If you think the Trump administration is trolling with the Nazi references, consider this.
In 2016, the government of Denmark passed a law stating that refugees must hand over any jewellery in their possession to authorities. The justification for this was that it was in payment for future services.
Earlier this year, after the immigration minister Inger Støjberg identified Muslims fasting for Ramadan as a 'danger' to Danes, the government passed a new law identifying 25 "ghettos" where mainly Muslim migrants live, and subjecting them to special measures. In those areas, "ghetto children" must be separated from their parents from the age of 1, for 25 hours a week, in order that they can be taught Danish values.
Just the other day, the Danish government announced plans to house failed "foreigners who have been convicted of crimes" in a tiny offshore island currently laboratories and disease research centres. That's right: an island as a prison. One of the ferries serving the island is called 'Virus', as if to inoculate the body politic. Støjberg crows that these foreigners are unwelcome in Denmark and will feel it.
Støjberg is not a fascist, but a leading member of the centre-right Venstre, which formed a minority government in 2015, in coalition with the far-right Danish People's Party (DPP), which is currently the second biggest party in parliament. And since being appointed immigration minister in 2015, she has improvised a new, inventive way to belittle and punish Muslims and migrants. You could call it Scandi-noir, without the adult moral complexity. In this one, the antisocial female hero is the psycho, and the sombre northern European chiaroscuro is the backdrop, not for grim social realism, but for volkish kitsch.
The relationship between neoliberal reform and anti-immigrant politics is crude enough to make a vulgar marxist out of anyone. On the one hand, the government slashes taxes, reducing its spending base. On the other hand, the finance ministry blames refugees for costing the government 4 billion euros a year (naturally, they are not taking into account the tax contributions of those migrants).
But, as in other parts of Europe, where the racist right is gaining power, this anti-immigrant thrust has been helped along by the Social Democrats. This has been done in two ways. First, like other Nordic social-democratic parties, they have overseen the privatisation and marketisation of the state sector. Second, they have popularised and mainstreamed the idiom of the far-right.
It was Social Democratic administrations that pioneered the privatisation of the schools system. It was the last Social Democratic government, elected on a reformist agenda in the wake of the credit crunch, that cut corporation taxes, raised the pension age and cut welfare, breaking their election promises. In this, they built on the 2006 Welfare Agreement, passed in part to meet the objectives of the EU's Growth and Employment Strategy. Like the Socialists in France, who reneged on their commitments in a similar way at roughly the same time, they plummeted in the polls.
What did they do next? Like the Hollande government, just as they abandoned their election commitments, they turned sharply to the right on immigration. Their initial promise had been a humanisation of policy. They shut down the Ministry of Integration, to distance themselves from the previous government. They devolved "integration" policy, under the 1999 Integration Act, to other ministries and local authorities. (The 1999 act had been introduced by Social Democrats, and was one of a string of policies intended to police migrant communities.) They proposed that some of the harsher measures of the previous government, such as Danish language exams, would be dropped. Instead, they began to tighten up immigration controls, bragging that they had made both asylum and family reunification more difficult. In the 2015 election, a "race to the bottom" on immigration, the Social Democratic Prime Minister emphatically declared that Denmark was not a multiethnic society.
This strategy was a two-fold gift to the DPP. It enabled them to position themselves to the left of the Social Democrats on welfare, promising to defend old welfare protections, while also linking it to nativist reaction. At the last election, the DPP saw their support rise by just under 9%. The Social Democrats' (useless) liberal coalition partners finally abandoned them at the last election for being "worse than the Danish People's Party" on immigration.
The Social Democrats' recent contribution to the debate on migration has been to demand a cap on "non-Western" refugees. They've proposed sending refugees to Africa, where they will be processed by a Danish-run facility before they even get to the Danish border. This is part of a wider tendency for Europe to extend its borders across the Mediterranean and into the continent of Africa. According to their senior parliamentarian, Mattias Tesfaye, in his book Welcome, Mustafa (yes, really), the proper social-democratic position has always been nativist, not liberal. The welfare state, he and co-ideologues claim, is not commensurable with a liberal immigration policy. Their most recent policy review, the seventh in their entire history, adopts wholesale the language of the racist right. They blame migrants for living separate lives, in culturally isolated enclaves. And they're enthusiastically supporting the government's "ghettos" policy.
Nationalism, which in the European context is toxically charged with racist chauvinism, has hegemonised the political field. In Denmark, as elsewhere, all the major parties are reformatting themselves as fervently nationalist, nativist parties. As an excellent piece in the latest Salvage argues, nationalism works best in the late neoliberal era by representing itself as an answer to "white working class" injury. It reconciles the neoliberal premise of a zero-sum competition with the emerging impulse toward solidarity, by treating the nation as a competitive enterprise overburdened by unproductive outsiders.
This makes it particularly appealing to right-moving social democratic parties who, because of their commitment to neoliberalism, have lost the ability to communicate with their electoral base. It creates a relatively seamless circulation of nationalist meaning and affect, from the far-right to the centre-left. And it insinuates a revisionist story about welfare and social protections, congruent with that. The 'Nordic model' of welfare was achieved through bitter class struggles and powerful labour movements, especially in the ruins of war with fascism. This is in no way consistent with the fantasy of a homogenous, harmonious society. The incumbent nationalism implies, however, that welfare was a sort of vertical solidarity, a form of social peace achieved by an ethnically and ethically homogenous society. Thus, by connotation, social solidarity, peace and well-being is a casualty of Muslims and migrants.
So, this is how we end up with governments policing "ghettos" and incarcerating migrants on island-jails.
