دان‍م‍ارک‌

  In May of 2018, the strategy of law-making was utilized in the Kingdom of Denmark to respond to or, more to the point, respond against full-face garments along the lines of a democratic and secular society in which values like transparency inform and guide interaction, dialogue, and communication. The new legal norm and measure, law L 219, does not refer expressly to the veil, nor to women, or to Islam. Nevertheless, the national Parliament in the Kingdom of Denmark proceeded on the basis of premises that reveal, upon scrutiny, why the particular provision that prohibits full-face veils is widely known and referred to as the “burqa ban”.Like the niqab, the burqa is a full-face veil. Numerically speaking, between 50 and 200 Muslim women wear such a veil, a fact that enters them into a minority within a minority statistics of 0.1 or 0.2 percent. However, to trivialize the burqa ban would be an error. This point applies to all sides, including the stakeholders who assumed the responsibility of drafting the new norm and measure. As the Danish legislators see things, law 219 is not an instance of “shooting sparrows with a cannon”. After this, the need to legislate appears to be an instance of following a trend in Europe and, at the same time, sending a message about the prevailing (Danish) ideology in contradistinction to “political Islam” that gives rise to unwanted phenomena like gender inequality, religious extremism, and terrorism. The authors of The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Messageattempt to give an in-depth account of the burqa ban and the political context for this, as provided by the negotiations that led up to the ban’s final adoption. One objective is to identify the various variables in the legal equation and, as another objective, capture the wider prescriptively-proscriptive direction of the Danish case, thereby also establishing a platform for further discussion, reflection, and response. (This part of the project – an intended component and outcome since the formulation of the original research task, labor division, and methodology – is published in the concurrent but separate article, The Burqa Ban: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations.)

  Extreme measures to reduce the number and cost of refugees and immigrants belong among the recent examples of the Kingdom of Denmark’s illiberal responses to crises in the wake of third party armed conflict. Politically, the process of tightening the law and having a transparently unwelcoming attitude towards foreigners began in 2001, at least according to some experts on Danish foreign policy, e.g. Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen. While the causes are controversial, the effects are clear. Denmark is undercutting its own history. However popular the current VLAK-coalition government’s Minister of Immigration, Integration and Housingmay be among the Danes, the ongoing series of restrictive policies cannot but result in Red Flags. Irrespective of any motivationally deeper or underlying reasons for their adoption, the relevant legal and other measures constitute international relations events and changes; and, as such, they affect the order among states. In terms of regional and global politics, the question is whether there is an analogy between post-2013 Qatar and post-2001 Denmark? More precisely, the question is whether Denmark should be listed under past as opposed to present “small and influential states”? By using Mehran Kamrava’s work on Qatar as a platform for a role reversal claim, the authors present a muted subtle power argument for the need to downgrade Denmark, too. Furthermore, a tension between the official Danish image and the climate of cultural values in Denmark creates a complex us versus them disconnect which, in turn, makes it possible to provide or, more to the point, explain some aspects of the evidence for the state’s precarious human rights capacity. Part of the argument derives from pre-2001 literary whistleblowing concerning Danishness – a strategy that accords with the popular Danish Minister’s own use of satire as a truth-recognition methodology.