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The foreign reports in the material were not identical, but taken as a whole it would not be very surprising if foreigners got the impression that Danes were especially opposed to refugees and immigrants, and that the Danish debate was characterised by a particular dislike of minorities.

The question of the attitudes of the Danes to minorities was discussed in the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit’s newsletter (March 2002) on the basis of an extensive study carried out by the EUMC in all EU countries in spring 2000. There were two main points in this newsletter article.

x Whether or not Danes were more open or, conversely, more xenophobic

than other nations depended entirely on the subject under discussion: o Danes felt much more disturbed than other nationalities by the

presence of people of a different religion.

o Danes were on the other hand far above the European average when it came to willingness to accept refugees from countries with internal conflicts, and more willing than others to involve immigrants in politics.

x On average, across various topics, Danes were rather in the middle in

terms of openness to ethnic minorities. More specifically, Danes were less welcoming to minorities than Swedes, but on the other hand, more welcoming than the Germans or the Austrians.

This information can be supplemented with examples from a further analysis of the material from the EUMC. First and foremost, Danes are the national group whose ranking varies most from subject to subject. If Danes are to be called especially “xenophobic”, then a strong selectivity has to be exercised to focus on precisely the issues where the Danes are most xenophobic, and to ignore the other topics.

The European Values Study (EVS) in 1999 presented a picture of the Danes as very welcoming to minorities. While the EUMC study asked generally about

feeling disturbed by the presence of people of a different religion – and correspondingly by people of a different race or nationality – the EVS in 1999 asked, more precisely, how respondents would feel about having a neighbour from certain specific groups: Gypsies, Jews, immigrants, Muslims and people of a different race. Amongst 31 European nations, the Danes came in 25th_{, with the}

31st _{place being the most tolerant.}

Similarly, in a situation of unemployment, the Danes, Swedes and the Dutch would not give preference to a fellow countryman when taking on a new employee. The other 28 nations would.

Thus far, EVS 1999 placed Danes amongst the most open of peoples in Europe. However, this was not true across the board. Danes were middle-ranked when it came to the immigration of labour from developing countries, and were also one of the nations who placed the greatest importance on immigrants adapting to the culture of the host country.

Once again, Denmark’s position varied from topic to topic, but on average across the topics, the Danes were very clearly one of the most welcoming nations. Once again, the Swedes were even more welcoming, while the British and the Germans were about the same as the Danes. Unfortunately, Norway was not included in the survey.

The results are not identical from study to study at a detailed level, but taking the surveys as a whole, the conclusions would seem to be:

x Danes are not as welcoming to minorities as Swedes are

x but in the various comparisons (amongst 15 EU, or 31 European nations) they are nonetheless amongst the more welcoming, while

x their place in relation to the neighbouring countries (Germany and Britain) varies.

The main survey in the research project on the living conditions of non-Western immigrants in Denmark (1999) included a question regarding attitudes towards marriage to a person from another ethnic group (Nielsen 2000). Responses to this question are often interpreted as indicators of attitudes towards other ethnic groups. The results shown in Table 11.1 are perhaps unexpected, in that the non- Danes displayed at least as much negativity towards other foreigners as the Danes did. Danes were asked the question about marriage to people from other ethnic groups in the special omnibus survey, and a comparison of the responses placed them at the more open-minded end of the scale in terms of their relatively limited negativity towards foreigners; their attitudes were approximately on a par with those of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, Iran and Somalia.

Chapter 1 of this book also shows that immigrants largely marry within their own national groups.

The results shown in the table thus suggest that there is no great division between Danes and immigrants on this issue.

Table 11.1. Opposition to marriage. The various nationalities are arranged in order from the most negative to the most positive in their attitudes towards marriage to foreigners. 1999.

Respondents’ home countries

Percentage opposed to marriage to a young person from an ethnic group other

than their own (average) Turkey 77 Pakistan 72 Lebanon 66 Vietnam 58 Poland 53 Somalia 48 Denmark 48 Iran 42 Former Yugoslavia 39

Source: Main survey, and the omnibus survey of Danes for 1999. Only those who expressed an attitude towards all groups are included in the statistics.

11.9. Is the Danish debate more “xenophobic” than that in other