Researchers: Denmark has been an activist nation for a long time

It was something new when Denmark, three times in five years in the period 1998-2003, went to war in countries far from its borders.

Yet Denmark has for a lifetime pursued an active foreign policy, just in different ways and under different conditions.This is according to two researchers behind an ongoing investigation of Danish wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Rasmus Mariager and Anders Wivel.

They refuse, however, at this stage to draw their conclusions on why, exactly, a Danish parliamentary majority decided to conduct foreign policy in such a robust manner and with such large human consequences for Denmark.

Liberal Party shut down commission in spite of protests

The process preceding the survey has not been pretty. First the former Liberal government after taking office in 2015 closed a commission that for some time had been working on shedding light on Denmark’s participation in the war in the 2000’s in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Liberal Party decision was attacked by large parts of the Danish Parliament, by researchers, editors and NGOs. It was said to be an attempt to whitewash leading centre-right politicians – primarily the former Prime Minister – for their responsibility in allowing Danish participation in the war in Iraq. Anders Fogh Rasmussen of the Liberal Party, and his Conservative Party Minister of Foreign Affairs Per Stig Møller – could get into trouble if the commission found that they had done something wrong or illegal in their decision to go to war.

But by shutting down the commission, the Liberal Party also prevented the Danish parliament and the Danish military from using the commission data to benefit from the experience of the two protracted wars.

The criticism led to a compromise. The Liberal party, the Danish People’s Party, the Liberal Alliance, the Conservatives and the Alternative Party agreed in 2016 to instead carry out a historical study of the wars. At the same time, the (in the 1990s disputed) war in Kosovo was also subject to the inquiry.

“Contradicts fundamental principles …”

The Danish university rectors were asked to nominate qualified researchers for the inquiry, and this set off a second wave of criticism.

It was about whether or not it was at all possible to conduct a proper inquiry under the five political parties’ stipulated conditions. The new study would not determine whether the Danish wars were legal, critics said, and the government would choose the two researchers from the rectors’ shortlist.

Authorities would also be allowed to re-classify papers after a detailed assessment so that certain information could not be included in the study – or even be mentioned in it.

Among the critics were six professors who in an open letter in August 2016 in the Danish newspaper Politiken called on the rectors to completely refuse any assistance to parliament and to desist from recommending researchers to an investigation whose basis, they claimed, was “contrary to fundamental principles of impartial and fair scientific inquiry, and thereby also with universities’ responsibility and integrity as research institutions.”

But in November 2016 Rasmus Mariager and Anders Wivel were appointed – not as a team but individually, and without the two having discussed the task with each other. They are now to get to work, and the job is set to be completed in the summer of 2018. They are from two different academic traditions and forms of analysis. Mariager, who will lead the study, is an associate professor in history, while Wivel is a political science professor and expert in international politics.

Wanted: Small belligerent nations

When the University Post met the two of them, they were sitting in a room at UCPH in a new building, which had managed to give itself the patina of lost time through brown, heavy furniture. Not a bad place to talk about history.

Why are you interested in spending two years at this job?
“I can respond to that very briefly,” says Rasmus Mariager. “Because it is an important and relevant task. Denmark has been at war since the Cold War, and Denmark decided to re-orient its foreign policy. It is important. It has been very controversial. It has been the subject of an important and polarized debate. A debate which may also have taken place on the basis of undisclosed facts. The participation in the war has meant a lot to many people. That is why I would like to contribute to the project.”

“I agree,” says Anders Wivel. “And I would add that it is also a debate that will continue to be important. Not just because of the three wars that we are to investigate. But also because, as we saw after the Cold War, there is a demand for countries to contribute to different military operations in the world. And this demand is also directed towards smaller countries like Denmark. It is therefore important that we understand how we have conducted ourselves in regard to this demand, and what we can learn from it in terms of future demands.”

The law not our business, but others are welcome to continue

Mariager and Wivel have responded to the criticism of their study’s eligibility in a featured article in the Danish newspaper Politiken. They write that there are, indeed, problems with the political agreement to set up the inquiry. They were appointed by politicians, for example. But they maintain at the same time that their work to shed light on recent war history is worth it.

“We are to explain the historical background and the political process, and on that basis we should carry out some analyses that can be considered a kind of learning. We agree that the legal issues are an important matter. But we are not the right people to examine these issues as Anders is a political scientist and I am a historian. This is something that lawyers and possibly the courts have to deal with on another occasion. We are to describe and to analyse, but we are not to say whether it was legal or illegal to go to war.”- Rasmus Mariager

“The lack of knowledge about what was behind Denmark’s military involvement has for nearly two decades contributed to a polarized debate on Danish foreign and security policy. But this kind of debate serves no-one, least of all the veterans and their relatives,” they wrote in Politiken.

Rasmus Mariager says that he and Wivel are to be loyal to their task.

“We are to answer some specific questions, and we will do so. And we will certainly be aware of the links between the different conflicts,” says Rasmus Mariager.

But both he and Wivel agree that they will not pass judgement on whether the Danish wars were legal.

“We are to explain the historical background and the political process, and on that basis we should carry out some analyses that can be considered a kind of learning. We agree that the legal issues are an important matter. But we are not the right people to examine these issues as Anders is a political scientist and I am a historian. This is something that lawyers and possibly the courts have to deal with on another occasion. We are to describe and to analyse, but we are not to say whether it was legal or illegal to go to war,” says Rasmus Mariager.

“We look at what information the decision makers had and how they used this information to make decisions. And how much of this information was passed on to parliament,” says Anders Wivel. “We also look at the international context of these decisions. But our eyes are not set on the legal issues, and we would not be qualified to consider the legal aspects.”

“Our inquiry will therefore not be in opposition to a legal investigation,” says Rasmus Mariager. “You can say that what we will present will be a foundation upon which it is possible to draw legal conclusions. If there is a desire for this. But this is not our business.”

Welfare state mindset can also lead to war participation

How do you divide the task? There must be many situations where you concern yourselves with the same material as on the one hand a Cold War scholar and on the other as a researcher into the militarization of Danish foreign policy?

“It was part of our commission that we should be both a political scientist and a historian. On this basis we are now preparing a model for the inquiry’s research design and organization” says Wivel.

Where does the historian stop and where does the political scientist start? Or is it the other way around?

Mariager: “You can quickly attach yourself to a set principle in describing the relationship between political science and history. But in practice these considerations are far from reality. When the daily work starts, we will work as a team. We will take stock of the source material and our mandate, and work to ask the questions that we will answer. We also need to interpret the mandate, and this we have to do together.”

“If someone in Denmark sees a problem, then there is this natural impulse to see the state as having a role in solving the problem, and this is also true in foreign policy.” – Anders Wivel

The big question is: When Denmark chose to participate in three wars in five years, was it because the same things were repeated, or were there three different scenarios?

Wivel: “It is dangerous if we begin to commit ourselves to an interpretation of what we are to use the next 18 months to investigate.”

Anders Wivel you have written in an article that Denmark was acting in accordance with a longer tradition in being an activist nation, while others have made this out to be a change from past practice.

“In my research so far, I have pointed out how Danish foreign policy activism has it roots back in the period just after the Cold War, but also to an earlier period, and that it is connected to a political culture in Denmark,” says Anders Wivel.

“The values that we find in our foreign policy, we also find in the Danish and Nordic welfare state. Like in the fact that Denmark emphasizes the creation of an international community based on the rule of law, just like our Danish rule of law. It also places emphasis on promoting global equality, just like we have emphasized achieving equality at home. We can recognize Danish foreign policy in the format of its activist approach to foreign policy. If someone in Denmark sees a problem, then there is this natural impulse to see the state as having a role in solving the problem, and this is also true in foreign policy. ”

The militarisation of activism

“Development policy is a good example,” says Rasmus Mariager. “It is in fact a kind of international social policy. One of the key words in the discussion we have here is the word activism, and you could argue that Denmark has a strong history of activism in an international context. If you go back to the period immediately preceding the period of our inquiry, and look at the early post-Cold War era, Denmark had a very activist policy regarding the Baltic countries. If we look at the 80s, Denmark had – an admittedly contentious – active ‘footnote policy’ and NATO policy. In the 70s, Denmark was one of the key activist countries in the CSCE process, and in the 60s we had a Danish foreign minister, Per Hækkerup, who led a very active policy towards Eastern Europe to promote dialogue, etc. Before that, in the 50s, Denmark led a high profile policy on NATO by maintaining that Denmark did not want nuclear weapons on Danish soil and no permanent peacetime stationing of NATO troops.”

“So we can point out that the Danish foreign policy has been an activist one, but that the decisive shift has been one in that the use of military hardware has been given a more prominent position. Previously it was primarily within the UN framework that Denmark acted militarily. In recent years this has also happened outside the UN. On top of this, the Danish activism was formerly not only – or not primarily – of a military nature. ”

What explains the shift to a more militarised activism?

“That is part of what we are trying to find out,” says Rasmus Mariager.

“This will certainly be a matter that will be included,” says Anders Wivel. “Some of it, we know, has been driven by demand. There has been a demand for smaller countries to contribute to military missions abroad. The global situation has for the past 25 years been less frozen than during the Cold War, where the Danes were concerned to act within the framework of the United Nations because there were two blocks facing each other who had a common interest in avoiding the Cold War turning hot. Subsequently Denmark has been able to enter into other global contexts. And when you talk about demand, there is another word on your tongue, and that is supply. We need to examine how and on what basis Denmark becomes the provider of contributions to military missions.”

Is there a lack of theoretical foundation to politicians’ foreign policy decisions? I am thinking that you as professionals are tempted to say: If only they had read the textbook on international politics theory!”

“You can’t say this,” says Anders Wivel. “There are, for example, many different interpretations of Russia’s actions at the moment, and what our response to them should be. And as for the theoretical deficit, at least in the US there is a strong tradition of journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy as cross-overs between the political and academic debates. In this way they become a meeting place. And in Denmark over the past 10-20 years we have seen a debate going in this direction. This has also grown as a consequence of the fact that Denmark has more choices in its foreign policy than it had in the past and has had to make some tough choices. We also saw when Taksøe-Jensen wrote his report in 2015-16 that a number of researchers had provided him with input. The worlds are no longer completely separate.”

“I don’t think so either,” says Rasmus Mariager. “If you look at it from an institutional perspective, the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) is a place where they work with policy development. And at Anders’ home department for political science, they have the Centre for Military Studies.”

“Our work will not be approved, just security-checked. Neither will we be edited in the final exposition.”- Rasmus Mariager

Rejects notion that study is government-controlled

When the former Iraq and Afghanistan commission was shut down, the departing chairman Michael Kistrup said to the news site Berlingske that the decision to disband the commission gave him a sense of a ‘lack of closure’. He also said that the inquiry’s data – the knowledge that had been accumulated at a cost of DKK 14 million – was wasted.

You could get the idea that Mariager and Wivel’s inquiry should take and re-use this material. But they do not know to what extent they can.

“It was a legal commission headed by high court judge Michael Kistrup, with lawyers and legal experts employed. It is not clear-cut that there will be continuity, but we may well have a conversation with them,” says Rasmus Mariager, who also says that Kistrup’s commission “had a different focus.”

“We will get access to the same material,” says Anders Wivel, “and more.”

Professor emeritus Heine Andersen, an avid debater on research freedom, has according the Forskerforum site said that you will have your end product approved at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Is this correct?

“No,” says Rasmus Mariager. “It is not. We need to have it go through a security check, but that is something different. Heine Andersen means we need to have our work approved by the government, but this is not the case. At the same time, the fact is that when you are working with completely recent history based on classified source material, we must ensure that it is presented and formulated in a way that does not prejudice Denmark’s security or Denmark’s future cooperation with other countries. Our work will not be approved, but just security checked. Neither will we be edited in the final exposition.”

chz@adm.ku.dk