Ellemann-Jensen is taking care to use the armed force’s buzz-word ‘robust’ when referring to the practice that the armed forces have developed since the end of the Cold War. The former Foreign Minister is arguing that the public must face up to the facts, which are that the new Defence Agreement has cemented the creation of a
‘robust’ defence. Ellemann-Jensen’s point is that the present policy can only continue if the Danes and their politicians admit that not all problems in an increasingly dangerous world can be solved by ‘Danish values’. In this case, Danish values are not the only guiding principle. Using Danish values is one way to go about a mission, but a more robust way is equally available to Danes. Ellemann- Jensen is therefore arguing that the use of armed force is a political, not a cultural issue. Because war is not a cultural issue, it does not necessarily ‘dehumanise’ the soldiers who are fighting it. They are guided by policy, not by some dark force inherent in the business of war.
While Ellemann-Jensen insists that the use of military force is a political rather than a cultural issue, he does not really want a political debate on what to do with the Danish forces in Iraq, harshly rejecting the opposition’s call for a debate over this, in September 2004.31
At this point the political argument becomes cultural as well, because this Clausewitzian conception of Danish foreign policy also reflects a notion of what kind of political community Denmark is or should be. There are two aspects to this.
First, in Ellemann-Jensen’s argument the idea that military force can be a con- tinuation of politics by other means becomes a value in itself. Thus he blames the opposition for not taking a responsible course vis-à-vis the security of the realm and the security and effectiveness of the Danish battalion in Iraq.32 Secondly, a number of people argue that, far from being a threat to Danish values, the conduct of the country’s soldiers in Iraq shows a set of Danish values that are different from the pacifist values mentioned by Pundik and others, ones that one should take pride in.
Søren Krarup, a member of parliament for the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), accompanied General Helsø on his trip to Iraq in October, on which Camp Danevang got its name. In an article in Berlingske Tidende Krarup turned his Iraqi stopover into a tale of two sets of Danish values. Krarup encountered the first set of values when he left Christiansborg to join the General’s party. Students were demonstrating in the square in order to protest against the government’s modest cut in their grants. Krarup feels ‘deeply uncomfortable’ with these young people because their noisy demonstration, in his eyes, shows how the welfare state has turned an entire generation into spoiled brats. When Krarup arrives in Iraq he meets
31 Ellemann-Jensen, 2004.
32 Ibid.
a completely different set of young people. The Danish soldiers do not yell at the palace walls to demand more money to go and sit in cafes, but are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, not only for Denmark, but also for the people of southern Iraq.
While Krarup describes the student demonstration in terms of anarchy and disorder, the Danish battalion in Iraq is seen in terms of order and efficiency. The message is clear: there are in fact two sets of Danish values. The values of the welfare state, which Pundik wrote about, have led to a decline in order and responsibility and turned Danes into a mob screaming for hand-outs from the government. The true Danish values, conversely, are those held by people of integrity who are prepared to do the right thing for the community (the national as well as the international community) for reasons other than their own material well- being.
Krarup’s dichotomy is well-known in conservative and republican writings. Only those who are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the community are worthy of speaking on its behalf. Thus Krarup’s journey to Camp Danevang becomes a rhetorical pilgrimage to true Danish values. From this point of view, the accusations of ‘torture’ in Camp Eden reflect on its critics back home rather than the soldiers in Iraq. The fact that people like Pundik feel alienated from Denmark’s role as an occupying power shows, in Krarup’s view, how far the ‘liberal establishment’ has strayed from the true, conservative values of the Danes.
In fact, Danish soldiers could be regarded not only as the carriers of true Danish values, but as those who have reinterpreted them in order to fit a new age. Katrina Niggard of the Royal Danish Defence Academy thus describes how post-Cold War international missions have led Danish soldiers to cross national boundaries by operating in distant lands for a combination of abstract values and long-term security interests rather than the immediate fear of the invasion of Denmark.
According to Niggard, this has placed Danish soldiers in the vanguard of globalisation. Nørgaard thus locates Danish soldiers in the general debate over globalisation, which to a large extent rests on what Anthony Giddens has described as a loss of ‘ontological security’.33 In a world of constant change generated by processes of social transformation that originate from beyond Denmark’s borders, a lot of people find themselves less secure in their jobs than their fathers were, and less sure about the values and social institutions they used to depend on. These people are to a large extent Krarup’s constituency, and his solution is to rediscover the true ‘Danish values’ of the old. In Krarup’s view the armed forces represent one of the preciously few institutions left that still embody these values.
33 Giddens, 1991: 3-69, 183-18.
Nørgaard embraces globalisation, however, arguing that Danish soldiers are globalisation professionals like stockbrokers, merchant seamen, designers, internet traders etc. As opposed to those who make money out of globalisation, soldiers do not deal with the promises of globalisation but are trying to contain its dangers, in doing so personifying the political values of a globalised society. ‘In a sense they are the heroes of our time,’ Nørgaard argues; ‘it is they who are re-establishing un- ambiguousness in times of confusion, who are creating order out of chaos.’34 In Nørgaard’s view this is why reactions to the slightest indiscretion of the soldiers in Iraq are so strong: if they are not good guys, then there are no good guys. If Danish captains torture their prisoners, there are no unambiguously good values left, only postmodern violence and confusion. In Nørgaard’s view, what happens at Camp Eden decides what our values are going to be, because Camp Eden is a test of how Danes are able to deal with the realities of a globalising world.
If Danish values are not given by Denmark’s circumstances but are defined by Danish soldiers acting abroad, then perhaps the analysis of the Danish values that underpin or undermine an expeditionary capability should focus on the values of the armed forces themselves. I turn to this in the next section.