In Denmark, the radical shift in recent political debate about migration and asylum is registered in language as much as in public policy. Ulf Hedetoft charts the way that a new discourse is changing the way Danes talk to each other about the strangers in their midst.
“This is all about what makes a modern society function. And to that end, not all cultures are equally good”. A central passage in a leading article in one of Denmark’s largest daily newspapers, Jyllands-Posten (17 June 2003), thus describes and acclaims a recent Danish government White Paper on integration.
The passage is as revealing as the White Paper itself. Integration of immigrants and their descendants is now debated in terms of culture as the pivotal benchmark – and not just culture as a relative notion, but as an absolute yardstick of “core values” which newcomers must be measured by, and before which their own culture must yield.
