s Danish way of enjoying. Ironically, this modestly

designed furniture and clothing is incredibly expensive. A

Danish way of consuming linked to a Danish way of life is thus

a performative act that requires a privileged financial

status.

While the aspects of the Danish national Thing outlined

above are not an exhaustive description of everything that

encapsulates Danishness, and while there are of course many

variations and exceptions within Denmark itself, I argue that

the aspects listed above play a role in how the Danes

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demarcate themselves in relation to a foreign other. This

demarcation is what the essay now turns to.

XENOPHOBIA AND NEW RACISM

According to Žižek, tensions of racism and xenophobia turn on

the possession of the national Thing. When the Danish

community thus demarcates itself, it does so in relation to a

foreign other that threatens the Danish national Thing:

We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: hewants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life)and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. Inshort, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiarway he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the“excess” that pertains to this way” the smell of “their” food,“their” noisy songs and dances, “their” strange manners,“their” attitude to work.”30

As an example of tension around the Danish national Thing we

can consider how a foreign other threatens Danish production,

export and consumption of pork. In relation to an increasing

Muslim population, Denmark has been through two so-called wars

on “frikadeller” (traditional meat balls made partly from

pork) because public institutions such as day care centers and

hospitals chose to stop serving pork and/or to only serve

halal-butchered meat in order to ensure that all

children/patients - including those who were Muslim - were

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able to eat the same food. These initiatives were met with

exploding public outcry in national media outlets, culminating

in 2013 with the Prime Minister officially defending a Danish

right to eat pork.31 Meanwhile Danish Crown, Europe’s largest

producer of pork, is closing butcheries in Denmark and

outsourcing the work to Eastern Europe, thus contributing to

Eastern Europeans (another foreign other threatening the

Danish national Thing) stealing Danish jobs. As Žižek

polemically asserts;

To the racist, the “other” is either a workaholic stealing ourjobs or an idler living on our labor, and it is quite amusingto notice the haste with which one passes from reproaching theother with a refusal to work to reproaching him for the theftof work.32

As mentioned above, the Danish national Thing is also at work

in the idea of a homogenous Danish identity tightly linked to

participation in the welfare state. This aspect is at the

forefront of contemporary immigration politics, especially as

they are voiced to the right of the political spectrum.33 Here,

the watchword is integration: Only someone who can participate

properly in the welfare society is welcome in Denmark. As the

Danish Conservative Party states on their website:

In Denmark we have some fundamental values we will not give up.Values such as democracy, freedom of speech, dialogue ratherthan violence, minority protection – but respect for majoritydecisions – and equality between genders. Real integration can

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only happen based on these completely invariable principles.Therefore, democratic integration is as important as economic.

An effective and targeted integration of new fellow citizens isnecessary. Therefore we must make demands about languageskills, education and employment, and we must reward those whomake a concerted effort. We as a society cannot afford, andview it as a waste of resources, that people walk aroundpassively on transfer income.

The tendency for “ghettoization” in certain residential areasmust be counteracted and fought. It is subversive to thecohesion of the Danish society when entire residential areasdevelop different fundamental norms than the Danish ones, andthere arises a concentration of social and cultural problemsthat have a negative influence on the rest of the society.34

Lines of demarcation are drawn here. Proper participation in

the welfare state is paramount, because the society cannot

afford and views it as a waste if anyone mooches on the

welfare system. It is also posited here that being different,

or having different norms and values than the Danish ones, is

seen as a threat to the rest of the community. This is again

congruent with a view of a foreign other threatening a

particular Danish way of enjoying. As Žižek says of the

national Thing, “The basic paradox is that our Thing is

conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the

same time threatened by him.”35 Hence what is possibly at play

here is much more than merely working, paying taxes, speaking

Danish, and believing in democracy, Danish law, and gender

equality. When these values are being explicated in a Danish

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context, they become interwoven with the Danish Thing that is

also informed by mainstream orientations towards history,

religion, culture, and objects. To integrate into Denmark, it

is thus not enough to know how to behave as a Dane, one must

know how to enjoy like a Dane. As an editorial in the national

Danish newspaper Belingske Tidende outlines, one has to want to be

a Dane, and one has to feel like a Dane:

“Dane” is something you become and are because you want to be,and because you in words and actions show that you feel like apart of Denmark. If you live in a ghetto and are one of thosewhose fault it is that the police and firemen can’t do theirjobs because of excessive harassment, or if you for exampleinsist on being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir or otherorganizations that openly despise all western and therebyDanish values, then you are perhaps technically a Dane becauseyou are a Danish citizen. But you are not in the strict senseDanish.36

This raises the question of whether the very production of

Danish national identity is premised on the exclusion of those

who are unfit for inclusion, and whether a simultaneous

exhortation to ”integrate” while partially denying the

possibility of such integration becomes a way in itself of

performing ”Danishness”. As Žižek puts it:

The demand “Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demandwhich counts on the other’s inability to really become like us,so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their failure. Thetruly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is anOther who effectively becomes like us, while retaining itsspecific features.37

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Furthermore, the view that a foreign other is unable to grasp

the Danish “way of life” suggests an ethos in which the Danish

“way of life” is seen as superior to other ways of life.

Successfully integrating the other into the Danish society,

teaching him or her how “we” do the welfare state, becomes

part of a civilizing mission. As Etienne Balibar aptly puts

it:

No theoretical discourse on the dignity of all cultures willreally compensate for the fact that, for a ‘Black’ in Britainor a ‘Beur’ in France, the assimilation demanded of them beforethey can become 'integrated' into the society in which theyalready live (and which will always be suspected of beingsuperficial, imperfect or simulated) is presented as progress,as an emancipation, a conceding of rights.38

Perhaps not surprisingly then, the xenophobia is unevenly

distributed in relation to where the other entering Denmark is

from. Recently, Denmark’s currently largest political party,

Venstre, launched a new set of immigration policies they would

like to implement. In a feature article by the Party’s

spokesman on nationality, it is made clear that “The state has

to make a distinction between people”:

We are already distinguishing between different countries. Itis easier to come to Denmark for an Italian than for an Indian.And it is harder for a Somali than a Swede. Now we areexpanding the list of countries. The countries have been chosenbased on objective and factual criteria. And those are –naturally – neither religion nor skin color.

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If one is from a country with a high standard of living –broadly speaking – there is a higher chance that one willsettle and thrive in Denmark without problems, and there is asmaller risk that one is coming for the wrong reasons.

All things considered, there is a bigger risk of problems witha Somali than with a Swede, regardless if this is an atheist, aMuslim or a Christian. It will hit unfairly in a lot of singlecases, but it can hardly be any different. The world is in manyways unfair, and Denmark’s immigration politics can’t solve theworld’s injustices and poverty problems.39

The idea is to accept immigrants based on how the country they

are from is rated on the UN Human Development Index. More

specifically, the level of otherness is ranked from benign to

threatening based on a logic that people from first world

countries will easily be able to integrate into the Danish

society, whereas people from third world countries will not.

As it is stated, the demarcations don’t center on questions of

religion or race, but they do however center on notions of

civilizational adeptness. Etienne Balibar relates such a need

to “differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of

their greater or lesser aptitude for – or resistance to –

assimilation” to an ethos where proper participation in the

welfare state is a “civilizing mission” in which “they” must

learn to partake in a civilized manner in “our” superior way

of structuring society.40

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Even though the political party denounces any talk of

possible racism in these policy-suggestions, the racism is

still there. As Balibar points out, contemporary racism,

especially as it pertains to western European nations, is no

longer based on biological heredity, but is ideologically

bound in a view of complete incompatibility between different

cultures:

What we see here is that biological or genetic naturalism isnot the only means of naturalizing human behavior and socialaffinities. At the cost of abandoning the hierarchical model(though the abandonment is more apparent than real, as we shallsee), culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particularfunction as a way of locking individuals and groups a prioriinto a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable andintangible in origin.41

While it is acknowledged that behaviors and aptitudes cannot

be explained in terms of blood or genes, these are now instead

explained by belonging to a certain culture. As such it is “a

racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the

superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others

but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the

incompatibility of life-styles and traditions.”42 In this way,

the arguments of the liberal multiculturalist, who is oriented

towards acknowledging the diversity and equality of cultures,

end up feeding this cultural racism with its arguments.

Suddenly, the idea of “mixing cultures” is bad because it will22

homogenize in a destructive way. This doctrine can be utilized

also to explain (or even legitimize) racism, because if these

differences are inherent in us, they will invariably clash,

which will inevitably result in conflict and aggressiveness.43

An argument of securing cultural diversity then becomes an

argument for maintaining tolerance thresholds and cultural

distances, and the result is that it is best to segregate

collectives, the prime mode of this segregation of course

being different nations.44 About the current “arabophobia,”

Balibar writes:

It carries with it an image of Islam as a ‘conception of theworld’ which is incompatible with Europeanness and anenterprise of universal ideological domination.45

Žižek also touches upon this new racism, which in his view is

“reflected” in that it puts itself forth as the opposite of

racism.46 Again, “apartheid is thus legitimized as the ultimate

form of anti-racism, as an endeavor to prevent racial tensions

and conflicts.”47

“We don’t want anything foreign, we just want what rightfullybelongs to us!” – a reliable sign of racism, since it claims todraw a clear line of distinction where none exists.48

It is thus an illusion – and a racist one – to assume that a

country has a natural, and politically correct, right to close

its borders to certain, unwanted people, who simply don’t “fit

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in.” Next, we will look closer at how racism, nationalism and

fantasies intersect.

FANTASIES AND FASCIST DREAMS

In Žižek’s view of nationalism, our enjoyment is characterized

by us never possessing it. In this psychoanalytic framework,

both the subject and social reality are constituted by a

fundamental lack – neither can ever be complete. This means

that the subject is always trying to cover these gaps by

different identification acts. The role of fantasy is to tell

us how (and what) to desire,49 and fantasy fills in ideological

gaps by offering the subject to envision a way out of the

dissatisfaction with social reality, and “In this way, fantasy

bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency

that appears to fulfill the lack that constitutes social

reality.”50 The fantasy operates such that the impossibility of

wholeness is transformed into being perceived as only a

prohibition or difficulty, thus leaving the subject with an

illusion that the impossibility (primordially lost) can be

transgressed.51 Keeping the desire unfulfilled, the fantasy

gives us an explanation for why our full enjoyment is missing;

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we could enjoy, if only... Žižek’s main example of an

ideological fantasy is the role of the Jew in the Nazi regime:

What appears as the hindrance to society's full identity withitself is actually its positive condition: by transposing ontothe Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces in thesocial organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is renderedpossible.52

According to Žižek, what is hated is however our own inner

antagonism, the overlap of lack and excess in the little

incomplete tastes of enjoyment we get. Hating the other’s

enjoyment is hating our own excessive, unobtainable enjoyment.

For example;

Do we not find enjoyment precisely in fantasizing about theOther’s enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude toward it? Do wenot obtain satisfaction by means of the very supposition thatthe Other enjoys in a way inaccessible to us?53

In Denmark, especially the Muslim and Eastern European ways of

enjoying are marked as threatening: Their food, their loud

conversations in different languages than Danish, their

smells, their celebrations, the way they dress and decorate

their homes, their manners, their tendency to steal and commit

violent crimes; and most of all the way they lazily exploit

the welfare state in order to live a comfortable life.54 Is

what is at stake here then, in fact the Danes hating their own

enjoyment, their own comfortable reliance on the welfare

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state? Is it this enjoyment that is threatened when it

crystalizes in the habits of the other? In the following

excerpt of a column in Berlingske Tidende, the author portrays a

very ambivalent attitude to his own (Danish) enjoyment:

My own frustration causes me to feel like the veil-women[Muslim women who wear the veil]. I only dwell in Denmarkbecause of my high income and the good health care system inline with many immigrants who are only here because of earlyretirement and sickness leave benefits. As soon as it ispossible, I run away on a long weekend or a longer vacationabroad, where the weather is better and the prices are lower.My country is turning into a defensive, masochistic amoeba thataccepts that everyone exploits it. The only answer seems to bexenophobia, which is as alien to me as Morten Østergaard’s[politician from a center-left wing party who is known for themost tolerant politics towards immigrants] naive andtotalitarian accept of veils, children’s checks [governmentsubsidy to families with children] to Rumanians and eliminationof the Danish language.55

The message here seems to be that others have ruined this

author’s belief in the Danish narrative, and have thus

destroyed the Danish national Thing, leaving his country “a

defensive, masochistic amoeba that accepts that everyone

exploits it.” The current situation leaves him unable to enjoy

being Danish, and instead forces him to enjoy Denmark in the

same, perverse way the immigrants do. In this sense, it is the

immigrants’ fault that he hates his own enjoyment. In terms of

a possible solution, the author feels trapped between a stance

of xenophobia, a stance he has arguably already taken, and

26

opening the borders completely and allowing the Danish way to

be destroyed, something that however seems to already have

happened.

Žižek reminds us that this logic of “theft of enjoyment” is

not motivated by an immediate social reality of different

ethnic communities living together, but comes about from “the

inner antagonism inherent in these communities”56:

It is too easy to dispose of this problematic by pointing outthat what we have here is simply the transposition, theideological displacement, of the effective socioeconomicantagonisms of today’s capitalism. The problem is that, whilethis is undoubtedly true, it is precisely through such adisplacement that desire is constituted. What we gain bytransposing the perception of inherent social antagonisms intothe fascination with the Other (Jew, Japanese …) is thefantasy-organization of desire.57

In the case of nationalistic xenophobia, the desire is of a

coherent Danish state free of antagonisms. This desire is a

priori something that cannot be fulfilled. Žižek calls it “the

fascist dream,” when a community fantasizes about being a

capitalist society without any excess or structural

imbalance.58 This dream is perhaps what is encapsulated in the

Nordic Model: Free market capitalism in a homogenous, equal

society of happy people that all enjoy a middle class status.

The Danish fantasy then posits that the only thing prohibiting

the Nordic Model from functioning without friction, are the

27

hordes of foreign immigrants who mooch on the system and

thereby wreck it. This dreaming of course leads to racism,

because according to the dream, an alien intruder introduced

the excess and structural imbalance from the outside, so by

excluding this alien intruder, society could return to its

frictionless status quo. When a Danish political party asserts

that;

We neither want to open nor close, we want both. Open for thosewho can and will. Close for those who will not.59

It gives us a clue that the source of the antagonism lies in

exactly a paradoxical setup of the Nordic Welfare state, where

Denmark wants to be open to free markets and closed to the

other. Hence, what is threatening the Danish national Thing is

the paradox that Denmark desires to partake as an incredibly

wealthy core country in the global neoliberal world order,

whilst at the same time wants to only be for Danes. The rest

of the essay will unpack and critique this paradox further.

DANISH BOURGEOISIE AND A FOREIGN PROLETARIAT

The Danish welfare state, the affluence it creates and

sustains amongst its privileged population, and the xenophobia

and racism that this setup seemingly elicits, questions the

28

notions of a regulated, benign capitalism. The image of a

nation state with “cuddly” capitalism becomes even more

questionable when taking into account how nation-states

provide political foundations for unequal exchange across

borders that results in a worldwide structural/axial division

of labor. In this arrangement, “core states” appropriate

surplus value from “periphery states,” as privileged states

utilize their positions of power to assure that money and

goods flow more “freely” across borders than labor and people.

As Immanuel Wallerstein suggests, the fundamental role of the

nation-state in a global capitalist economy is to augment the

advantage of some against others in the market, by reducing

the “freedom” of the market.60 Those who are in favor of this

setup of course tend to be those who benefit from this uneven

sociographic distribution of bourgeoisie and proletariat in

different states. Here, the nation, or the “peoplehood”

becomes a claim for a position of advantage in the capitalist

world-economy:61

Ethnicization, or peoplehood, resolves one of the basiccontradictions of historical capitalism – its simultaneousthrust for theoretical equality and practical inequality – andit does so by utilizing the mentalities of the world’s workingstrata.62

29

When the Danish refrain “we want equality, but only for us!,”

goes along with a wish to open the borders to wealth and close

them to foreigners, we see how this combination of theoretical

equality and practical inequality is naturalized by way of the

imaginary of a people. The political Party of Venstre then

reminds us that “The world is in many ways unfair, and

Denmark’s immigration-politics can’t solve the world’s

injustices and poverty problems,” once again naturalizing the

affluence of Danes as something that is inherent to their

nationality and not something that depends on a global

division of labor. What we see here is also an example of a

core state that demarcates itself against an unwelcome foreign

proletariat that is viewed as a threat to the affluent middle

class lifestyles inside the Danish borders.

If one views Denmark as a closed bubble, it may seem as

though capitalism has been tamed and reined, and that what is

gained is only its benefits. However if one takes a global

perspective and acknowledges that the Danish welfare state and

the affluence it sustains for its population is entirely

dependent on cheap labor and resources in other parts of the

world, the struggles at the Danish borders are in fact class

struggles between a Danish bourgeoisie and a foreign

30

proletariat.63 Žižek uses the term “the new bourgeoisie” about

privileged salaried workers, a description that fits the vast

majority of Danes today:

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but inthe (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’:they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’(an often mythic point of reference whose only real example intoday’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker inChina or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from commonproletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie inthe classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappearas a subset of salaried workers, as managers [as well as allsorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors,lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists] who arequalified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which iswhy pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimisesdisparities).64

This Danish bourgeoisie I argue is comparable to affluent

middle classes in places such as India, South Korea, and so

on, and as such, the definitions of bourgeoisie and middle

class collapse in today’s neoliberal global capitalism. The

distinction is between an affluent population who is able to

thrive on the economic setup of neoliberal globalization, and

a struggling population whose surplus value is appropriated to

enable continued affluence for those who are better off. The

axial division of labor is thus not always in congruence with

state borders; some nation states, such as India and South

Korea, have both core and periphery populations within.

31

The affluent Danish bourgeoisie/middle class quite aptly

fits Marx and Engels’ description of Socialist bourgeois:

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modernsocial conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarilyresulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society,minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wishfor a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisienaturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be thebest; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortableconception into various more or less complete systems. Inrequiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, […] itbut requires in reality, that the proletariat should remainwithin the bounds of existing society, but should cast away allits hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.65

Here, the socialist wish for a “bourgeoisie without a

proletariat” is critiqued for merely silencing the proletariat

within the community. However in the Nordic Model, the wish

for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat has been fulfilled by

pushing the proletariat, and hence any radical critiques and

revolutionary elements, out of sight. Marx and Engels viewed

Socialism as utopic because it wouldn’t get rid of class

antagonisms. The ‘third way’ Nordic welfare states could claim

to have fulfilled this without the step of abandoning

capitalism, but class antagonisms are not absent in the Nordic

Model, they have merely been outsourced.

That class antagonisms would be removed from within an

entire nation was not something Marx and Engels foresaw. As we

know, their solution rested firmly on strong, independent

32

states. What they described as a “universal range” of the

revolution they sought was only all so-called civilized

countries; “that is to say, at least in England, America,

France and Germany.”66 In the framework of Marx and Engels, the

“uncivilized” countries simply do not count. For Marx and

Engels, a large state was seen as the solution for ending

capitalist exploitation. However in the case of a Danish

middle class exploiting a foreign proletariat, the state is

the enabler of this exploitation as it enters into a

dialectical relationship with neoliberal capitalism.

What we see in the Danish struggles of immigration, then,

is how the world onto which the Danish welfare state has

outsourced the excessive, destructive elements of capitalism

comes knocking on the Danish front door, as the lives of the

proletariat in periphery countries have become intolerable due

to excessive inequality, oil-related conflicts, environmental

devastation and so on. The Danes are thus confronted with

their own excess by their borders. Rather than critical self-

investigation, the result of this confrontation becomes racism

and xenophobia, as the national fantasy of a coherent welfare

state of shared solidarity that is irreplaceable, precious and

33

threatened becomes the framework in which the confrontation is

understood.

One of the major problems of the Danish system is that it

looks so pretty. The revolutionary elements have been removed,

suffering has been outsourced to China, Bangladesh, India,

Mexico - out of sight to the Danes who consume at a rate that

it would require four and a half extra earths to sustain.67 A

belief that a coherent, frictionless, liberal-democratic

society will surface if we get rid of racist nationalism

misses the point that a modern, capitalist, liberal democracy

is inevitably constructed with a split between those who will

be inside, and those who will be outside, as the structural

setup of liberal democracy means that it can never be

universalized. This inevitable split is of course not

analogous to the new racist claim of an inevitable split

between different cultures. Rather, this inevitable split

enables a shift of critique from blaming an intruding other

that society fails to be coherent, to looking critically at

the dialectic relationship between state and capitalism.

EQUALITY WITHOUT BORDERS

In her book Frames of War, Judith Butler theorizes on how some34

lives become recognizable as lives while others are not by

asking “when is life grievable?” To Butler, ungrievable lives

are those that cannot be lost or destroyed because they

inhabit a lost and destroyed zone, and so are from the very

outset lost and destroyed.68 In relation to these lives that

don’t count, Butler discusses;

… a form of righteous coldness cultivated over time throughlocal and collective practices of nation-building, supported byprevalent social norms as they are articulated by both publicpolicy, dominant media, and the strategies of war.69

This, she writes, also plays out in immigration politics,

where certain lives are perceived as lives while others, even

though living, are not viewed as such:

Forms of racism instituted and active at the level ofperception tend to produce iconic versions of populations whoare eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, andwho remain ungrievable.70

Here, “unfit” populations are not only unfit because their

cultures are viewed as incompatible, they are unfit in the

sense that they don’t really count as people. As the current

Danish government states in their “foundation,” the demands to

become a Danish citizen “must be high, because Danish

citizenship is something special.” In other words, some

populations are not special (modern, democratic, tolerant,

Christian) enough to be worth a life with as much affluence as

35

a Danish life. In relation to Islamophobia and a view of

Europe as modernized with rational, advanced secular

principles, and Islamic countries as somehow medieval, Butler

writes:

If the Islamic populations destroyed in recent and current warsare considered less than human, or “outside” the culturalconditions for the emergence of the human, then they belongeither to a time of cultural infancy or to a time that isoutside time as we know it. In both cases, they are regarded asnot yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human. Itfollows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of suchpopulations, their infrastructures, their housing, and theirreligious and community institutions, constitutes thedestruction of what threatens the human, but not the humanitself.71

The Danish sense of entitlement and the civilizing mission

inherent in the politics of integration thus brings the

cultural racism into an ideological realm where other, foreign

lives simply aren’t worth a Danish life. The foreign

proletariat are the “rabble”, a mob of humans with no lives,

useful insofar as they mine the metals for our mobile phones,

but useless as Danish citizens.

To encourage a move towards a new, radical form of

egalitarianism, Butler introduces the term ’precariousness’ as

a shared social human condition, and asks the left to move

beyond multicultural conceptions of different (minority)

36

identities within the framework of a nation-state, to a focus

on state violence against precarious populations:

Precarity cuts across identity categories as well asmulticultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliancefocused on opposition to state violence and its capacity toproduce, exploit and distribute precarity for the purposes ofprofit and territorial defense. Such an alliance would notrequire agreement on all questions of desire or belief or self-identification. It would be a movement sheltering certain kindsof ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing suchpersistent and animating differences as the sign and substanceof a radical democratic politics.72

If we apply this idea to the Danish case, it suggests a shift

from a situation of “us and our welfare state against the

other” to “us and the other against the (welfare) state.” It

also suggests a shift from a view of global poverty and

violence being “their problem” to something that is also “our

problem”. When in the Danish case the (welfare) state is

perceived as “us” and “ours,” this proposition of a universal

struggle against state violence in general would require a

complete ideological re-rendering of the Danish national

narrative.

The solution proposed here by Butler isn’t far removed from

Žižek, who posits the solution of “traversing the fantasy”: We

must realize that our desires, or enjoyment, and our “way of

life” is contingent upon our fantasies.73 We must realize that

the other does not possess any secret Thing just as we do37

not.74 So even though nationalism hinges on a real,

nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment, we must realize that this

enjoyment is bound in fantasies, and it is these fantasies

that should be “traversed” as it were. This poses the

challenge of balancing between a destructive claim to

homogenize everyone and a new racist claim that mixing

different people will lead to conflicts:

If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, thenmulticulturalism turns into a form of legally regulated mutualignorance or hatred. The conflict over multiculturalism alreadyis a conflict about Leitkultur: not a conflict between cultures,but a conflict between different visions of how differentcultures can and should co-exist, about the rules and practicesthese cultures would have to share. One should thus avoidgetting caught in the liberal game of determining how muchtolerance we should show the Other […] At this level, ofcourse, we can never be tolerant enough, or else we are alwaysalready too tolerant […] The only way to break out of thisdeadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universalproject shared by all participants.75

Žižek suggests that the struggle against global neoliberal

inequality structures, against fundamentalism, against anti-

Semitism as well as aggressive Zionism, the struggles of

WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, Occupy, and Pussy Riot, are all a

part of the same, universal struggle.76 Butler pointed to the

state as a central focus of this struggle, and Žižek adds to

this that also capitalism is a fundamental force to resist:

[…] there is no way out as long as the universal dimension ofour social formation remains defined in terms of Capital. The

38

way to break out of this vicious circle is not to fight the“irrational” nationalist particularism but to invent forms ofpolitical practice that contain a dimension of universalitybeyond Capital.77

Taken together, this means that both the violence of states

and the violence of global capitalism must be resisted and

unraveled. This requires an unveiling of the fantasies that

function to keep this violence naturalized and/or out of sight

as spatial distances and national security measures are

curbing any potentials of change. A view of racism and

immigration struggles as contemporary class struggles in a

global neoliberal division of labor can perhaps help to bring

what is out of sight back into sight, by pointing to the

interdependence we all share despite national imaginaries and

state borders. We must ask what is more utopic: the idea of a

Danish welfare state without xenophobic nationalism, or a

society without capitalism?

Word count, text body including endnotes: 9014.

39

1 ”Special report: The Nordic countries,” The Economist, February 2, 2013. 2 Ibid.3 Sara Miller Llana and Fabrizio Tassinari, “Nordic cuddly capitalism: Utopia, no. But a global model for equity,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2014. 4 Depending on the perspective, there can also be a middle class and a proletariat within Denmark itself. However when comparing the affluence of this Danish proletariat to lives in third-world countries, it is firmly middle class. 5 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 201-237. 6 Ibid., 202.7 Ibid., 201.8 Ibid., 202.9 Jacob Torfing, Velfærdsstatens Ideologisering. Research Papers from the Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, 1999, http://rudar.ruc.dk/handle/1800/1229.10 Lasse Koefoed, “Glokale nationalismer: Globalisering, hverdagsliv og fortællinger om dansk identitet (PhD diss., Roskilde University, 2006), p. 140.11 Ibid., 141.12 Ibid.13 See Knud K.V. Jespersen, A history of Denmark, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ove Korsgaard, The struggle for the people; Five Hundred Years of Danish History in Short, (Copenhagen: Danish School of Education Press, 2008); Uffe Østergaard, “Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(1) (1992) 3-27. 14 John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, National Identity and the Varieties ofCapitalism: The Danish Experience, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), p. 23. 15 Campbell and Hall, National Identity, 23. 16 Korsgaard, The struggle for the people, 59. 17 Campbell and Hall, National Identity.18 Østergaard, Peasants and Danes, 18.19 Jespersen, A History of Denmark, 82.20 Korsgaard, The struggle for the people, 56.21 Aarhus University, Danish history, accessed September 26th, 2014 http://danmarkshistorien.dk/leksikon-og-kilder/vis/materiale/de-vestindiske-oeer-dansk-vestindien/22 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), p. 81.23 Thomas Dickson, Dansk Design, (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2008), p. 30.

24 Ibid., 31.25 Ibid., 24.26 Ibid., 27.27 Dansk Møbelkunst, Accessed September 26th 2014, www.dmk.dk.28 Dickson, Dansk Design.29 Dickson, Dansk Design, 27.30 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203.31 Anne Mette Svane, “Thorning er Statsminister for frikadeller og flæskesteg,” Politiken, August 13th 2013. 32 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203.33 The examples of immigration discourse I give here are from parties that are seen as being on the right of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, these views currently represent more than half of the population, and it can be discussed how different these views of immigration are from the onesharbored by parties on the political left. As the current, leftist government states in their “foundation of government”: “The government wishes a Denmark, where everyone regardless of background feel welcome and are active participants in our community. A Denmark, where everyone speaks the Danish language. A Denmark, where everyone gets an education they can use. A Denmark, where both men and women are participating in the labor market. And a Denmark, where people with different social and ethnic backgrounds live side by side. […] The government wants to send the clear signal that foreigners who have lived in Denmark for several years and where the integration is successful, can become Danish citizens. The demands must be high, because Danish citizenship is something special. […] The government wants to pursue a consistent policy towards the little minority that is challenging our democracy, law and order, and that doesn’twant to contribute to the Danish society. The effort against forced marriage, extremism, parallel laws and antidemocratic organizations must beseverely intensified […] Translation by the author.34 Konservativt Folkeparti, Accessed September 26th, 2014, http://www.konservative.dk/politik/integrationspolitik/demokratisk-integration. Translation by the author. 35 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203. 36 Berlingske Tidende, Det at være dansker. Berlingske mener, Editorial, Berlingske Tidende March 25th, 2014. http://www.b.dk/berlingske-mener/det-at-vaere-dansker. Translation by the author. 37 Slavoj Žižek, "Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion" Lacan.com, 2009. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/multiculturalism-the-reality-of-an-illusion/38 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 25.39 Jan E. Jørgensen, “Venstre vil både åbne og lukke landet,” Berlingske Tidende, August 16, 2014. Translation by the author.

40 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 24.41 Ibid., 22.42 Ibid.43 See Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time” in JudithButler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 101-135. 44 Ibid., 22-23.45 Ibid., 24.46 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 226. 47 Ibid.48 Ibid., 204. 49 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 7.50 Adam Cottrel, “Fantasy,” in Rex Butler ed., The Žižek Dictionary, (Durham: Acumen, 2014), p. 90.51 Jason Glynos, “Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter,” Political Studies, 56 (2008): 679-704.52 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 90.53 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative,, 206. 54 To point to the arbitrariness of such national and/or foreign enjoyment, it is of course just as easy for others to hate for example the Danish perversion of pork, the excessive Danish consumerism and the way Danes define their worth in terms of clothing and interior decoration.55 Poulsen, 2014. My translation. 56 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 205.57 Ibid., 206.58 Ibid.59 Jørgensen, “Venstre vil både åbne og lukke landet”60 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 122.61 Ibid., 82.62 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 84.63 For a great insight into the excessive Scandinavian consumerism and the axial distribution of labor, see the Swedish documentary Santa’s Workshop: InsideChina’s Slave Labour Toy Factories by Lotta Ekelund and Kristina Bjurling.64 Slavoj Žižek, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie: The New Proletariat, London Review of Books, 26 January (2012). 65 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), p. 81. 66 Ibid., 142.67 WWF, Living Planet Report 2014: Species and spaces, people and places, Accessed September 30th, 2014, http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/

68 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), xix.69 Ibid., xxiv.70 Ibid., 24.71 Ibid., 125.72 Ibid., 32. 73 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 213.74 Ibid., 221.75 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, (London: Verso, 2010), p. 415.76 Slavoj Žižek, “Rotherham child sex abuse: it is our duty to ask difficultquestions,” The Guardian, September 1, 2014. 77 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 220.