Heroes in Helmand: Military heroism and national identity in Denmark

Since the end of the Cold War, Denmark has played a new and active role in transnational military interventions. This dissertation illuminates one feature of this process of militarisation. The objective is to explore the heroification of the Danish military, focusing on the historical relationship between military heroism and national identity between World War II and the 2001- 2014 War in Afghanistan. To this end, I pose the following research question: How are Danish discourses of military heroism bound up with larger historical processes and social structures? I explore this question from three historical perspectives: 1) changes in the external relations between Denmark and other states; 2) changes in the internal relations between the Danish state, its military and its citizens; and 3) changes in expressions of national belonging, ideals and values. After a general introduction, I present four papers.

The first paper provides a brief history of social theories about heroism. While the sociology of heroism goes back at least to the eighteenth century, surprisingly little work has been done to summarise the different attempts to understand this phenomenon. On this basis, I discuss the conceptualisation of heroism in four thematic strands of this literature: the study of great men, hero stories, heroic actions and hero institutions. In the course of this discussion, I extrapolate the individual and structural dimensions of heroism, while elucidating the theoretical trajectory of the literature, going from a restricted usage of the title ‘hero’ to reference god-like figures in history and mythology to more ‘democratic’ notions, which embrace ‘ordinary’ men and (sometimes) women within the hero category. Moreover, I connect the hero literature with classic themes in social theory. These include the relationship between individual agency and societal structures, the cause of history, the locus of human behaviour and the production of cultural meaning. Bringing together the predominant approaches to heroism, while calling attention to the relevance of this phenomenon for the mainstream of social theory, this paper places the following three analytical papers within a broader discussion of theory and society. As a contribution to this discussion, these papers aim to strengthen our understanding of how ideational and socio-political structures impinge upon the social construction of heroes.

To this end, the second paper brings the state into the centre of the study of the social construction of heroes. If we wish to understand why specific notions of heroism emerge and attain legitimacy, it is not enough, I argue, to consider how individuals, groups, deeds or virtues are recognised as heroic within society, since heroification processes are bound up with larger dynamics between states. I explain what Norbert Elias meant by the state as a ‘survival unit’, and how this concept can advance our knowledge of heroes with a theoretical perspective that foregrounds the dynamic figurations in the international system of states to explain the emergence and transformation of specific heroic figures and discourses. The heroification of the Danish military is a case in point here. Through an analysis of prime ministers’ New Year addresses from World War II to the western campaign in Afghanistan, the paper connects the rise of the soldier hero in Denmark to the elevation of professionalism, self-motivation, individual responsibility and global outlook into civic virtues since the 1990s. Utilising Elias' survival unit, I argue that this elevation has been preconditioned by the gradual development of ‘competition state’ and ‘security state’ strategies for protecting the Danish welfare state in the wake of growing international interdependency.

To test the scope of the political discourse on Danish soldiers, the two following papers explore discourses of heroism within the Danish Army. The third paper explores the army's remembrance of dead soldiers. This is done on the basis of an analysis of the obituaries produced by the army in memory of Danish soldiers killed in World War II and in the recent campaign in Afghanistan. Here I show that a ‘good’ military death is no longer conceived of as a patriotic sacrifice, but is instead legitimised by an appeal to the unique moral worth, humanitarian goals and high professionalism of the deceased. This appeal is essentially in line with the political discourse found in the previous papers, and so there is no reason to assume - as seems to be the case in the literature on post-heroic warfare - that the state's ideology and the civic virtues of contemporary society are no longer capable of legitimising the death of soldiers in war. Hence, the Danish case illustrates that the predominant order of meaning, what Peter Berger has called ‘nomos’, may underpin and not per default undermine ideals of military self-sacrifice today. On this basis, the paper proposes that the fatalities in Helmand have invoked a sense of post-patriotic heroism instead of a post-heroic crisis.

To further bring home the prominence of discourses of post-patriotic heroism in today's forces, the final paper turns to a more elusive way of meaning construction: naming. A new body of literature has shown that names given to military bases, equipment, operations, sites, units and weaponry play an important role in the demonstration of power, the legitimisation of war and the formation of cohesion in the ranks. This paper argues that such naming practices form part of a broader process of meaning construction, or what Hans Blumenberg has termed the ‘work on myth’, since names work as principal devices for creating, reproducing and transforming cultural narratives. Based on a case study of the Danish experience as part of Task Force Helmand, the paper explores how the name of the base Armadillo, and Viking names such as Odin, Valhalla and Vidar, have brought stories of national origin, heroic greatness and warrior ancestry into the banal space of life abroad, where a mythscape has grown and changed in response to the situation on the ground and changes in the wider figuration of the Afghan War. On this basis, the paper stresses the fecundity of national beliefs, ideals and values as a source of meaning in transnational military interventions, but it also brings into focus a discrepancy in the discourse of warrior heroism among the men on the ground, and the political-military discourses of post-patriotic heroism predominant in the public sphere in Denmark.