Building the Nation: N. F. S. Grundtvig and Danish National Identity ed. by John A. Hall (review)

Centuries ago, Denmark ruled from Greenland to Russia and northern Germany, including the later countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland. It was the major European power. Then it lost wars and territory, first relinquishing Sweden (and Finland) in the sixteenth century, and, having been on the wrong side in the Napoleonic wars, forfeiting Norway to Sweden in 1814. Finally, Prussia took the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in 1864, and Denmark became the small, compact country that we know today.

Along the way, the Danes became a singular nation with impressive social cohesion, high levels of reciprocal trust, and miniscule amounts of corruption. But it supported an absolute, if benevolent, monarchy from 1660 to 1849. Several of its most important nineteenth-century political thinkers assert, however, that because Danish kings ruled for, and on behalf of, their people (rather than by divine right), that they listened to the voices of their people (their constituents), and that they consciously sought to “do good” rather than to be rapacious, monarchical traditions actually contributed positively to the successful state that Denmark has become.

These influential nineteenth-century Danish thinkers argued that the country’s identity was established only after the Napoleonic wars, as more and more of Denmark’s core inhabitants began to converse in Danish, to receive their education in Danish, to worship in Danish, and to consider themselves a collection of persons and estates with common interests, all belonging to a single community, not as subjects of a king. The peasant estate, reasonably content under a succession of kings, spawned a new political party after 1849, and soon controlled the new Danish Parliament.

This book is profoundly about how many of Denmark’s finer attributes emerged from profoundly nondemocratic roots, and how the retreat from major territorial hegemony to provincial and peripheral autonomy proved fundamental to the nation-building enterprise. Admittedly, Prussia (and Otto von Bismarck) coveted Jutland as well as the north German duchies, compelling the Danes to strengthen their embryonic internal political mechanisms and accelerate nation-building. By the 1860s, the Danes were also educating themselves intensively, creating novel folk high schools, developing Protestant congregational and evangelical forms of worship alongside the established state church, trading openly and widely, shipping grain profitably to the United States, and developing their nascent democracy.

This intricate and unique story adds measurably to the literature on national identity formation. It also helps significantly to explain why Denmark and the other Nordic nations have been ranked the globe’s least corrupt polities since such measures were first compiled and published in 1995. Building the Nation, especially its most engaging chapters, focus on Nikolai Frederik Sever in Grundtvig’s massive contribution to these major accomplishments as something of a founding father. Grundtvig was a thinker, a writer, and a polemicist, as well as a Lutheran preacher and a compiler and composer of hymns, who became a member of the Danish parliament after 1849. He was also, by turns, a monarchist and a reluctant democrat, a conservative theorist, and a modernizing activist. Grundtvig wrote a number of influential books that extolled the Danish people’s Nordic heritage, articulated a growing sense of “national” sensibility, and helped to merge the “estates” into a people.

This book is neither especially methodological nor intrinsically interdisciplinary, but it contains twenty-three thoughtful chapters by political scientists, political theorists, sociologists, social historians, economic historians, and theologians—predominantly Danish—who each enrich our understanding of how and why Danish exceptionalism emerged and how and why little Denmark became a paragon of governance virtue in the twenty-first century.