We beg to differ. The political emergence of un-Danish Danes.

About the Seminar

Denmark is currently undergoing a shift in its demographic make-up. After sixty years of receiving migrants from Turkey, Bosnia, and the Middle East, its population, until recently thought of as broadly ethnically homogenous, now indisputably includes minority populations born and raised in Denmark, the vast majority with a Muslim background.

Their presence has, over the past half century, been contested in dominant political discourse and presented as a justification for anti-immigration policies. Lately, however, younger generations from these migrant communities have begun to claim a “hyphenated” Danish identity and the right to belong to the nation in which they have always lived. They form, despite widely different national and socioeconomic backgrounds, a coherent group that articulates their shared identity around religion, as is made explicit in their demands for recognition not in terms of their plural national or ethnic descendance, but as Danish Muslims.

Exploring the extreme form of othering that the Danish approach to immigrants has produced, I will look at how the “Muslim other” has progressively morphed into a more intimate category that, although not yet included in the imagined national community, now bears the characteristics of an “underclass” and has begun to reconfigure internal social hierarchies. This shift and its effects will also be discussed in terms of the political force that has been under formation in the progressive establishment of a coherent minority group, a phenomenon now pushing for a redefinition of collective and national identities. Finally, I will invite reflection on the ways in which this group’s reaction to the policy exposes the paradoxical nature of Danish egalitarianism, demonstrating that this model of extensive equality implicitly relies on the Danish ethnic majority’s assumed cultural superiority.