Photo by Chris Patriarca (cc)

Denmark, or rather our capital, has now given name to a most un-flattering definition, called the Copenhagen Syndrome. An article from openDemocracy defines it like this:

They [the Danes] give away one of the largest percentages of their gross national income in foreign aid and their government has the most restrictive immigration policies in the European Union. Danes are very generous to the poor and needy, the “other”, but they do not want to look at them.

The article goes on debating how far a nation’s radius of empathy extend, and how “post-modern bourgeois liberals do not like to have their space violated by poverty”. Furthermore, we get a huge slap in the face towards the end of the article:

We often hate most what we dislike in ourselves which may be why it seems so appropriate to give this syndrome a name that evokes the Danes and their unapologetic “hunkering” (as [Robert] Putnam calls the retreat to the comfort of one’s equals, or, rather the people we assume to be our equals because they have like morals, points of reference, purchasing-power)

Great.

What a historic reputation to be given! Unfortunately I can concur with the definition, although it hurts me deeply to having it become a “golden standard”, when the talk is on the moral and ethical issues inherited in this debate about the Global Village. It is hard to explain why I concur, but as the Norwegian social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen says, “we have everything, but that’s all we have”¹, I feel the same when looking upon my fellow Danes in general. This stems from several points of personal views (and I’m talking in very broad terms here): How the media and the politicians treats subjects such as poverty and immigration, how this influences the views on the population, how these things generally are totally neglected when people are having social conversations (this along subjects such as politics, where topics then mostly revolve around jobs, kids, social status, consumerism), etc., etc. Hard to pinpoint exactly, and by all means most Danes should not be looked upon as well-fed racist egomaniacs, but I have this feeling that the view is appropriate as looked upon from “the outside”, also seen in the light of the bad reputation the current government and the ultra-nationalistic coalition party “Dansk Folkeparti” have given Denmark in the past few years, ranging from the extreme restrictive immigration policies (as mentioned) to the Muhammad Drawings.

And the Swedes have such a much cooler definition named the Stockholm Syndrome… Egad.

I don’t quite know where I was going with this, but frankly, I feel a bit ashamed.

¹ This is, in my limited knowledge, a re-write of the Machiavellian saying: ‘There are people who know everything, but that is all they know.’

On this day...

... in 2005: Whoever dares, wins - the new [°} v5!