Denmark – Millisphere

Denmark

Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population.

Technically Denmark (2020 population 5.4 million) includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands but in a previous millisphere I had lumped them in with Iceland, Finland, Alaska and the indigenous people living within the Arctic Circle to make up the millisphere I called “North Pole”.

Previous to WWII Iceland had belonged to Denmark but had turned itself over to the then neutral USA in 1941 and is now independent. Today the Faroes and Greenland enjoy a degree of autonomy from Denmark.

Home to IKEA, Lego, Carlsberg beer and Maersk shipping containers Denmark is a Nordic Lutheran welfare state well known for its socially liberal views and in recent times has been embroiled in a global debate on free speech.

Pornography was legalised in 1969 and the Danes allowed “gender neutral” marriage before same sex marriage was adopted elsewhere. In 2009 the Danish royal family moved to “absolute primogeniture” – if the firstborn is a girl she becomes the new monarch, not her younger brother and in 2020 Denmark pushed Switzerland out of the top position on the world environmental performance index.

Recently I have come to know Frank, a Dane, who as a seventeen-year-old musician was involved with the anarchist commune of Christiania which started in 1971 as a hippie squat on 19 acres of abandoned army barracks. In defiance to the state laws they proposed a self governing society where “everyone held themselves responsible for the well being of the entire community” – which included drug addicts – and they made their own rules. Pusher Street, their “green light district”, became one of Copenhagen’s main tourist attractions. When international bands like Pink Floyd played Copenhagen the after concert party was at Christiania. “The music scene was magic,” Frank remembers.

Since the 2000s Christiania has come under increased state pressure. Police invaded in 2007 demolishing unpermitted houses and introduced a policy of zero tolerance. A police request for drug sales to be “less visible” was responded to by draping camouflage nets over the stalls. In 2016 a Bosnian, carrying the day’s takings, shot two police and a civilian during a police raid. The residents then voted to remove the drug stalls – but they sprang up again.

The process of “normalisation” in Christiania is ongoing. The Danish state refused to recognise the collective – only individuals they said – and they are still trying to force the 1000 odd residents, who are opposed to individual ownership, to buy the property they have occupied for over 40 years.

Denmark’s “worst international relations incident since WWII”, according to their Prime Minister, started when in 2005 the ring-wing Jylland-posten newspaper pushed the boundaries of free speech. Free speech was self evident in liberal Denmark, the paper opined, this piece of journalism was to be about self censorship. Danish cartoonists were approached to submit cartoons depicting the prophet Mohamed. Some declined citing contractual obligations but twelve responded.

After publication all hell broke loose. Representations of the prophet Mohamed are considered blasphemous by most Moslems, let alone cartoons depicting him as a bomb wearing a turban. Imams and entire Moslem countries condemned Denmark for allowing the cartoons to be published and Danish exports to the Middle East dropped by 50%.

The incident sparked a global debate on free speech. The Danish government had lived without censorship since the Nazi occupation and held that free speech was one of their intrinsic values. There is a Danish tradition of satire they reiterated.

In the spirit of “journalist solidarity” the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, republished the cartoons in 2011. In 2015 two French Muslim brothers forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo killing twelve and wounding eleven and in 2016 another Muslim gunman attacked a meeting in Copenhagen organised to discuss free speech.

The Danish government has recently required that sermons given in a foreign language be translated and supplied to local authorities. Five percent of Danes are Muslim and fifty percent of them believe criticism of religion should be censored.

Jyllands-posten has just published a cartoon depicting the Chinese flag but with yellow coronaviruses instead of stars. This time it is the Chinese who are outraged.

Living without domination

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by approximately 1000th of the total world population. Around seven million people but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

When I originally built The Millisphere, pictured, as part of a paper on the philosophy of science, it forced me to look at where people live and in the process I unearthed stories to draw on for millisphere columns.

Iceland (population 350,000) is too small to qualify as a millisphere; its nearest neighbour Greenland (56,000) has even less. It is self evident that hot/sunny countries (with lots of rainfall) can support large populations so it is not surprising that it requires all of the land and islands within the Arctic Circle, and beyond, to scrape together 3.5 million to form the millisphere I call Northland – shown here in white.

Greenland at 70 percent leads the world in the use of renewable energy (mostly hydroelectric) and 88 percent of its population are Inuits whose “nation” extends around the north of Canada, the state of Alaska and crosses the Bering Strait into the Russian Federation. There are 150,000 Inuits in total who, in 1982, for the first time, gathered at the “Inuit Circumpolar Conference.” Other hunter/gatherers such as the Nenets in Russia and the Saami in Norway and Finland complete the circle.

There is logic in considering a unique millisphere that has two months when the mid-summer sun never/hardly sets and whose inhabitants are collectively facing the impact of global warming; caused, to greater or lesser extent, by the other 999 millispheres.

The reality though is that the Arctic is divided by boundary lines radiating from the North Pole. Boundaries imposed by “Great Powers” not by the Northland migratory hunters and gatherers who live “everywhere and nowhere.”

The effects of 19th century colonialism and 20th century militarism were profound and universal for the inhabitants of Northland many of whom transitioned from hunters to wage earners. Their forests were destroyed, rivers polluted, pasturelands flooded and herds dispersed. Their health records are now poor and unemployment is high. Domestic crime, drunkenness and suicide are three or four times the national average of their respective countries.

In 1925 Canada was the first to extend its borders northward, followed quickly by the USSR, Norway, USA, Sweden, Finland, Denmark (through Greenland) and finally Iceland. The Cold War ramped up the military impact on Northland.

In 1942 the US established an air force base at Goose Bay in northern Canada as a stop off point on the flight to Europe and then converted a vast area of “empty” land into a “Tactical Fighter Weapons Training Centre” (bombing range). Paranoid that the USSR would send nuclear missiles over the pole the US deployed radar stations and invited its NATO allies to practice low-level flying over Innu land at Goose Bay. By 1990 there were around 40,000 annual “practice flights” and the Innu caribou herd had halved since the invasion began.

Not be outdone the Soviets established the Rogachevo air base on the far north island of Nova Zembla, shifted off all the native Nenets in 1957 and used the island to test nuclear weapons. In 1961 they dropped the “Tsar Bomba,” the largest and most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated. When testing concluded it transpired that not all the Nenet nomads had been evacuated.

Under the Northland ice and sea are reputed reserves of oil and natural gas. The eight contested slices of the pie radiating from the North Pole divide these fields of fossil fuels which when extracted would further impact on the millisphere of Northland.

In retrospect the question has to be asked: was it all worth it? To consume vast amounts of non-renewable resources to wreak havoc on natural environments; and inhabitants living in some sort of harmony with those environments.

There must be a better way. Northland represents a millisphere dominated by nation states – which are themselves composed of millispheres. No millisphere, or group of millispheres, should dominate any other millisphere would be a good place start.