Uffe Østergård

Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture

From a cultural and historical-sociological perspective, the Danish nationstate of today represents a rare situation of virtual identity between state, nation, and society, which is a more recent phenomenon than normally assumed in Denmark and abroad. Though one of the oldest European monarchies, whose flag came ‘tumbling down from heaven in 1219’—ironically enough an event that happened in present-day Estonia—Denmarks present national identity is of recent vintage. Until 1814 the word, Denmark, denominated a typical European, plurinational or multinational, absolutist state, second only to such powers as France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and perhaps Prussia. The state had succeeded in reforming itself in a revolution from above in the late eighteenth century and ended as one of the few really “enlightened absolutisms” of the day (Horstboll and ostergard 1990; ostergard 1990). It consisted of four main parts and several subsidiaries in the North Atlantic Ocean, plus some colonies in Western Africa, India, and the West Indies. The main parts were the kingdoms of Denmark proper and Norway, plus the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. How this particular state came about need not bother us here.

The Danish Path to Modernity

In a comparative context, Danish national identity and political culture combine features of what is often referred to as East European integral nationalism , typical of smaller, recently independent nation-states, and the patriotic concept of citizenship in the older West European state nations. The explanation of this apparent paradox is that Denmark belongs to both families. A former multinational, composite state in 1864 was cut down to a size that enabled a class of about 60,000 peasant-farmers to establish an ideological hegemony in the diminished and nationalized, yet still fully legitimate, state. A libertarian ideology of social solidarity ended up dominating this rump nationstate. The net result in Denmark has been a political mentality stressing the importance of consensus among all the people, in Danish ‘folk’. This populism or ‘popular’ ideology ( folkelighed ) is shared by virtually all political parties. Thus Danish modernity was characterized by industrialized agrarian capitalism with a socially and nationally homogeneous face, i.e. a folkish democracy which I have elsewhere baptized ‘Peasants and Danes’ (Østergård, 1992).

LUTHERAN ORTHODOXY AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN DENMARK – 1536-2011

This article shows how anti-Catholicism has influenced Danish society and the politics of the Oldenburg Monarchy1 since the Reformation. Scandinavian historians have typically had a materialist approach to history but it is argued that religious convictions played a crucial role. Legislation was dominated by a very explicit anti-Catholicism, also in the written absolutist constitution (Lex Regia, 1665). No persecutions took place and there are several examples of how Catholics were allowed to stay, work and worship, especially in the periphery of the Oldenburg conglomerate state. Absolutism was abolished in 1848-49 but the new constitution still gave a privileged position to the Lutheran state church, which is upheld until today. Although religious tolerance gained ground already in the beginning of the 19th century Lutheranism remained an integral part of Danish national identity.

Danish National Identity

Denmark has a long history as a sovereign state, normally assumed to date back to the tenth century AD . Since the seventeenth century, however, the country has continuously lost power, influence and territory to its neighbours, first to an emerging Sweden, and then in the nineteenth century to the united Germany led by Prussia. Yet, although Danes share many cultural traits with Sweden and northern Germany they have spent much energy on distancing themselves from these two neighbours. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Denmark and the Danes have oriented themselves towards the English-speaking countries, first the United Kingdom and, since World War II, the United States. The peculiar combination of a long, uninterrupted existence as a sovereign state and the many military defeats has resulted in a national culture and identity that combines self-confidence with apparent humility. These same traditions have had a strong influence on behaviour in the workplace and Danish management traditions, at home and abroad. Behind this apparent humility, however, lurks a feeling of superiority on behalf of the small nation and its own, ‘Danish’, culture, only thinly disguised as an inferiority complex. This combination often manifests itself in ironic forms of discourse and a relaxed informality which, if challenged, may suddenly change into aggressive self-assertion and almost authoritarian attitudes.

Historical sociology, political science and comparative history of empires

Before moving to a consideration of the book under review on Ancient Empires it might be appropriate to briefly chart some key developments in the field of comparative studies of empires, ancient as well as more contemporary, and sketch some of the traditions within the relevant scholarly disciplines. In 1986 the historical sociologist, Michael Mann, published the most important investigation of the social bases of power and institutions since the posthumous publication of Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in 1922. Mann is heavily inspired by Ernest Gellner and John Hall with whom he conducted an influential weekly seminar on ‘Patterns of History’ at the London School of Economics in the 1980s. Some of these intellectual roots have most recently been treated in a vigorous and stimulating book by Hall (2010) about the multi-faceted work of the philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist Ernest Gellner who died in 1995. These publications testify to a re-emergence of comparative historical sociology which another deceased historical sociologist, Tilly (1984), programmatically baptized ‘Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons’. There is hope that we are today witnessing a resurgence of historical sociology of important questions on a comparative basis in the best tradition from Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Barrington Moore, Reinhart Bendix and others. In the preface to his influential book Mann describes the relationship between history and sociology as a process of mutual disciplining. According to him ‘sociological theory cannot develop without knowledge of history. But the study of history is also impoverished without sociology. If historians eschew theory of how societies operate, they imprison themselves in the commonsense notions of their own society’ (Mann 1986, p. vii). There are countless examples of this failure of historians to realize how much they are imprisoned by their own everyday notions. One of the most typical of such implicit modernisms is the unhistorical and anachronistic criticism of Moses Finley’s (1912–1986) pathbreaking book on Greek and Roman societies in The ancient economy (1973) by classical scholars and, in particular, archaeologists from a modernist point of view. Without any knowledge of the refined debates between the so-called ‘modernists’ and ‘primitivists’ earlier in the century, they sided with the great historian of the social and economic realities of the Greek and Roman world, Michael Rostovtzeff (1870–1952), exhibiting a rather unsophisticated use of economic assumptions from their own time (I wrote a critique of these assumptions in Danish in 1974 which is now outdated, but still correct in its basic criticism of Journal of Political Power Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2011, 465–471