Re-Imagining Denmark

The historian Benedict Anderson called the nation-state an 'imagined community'. In other words, the nation is an artificial man-made construction. Who belongs and who does not is simply all in the mind. Currently, a few small-minds in Denmark are trying to reconstruct what it means to be Danish.

Today, Denmark deployed 50 additional customs agents to its borders with Germany and Sweden. Not content with just restricting immigration from outside of the EU, the Danish government now feels that it is time to impose border checks on European travellers too.

Pia Kjærsgaard and her Danish People's Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF) must be celebrating tonight. They have scored another symbolic highly-publicized blow against a Europe without borders. At the same time, they are constricting the development of a free and open society in Denmark.

The Schengen Area of 25 nation states is based on mutual trust, cooperation and extremely tight external border control. Denmark sits geographically in the very middle of this exclusive zone and yet it is the first country to contravene the spirit and purpose of the agreement.

If Kjærsgaard and her cronies are only able to imagine a return to the parochial and backward Denmark of the past, then let us hope that their myopic view does not take hold. For breaking down borders begins in the mind.

Immigration Crisis in Europe?

On the surface the 'Arab Spring' is welcomed in Europe as the democratic awakening of a people. The authoritarian regimes in North Africa are crumbling: hurrah! But beneath the rhetoric lurk serious concerns about instability in Europe's neighbourhood.

It has brought an end to lucrative arms deals with dictators and disrupted the oil trade. But this doesn't excite the people of Europe as much as the threat from illegal immigrants. So this is what Europe's stagnant Right have seized upon.

Thousands of Tunisians have risked their lives on small boats trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa. Those that made it were given a foil cape and a bottle of mineral water to suck on by the Italian authorities. Then they were left to languish in the open for nearly two weeks. Italy wanted help from her EU friends. But these friends did not help.

So Italy started shipping the Tunisians to the mainland and granting them temporary residence permits. In principle the migrants could now enjoy the benefits of freedom of movement across the Schengen area. France assumed that these migrants would now all head for their great capital Paris and promptly started checking trains crossing their border.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi engineered a little crisis and called the EU's freedom of movement into question.

Is this really about a few thousand desperate Tunisian migrants? No, this is about undermining community spirit and clawing back national privileges. In the wake of Sarko's and Silvio's antics, the Commission has little power to reign in similar action from other member states.

Ludicrously, Denmark has reinstated checks on its border with Germany and the bridge from Sweden

So rather than fully supporting the Arab Spring as a united body, EU member states have used it as an excuse to pander to the xenophobic far right. When the going gets tough, there is a marked lack of community spirit.

Links:

Guardian video witness follows a Tunisian migrant

Aircraft carrier left us to die, say migrants