The debate on identity, belonging, the word and the category 'Danish' - is running again this year at full speed.
Everyone has an opinion. Fewer have a model.
And most end up somewhere where they either dissolve all categories to avoid the discomfort - or lock them down in blood and soil to avoid the complexity.
Both are a mistake.
Let us first establish a common understanding of why Western Europe chose to dissolve the category "people" - because it happened neither by accident nor overnight.
After the Second World War, nationalism had become a slur. With good reason. One had seen what it could lead to. And part of the reckoning with this was necessary.
But we did not stop at the reckoning.
We continued over the edge.
The cultural radical current that emerged in the '60s took over and made nationality a prejudice in itself - it was something 'primitive people' felt, and 'enlightened people' had moved beyond - and when globalisation arrived and gave it all an economic foundation - that is, free movement, open markets, people as labour moving to where they are best used - we stood in the middle of three currents that all had the same direction.
The result was that we stopped asking what 'a people' actually is - because the question itself had become suspect.
It was not a solution, however. It was just a way to avoid addressing a difficult subject. We hoped that if we just said "everyone who lives here is one of us", the tension would disappear by itself.
It did not. As everyone feels today.
In that way, Reality - Logos - has a way of catching up with that kind of false construction and lie.
The question of when a person with a different background becomes part of a people, however, is not as difficult as we make it. We know very well when it succeeds. And we know very well when it does not.
We know exactly what we mean when we meet a person with roots from the Middle East or Africa who is more Danish in his humour, his loyalty and his understanding of the country than many who were born in Funen. We feel it and we recognise it, without a grain of doubt.
And we know just as well what we mean when we meet 3rd and 4th generation immigrants who still in their primary identity do not experience themselves as Danish. Despite having grown up here. Having gone to Danish school. Having had their everyday life in Denmark. But who still shout "fucking Danes" at Danish children and young people on a Friday evening - because they never stepped fully in. And because a parallel identity was built instead of a common one.
It is not ethnicity that determines it. But it is not just law-abiding behaviour, good deeds, a job or a passport either.
What is decisive is something more fundamental.
Belonging has always been conditional on loyalty - and although some media in their historical ignorance attempt to portray it that way, this is not a national conservative invention. It is a universal human pattern and logic - which one still sees across most of the world today.
One does not simply become part of a people by declaring it. One is admitted, over time, by taking it on. Fully.
One sees it in history. The Huguenots who fled to Denmark in the 1600s. The Jews who over generations became an inseparable part of European culture, science and intellectual life. The Irish immigrants who travelled to America without a crown - and whose grandchildren today are more American than most.
It worked. Not because anyone forced them. But because they chose it fully.
And historically, the way in has almost always gone through the same thing: that one married into the people. That one had children who grew up with one foot in what one came from - and both legs in what one came to. That the family lines slowly wove together, until the distinction was no longer visible.
It is not romanticism. It is biology and culture in interplay. It is the way peoples actually absorb each other - not through papers and declarations, but through families, children and shared future.
The UAE has made a model that is honest about this in a way we in the West find difficult. You are welcome. You can contribute. You can extract prosperity and security from society. But you will NEVER become Emirati. Not because you are inferior. But because a people knows that if it dissolves its own markers to please everyone, it ceases to exist as itself.
We in the Western world cannot copy that model. But we can learn from the honesty in it.
Because the real question is not where the boundary lies.
The real question is - what happens to a people that no longer has a place that reflects its heritage, lineage, culture and particular arrangement?
That is - what do we lose if we dare not ask it.
The answer is not dramatic.
It is quiet.
A people that can no longer recognise itself in its own streets, its own institutions, its own story - it does not cease with a bang. It thins out. Gradually. Until what was particular becomes indistinct. And what was home becomes just a place one lives.
Most people feel the answer when they come home from a longer journey.
It is lovely out there. But there is something quite particular about coming home. And that is there ONLY because there is DIFFERENCE between there - and here. And that difference is the sum of all the people who over generations have built something, committed themselves to each other and chosen to carry it forward.
That is assimilation. And it works. Over generations, when it succeeds fully. A child who has grown up here, speaks Danish, thinks Danish and has taken on the country - not just the language, but the way the country understands itself - cries with it, is uplifted with it, shares its hopes and dreams - yes, that child is Danish. Not because it has a passport. But because it has inherited the story and taken responsibility for it.
But "fully" is not a detail.
It is the entire premise.
The boundary does not lie at blood.
It lies at whether one has taken on the country - not because one must, but because one cannot help it.
That is what 'home' does to a person.
It is difficult. Particularly because we in Europe and Scandinavia over the last 80 years have quietly and gradually let ourselves wander away from this understanding of ourselves - our Home, Culture and Faith - as something particular, something worth preserving, defending and stewarding with responsibility and love.
...
It leads to what the fewest dare say aloud today.
It is not indifferent what people in a nation believe.
The modern liberal idea that anyone may just believe what they wish - that faith is a private matter without consequences for the community - is one of the most naive notions modernity has produced.
Because faith forms people. It forms what one experiences as right and wrong. What one owes each other. What one is willing to sacrifice - and for whom. What one thinks the state is for. What one thinks the family is. What one thinks the man and the woman are. What the meaning of life is.
The deeper a person believes in something particular - over other things - the stronger it can stand in opposition to the people it lives among. Not necessarily with violence. But with a parallel understanding of the world, a parallel reality and society, that cannot be assimilated - because it does not want to. Or. Cannot.
I will dig deeper into this in the coming days - because Man's need to believe is not accidental and it is not a weakness. It is a structural feature of man himself, to which ALL are subject.
And now that we are at Easter, let us use Thursday to Sunday to understand what Western civilisation has grown from - because it is not one among many.
It is particular.
Worth understanding.
Worth standing firm on.
Worth defending.
Good evening, friends
❤️🔥🪽
