Janus-Faced Solidarity

Abstract

With domestic political cultures in which the values of solidarity, equity and social justice figure large and a long history of internationalism in foreign policy, the Nordic states offer themselves as prototypical ‘good international citizens’. Danish foreign policy long had a passive quality to it, nonetheless it has been broadly consistent with the Nordic internationalist tradition, especially with the adoption of ‘active internationalism’ after 1989. Since the 2001 Election of the first Fogh Rasmussen government, however, the ethico-political rationales underpinning Danish internationalism appear to be changing at the same time as Denmark has enacted a controversially much more restrictive and, critics argue, strongly culturally framed immigration and refugee policy. Although the Fogh Rasmussen governments have not abandoned internationalism, and key aspects of current Danish foreign policy resonate fully with the Nordic internationalist tradition, Denmark is now much more closely aligned with the US and the muscular internationalism that it promotes. It may now be the case that a normatively re-jigged internationalism helps to legitimate an overtly exclusionary Danish national narrative. Since the ‘cartoon crisis’, however, there are signs of a greater sensitivity to cultural politics in Danish foreign policy, but it remains moot whether this will flow through into the government’s handling of the relationship between the peoples that comprise contemporary Denmark.