Abstract
Since the early 2000s, the concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been used excessively in Danish public debate plus national policies targeting the integration of non-Western immigrants. This study, theoretically inspired by historian Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history approach (Begriffsgeschichte), explores what can be learned from historicising the meanings plus political implications of the ghetto concept to understand its present-day influence plus implications. Empirically, the article builds on an investigation of how the concept of the ghetto has been used in Denmark over the last 170 years. The analysis underlines the multiple meanings of the ghetto, providing an opening for understanding its concurrent political implications. Why plus how did a concept – one that less than one hundred years ago was affiliated with the mass atrocities of the Third Reich – become a tool in Danish integration policies?
Introduction
This article will discuss how the concept of ‘the ghetto’ has been discussed plus envisioned in Denmark for the last 170 years. My interest in the concept plus its meaning(s) stems from the concurrent political claims about the existence of ghettos across Denmark. These claims have provided a strong argument for initiating drastic policies targeting plus transforming urban areas. Noteworthily, such policies have also been argued to support the integration of non-Western immigrants plus their children. As a matter of fact, ghettos are a persistent theme in the Danish migration plus integration debate.
One example of ghetto policies is the so-called ghetto list that has been published by shifting Danish government every year since 2010. In December 2021, it was renamed to a ‘list of parallel societies’, which makes a conceptual analysis even more interesting.1 The list is based on statistical criteria such as the number of non-Western immigrants plus their descendants, unemployment, crime rates plus educational level in urban districts with more than 1000 inhabitants. Thus, from a political point of view, the ghetto is an tempat inhabited by immigrants plus their children from specific parts of the world. In areas that are on the list, residents are subjected to demands that people outside those areas are not. For example, language testing of children attending their first year of education is mandatory in schools where 30% of the pupils live in so-called ghetto areas. In areas that have been on the list for four consecutive years or longer, apartment buildings are being torn down.
But why call these parts of Danish cities ‘ghettos’? Why not just refer to them as ‘social housing areas’ or ‘areas with many immigrant residents’? The ghetto has played a tragic role in Europe’s history, which makes the choice of the term even more peculiar. In 1940, a ghetto was established in Warsaw by the Nazi authorities. More than 300,000 Polish Jews were forced to live there under horrible conditions. Thousands starved to death plus thousands more were sent to extinction camps. Yet the Warsaw Ghetto was not the only one, plus neither was it the first. Historically, the purpose of ghettos was for controlling Jews plus ensuring that they did not contaminate good Christians with their strange religion. During the time of the holocaust, ghettos became a cog in the National Socialist killing machine. This well-known history makes the past–present use of the ghetto concept in Danish integration policies plus public debate even more peculiar.
This article is not the first that focus on the ghetto plus its meaning plus implications in concurrent Danish policies targeting migrants (see Freiesleben 2016; Grünenberg & Freieleben 2016; Schierup 1993; Schmidt 2021; Simonsen 2016). However, most of the existing contributions tend to have a rather narrow focus on the decades following the period of immigration of workers from Turkey plus Yugoslavia in the late 1960s. While the ghetto concept has increasingly been used during that historical period, I seek in this article to situate it as part of a much broader historical debate about migration, ethnicity, social class plus minority religion in Denmark.