Free How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark by Patrick Kingsley Page A

understand why there is such consensus for a social democratic model, we need first to rewind several generations,not just to the late 19th century, and to the cooperatives and folk high schools mentioned in previous chapters, but to the late 1780s, when revolutionary fervour was sweeping most of Europe. Most, but not all. In Denmark, political change did not arrive until 1848, even though the country was subject, like France, to an absolute monarchy: the house of Oldenborg, a line of kings stretching back to the Middle Ages who were almost always called Christian or Frederick. The reason why Denmark did not yet go the way of France was that the Danish king at the end of the 18th century – Christian VII – recognised the need, out of self-preservation if nothing else, to grant his citizens greater freedom. Previously, peasants had been forbidden to leave the farms where they grew up, and instead had to work in a quasi-feudal relationship for the local landowner – a system known as adscription. In the summer of 1788, Christian VII abolished adscription, a move which paved the way for peasants to set up their own smallholdings.
    The short-term impact was clear. There was no revolution, and a group of grateful farmers even erected a monument to the king on one of the approaches to Copenhagen. The long-term impact was larger. First, the state began to be seen as an enabler of freedom – as a social good rather than the authoritarian creature it is considered in many countries, perhaps even in Britain. According to the historian Daniel Levine, by the early 1900s many Danes talked about the state, society, the public and the public sector as if they were talking about the same thing. Second: the abolition ofadscription turned the rural underclass into a newly aspirational breed of farmers – the very same people whose descendants would be educated in Grundtvig’s folk high schools, and would then go on to found the thousands of farming cooperatives described in earlier chapters.
    By the late-19th century, this new class of entrepreneurial farmers had even formed a new political party in opposition to Højre, the group of conservatives who represented the interests of the larger landowners and the urban elite. By the 1890s, this party was not just championing the cooperative movement, but also campaigning for Denmark’s first pieces of social legislation: a primitive pension scheme for labourers that was introduced in 1891; social insurance (1892); and accident insurance (1898).
    In the pages of the Danish Journal of Agriculture from the period, you can see this party’s politicians make a parallel argument for both the furthering of the cooperative movement and state support of the elderly and the sick. That party’s name? Venstre. Over the years, Venstre has become a party of business, and though a version of Højre still exists as the Danish Conservatives, Venstre – through its sheer size – could be described as Denmark’s nearest equivalent to the Conservative party in Britain. But it is significant that Venstre, unlike the Tories, has its roots in the premise of the collective and in the battle for social equality, something which helps to explain why much of the Danish right, with their distant roots in the agrarian community, is still reluctant to take an axe to the welfare state.
    Borgen: the Danish parliament
    “There is a way in which the Danish welfare state,” writes Knud Jespersen in his History of Denmark , “with its comprehensive social safety net and high level of collective responsibility, can be perceived as a modern, national version of the old village collectives from before the time of agrarian reform. These created a secure framework for the everyday life of the Danes over centuries and shaped their behaviour and norms to the point of defining what it meant to be Danish. The welfare state, with its innate security and collective protection against threats from both within and without, touched