12.06.2007

Cultural Homogeneity and the Welfare State

To help answer the questions from the last post, I looked again at the welfare system in Denmark and how it was supported and upheld by Danish society. In my research of Danish culture I noticed that Denmark would often be referred to as a welfare state, giving its citizens free heath care, education, unemployment benefits, etc., that all citizens and residents of Denmark could access. These benefits, however, require high taxes that spread wealth more evenly throughout the population. From the website of the Migration Information Source:

“These welfare structures entail both a significant amount of state intervention in the social domain and economic redistribution across social groups. The system is rooted in ideas of social egalitarianism, but also in the assumption that citizens earn their entitlements by contributing (through taxation) over a lifetime of active work to the maintenance and growth of the national wealth. Cultural belonging and political rights are thus intertwined, and "equality" is interpreted to mean two different things simultaneously: "cultural similarity" and "political sameness" (in regards to civic rights).”

Reading this, it became more clear to me why the students felt that immigrants were negatively impacting their country. In Danish culture and society, Danes feel that equal rights to the social benefits programs are a result of being part of the Danish culture and having a shared understanding of the assumption that they are supposed to contribute to the economic growth of their country. I started to see how It is assumed that in being part of the Danish culture, you should want to help the systems that give everyone equal access to social benefits and therefore, be deserving of these benefits. When immigrants of very different cultural backgrounds are not able to assimilate into homogenous Danish culture, they are seen as undeserving of the welfare system because they may not have the same understandings of the welfare system. Danes may begin to believe that in not having this understanding, the non-Western immigrant population will only live off the welfare system and not contribute to it, thus corrupting the egalitarianism of their society. Because of this, it can be seen how negative stereotypes of immigrants in Danish society are created on assumptions. The uneasiness of Danes of outsiders coming into their society shows the importance Danes place on maintaining the cultural homogeneity that in many ways is seen to support the egalitarianism in Danish society. I realized that the egalitarianism in Danish society both creates and is created by cultural norms and practices in Danish society.


Migration Information Source
2007 Denmark: Integrating Immigrants into a Homogenous Welfare State. Electronic document, http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?id=485

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