The emotional geopolitics of contested peace: the austerity crisis and the Danish minority of South Schleswig

ABSTRACT

In 1920, the Treaty of Versailles attempted an innovative solution to the Danish–German boundary dispute, known as the ‘Schleswig-Holstein question’. Two plebiscites asked the populations which state they wished to be governed by, and although the conflict was far from resolved by these votes, the subsequent century has witnessed the stuttering but gradual progression from war to a ‘negative’ and subsequently a ‘positive peace’. However, austerity measures implemented by the German state in 2010 cut budgetary support for Danish minority schooling, threatening to undo decades of progress. This paper uses an ethnographic approach to the 2010 årsmøde, an important annual Danish cultural festival in German South Schleswig, which coincided with the announcement of the budget cuts. Drawing on work in geographies of peace and emotional geopolitics, it interrogates community singing at public meetings as a way to broaden narratives of responses to the budget cuts from just ‘elite’ political accounts, and to highlight the significance of everyday and emotional aspects of nationalism that serve to unsettle notions of ‘successful’ peace-making. Whilst acknowledging the achievements of peace-making in Schleswig-Holstein, it is argued that peace is not an end point, but rather a continual process subject to contestation.

KEYWORDS:

• Schleswig-Holstein
• geography of peace
• geopolitics
• emotion
• song
• conflict
• territory
• nationalism

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief Klaus Dodds for their insightful comments. The authors also wish to acknowledge the help received from Dr Stefanie Kappler. This article is dedicated to the memory of Per Østerbye (1934–2013), priest, gatekeeper, friend – NSM.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Spoorendonk is known for her rejection of the idea of a particular ‘South Schleswigian’ identity that will transcend Danishness and Germanness in the border region. See her interview Lindsø (2011), 93.

2 https://www.graenseforeningen.dk/node/4566 For an emotional depiction of this, see the well-known 1991 film about the emergence of Danish resistance to German occupation, Drengene fra Sankt Petri.

1 See https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partiii.asp/.

2 To reflect the status of Flensburg as being at the Danish–German interface, we refer to it variously by the Danish (Flensborg) and German (Flensburg) spellings, and likewise the region variously as Slesvig or Schleswig. For a discussion of the use of varied spellings of place names to avoid ‘methodological nationalism’ in ethnically contested places, see Megoran (2017, p. xv).