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My first foreign language in primary school was Danish. Thereby hangs a tale. Iceland was governed from Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital, from 1380 to 1918, when the Danish government finally recognised her sovereignty after friendly negotiations. The Icelandic experience of Danish rule was mixed: first bad, then good. In the first few centuries, the Danish crown regarded Iceland simply as a tributary, and indeed in the sixteenth century, the Danish kings tried thrice to offer the island to Henry VIII of England as collateral for loans. The English king was not interested. In the seventeenth century, absolutism was introduced in Denmark, but it was an opinion-guided monarchy, and even Robert Molesworth, an English Whig who in 1694 wrote a diatribe against Denmark, admitted that she enjoyed a strong legal tradition that protected both the high and the low. In the late eighteenth century, the Danish government became more liberal, serfdom was abolished, most farmers became freeholders, and censorship was greatly relaxed. The Icelanders began to benefit from Danish culture. Most Icelandic academics received their education in Copenhagen until the University of Iceland was founded in 1911.
Nations by Choice
Paradoxically, Denmark’s defeats in two wars, which led to the loss of Norway in 1814 and of Schleswig in 1864, strengthened Danish civil society. Danish agriculture became innovative and competitive, and Danish farmers were staunch supporters of free trade. Danish industry and commerce flourished. The most influential Dane of the nineteenth century was the priest, poet, and politician Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), who was both a nationalist and a conservative liberal. His nationalism was based on choice: what constituted a nation was the will of individuals to belong. (This is, of course, the same idea that French historian Ernest Renan later presented, that the nation is a daily plebiscite.) Grundtvig’s nationalism was non-aggressive. It was about respecting, preserving, and developing the nation as a spontaneous community, sharing the same history, language, and culture. Grundtvig believed in evolution rather than revolution, and in free trade and private property. He taught that the transfer of power from the king to the (representatives of the) people required a strong civic culture, a real national spirit, which had to be brought about by civic education in people’s high schools.
The Escape of the Jews
What is remarkable about Denmark in the last two centuries is indeed her strong civic culture. This was shown in 1943 when she was occupied by the German Nazis. A Nazi official revealed to Danish politicians that the 7,800 Danish Jews would be rounded up in the first two days of October. The politicians alerted Jewish leaders. Subsequently, most of the Danish Jews managed to escape to Sweden. When the Nazis struck, they only found 464 Jews who were sent to concentration camps. Danish officials closely monitored these camps, and only about 100 Danish Jews perished in the Holocaust, the lowest proportion in any country occupied by the Nazis. The Israeli historian Leni Yahil explains this extraordinary course of events by the Danish civic culture, largely moulded by Grundtvig, a tradition of moral integrity and spontaneous cooperation.
The Return of the Manuscripts
The Icelanders know well another example of the Danish civic culture. In the 1960s, the Danish authorities decided to return to Iceland the most valuable ancient manuscripts of the Icelandic sagas, poems, and chronicles, the only historical treasures of this tiny nation. The Danes were under no legal obligation to do so because the manuscripts had been either bought by or given to Danish institutions. This noble gesture is in stark contrast to the behaviour of some other European nations that proudly display their past loot and plunder in museums. It is not surprising that the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama has written admiringly about ‘getting to Denmark’, or how to develop a national culture of openness, accountability, prosperity, freedom, and social cohesion.