
Out here in Jutland, the mainland peninsula of the Kingdom of Denmark, I live in something approaching a perfectly bureaucratic state. The people of my region, the Jutes, were once known for their non-conformity. Denmark’s national epic, Saxo’s Gesta Danorum from the early 1200s, calls the Jutes gens insolens “an uppity people”.[1] Another medieval chronicle of the late 1300s speaks of the antiquam Iutorum pertinaciam “the ancient obstinacy of the Jutes”.[2] Today, Jutes sometimes revel in their vestigial reputation for slyness and rule-bending. A popular euphemism for “cash-in-hand” in Danish literally means “Jutish dollars”. But for the most part this is an affectation. We are good subjects of the modern Danish welfare state. Like anywhere else in the country, we have a rule and a correct process for nearly every occasion. Francis Fukuyama has made a career out of being awe-inspiringly mistaken about the arc of history, but he was not totally wrong to make “Denmark” a euphemism for a well-ordered society.[3] At the university where I work a sacred (and to me, I admit, impenetrable) website called the studieordning regulates all aspects of assessment, curriculum and examination in minute detail. A two-step authentication app on my smartphone, called MitID, is required for everything from booking dentists’ appointments to paying my credit card bill. Woe betide any member of my local sauna and wild swimming club who has not kept themselves appraised of the thirty-odd vedtægter (rules). You can be naked, but you can never strip off the law. Some of my research into the history of bureaucracy in Denmark has recently been published in Social History – namely, an article on those who lived out my own fantasy of burning piles of paperwork during the Danish Peasants’ Revolt of 1438-1441.