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The Almost Nearly Perfect People

Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

Picador

HAPPINESS

As the rainclouds finally part to reveal an electric blue, early evening sky, we venture out of the tent sniffing the cool, damp air like nervous rescue animals, turning to savor the last warmth of the vanishing sun. It casts a pinky glow, which, as the evening continues, transforms into a magical white, midsummer light and, finally, a deep dark blue-black backdrop for a planetarium-style celestial display.

Midsummer's Eve is one of the highlights of the Scandinavian calendar; pagan in origin but hijacked by the Church and renamed in honor of "Sankt Hans" (St. John). In Sweden they will be dancing around maypoles garlanded with flowers; in Finland and Norway they will have gathered around bonfires. Here in Denmark, in the garden of my friend's summerhouse north of Copenhagen, the beer and cocktails are flowing. At ten o'clock we gather around a fire to sing "Vi Elsker Vort Land" ("We Love Our Country") and other stirring, nationalistic hymns. An effigy of a witch, assembled from old gardening clothes and a broomstick, is burned, sending her—my friend's eight-year-old daughter informs me—off to the Hartz Mountains in Germany.

The Danes are masters of revels such as these. They take their partying very seriously, are enthusiastic drinkers, committed communal singers, and highly sociable when among friends. They give good "fest," as they call it. This one boasts two barmen and two large grills with a variety of slowly caramelizing pig parts, and, later, there will be the all-important nat mad, or midnight snacks—sausages, cheese, bacon, and bread rolls—served to soak up the alcohol and see us through to sunrise.

As is often the case, I find the searing anthropological insights begin to kick in around about my third gin and tonic. It occurs to me that this midsummer's party is the perfect place to commence my dissection of the Danish happiness phenomenon, my friend's get-together exemplifying as it does so many of the characteristics of Danish society that I find admirable, and that I believe contribute to their much-vaunted contentedness. As I stand here beside the bonfire's dying embers, I begin to tick some of them off.

One is the mood here in this lush green garden surrounded by high beech hedges, with the obligatory flagpole flying a large, red-and-white Dannebrog at its entrance. Though the drink has been flowing, the atmosphere is relaxed, there are no raised voices, no hints of alcohol-fueled fightiness.

Then there are the children haring about the place. Danish children are granted what, to American eyes, can seem an almost old-fashioned freedom to roam and to take risks, and it is natural that the youngsters present this evening are as much a part of the party as the adults. They are still running about as midnight approaches, yelling and screaming, hiding and seeking, buzzing and crashing on Coca-Cola and hot dogs.

Most of the people assembled here will have left work early; not sneaking out "to go to a meeting," or feigning illness, but straightforwardly informing their bosses that they will be attending a party an hour north along the coast, and that they will need to leave work early to prepare. Their bosses—if they haven't already left themselves for the same reason—will have been at ease with this. The Danes have a refreshingly laid-back approach to their work-life balance, which, as we will see, has had major consequences—both positive (the happiness) and potentially negative (sometimes you do really need to buckle down and do some work: during a global recession, for example). I have met few "live to work" types in this country; indeed many Danes—particularly those who work in the public sector—are frank and unapologetic about their ongoing efforts to put in the barest minimum hours required to support lives of acceptable comfort. The Danes work almost half the number of hours per week they did a century ago, and significantly fewer than the rest of Europe: 1,559 hours a year compared to the EU average of 1,749 hours and the US average of 2,087 (although the Greeks work 2,032 hours, so clearly, this is not a cast-iron measure of productivity). According to a 2011 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study encompassing thirty countries, the Danes were second only to the Belgians in the laziness stakes—that's globally.

In practice this means that most people knock off at around four or five in the afternoon, few feel pressured to work at weekends, and you can forget about getting anything done after 1 p.m. on a Friday. Annual leave is often as much as six weeks, and during July, the entire country shuts down as the Danes migrate en masse, like mild-mannered wildebeest, to their summerhouses, caravan parks, or campsites located an hour or so away from where they live.

More than 754,000 Danes aged between fifteen and sixty-four—over 20 percent of the working population—do no work whatsoever and are supported by generous unemployment or disability benefits. The New York Times has called Denmark "The best place on earth to be laid off," with unemployment benefits of up to 90 percent of previous wages for up to two years (until recent reforms, it was eleven years). The Danes call their system flexicurity, a neologism blending the flexibility Danish companies enjoy to fire people with short notice and little compensation (compared with Sweden, where jobs can still be for life) with the security the labor market enjoys knowing that there will be ample support in times of unemployment.

More reasons for the Danes' happiness? We must also include this very summerhouse—a homely, single-story, L-shaped cabin, identical to thousands of others scattered along the coasts of these islands. These little wood-and-brick hideouts are where the Danes come to unwind in flip-flops and sun hats, to grill their hot dogs and drink their cheap, fizzy lager. And if they don't own a summerhouse themselves, most will know someone who does, or maybe have a permanent plot in a campsite, or a shed in a koloni have ("colony garden"—like an allotment but with the emphasis more on sitting with a can of cheap, fizzy lager and a hot dog than toiling among vegetable patches).

This summerhouse is furnished, like most, with bric-a-brac and IKEA perennials. One wall is lined with well-thumbed paperbacks, there's the obligatory cupboard packed with board games and jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces, and, of course, a fireplace primed with logs to warm bones chilled from the sea. The floors are bare wood for easy sweeping of sand and grass, and the whitewashed brick walls are hung with art works from the "School of Relatives"—family members' attempts at oils and watercolors, usually in a grisly faux naïf abstract style.

As I said, tonight the alcohol is flowing like the river Jordan. Denmark has a much more laissez-faire attitude to booze than the rest of the region; there is no state-owned alcohol monopoly here, as there is in the other four Nordic countries. In Carlsbergland alcohol is sold in every supermarket and corner shop. The Swedes, whose twinkling lights I can see just across the Øresund strait this evening, have long flocked to their southern neighbor to let their hair down and sample what is, from their perspective, the Danes' louche, fun-loving lifestyle. (Younger Danes, in turn, head for Berlin to get their jollies.)

At the end of the evening a group of us go, giggling, to the beach, disrobe, and tiptoe into the waters. It is something I have struggled to adjust to, but nudity is no biggie here and at least by now it is dark. The initial bracing chill as the water reaches thigh height almost sends me scurrying for my clothes, before I finally pluck up the courage to dive under the surface and, once fully submerged, am reminded once again how surprisingly warm the Danish sea in summer can be.

On evenings such as this it is easy to see why the Danes have come to feel so contented with their lot these past few decades. As long as they can avoid opening their credit card bills, life must feel pretty great to be a middle-aged, middle-class Dane. It is hard to imagine how it could be any better, in fact. But things have not always been so rosy in the state of Denmark. To reach this point of heightened bliss, the Danes have had to endure terrible trauma, humiliation, and loss. Until, that is, bacon came along and saved theirs.

BACON

Once upon a time, the Danes ruled all of Scandinavia. They like their fairy tales, the Danes, but this one is true. The Kalmar Union of 1397 was an historic high point for the Danes, with the then queen, Margaret I, ruling a loosely unified Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The union held for over a century until, in 1520, the then Danish king, Christian II, rashly beheaded around eighty Swedish nobles in the so-called Stockholm Bloodbath, something of a diplomatic faux pas. Though Denmark did manage to hold on to Norway for a few hundred years more, henceforth the Swedes would play a far more proactive role in the region's history, mostly by holding Denmark's head in the toilet bowl while Britain and Germany queued up to pull the handle.

There was a brief false dawn for Denmark under the reign of their great Renaissance king, Christian IV—Denmark's Henry VIII, with similar appetites and girth—who oversaw some of Denmark's most ambitious military and architectural projects, funded chiefly via the toll he extracted at Helsingør (Elsinore) from ships entering and leaving the Baltic through the narrow bottleneck there (the Panama Canal of the north). Sadly, Christian IV lost a few too many battles, mostly with the Swedes, finally bringing his country to the brink of bankruptcy. He died in 1648, consumed by envy at the rise of his Swedish rival, King Gustav II Adolf. One historian wrote of Christian's funeral, "Financially Denmark had now sunk so low that, when the most splendid of her kings was finally laid to rest, his crown was in pawn and even the silken cloth which covered his coffin had to be bought on credit." In contrast, by the time Gustav Vasa died, battling the Germans (a preoccupation of his later life), he had transformed Sweden into the key power in the region and beyond.

Christian IV was fortunate not to have lived to witness one of the darkest days of Danish loss. By the terms of the Treaty of Roskilde, signed a decade later in 1658, the Danes were forced by the Swedes to relinquish what are today the southern Swedish regions of Skåne, Blekinge, and Halland, as well as the Baltic island of Bornholm (the latter was eventually returned and remains Danish). They had always been Danish territory, and their loss was keenly felt by Copenhagen.

The ensuing centuries were even less kind to the Danes. In 1801 a British fleet, with Nelson as second in command, attacked the Danish navy anchored outside Copenhagen to prevent it from falling into French hands. The British returned in 1807, this time bombarding Copenhagen itself for three days, resulting in the deaths of as many as two thousand locals and the destruction of a good part of the city. This is supposedly the first ever bombardment of a civilian target; even the British media were critical at the time—and, in fact, the attack had the opposite effect of that intended, forcing the Danes into the arms of the French. To this day, if you visit Copenhagen's old university library, halfway up the stairs is a display case in which sits a book with fragments of a British cannonball still embedded in its pages. The book's title is Defender of Peace (suspiciously apt, it's always seemed to me). Though the bombardment of Copenhagen has slipped from the memory of most English people, Danes still remind me of it from time to time as if it happened sometime last year. "Well, you were threatening to join sides with Napoleon," I always try to explain, but it doesn't seem to mollify them.

I can feel myself being dragged against my will into having to explain early-nineteenth-century European geopolitics here, but I shall resist the temptation. Essentially, when the dust settled on the Napoleonic wars and everyone had swapped sides at least once, Denmark discovered that it had lost Norway to Sweden in yet another of those dratted treaties, this one signed in Kiel in 1814.

How the Danes must have come to dread treaty-signing time. Another, signed later during that calamitous century, would finally denude them of their troublesome territories, Schleswig and Holstein, the Danes having been forced to abandon their thousand-year-old defenses, the Danevirke, to the Prussians in 1864. Suffice it to say that, at one especially low point in the negotiations, the Danish king even mooted the idea of Denmark becoming part of the German Confederation and, when that was rejected, offered Iceland instead. But Bismarck was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, and so both duchies became forever German, and Denmark's borders were redrawn once more.

With Schleswig and Holstein gone south, Denmark had lost roughly a third of its remaining land area and population, and by some estimates as much as half of its potential income. Over time, it would also lose its small colonies in India and the West Indies, and even the Faroes would vote for autonomy. Thank goodness for Iceland, I hear you cry. But eventually the slender thread of a shared monarchy linking those two nations was also severed by that most unlikely of liberators, Adolf Hitler: when his army invaded Denmark in April 1940, it inadvertently relieved Iceland of its Danish head of state.

Denmark and Germany had signed a pact of mutual nonaggression a year earlier, but the Danes had effectively extended an open invitation to the Nazis to invade when they decided to leave many of their military posts unmanned for seven months of the year. The Danish Nazi Party had grown in strength, thanks largely to support from farmers and landowners, and now had representatives in Parliament; the Germans rightly assumed that the Danes would be reluctant to retaliate and risk provoking a bombardment similar to the one they had endured in 1807.

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."

It would be surprising if this long litany of loss and defeat had not had a lasting impact on the Danes, but I would go further. I suspect that it has defined the Danes to a greater extent than any other single factor—more than their geography, more than their Lutheran faith or their Viking heritage, more even than their modern political system and welfare state. You see, in a roundabout way, Denmark's losses were her making.

Their greatly reduced circumstances bound the Danes together more tightly as a tribe than any of the other Nordic countries. As historian T. K. Derry writes (about the accession of Norway to Sweden), "The Danish king and people resigned themselves to the loss ... as a common misfortune which drew them together in a desire to avoid all further changes." The territorial losses, sundry beatings, and myriad humiliations forced the Danes to turn their gaze inward, instilling in them not only a fear of change and of external forces that abides to this day, but also a remarkable self-sufficiency and an appreciation of what little they had left.

No longer the great European power it had once been, Denmark withdrew, mustered what few resources remained within its much-reduced boundaries, and decided never again to have ambitions in that direction. What followed was a process of what you could call "positive parochialization"; the Danes adopted a "glass half full" outlook, largely because their glass was now half full, and it is an outlook that, I would argue, has paved the way for the much trumpeted success of their society to this day.

Of course there are many factors that combine to form a national psyche, and I am being reductive to make a point, but 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.)

The line was originally written by the author H. P. Holst in 1811, but it obtained broader cultural purchase when it was adopted by the Danish Heath Society, which interpreted it, quite literally, in its work to reclaim coastal land by draining sandy territories in Jutland. So successful was the society at this that, by 1914, Denmark had effectively replaced the hectares it had lost to Germany with fresh, farmable, arable land.

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Excerpted from The Almost Nearly Perfect People by Michael Booth. Copyright © 2014 Michael Booth. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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