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Title: Anarchism in Denmark Author: J. Laurence Hare Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Denmark, history Source: Retrieved on 22nd November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0051 Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
Since the 1970s Denmark has been a focal point for modern anarchists,
not for its theoretical contributions, but for its possibilities for
lifestyles and actions widely considered to be anarchist in nature.
Organized anarchy, however, has been historically weak in Denmark in
comparison to the rest of Western Europe. Despite Danish engagement with
the First International and the emergence of a short-lived syndicalist
movement in 1906, a complementary anarchist organization failed to
coalesce before the late twentieth century. Indeed, the reformist
quality of the Danish Socialist movement led the country’s most
prominent anarchist, Jean-Jacques Ipsen (1856–1936), to emigrate to
Paris in 1889.
Upon his return, Ipsen collaborated with the Norwegian activist Hans
Erik Jaeger (1854–1910), publishing Jaeger’s Anarkiets Bibel
(Anarchist’s Bible) in Copenhagen and producing ten issues of the
journal Korsaren: Imod Social-Demokratiet og for Socialismen (Corsairs:
Against Social Democracy and For Socialism) in 1907. Yet their attempts
to promote an anarchist society in Copenhagen generated little interest
(Ipsen 1926).
It was only in the context of the student movement of the late 1960s and
early 1970s that a recognizable Danish anarchism emerged. In 1971
housing shortages led a youth group to occupy the abandoned naval
barracks in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn neighborhood, creating a
community known as the Freetown of Christiania. With the motto of “do
your own thing,” approximately 1,000 activists organized themselves with
a collective decision-making process and no property rules. Above all,
they declared themselves to be an autonomous entity within Denmark.
Though Jacques Blum (1977: 33) later declared the anarchist orientation
of the community to be an “open question,” the structure of the
community was compatible with traditional anarchist philosophy,
representing a shift from Ipsen’s individualism to a more Kropotkinian
emphasis on voluntary cooperation. Since its founding, the Christianites
have maintained a tenuous status as an ongoing “social experiment” often
under threat from conservative parties in the Danish parliament.
Several Christiania youth, as well as a number of avowed anarchists,
also participated in the so-called BZ squatter movement in the Nørrebro
district of Copenhagen in the 1980s. The BZs drew inspiration from
squatter movements elsewhere in Europe. Unlike the Christianites, many
BZs favored direct action against the authorities, which led to
outbreaks of violence, most notably the Ryesgade Revolt from September
14–22, 1986 and intense riots over the demolition of the Ungdomshuset
(Youth House) in the spring of 2007.
Both Christiania and the BZ movement thus created rare opportunities to
put anarchist thinking into practice, but they also created serious
dilemmas for the movement. In Christiania the implementation of an
anarchist community on state-owned land continues to raise questions
within the Danish and European legal systems, while the rioting
associated with the squatter movements in general has divided anarchist
groups over the issue of acceptable anarchist tactics and the use of
violence (Delaune 2007).
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Blum, J. (1977) Christiania – A Freetown: Slum, Alternative Culture or
Social Experiment. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark.
Delaune, T. (2007) The Free Town of Christiania: Endangered Experiment
in Radical Self-Government. In F. Feiereisen & K. Frackmann (Eds.), From
Weimar to Christiania: German and Scandinavian Studies in Context.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Ipsen, J.-J. (1926) Hans Jaeger. Copenhagen: Woel.