I am getting some perspective shift as I think to and fro about living here in Denmark. Undeniably, settling in here is really difficult for people from outside, and I call them / us ‘internationals’ because ‘foreigners’ as used locally is a word that just means, ‘people we don’t want.’ (Denmark, fix yourself.) Living here as an international is very difficult to crack socially, hard to manage (let’s face it) materially, and often full of hurts, small and large. But although Denmark is more inward-looking, more peripheral and socially deader than other European countries, I think it’s very unlikely that settling in any European country, including Britain and France, would be what one might call easy. It might be easier to make friends, but I’m sure that in every case, most of one’s friends would be other internationals.
My point is that I think these European societies are very dense and settled and unused to change, and that this makes them hard to get inside. Whereas this does not seem to be true of the US. Families don’t stay in the same place, everyone moves around the country, there is extreme social mobility, all the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration melting-pot thing, and a second-generation American is president. There are big cities, lots of subcultures all over the place, MOVEMENT.
There are various other places in the world that are genuinely international, multicultural. Cairo is one. Hong Kong. Bombay. Delhi? Don’t know. Jakarta? Writer, tell me. Singapore, certainly. Shanghai maybe. Rio. Buenos Aires. Those are a bit different. It’s not that they’re rich melting-pot countries to which people came from all over. These are all cities that were colonized by foreign elites, multiple times over, not just the British. Cairo, for example, was run by foreign elites without a break from 330BC to 1952, that’s more than 2,000 years. Makes you a bit more open to outsiders. Also, all these cities (don’t know about Rio) were always on major trade routes, and are still major international crossroads. (Scandinavia? Are we joking?)
Anyway. In these places it is easy to live as an international, and not just for people who are jetted in by oil companies. I turned up in Cairo on my own with nothing but my education, and did fine.
But why *would* it be easy to settle in Europe? I think that we, for one (meaning me and my family), made a big mistake in our thinking coming here. We are white, English, privileged (though I hate that word and have done my time to work it off), educated at the best universities in the world. We don’t get the racism that is flying around here, but we get the xenophobia and the intense resistance to anything from outside.
In my spouse’s field, Muslims in Europe, it is apparent that second- and later-generation Muslims in Europe do not prosper. Very few manage to achieve a decent education; they become dissatisfied, they turn to the counterculture and they get networked into radicalism. Yes, it’s a worse starting situation in Europe because European Muslims are not skilled and educated (those go to the US). But the only niche they can find is at the bottom, and surprise, surprise, they are not happy. Well, I think this doesn’t only apply to asylum-seekers.
I too wanted to try living in different places around the world. I did it for fifteen years, extremely happily, in Cairo. But I think in coming to Europe we have all come to the wrong place.
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This post touched me very deeply. I feel myself trapped in time- its almost static- this perspective on internationalism here in Scandinavia. Having come from such a spectrum, I cannot accept the narrowness of the vision here. Im almost afraid on the impact living here will have on me- will the lack of exposure dumb me down, turn me ignorant? I feel like I have had such a wealth of experience and interaction and Im suddenly caught in a vacuum.
ReplyDeleteI think you have made some very good points here.
ReplyDeleteNot sure how Muslims (second-generation and on) are faring in the rest of Europe, but I do know that they are doing very well here. In fact, more teens of Middle Eastern origin are taking secondary education and going to university than ethnic Danes, according to the last poll I read this summer. So there is reason to be positive.
Although I have never lived in other European countries (apart from the short visits) I could imagine that you are right about this.
ReplyDeleteLiving in here is generally hard and we have to work double as hard as the locals to prove that we're "worthy". Just like what badimmigrant has put, the second generation immigrants are taking up (and advantage of) Danish (free) education - which is good.
Perhaps someday Danes would change their mind about foreigners. Those they see now are they who came to the country as asylum seekers in the 1970s. Poor, uneducated and so on now it's probably time to show them that we are not like that.
As for Jakarta, what can I say? The city is indeed a melting pot. Not just internationally, the city is bursting from people coming from every corner of the countries - those who have different skin (fair to African-like), eye colour, dialects so we're pretty much used to diversity.
Indonesia is nothing like Denmark where everybody looks and dress the same so the word "foreign" is nothing new to us.
My point is that the countries of Europe are the ones that sent the colonizers. They never experienced it themselves. And foreign communities in Europe were judged a problem. Look at the Jews in Europe!
ReplyDeleteIt IS odd here.
ReplyDeleteI've lived a bit in 'other European countries' and I have been shocked by the levels of discontent amongst expats here, I haven't seen it anywhere but Denmark, not at this level.
And I can go back three decades, to when I first met an expat in Denmark, and she was sat in her chair bitterly spitting all that she loathed about Denmark after being here for a few years. I can remember being really taken aback, because at that point, I didn't have that much experience, so I thought she was an isolated example of discontent in Denmark.
The good thing is, that now more of us are coming out of the woodwork and admitting, no it aint easy, we might just have to throw the towel in, but we are going to give it a darned good try before we quit.
The main struggle appears to be not losing oneself in the Danishness,and feeling okay about having the right to be different.
It's all the horrid 'you shall be like us' crap that does my head in, like the Danes have ALL the answers.
I know that what you say must be true because I hear it from others quite frequently, but personally, I just do not experience it???? I am not sure if I am just one of the lucky ones in a great job, in a great city, with a great extended family or what?? But I feel very welcomed and very accepted in every aspect of my life. I have an equal number of friends on my expat side and my Danish side (these are wives and girlfriends of Mads´ friends, but nonetheless, they have accepted me...) I wonder why my situation is so different???? I think my life in DK is a breath of fresh air from the closeminded attitudes that prevail in the southern US. At least Danes ADMIT there is a world outside of DK... Americans often do not.. which makes me very sad! But is good to hear everyone else´s experiences... keeps things in perspective. :o)
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Kelli, there are lots of awful sides to the US too. We've only just come out of the tunnel of the Bush years, for heaven's sake. (If it hadn't been for the Bush years, Egypt would be a much more stable place, and we wouldn't have left, BTW.) But I think in the big cities there is more variation, more difference, and openness than in European cities, even capital cities. Of course Aarhus while sweet is barely more than a village so it's a different comparison. But London, Paris, Berlin - even there internationals can't really get a purchase.
ReplyDeleteIt was really good to read this. I'm so used to thinking about the Danish-Denmark issue but I'm trying to pull the microscope strength back a bit and look at it as a European issue as well. Colonizers are being in essence "invaded" by the formerly colonized has certainly had an enormous impact on European identity - never-mind the response to the feared loss of sovereignty that comes with EU discussions. What a layer cake of issues!
ReplyDeleteOh, I wanted to respond to Kelli too: I have to also say that I have been very lucky to be with a fellow musician who has really cool, open-minded, and kind musician friends who have also become my friends. Coming from NY, I've never dealt with the notion of limitations - so I think that the Janteloven thing is really what makes me absolutely nuts. I'm very happy not to have to deal with the same kind of racism that I have faced in the U.S. but I find here that there is still another kind of racism that is present. Until the bank teller hears my American accent, I might as well be an Afrikaner invandrer...disturbing.
ReplyDeleteJust had to weigh in. I would say that you are most likely correct in thinking that Denmark is not alone in having difficulty assimilating outsiders. Europe is the densest aggregation of nations in the world - that invariably means that nationalism was a major driving force to keep them separate and defined.
ReplyDeleteThere are other regions which have equal or greater cultural diversity, like south east Asia, but there wasn't the same level of national partitioning, and therefore it was easier for people to move between groups. Europeans therefore do seem to have a more strongly developed sense of division and self-identity. Add to this its history of being a source of migrants, not a destination, and you can understand why there isn't a strong tradition of accommodating outsiders.
Denmark though does seem to be doing the worse job of it. I like comparing Denmark and Sweden because culturally they are extremely close to each other, and have similar government systems, economic models etc. If Denmark was representative of the "average level of tolerance" in Europe, one would assume it would function in much the same way as Sweden does. Sweden itself doesn't seem to be that different from other European countries, both in its successes and failures. But Denmark seems to lag significantly behind Sweden in matters relating to integration. I've experienced both countries firsthand and through the accounts of others, and feel this to be true.