Abstract:The Danish cartoon crisis, which attracted international media attention in 2006, has largely been debated as an issue of freedom of speech, feeding into broader debates about the 'clash of civilizations'. This article aims to explore the dominant discourses that performed a seemingly stable and consistent Danish identity at the domestic and external levels. Domestically, the discourse of a progressive Danish identity under threat from unmodern others was performed via discourses of a 'culture struggle' and a … Show more
“…This is a position supported by Barkawi () when he notes that Westerners defined and empowered themselves against an inferior, Orientalized other. Agius () observes a recent construction of “progressive Danish identity under threat from unmodern others” in Danish media and public reactions to the cartoon crisis. But perhaps a most striking example of ontologically securitized and narcissistic political imagining can be found in the Italian perception of Ethiopians after a most unexpected major defeat at Adwa in 1896: Since racism did not permit Westerners to acknowledge that black men could vanquish whites, Europeans suddenly discovered that Ethiopians were Caucasians darkened by exposure to the equatorial sun.…”
Section: A Positive Self In New Encountersmentioning
Public narratives of unexpected international events frequently help (re)imagine uncertainty as something familiar or predictable. This process underlies social and political responses and is deeply significant in relation to identity and boundary security. I propose to read early perceptions of international crises through a reformulation of ontological security principles that find motivation for behavior in self-identity needs. Political imagining is shown to seek continuous self-concepts and to routinize new encounters within familiar and selfaffirming frames. This article suggests a new approach to ontological continuity: instead of an unchanging narrative, its security may rest in a continuously positive version of the self, with narratives of others balancing and securing the relationship. In the second half of the article, I draw on interviews about the "Arab Spring" to show how illusions of recognizing unexpected events and the political imagining this produces can be motivated by self-concepts in need of security.
“…This is a position supported by Barkawi () when he notes that Westerners defined and empowered themselves against an inferior, Orientalized other. Agius () observes a recent construction of “progressive Danish identity under threat from unmodern others” in Danish media and public reactions to the cartoon crisis. But perhaps a most striking example of ontologically securitized and narcissistic political imagining can be found in the Italian perception of Ethiopians after a most unexpected major defeat at Adwa in 1896: Since racism did not permit Westerners to acknowledge that black men could vanquish whites, Europeans suddenly discovered that Ethiopians were Caucasians darkened by exposure to the equatorial sun.…”
Section: A Positive Self In New Encountersmentioning
Public narratives of unexpected international events frequently help (re)imagine uncertainty as something familiar or predictable. This process underlies social and political responses and is deeply significant in relation to identity and boundary security. I propose to read early perceptions of international crises through a reformulation of ontological security principles that find motivation for behavior in self-identity needs. Political imagining is shown to seek continuous self-concepts and to routinize new encounters within familiar and selfaffirming frames. This article suggests a new approach to ontological continuity: instead of an unchanging narrative, its security may rest in a continuously positive version of the self, with narratives of others balancing and securing the relationship. In the second half of the article, I draw on interviews about the "Arab Spring" to show how illusions of recognizing unexpected events and the political imagining this produces can be motivated by self-concepts in need of security.
“…Against such markers, Muslims are contrasted as incompatible 'outsiders' whose norms, culture and agency centre on religion. To differing degrees, Danish political discourse casts Danish culture as 'superior' to 'uncivilised' Islamic culture (Agius, 2013;Rytkønen, 2007: 88), and despite Sweden's claim to multiculturalism, Islam is regarded as a threat to values such as democracy and modernity, particularly since 9/11 (Kinnvall andNesbitt-Larking, 2010, 2011: 115). The welfare state, which symbolised the idea of the home, relies on trust, and for one interviewee, was 'based around a very homogenous people, one people, one state, one welfare state, one community.'…”
Section: Constructing the (In)tolerant Muslim Subject: Ontological Inmentioning
The controversy of the Danish cartoon crisis in 2006 overshadowed a similar one that took place in Sweden a year later. The crises have broadly been framed as a clash of values but both cases reveal differences worthy of investigation, namely for the complex tensions and convergences between the two states on questions of immigration, Nordic solidarity and national identity. This article aims to explore the intersubjective discourses of identity that were threaded through the debates on the cartoon crises, looking to the overlapping discourses that have constructed ideas of identity in terms of ontological security, or security of the self. It argues that both cartoon crises represent a complex discursive performance of identity that speaks to a broader set of ontological security concerns which intersect at the international, regional and national levels. Even in their differences, Swedish and Danish discourses show the tensions associated with the desire for a stable and consistent idea of self when contrasted with the Muslim 'other', explored in the context of discourses of modernity and tolerance, which operate as key sites that work to reiterate, reclaim and reinstate the idea of the progressive state.
“…The publication created a major national and international uproar with strong reactions from Muslim communities, who accused Denmark of being disrespectful to minority‐religious or cultural groups. Throughout the crisis, freedom of expression was upheld by key Danish actors as a specifically Danish value, thus implying that people (among these, some immigrants) not celebrating the right to freedom of expression were not real Danes (Agius :242).…”
Section: The Ghetto Enters Danish Politicsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…This entailed rejecting multiculturalism and the accommodation of ‘other’ cultural values through reference to the superiority of liberal‐cum‐Danish values. As such, the government succeeded in connecting the liberal values of the governing parties (the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party) to the nativist values of their supporting party, the Danish People's Party (Agius :246–49).…”
Section: The Ghetto Enters Danish Politicsmentioning
This article examines the role of the ghetto in Danish political discourse. While ghetto studies have previously been conducted within the field of urban sociology, the article departs from this tradition in offering a discourse analytical perspective on the former Danish government's strategy against ghettoization (The Ghetto Plan). Integrating perspectives from the literature on nationalism with Laclau and Mouffe's discourse analytical framework, the analysis argues that the ghetto marks an antagonistic anti-identity to Danish society. This discursive construction of the ghetto against society has the effect of confirming Danish identity, while at the same time precluding possibilities of the ghetto's integration in society. Highlighting these implications, the study feeds into societal debates on integration, and suggests a framework for studying nationalist othering in a discourse analytical perspective.
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