Background Document - Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy

ulation were now able to read about current political movements and literature in
Danish-language newspapers and periodicals.
Due to these reforms, it was a relatively egalitarian, prosperous, and enlightened
population that took over the management of national affairs in 1848, when the King
renounced absolute power and convened a constitutional assembly.
Since then, the Danish Constitutional Act has been revised three times, with the
latest revision adopted in 1953. The fact that the current Constitutional Act is coming
up on its sixtieth anniversary is remarkable not least because the concepts of democracy
and citizenship have been subject to swift and profound transformations in the
period following World War II. Due to this singularly conservative constitutional tradition,
Denmark – unlike most other nations – has not embedded a modern notion of
human rights in the Constitution.
DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Modern democracy is defined by both a political system of government and a political
ideology. Both aspects were developed during the Enlightenment, whose ideas of
human rights, popular sovereignty, and social contract legitimised the abolishment
of tyrannical regimes and inherited privilege. Under the watchword of “liberty, equality,
fraternity”, the great majority of farmers and burghers joined forces to combat the
concentration of power in the hands of royalty, clergy, and nobility.
The grand narrative of modern democracy is about free and equal individuals
who enter into a covenant in order to institute governments that further the development
from a state of barbarity, where the jungle law applies and might makes right, to
civilised societies and the rule of law. The societal covenant is, in other words, a social
contract under which private individuals relinquish sovereignty to public authorities
that, in their turn, undertake to ensure the rights of citizens and maintain law and
order. From this perspective, despotism and oppression deprives individuals of their
rights.
This narrative was laid out with model conciseness in 1776 in the American Declaration
of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” 1
This was followed in 1789 by the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du
citoyen – the first declaration of human rights proper, containing a catalogue of rights
and duties of democratic citizenship.
HUMAN RIGHTS AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS
‘Men’ and ‘homme’ can both mean human, but in the context of the two foundational
texts of the democratic movement, they meant ‘man’. These documents instituted a
man’s rights discourse, which was not replaced by a human rights discourse until the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
1 American Declaration of Independence
WOMEN IN POLITICS DANISH INSTITUTE FOR PARTIES AND DEMOCRACY PAGE 47