Abstract
Back in 2005, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Álvaro Gil-Robles, articulated his frustration at the racist tone of the Danish debate on foreigners in an article in Kristeligt Dagblad, in which he described the Danes as ‘primitive nationalists’. Soon after, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister and leader of the Liberal party (Venstre), called a news conference to rebuke the critics of his immigration and integration policies for being ‘totally out of touch with reality’; Denmark was an ‘open, broad-minded, unprejudiced society’, he said. In The Annoying Difference (of race and religion), cultural anthropologist Peter Hervik underlines the correctness of Gil-Robles’ analysis. Divided into four sections (the first outlining methodology and historical context, the remaining three dealing with media reporting in three distinct cases between 1997–2007), this book is an important contribution to the study of neo-racism and neo-nationalism in different European contexts. It draws its strength from Hervik’s thirteen years of diligent research into media representations of ethnic minorities and Islam, and describes the many ways in which a small, but powerful rightwing network, which started out in the semi-secret Giordano Bruno Society and cohered in the International Free Speech Society, captured much of the Danish media attention and chained it to the divisive cause of Danish and American neoconservatism and nationalism.
In fact, no one could be better placed than Hervik to dissect the processes and mechanisms through which nativism came to be institutionalised in Denmark. When the Conservative-Liberal coalition formed a new government in 2001, Hervik was researching media representations of Muslims for the Board for Ethnic Equality, which was coming under attack from the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF). Formed in 1995 as a breakaway from the extreme-right Progress party, electoral support for the DF was rapidly increasing and the centre-right coalition needed its backing to stay in power. In 2002, in what was probably a gift to the DF, the Board for Ethnic Equality was closed down on the grounds that it had become ‘too politically correct’ and was run by elite ‘judges of taste’. Hervik, whose work is ridiculed and trivialised to this day by the Right, emerges from this book not as an embittered and marginalised academic, but as a passionately committed cross-disciplinary scholar. He sees it as his duty to defend stigmatised and marginalised ethnic minorities, victims of the ‘politicisation of Danish news journalism’ and the ‘structural violence’ unleashed by politicians and media gatekeepers, who have presided over ‘increased physical violence, crime, carelessness, political polarisation’.
The three distinct issues covered in The Annoying Difference are: the 1997 Ekstra Bladet tabloid newspaper’s campaign against ‘foreigners’ (‘what are the limits of tolerance?’, the newspaper asked, even as it featured stories about ‘out of place’, backward Somali nomads and called for a debate on whether Denmark should become a ‘multi-ethnic society’); the 2001 Mona Sheikh story (three Danish-born young Muslims, including university student Mona Sheikh, denounced in the media as supporters of the Taliban and accused of disloyalty and infiltrating Danish politics on behalf of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an movement in Pakistan); and the more familiar story of the international crisis that followed the publication of twelve editorial cartoons in Denmark’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, on 30 September 2005 (the so-called ‘Muhammad cartoons crisis’).
Anyone who has seen the brilliant Danish TV detective series The Killing, and admired its stubborn police detective heroine Sarah Lund, will recognise some of the bizarre characters who make an appearance in The Annoying Difference. First, there are the DF’s radical Protestant pastors, Søren Krarup and Jesper Langballe. Then, there are the radical Right figures from the media, like the Free Press Society’s Lars Hedegaard (co-author with Daniel Pipes of a newspaper article demonising Danish Muslims as convicted rapists and anti-Semites). There is the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who grew up in a Christian Right mission in Northern Jutland in the 1930s and contributed the most offensive cartoon, the bomb-in-the-turban, as well as Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Jyllands-Posten, who commissioned them. And then there are the politicians: former Liberal party immigration and integration minister Bertel Haarder, whose romantic nationalism led him straight into the arms of the nativists, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the modernising prime minister with his coterie of spin doctors, who depicted himself, during the ‘cartoons crisis’, as a valiant defender of free speech presiding over the worst international crisis to hit Denmark since the second world war.
The neoconservative and counter-jihadist conspiracy theory that Muslims are out to Islamicise Europe relies on several key discursive frameworks, such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis’s clash of civilisations thesis and its supporting notion of Islamofascism (fascism and Islamic extremism, or even Islam, being one and the same). What Hervik does with great patience is to show how the Danish media incorporated the vocabulary of these frameworks into everyday news reporting. Hervik asks, did the Jyllands-Posten, which commissioned the twelve cartoons, ostensibly to ‘test the self-censorship of Danish cartoonists’, act as ‘provocateurs and purveyors of anti-Islamic populism’? Whether they did this wittingly or unwittingly (and Hervik leaves it to the reader to decide), Jyllands-Posten undoubtedly legitimised the DF’s abusive use of metaphor – veils compared to swastikas (Søren Krakup), Muslims to tumours in need of radiation (Louise Frevert) and Islam to a plague that must be fought like Nazism (Jesper Langballe). The timeline of Hervik’s study (beginning not in 2001, but in 1989, the end of the cold war) enables him to show the links between today’s anti-Muslim racism and the anti-refugee, anti-immigrant discourse that preceded it. Both are connected to a wider Danish neo-nationalism, which still obscures the truth about Danish collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation of 1940–1945 by emphasising the heroic deeds of the brave soldiers and civilians of Southern Jutland in resisting the Germans. The 1983 Committee Against the Refugee Act (later the Committee Against the Policy of Integration) and the Danish Association drew on this anti-Nazi resistance narrative in their campaigns against immigration, the new ‘foreign invasion’, describing those who supported migrant rights as ‘elite traitors’ comparable to those who supported the occupying troops. All this explains how a concept like Islamofascism has fallen on such fertile ground.
In his discussion of the ‘cartoons crisis’, Hervik stresses the similarities between the thinking of neoconservatives and the political theories of earlier arch-conservative writers such as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt – the most prominent judge of the Third Reich. He believed that politics only became real when you treated your adversary as an enemy and you were ready to die for your cause. The ‘politics of negative dialogue’, which demand aggressive action on the grounds that ‘certain conflicts are unavoidable and certain cultural encounters are impossible to resolve’, are part and parcel of neoconservative politics, Hervik argues. The clash of civilisation thesis allows no room for diplomacy, and confrontation comes to be viewed as the only responsible way to do politics. Hervik once again provides information from a variety of sources, before asking his readers to decide whether the publication of the twelve cartoons by Jyllands-Posten was ‘a calculated provocation meant to create or strengthen an image of Muslims as evil and dangerous, hence keeping the “clash of civilizations” ideology active’. Was Prime Minister Rasmussen’s rejection of a request made by eleven ambassadors from Muslim countries for a dialogue (a letter requesting a meeting was sent before the attacks on Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan and Iran and the other violent reactions seen around the globe, which claimed 100 lives) a terrible ‘blunder’ (made on the advice of his spin doctors) or, in line with the neoconservative politics of negative dialogue, ‘part of a fight to beat the opponent’?
Despite its undoubted importance, The Annoying Difference does pose a significant difficulty (apart from its price) for the non-academic, non-media specialist reader, which arises, ironically, from its strengths. The fact that The Annoying Difference is based on the findings of three large-scale qualitative research projects carried out over a thirteen-year period gives Hervik’s analysis depth. But the presentation within the book of the methodology and findings of these projects, which not only involved close reading of texts, but focus groups and attitude surveys, to establish how the media was shaping opinions and prejudices, means that this is really not one book, but two. And the two books do not always sit easily together. The first book, which comes replete with tables and discussion of concepts, is more academic and concerned with methodology, concepts and findings, while the second, which discusses neo-racism and neo-nationalism within the context of the professionalisation of news management and the emergence of spin, is investigative and analytical. It is really in the first 100 pages, which move in fits and starts between the two approaches, that the greatest difficulties arise. But those readers who persevere will find in this book much that is informative and new and will be heartened that the attributes of the bright, tenacious and unstoppable TV detective Sarah Lund can also be found within the Danish academy.