Beyond Stereotypes

As per request my speech from yesterday evening.

 

Check against delivery

Welcome

Thanks to Municipality and Mayor Omar for use of this hall – I know he has a weak spot for stand-up so he really had no other option than to accept.

Thanks to the Royal Film Commission for all their assistance and for use of their Facebook group. We look forward to do more with you in the future.

One the Danish side this event has been created by the Danish Center for Culture and Development – with humble financial assistance from the Foreign Ministry – so to them all the credit.

I think we have a good program for tonight and with Nabil’s gentle but firm guidance we will be in good hands.

Stereotypes – you know what – I happen to belong to a somewhat exclusive stereotype – the diplomat. 80 years ago a diplomat was stereotyped by his “good temper, good health and good looks”. That was a diplomat. Little later things became less rosy – then a diplomat was a “cookie pusher” – a guy doing nothing but attending tea parties. 

Today – in my country – a diplomat – for not speaking about an ambassador – is a person always wearing tuxedo, moving around in “elevated circles” and attending cocktail parties to no good. And thanks to an often repeated TV-commercial the diplomat favours a specific type of Swiss chocolate. This is the image that is regularly being portrayed in movies, news paper articles and on TV.

I don’t deny or shy away from the fact that I belong to the diplomat category – but I find the stereotyping a bit unfair. I didn’t bring my black tie; most of my working hours are spend on political, security or trade issues and meeting with people from all walks of life in all kinds of places; and I don’t like the chocolate. I am pretty sure that my fellow colleagues feel the same way.

But it is hard to fight a well grown stereotype. In the Foreign Service we have tried for years and years – without success. It doesn’t matter how many times we are seen publicly working under extreme, dangerous or unhealthy conditions. It doesn’t matter how much we try to be of assistance to Danish companies and Danish citizens in trouble or how successful we are in doing that. It actually doesn’t matter what we do in real life – the stereotype sticks like glue.

Luckily – it is one of the more benign stereotypes – we are only hurt on our egos and we can joke about our stereotyped selves:

My experience tells me very clearly that moving beyond stereotypes takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. 

While preparing for tonight I used Wikipedia to look-up stereotypes. Couldn’t find any Danish ones. A wider search gave a few hits – one person was asking where you could find negative Danish stereotypes – he had only found a few positive ones. I searched also in vain for the negative ones – the only thing that came up a couple of times was that Danes are not very open towards strangers. The only really negative one was one that I had found earlier here in Jordan – it is made by my favourite cartoonist Emad Hajjad. He takes the Danish symbol – the national flag and twists the cross in the flag to make a nazi swastika cross – equalizing all Danes with Nazis. Serious stuff.

Arab stereotypes you find in tons on the net. On Wiki It has its own article. The Arab American community talks about the “three B’s syndrome”.  Arabs in TV or movies are Bombers, Belly Dancers or Billionaires. I think I know which one is the dominant one today.

That brings me to touch on a very well known Arab/Muslim stereotyping of Danish origin – the Cartoon. I don’t want to recall the whole story about this – just to emphasise that for many reasons this probably got a lot more media exposure than it deserved from the outset.

But it did illustrate one thing very clearly. What we do and say in our own little back yard is picked-up and reacted to in ways that was not originally intended and that can get totally out of control. It reminded all of us in my country that we are living in a global village and that we are faced with a new challenge.

How do we find the right way between behaving as we are used to do and then taking into consideration that other people in the global village may have different norms and standards?  What if the others are seriously offended? Should we care?

Many people are worried and most do care. Let me give you some numbers from a recent poll from Gallup Institute for the Danish Youth Council: They asked a large sample of Danish youth: Do you agree that Denmark is hated in the Middle East because of the Cartoons: 65% did agree and only 10% did disagree. I wasn’t asked – but I would definitely disagree with that statement.

Anyway – a follow-up question was: Do you agree that it is particularly important to have a dialogue with youth in the Middle East to improve the perception of Denmark? 67% did agree, 7% did disagree. Others questions gave answers along the same line.

Most Danes also want to live peacefully with their neighbours in the global village. So we have to discuss how we are able to protect our own society as a society that develops through un-censored free speech and open exchange of views and leaves space for different political views and religious beliefs.

Can we in the future avoid all kind of speech that could lead to a new crisis? No. It is in the nature of a free open society that we cannot – and that we will not – control all things. Any individual or group has the possibility to say and do things that might be considered provocative or offensive somewhere. But what we can do is to discuss ways to avoid that such incidents – in particular if made with bad intentions – become crises between whole populations. We all have to work to ensure strength in our relations to avoid that small incidents can become and be used for major crises. We should work together to find ways. There are three keywords: dialogue, dialogue and dialogue. Maybe we should add a fourth – humour.

And dialogue and fun is what we hopefully will have in this hall tonight. I look forward to our discussion and I thank you for participating tonight.