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The European Feast (festen)
 | CBS reflects many different nationalities, one of them is the Irish Professor Brian Moeran. Brian Moeran has experienced England, Greece, Japan, Hong Kong and Denmark from more than a tourist's point of view. His reflections on being European have resulted in a speech - in fact in two, a green and a gold one ...
For those of you familiar with the dogme film 'Festen' (The Celebration) this is not new, but this time you have to read and create your own pictures. |
Originally this text was a contribution for the book 'Mit Europa' edited by Per Milner, Torkil Morsing and Knud Overø (Lindhardt & Ringhof, 2003). This version is published by Insights@CBS with permission of Lindhardt & Ringhof Publishers.
So here we are, all together at this European family gathering
You've been listening to various different people's speeches and now it's my turn to get to my feet, clear my throat and gently tinkle my empty wine glass with a spare piece of cutlery to attract your attention. Ting ting ting ...
Hello everyone. I'm sorry to intrude upon your conversations, but I thought I might say a few words as someone born and brought up in England, but who left the country as soon as he possibly could at the ripe old age of 20 and then spent a couple of years in Spain, a couple more in Greece, fifteen in Japan and half a dozen in Hong Kong, before making the mistake, possibly, of coming to live and work here in Denmark. To complicate my cosmopolitan lifestyle a little further, I should add, perhaps, that I am the proud bearer of an Irish passport since my father was born in Dublin (in the same house as the painter, Francis Bacon). Why proud? Because, for one thing, we Irish can drink you Danes under the table any day of the year. And the statistics support me. On average, we consume 151 litres of real beer - I mean, Guinness, of course - a year. This is a good 20 litres more than our European allies, the Germans, and 30 more than the average Dane. So much for Viking culture! We Celts can teach you a thing or two, if you'd care to learn!
But the other thing I'm proud of about being Irish is that, against all odds (including the British), we not only joined the European Union, but continue to revel in the opportunities the EU affords us out there on the north-western tip of the continent. I mean, we don't touch our forelocks any more every time the local squire passes us in his car. And we're not quite so respectful of the clergy as we once were, although there's still a battle to be fought there - or so some of us would say. And then we've got rid of the donkeys, you know - more or less all 50,000 of them in the County of Tipperary alone. I'm not saying we're perfect, mind. We've come a long way, all right, but there's a lot that needs to be done when it comes to social issues like abortion, racism (yes, your favourite topic here in Denmark), and the like. But at least we've had in Mary Robinson a very fine president. You didn't find her voice dropping an octave once she got into power, the way Margaret Thatcher's did. To her immense credit, Mary Robinson managed to be intelligent, human and a woman during her term of office. And that's more than you can say of one of your more extreme political party leaders here in Denmark, isn't it?
But enough of all that. I'm here to give a speech or, to be precise, two speeches. You can see them here, one in each hand - a green speech and a gold speech. Take your pick. You'll go for green? A splendid choice, if I may say so, and most tactful of you to select my national colour. Let me quickly raise my glass in thanks, now. Cheers!
Now then, what does my green speech say?
Let's have a look now. Ah yes! You chose the one with the nice contents. It's a short speech, though - all about Danes and what a wonderful people you are when we meet you abroad. Your English is impressive, isn't it? It comes pouring out of your mouths so fluently. Of course, you've got that special accent that all you Danes seem to share, but it's readily comprehensible - more so, let me tell you, than a lot of my friends when they get tanked up in an Irish pub. The sheer uniformity of your communication makes you splendid companions at a restaurant table or pub bar. And you're not stingy like the Brits, who are forever counting their Euros - whoops! Pennies still, aren't they! Anyway, we enjoy your company, your civility, your general level of education and social awareness. You seem to be level-headed and sensible, the sort of people anyone can start talking to and get along with without too much difficulty. Just the sort of people we need in Europe, really, now that I come to think of it.
So what on earth persuaded you to vote against joining properly? I really don't understand the logic of that "No!" you gave back in 1999. Still, what's done is done. As a result, though, you've made a two-tiered Europe more than likely and so destroyed the very ideal of a union - which is pretty ironic given your sense of egalitarianism and fairness. It seems to me you've a lot to answer for, me lads, when you get to those pearly gates and God asks you what you did for other people here on earth! Down the hatch!
But let's get on with the speech, now. Abroad, we also like the way you hold your own with anyone and everyone. You come across as having a healthy disregard for, and dislike of, hierarchy. You treat everyone on their own individual merits, without getting too tied up with problems of class and status and all that sort of stuff that is the bane of people's lives in somewhere like England, for example. And, as an Irishman with a strong streak of anarchy in his blood, I can't help but applaud such an attitude. If only the Germans or the Brits could do the same!
And you're not hung up on sex either. That's a grand thing for those of us who've had to wrestle with the Catholic church. Danish women have a reputation for not beating about the bush. You know, more or less, where you are once you start flirting. And that saves a lot of time and energy and allows you to get to the heart of things, in a manner of speaking. No wonder all those macho Mediterranean men start drooling the moment they spot a Dane on the beach or in a bar. They reckon they've got themselves an easy lay.
What they don't reckon on is the post-coital relationship, of course. That can be something different. After all, Danish women stand their ground in front of men. There's comparatively real equality here. Women aren't going to allow themselves to be bullied into doing something they don't want to do. They're not going to sit at home looking after the kids while Daddy's out working and earning enough to feed the family, for example. Not on your life. Women are every bit as good as men and you'd be wise not to forget it.
So this is a fine people we have here. We need more like them in Europe. These are the kind of people we would tolerate and accept.
... Or are they? My green speech has been about a particular kind of Danish people. It's the kind of people you come across abroad when they're interacting with other Europeans outside their normal social and cultural environment. It's also the kind of Danes you eventually come across later on in the summer months after a long, dry, sunny spell of weather and people have finally begun to cast off some of their Hamlet-like gloom and hand-wringing uncommunicativeness. But are these cosmopolitan summer Danes our 'real' Danes? What about Danes at home during those dark winter months that drag on and on and on as relentlessly as the rain in Ireland? For an answer to that, ladies and gentlemen, I will turn to my other speech, my gold speech.
I'm afraid that this speech isn't so flattering
But over the past five years, I've been watching you - that's all I can do because, although you tolerate them, you don't engage with us foreigners. And, as I watch you in the streets and other public places, at work, and rather more rarely in your homes, I inevitably end up drawing a few tentative conclusions about you as a people. That's the way of the world. You'd do the same if ever you came to live in Ireland.
I guess we have to start with the family, because it seems to me that the family is the basic unit of organisation in Danish society. That means that every Dane has two families - one on the mother's, the other on the father's, side - and interacts only with these two, until s/he is grown up enough to have a kæreste and suddenly enters into a new family circle. That's not so different in itself from many other societies, where families tend to be an extremely conservative form of social organisation, but there isn't really very much by way of social units between family and state in Denmark. The Danish family system is extremely exclusive. It cuts society into fragmented, atomised units that can rarely find a reason to coalesce into a larger, more coherent form of social organisation. The ideal of the family is so strong that it prevents the creation of a separate work culture, for instance, that would allow Danes to socialise in different environments and broaden their horizons. As a result, if you happen not to have a family when living in Denmark - or, as is usually the case with foreigners who marry in, have only one family with which to interact - you lead a pretty isolated life. And that's part of the State's control mechanism (along with CPR numbers, taxes and the rest).
At the same time, though, the ways in which different family members interact often seem a little strange. I mean, most families have their ups and downs, their laughter and their arguments, their reunions and their fights. But the families I know of here (and it's true, I haven't been allowed to get a glimpse of many) spend an awful lot of time and energy creating an ambience of happy gatherings and smooth relations, where everyone makes a lot of noise and doesn't really listen to what anyone else is saying. In family gatherings - precisely because they are family gatherings, perhaps - people certainly don't seem to want to know too much about what their siblings, nephews, grand daughters and so on are thinking about, worrying over, doing in their everyday lives. There's no sense of curiosity. Instead, families for the most part prefer to maintain a veneer of harmony that, as in that wonderful film Festen, can suddenly shatter into glass-like splinters of recrimination and shame.
'Being Danish'
This veneer of harmony, which you love to call hyuggelig, can become quite a joke to those of us who are not properly cued in to the socio-cultural nuances of "being Danish." I well recall a year I spent not so long ago in a newly established Research Centre here in Copenhagen, where from the very first gathering of the 10 appointed research fellows and their director, the sole raison d'être for the Centre appeared to be how best to have lunch together. Should we bring our own lunches independently? Absolutely not. Should we all go out to eat lunch together? A nice idea, but too expensive. Should we bring someone in to prepare lunch for us all? A grand idea, but who? Could we find someone to do this at a reasonable price? No. How then should we have lunch together? Questions such as these plagued the Centre's collective brainpower for the first four months of its existence. We never once discussed what, officially, we were there to research and discuss.
But being hyuggelig doesn't mean that you're actually able to manage relationships very well. Indeed, it's probably the relative failure to develop successful long-term relationships between men and women that makes you focus so much on hyuggelig as an ideal. Moreover, one result of your focus on the private realm of the family means that most of you Danes behave in what, to an outsider, often appear as fairly odd and inconsiderate ways in public arenas. You simply have no idea at all about how to introduce people to others, for example, and expect them to speak for themselves. You rarely say "thank you" when extended a common courtesy (like having a door held open for you). You stand with your bicycles in the middle of the pavement or doorways, so that it's virtually impossible to pass you by. You hardly ever yield to people trying to cross the road at pedestrian crossings (and that includes police cars, our great upholders of the law!). Your driving manners, too, are appalling. Just think of how you drive down the middle lane of motorway and never once move over to let others pass. Real middle-of-the-roaders.
And some of you - especially women, since the gender equality game tends to mean that women should, ultimately, behave like men - love to shout: at immigrant bus drivers who may have neglected to close a door, for example; or at an errant cyclist in the City's pedestrian area. You're also extraordinarily inconsiderate to obvious foreigners (by which I mean those who 'look' foreign - blacks, middle easterners, non-adopted Asians). I've heard one Danish woman in a train ordering a Japanese mother to speak Danish to her six-year-old son, because she's "living in Denmark now". Is this nationalism, racism, plain insensitivity, downright rudeness, or a combination of all four?
And yet, generally speaking, none of you says anything very much here in Denmark. Oh, you talk all right, but you don't actually have that much to say, it seems, that goes beyond level-headed civility or grumpy complaints. I mean, it's rare to come across someone who's a good storyteller or knows how to tell a joke. And people don't seem to want to engage in political discussions or anything like that - apart from the occasional put-down of one of your public figures. You can't really tread the fine line of irony, either, even though you profess to love the kind of English humour displayed by Monty Python. As a result, all you often do is end up producing some biting sarcasm. You know how to put people down all right. But the ability to put another down implies that you're better than the person you're putting down, doesn't it? Can you explain that conundrum, please, the next time we have a drink together?
And I guess it's the egalitarian bit that makes you want to make sure that nobody - and I mean nobody - gets the upper hand. Here you love to quote good old Jante's Law in justification of how you behave. But you're not the only people in the world to have this kind of social and moral sanction. The Japanese, for example, love to talk about a classic proverb of the nail that sticks out must be hammered down (and I am not talking about a finger nail, which is how this proverb is usually translated into Danish!), but they also encourage people to be different at the same time and are generally far more tolerant than you Danes.
So what is this determination to be the same as everyone else? I mean, common sense tells us that we're not the same. None of is, and none of us can be, as long as procreation continues the way it does and we don't start cloning the likes of George (don't-forget-the-W) Bush. So how do you deal with the fact that some people are better (and worse) at some things than others? The fact is you don't know how to. At best, your egalitarian façade leads to endless stress because nothing ever gets done efficiently (just think of those appallingly slow supermarket check-out queues that you stand in almost every day). At worst, it makes you ignorantly obstructive. For instance, I've had a dozen students telling me what should and should not be included in a course on Japanese management, on the basis of two of them having been in Japan for a grand total of three weeks between them. For the sake of Jante's Law, I ended up teaching a totally crap course that would have been thrown out of any curriculum in a British or other European business school or university.
Which brings me nicely to the Danish tertiary education system
Mediocrity may be what you make of it, but mediocrity is certainly what the education system here encourages. On the personnel side, there is a strong tendency to employ only insiders in any department, and to ignore outside (especially foreign) applications for positions. This is partly because there is no internal promotion system, so that lecturers have to apply for associate professorships after 3 years and associate professors for professorships. Assessment committees tend to favour internal candidates, even when there are obviously better qualified external applicants for the same job. The principle appears to be that those who have 'served their apprenticeship', so to speak, should be rewarded. As a result, Ph.D. students quickly end up as lecturers, even though the standard of their degrees is often not up to an international level (as a number of my foreign colleagues who have been censors confirm) and the Ph.D. viva is more of a department and family celebration than a proper examination. Good old hyuggelig rules OK!
And what does it all mean in the long run? A narrow-mindedness among most academics that should not be a characteristic of tertiary education; a fear of people who might disturb their intellectual self-satisfaction; and thus a mediocrity (please, no bright stars) that ensures that younger generations will rarely have an opportunity to broaden their intellectual horizons. But if you're not helping the young, then what's the point of education? Can you tell me that?
And how are teachers not helping them? Quite simply, by not being tough enough with them. You're scared shitless of confrontation. I mean, I've been censor in an oral examination where a student objected to the mark (to my mind a most lenient 9) and the examiner quickly dismissed the examinee, turned to me and said: "It's right. It should be a 10." But when I asked why, the examiner couldn't give a single reason for raising the mark. (We stuck to a 9!) As the examiner said at the end of the day, it was just just to avoid a conflict, and keep out of trouble. "All we've got to do is keep them happy," the examiner said ruefully. Mediocrity of this kind is not helped, but actively supported, by a Government that only provides educational institutions with finance (stå) for students who pass and not fail examinations for every course. Who expects standards in an environment that insists on conformity? But conformity is not itself, and never can be, a standard.
I could go on, but there's a limit to the amount of criticism you're prepared to put up with, and that's fair enough. But, in the long run, I guess what we have to ask ourselves is: do you really have the kind of society that would add a little special something to the sort of thing we're all looking for in our new European mix? Personally, I have some serious reservations about how you go about things here (as I do of Ireland, and Britain, and Japan, and all those other countries in which I've had the good fortune to live over the years). I have the feeling that, deep down, you know the weaknesses of your system and that, at this level of the subconscious, this was why you voted the way you did the last time round. To me it looks as if you're secretly scared of revealing your real selves to the rest of Europe and so make up a lot of excuses about why you shouldn't join the EU. You know you'll have to change your everyday social attitudes, so, instead, you create excuses that emphasise changes in the State apparatus (like taxes and the welfare system, and the lie that you can't have the Queen's head on your Danish Euros).
This is all a bit of a shame, because - as I said in my green speech - I reckon you have a lot to bring to the European feast. At the same time, though, if there's one thing I'd like to see, it's a shift from tolerance to acceptance - of people, of situations, of new ideas. For the most part, you're tolerant and that's fine, so far as it goes. But we also need to learn to accept what is different, strange and unexpected. For the most part, I think, Europeans accept> you Danes, so why don't you do the same with us?
Ah well. The speech is over and I can sit down now. But I'll raise my glass in the hope that we can have a sensible debate about Europe. So here's to you all. And good riddance to bad prejudice!
Brian Moeran, Professor
Department of Intercultural Communication and Management
Last updated by Insights@CBS 18.03.2004 | Marts - 2004, nr. 1
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Marts 2004
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