What does it take to become Denmark?

Pakistan must invest in building the three democratic institutions — state, rule of law and democratic accountability

Seeing what is happening in Palestine, Kashmir, India and Pakistan, would it be wrong to assume that the violence, disturbance and the modern civil war-like conditions that these countries are experiencing is a result of their history of colonisation. As part of their governing model, the colonists treated these nations as one nation within a state. However, when the people stood up and finally defeated and chased them out, what the colonisers left behind was a dominant community, their own incarnation who likes them to implement the same governance model and dominate and rule many sub-nations within the state with the same brute force and violence that the colonists had earlier demonstrated.

So, the question that I ask is: how can such countries choose to become Denmark when everything they are doing is portraying them in the shade of being modern day Libya and Egypt? In all the three countries that I quoted, democracy is just a sham, beaten and bruised and reeling on the ropes, where political liberty is not being seen as the ability of the citizens to rule themselves but a demonstration of state-sponsored coercion and violence unleashed on the people and against selected communities. Becoming Denmark necessitates the learning of few lessons, and not becoming Libya or Egypt also warrants a peep in the history. But first Denmark.

Inspired by Martin Luther King, Lutherans in Denmark focused on the peasant’s literacy. The aim was to enable ordinary people to read Bible and have direct access to God. Sixteenth Century Lutherans began to establish schools in every village of Demark. By eighteenth century, peasantry in Denmark had emerged as well-educated and well-organised social class. The Danish Monarchs allowed the people to own land freely and engage in commerce on an equal basis. The monarchs also saw peasant freedom as an opportunity to undermine the noble land owners. Most importantly, the church in Denmark had only religious identity that unified its people unlike the church in western Europe that maintained both the religious and corporative identity and thus played one ruler off against another which fragmented the political landscape of western Europe. Denmark’s social mobilisation was driven by the religion which has ended up creating one of the most successful modern welfare states in the world. The Modis, Netanyahus and Sharifs of the democratic world have however adopted different mental models of reality which suggest to them that as leaders they are the only and the best answer to the problems of their countries. History tells us that this is a wrong assumption.

Libya is a state currently experiencing a civil war — a post-colonist artificial construct the country has today fallen apart to its original incarnation of three distinct geographical regions termed as Tripolitania (three cities) in the Greek times. The first region Tripolitania was always oriented northwest and looked to trade with its southern European neighbours. The second region Cyrenaica always looked up to Egypt and the Arab lands. And the third region Fezzan, a land of nomads with very little in common with the former two coastal regions. Islamic groups in this third region ended up declaring an Emirate of Cyrenaica. President Muammar Qaddafi kept Libya together for 42 years till 2011 but after the American-led western intervention, civil war erupted in the country. Thus, Humpty Dumpty fell from the wall and no matter how hard the world tries today to put the Humpty Dumpty ‘together again’, it is a difficult task as originally Libya was never a whole.

Francis Fukuyama goes to the heart of the indispensability debate of leadership and addresses this question by saying that liberal democracy rests not on the quality of any individual leadership but on building three sets of democratic institutions — state, rule of law and accountability in the government. The intellectual American President, Barrack Obama, also had something to say on this subject when during one of his speeches on his Africa tour in 2015 he said, “The continent will not advance if its leaders refuse to step down when their terms end…Sometimes you will hear leaders say I am the only person who can hold this nation together. If that is true then that leader has truly failed to build their nation.”

The second example of understanding why you cannot become Denmark is by looking at Egypt and the development path that it took. In 1948 after Israel defeated Arabs and declared independence, Egypt was boiling and people were blaming the state for carrying out deals with the British and French and unleashing imperialist forces on them. Britain had stationed 80,000 troops in the Suez Canal Zone. The people of Egypt protested against the presence of foreign troops and violence erupted. British forces hit back and many people died. Egypt was reeling but King Farouq kept favouring the colonists. Fed up with the king and his courtiers, the Egyptian military in a military coup in 1952 overthrew King Farouq’s government. Opposition to Britain in Egypt had brought two breeds of Egyptian nationalism together — the secular Egyptian military and the conservative Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic organisation which believed in the creation of a state ruled by the laws of Islam. The first breed ruled Egypt till 2011. Jamal Abdul Nasir was followed by Anwar Saadat and after his assassination Hosni Mubarak who was a carrier officer in Egyptian Air Force took over as fourth President of Egypt in 1981. Like President Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak also ruled for a long period — 30 years — before his government was removed as a result of Arab spring in 2011, and Muslim Brotherhood for the first time came to power in Egypt as a result of the elections the same year. But since the Egyptian Army saw Muslim Brotherhood government as a threat, it was removed by the Egyptian military and President Sisi since then has imposed a police state on the people of Egypt. A country following a development model that would never make it a Denmark.

India and Israel define national identity on the basis of exclusion of religious minorities. Their path to development is also violence-prone and built on violation of human rights of minorities in their countries. Pakistan needs to learn quickly, and learn that the path to becoming Denmark of this world is simple: invest in building the three sets of democratic institutions — state, rule of law and democratic accountability. Nothing less will work.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 9^th, 2023.

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