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.
This move seems backward and small-minded indeed. But then again, they're only going to control their borders, not close them down. The (legal) flow of people and goods into and out of Denmark won't be restricted any more than before.
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