The Annoying Difference: the emergence of Danish neonationalism, neoracism, and populism in the post-1989 world

Back in 2005, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Álvaro Gil-Robles, articulated his frustration at the racist tone of the Danish debate on foreigners in an article in Kristeligt Dagblad, in which he described the Danes as ‘primitive nationalists’. Soon after, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister and leader of the Liberal party (Venstre), called a news conference to rebuke the critics of his immigration and integration policies for being ‘totally out of touch with reality’; Denmark was an ‘open, broad-minded, unprejudiced society’, he said. In The Annoying Difference (of race and religion), cultural anthropologist Peter Hervik underlines the correctness of Gil-Robles’ analysis. Divided into four sections (the first outlining methodology and historical context, the remaining three dealing with media reporting in three distinct cases between 1997–2007), this book is an important contribution to the study of neo-racism and neo-nationalism in different European contexts. It draws its strength from Hervik’s thirteen years of diligent research into media representations of ethnic minorities and Islam, and describes the many ways in which a small, but powerful rightwing network, which started out in the semi-secret Giordano Bruno Society and cohered in the International Free Speech Society, captured much of the Danish media attention and chained it to the divisive cause of Danish and American neoconservatism and nationalism. In fact, no one could be better placed than Hervik to dissect the processes and mechanisms through which nativism came to be institutionalised in Denmark. When the Conservative-Liberal coalition formed a new government in 2001, Hervik was researching media representations of Muslims for the Board for Ethnic Equality, which was coming under attack from the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF). Formed in 1995 as a breakaway from the extreme-right Progress party, electoral support for the DF was rapidly increasing and the 444832 RAC54110.1177/0306396812444832ReviewsRace & Class 2012