The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

by Michael Booth

There was little resistance to German occupation for the first three years or so; indeed, both the Danish king and prime minister at the time criticized the nascent Danish underground when they occasionally carried out minor acts of sabotage. Unlike the Norwegians, who resisted with great courage and ingenuity (greatly aided by their mountains and climate, admittedly), Denmark had little choice but to submit to life as a pliable German satellite. Some have gone as far as to categorize the Danes as German allies, as they supplied much-needed agricultural produce and even troops to fight on the Eastern Front and in Berlin during the Second World War. Churchill called the country “Hitler’s pet canary.”

No longer the great European power it had once been, Denmark withdrew, mustered what few resources remained within its much-reduced boundaries,

the Danes adopted a “glass half full” outlook,

this parochialist urge toward insularity and its accompanying national romanticism is a defining element of Danishness that is epitomized by a saying that every Dane knows by heart to this day:

Hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes. (What was lost without will be found within.)

Søren Kierkegaard write his groundbreaking existentialist works;

C. W. Eckersberg and his pupil Christen Købke, and the Royal Ballet master August Bournonville,

only a little over five million people;

they have no mountains or waterfalls, and that you can cross their country by car in four hours.

Other key moments in Denmark’s recent history include the country’s peaceful move toward democracy when the king renounced his absolutist powers with the constitution of 1849, and the all-important agricultural cooperatives that emerged soon after.

today, the Danes are the world’s leading pork butchers, slaughtering more than twenty-eight million pigs a year.

The pleasantly woozy feeling after a lunch of pickled herring with red onion on rye, a Tuborg beer, and an icy schnapps.

Christiansborg Palace, the Danish parliament building.

The word overskud, meaning a kind of surplus of energy. As in, “I can’t cut the lawn now—after that great big boozy lunch I simply don’t have the overskud.”

Smask is another great Danish word: it’s the annoying mouth noise some people make when they eat, say, an apple, or breakfast cereal, or ...

The fact that I once saw the Danish prime minister on a pre-election walkabout in Copenhagen, on the equivalent of Times Square, and no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention.

Babies left sleeping outside cafés; a perfectly normal occurrence throughout the country and one that happens in all weathers.

as one Danish mother, the actress Annette Sørensen, discovered in 1997, this approach does not work in New York: her child was taken into protective care when Sørensen left it sleeping in a stroller outside a restaurant in Manhattan.)

The word Pyt. A dismissive exhalation that roughly translates as “Let it go, it’s not worth bothering with.” Midsummer party threatened by rain? Pyt med det! (“Pyt with that!”)

They sell wine and beer in movie theaters, and you are usually allowed to take it into the theater with you. Is there any greater...

The hollyhocks that spring up from between the cobbles of Christianshavn, the canal quarter of Copenhagen.

The Danes do seem to have an uncommon facility to get on with each other regardless of age, class, or outlook. Egality comes easily to them. One of my most cherished memories of this inclusiveness is of a friend’s fortieth birthday party, at which his octogenarian grandmother was seated next to the country’s most notorious rapper, and the two spent a jolly evening chatting together.

according to the New Statesman, “90 percent of the population [of Denmark] enjoy an approximately identical standard of living.”

Unfortunately, the Danes score notably badly in terms of their health. According to a recent report from the World Cancer Research Foundation, they have the highest cancer rates in the world

They also have the lowest average lifespan of any of the Nordic countries, and the highest levels of alcohol consumption, ahead even of the famously boozy Finns.

The Swedes have an even greater trade-union membership and in their spare time are particularly keen on voluntary work: they call this instinct for diligent self-improvement organisationssverige,

The Finns are famed for their after-work classes, particularly their amateur classical musicianship and fondness for joining orchestras, while the Norwegians’ love of communal outdoor pursuits, most famously cross-country skiing, is one of their defining characteristics.

Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index currently ranks Denmark and Finland as the least corrupt countries in the world, with Sweden and Norway following closely behind (the United States is in nineteenth place).

“Do Danes really leave their bikes unlocked?” I was once asked by a British radio interviewer with an especially rose-tinted view of the region. Not in Copenhagen, they don’t, but it is true that, out in the countryside, front doors, cars, and bicycles are often left unsecured.

you drive around the country lanes you will find fruit and vegetables on sale in stalls to be paid for via honesty boxes, and, as I have mentioned, people do leave their kids sleeping in strollers outside cafés and shops, even in the cities, and they let their children commute to school alone, often by bicycle, from as young as six or seven years old.

the man who built this impressive circular fortress in AD 980, the legendary Viking king Harald Bluetooth (namesake of the wireless technology, which was invented in Scandinavia).

an era (the era) when they reigned supreme: the two-hundred-or-so-year period from the late eighth century when Vikings terrorized a good part of northern Europe, ruled parts of Scotland and Ireland, rattled the gates of Paris, and discovered North America. This was the time of warrior kings like Bluetooth, Sweyn Forkbeard, and King Cnut the Great, who used the strategic location of their homeland—within striking distance of modern-day Germany, France, and Britain—together with their recently developed fast, agile ships, to make devastating lightning raids on unsuspecting Christians across Europe. And, yes, as countless Danes have reminded me over the years, they also ruled eastern and northern England (although, as I keep having to point out, their rule lasted less than thirty years in total and Yorkshire was mostly swamp at the time).

When you visit a Danish company and can’t tell the CEO from the office clerk, that’s Viking egalitarianism at work. When you see women leaving their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés, that’s Viking social trust. When the Danish prime minister can walk the streets of Copenhagen without turning heads, that’s a Viking attitude to class and leadership. Or that’s the argument.

“One of the fundamental elements of Viking-age society was honor,” Cambridge University’s Dr. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe told me. I had telephoned her after coming home from Trelleborg, more confused than ever about the Danes’ Viking inheritance. “It was like a credit rating. Every action you took would have real-life repercussions, practically every interaction could affect your standing. Valor and honor were especially valuable to men because they were a measure of who you could trust, who your daughter could marry, and so on.”

“Well, yes, they were pillagers and marauders, but obviously it was a violent age, those were the times. But they were also very law-abiding. The English word for law comes from Old Norse,” Rowe said, adding that cooperation and a spirit of community were extremely important in the harsh northern lands.

in Sweden,

the infamous Rosengård housing estate in Malmö.

Aside from the troubling racial stereotyping—which, I am afraid, occurs widely in Denmark, is a common theme in the Danish media, and is an accepted feature of political rhetoric across the spectrum—

Pedersen immediately put me at ease, both personally and with regard to the Danish system. “Nah, bullshit. That’s absolute bullshit,” he laughed when I asked him about the Viking inheritance theory. “Absolutely it is because of the equality and our tax rates and the welfare state. The trust is based, on my understanding, on the welfare state, period. You trust your neighbor because you know your neighbor is paying tax just like you are, and when that neighbor gets sick, they get the same treatment as you, they go to the same school. That is trust: that you know that, regardless of age, sex, fortune, family background or religion, that you have the same opportunities and the same safety net. You don’t have to compete with your neighbor, or be envious of your neighbor. You don’t have to cheat your neighbor. “The welfare state is the most important innovation of any country in the postwar period. Before it, Denmark was split between 25 percent with the highest income, 25 percent at the bottom: now we have 4 percent at the top and 4 percent at the bottom.”

But perhaps more representative polar opposites of Danish socioeconomic extremes are the “Whisky Belt” Danes and the “Rotten Banana” Danes. The former live on Denmark’s “Gold Coast,” Strandvejen (the Beach Road), a ribbon of lavish villas, modernist bungalows, and sea-view apartment blocks, many of them designed by Denmark’s legendary postwar architects (the aforementioned “most beautiful gas station in the world,” designed by Denmark’s master builder Arne Jacobsen, is here). Strandvejen stretches twenty or so miles north from the prosperous suburb of Hellerup and boasts great beaches, Michelin-starred restaurants, Jacobsen’s famous Bellavista housing complex, the forested deer park of Dyrehaven, and, farther north, the loveliest art museum in Scandinavia, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Strandvejen’s fishing villages and Hamptons-esque waterfront mansions are home to Denmark’s elite—its movie stars and directors, big-time lawyers, bankers, hedge funders, sports stars, CEOs, and IT entrepreneurs.

And who are the Rotten Bananas? This is a recent media term used to describe a great, crescent-shaped swathe of the country that is plagued by high unemployment, low wages, crumbling infrastructure, poor health care, and underperforming schools. It runs from northern Jutland south along the west coast, before curving east across the island of Funen and ending with the southern islands of Lolland and Falster. Also referred to as udkantsdanmark (“outlying,” or “peripheral” Denmark; the hinterland), the Banana is mostly rural and actually encompasses the majority of Denmark’s landmass, bar its two main cities—Copenhagen and Aarhus—and North Zealand.

Sweden, where almost 40 percent of the population now lives in the three main cities—Gothenburg, Malmö, and Stockholm.

Sweden is a much less densely populated country (it has more than ten times the landmass of Denmark but less than twice the population),

If you wanted to sum up each of the Nordic lands in a single statistic, one peremptory and reductive yet insightful factoid, what would they be? In Iceland, it would probably be the size of the population, which tells you just about everything you need to know about the windswept and frozen island’s appeal over the centuries as well as providing a fairly strong clue about how the financial misadventures of recent years came to pass. In Finland my gateway fact would be a list of the three most popular prescription drugs (no skipping ahead). In Sweden it is probably the size of its immigrant population; in Norway, the gargantuan size of its oil-revenue wealth fund. Denmark’s defining statistic has to be its tax rate. The Danes have the highest tax rates in the world, both direct and indirect.

VAT (“value added tax,” added to goods and services, called “MOMS” in Denmark) is 25 percent and levied on virtually everything you buy,

though Denmark’s magnificent road and rail bridges to east Sweden and between the Danish islands of Zealand and Funen were paid for long ago, there is still a charge to cross them

the total direct and indirect burden on the Danish taxpayer ranges from 58 to 72 percent.

Østerbro [home to Copenhagen’s bourgeois bohemians]

overskud—that useful Danish word for a surplus or excess—

More than half of the Danish adult population—as much as two-thirds, according to some estimates—either works in the public sector or is financially supported by it in the form of benefit payments. The idea, then, of the Danes voting for a reduction in the size of the public sector funded by tax cuts seems about as likely as the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. The majority will always vote for the status quo because their livelihood depends on it.