Getting to Denmark
The United States is no longer a high-trust country. We must regain what’s been lost.
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Last weekend, I had the pleasure of giving an address in Aarhus, Denmark. Using “Getting to Denmark” as a shorthand for building a high-trust society, I took the opportunity to explore how Donald Trump is undermining trust at home and abroad—and why Americans should be inspired by Denmark’s example.
– Frank.
I’m happy to have been invited back to another Matchpoints conference here in Aarhus. I have very fond memories of the time I was a visiting professor here, and am glad to have the opportunity to catch up with some old friends.
As you may know, I was responsible for popularizing the idea of “Getting to Denmark.” This phrase was used originally by a friend of mine at the World Bank, who complained that many development programs funded by rich countries unrealistically sought to turn poor countries like Somalia or Afghanistan into effective states like Denmark overnight.
My admiration for Denmark is somewhat different from that of Senator Bernie Sanders. He likes Denmark’s social democracy. I instead marvel at the quality of government in this country, its efficiency and relative lack of corruption. We scarcely understand how the Denmark of the Vikings got to be modern Denmark, much less how to transform a contemporary underdeveloped country in a similar fashion.
I knew that I had to return to Denmark last February when my president, Donald Trump, began threatening your country and talked once again about taking over Greenland. World order cannot exist without a minimal degree of trust, and today the United States has become a giant source of distrust.
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There are two critical types of trust. The first is trust in formal institutions like the rule of law and the existing constitutional order. People must have a shared understanding of the law, and confidence that the state will enforce it. The second form of trust is what has been labeled “social capital,” that is, informal norms that allow people to work together. Both types of trust rest on a foundation of moral virtue. People come to trust government if the institutions that comprise it are stable and predictable, and they trust one another if they are individually honest, reliable, and keep commitments.
Trust builds over time: if citizens interact with one another, they will gravitate to working with those who show themselves to be honest and reliable. It is only through a process of repeated interaction that trust develops.
Both social capital and trust in formal institutions are necessary for the proper functioning of both a modern economy and a healthy democracy. Economic prosperity is built on the belief that the government will enforce property rights and fairly adjudicate business disputes. Social capital for its part acts like a lubricant for formal institutions and makes business transactions function smoothly. In politics, social capital is what allows citizens to work together in the groups and associations that we call civil society. A healthy democracy depends on a vigorous civil society: under such conditions, citizens are not isolated individuals but are able to act together in groups united by common passions and interests.
Not all societies are blessed with high levels of institutional trust, or generalized trust between citizens. Many decades ago, the social scientist Edward Banfield described a town in Southern Italy that he said was characterized by what he labeled “amoral familism.” In such a society, people trusted only members of their immediate nuclear family; strangers were regarded as potential threats and kept at arm’s length. As a result, Southern Italy was largely devoid of the sorts of voluntary associations that were plentiful in the north: football clubs, newspapers, self-help societies, labor unions, and other organizations that gave texture to civic life.
The two organizations that flourished in the south were the Catholic Church and the Mafia. The latter was the direct outcome of distrust: because of a weak rule of law and distrust of government, business partners could not rely on the state to enforce contracts or protect their property rights. They had to use mafiosi—otherwise known as “men of honor”—to threaten violence on their behalf. This type of private enforcement naturally leads to greater violence overall as protectors turn into extortionists. This pathology is evident not just in Southern Italy, but in many parts of Latin America and Asia.
By contrast, Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia are properly understood to be “high-trust” societies. That trust extends both horizontally between citizens, as well as vertically in citizens’ relationship to the state. Anyone living in this region knows that crime, corruption, fraud, betrayal, and dishonesty exist here as in any other society, but the aggregate level of these dysfunctions is much lower than in, let’s say, Southern Europe.
In my 1996 book Trust, I characterized the United States as a “high-trust” society as well. This was not an idiosyncratic judgment on my part; there has been a long history of outside observers noting that the United States experienced high levels of trust. The great French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, after traveling through the United States in the 1830s, noted that American democracy was supported by what he called a strong “art of association,” in which ordinary citizens had an easy time coming together in a wide range of clubs, neighborhood associations, religious organizations, and the like. This, he noted, stood in sharp contrast with his native France, where, he said, you couldn’t find ten Frenchmen who could come together spontaneously for a common purpose.
I would no longer characterize the United States as a “high-trust” society. Beginning in the 1990s, we have seen an increasing polarization of American society. This polarization was initially political, based on the differing policy preferences of Democrats and Republicans. Willingness to cooperate across party lines fell. The polarization deepened steadily, particularly in the 2010s, and evolved into what social scientists label “affective polarization,” meaning that partisans no longer simply disagreed on policy issues, but believed that their opponents were deeply malevolent and dishonest. With the rise of Donald Trump, we had a political leader who made no effort to unify the country or to be a president for all Americans; rather, he trafficked in distrust and demonized anyone who disagreed with him as “Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics.”
This loss of social trust has not occurred only in the United States, but has affected many other countries as well. It manifests itself in conspiracy theories: the belief that society is being manipulated behind the scenes by a shadowy elite, whose secret dealings need to be exposed.
This kind of populism is driven by a number of social and technological factors. In many societies there has been a sorting between inhabitants of large, diverse urban areas, and those who live in the countryside. This mirrors a sharp division based on levels of education. Educated urbanites tend to vote for liberal parties, while populist movements usually rely on rural and small-town voters.
Technology has also contributed to this polarization. The spread of the internet and social media has changed the nature of social interaction. Citizens who used to rely on a small number of elite-controlled media channels can now get information from anywhere in the world. The kinds of filters that used to control the quality of information have been undermined, which has led to the appearance of parallel information universes in which there is no common understanding of empirical reality.
Trust is also critical in international relations. There is no such thing as an international rule of law, because there is no global sovereign to enforce rules. International law is more normative than legal in nature, articulating rules and behavior that states believe other states are likely to follow. This makes trust very important: global order depends on states making their future behavior predictable by following a host of informal norms. Since 1945, global stability has been based on deterrence. Early on, there was a realization that countries could defend themselves from nuclear weapons only with great difficulty. It was only the credible threat of nuclear retaliation that kept the peace. Deterrence extended further to conventional warfare as well, and was embodied in NATO’s Article 5 commitment that an attack on one member of the alliance would be regarded as an attack on all. One’s international competitors and enemies did not have to believe in your values, but they did have to believe that you would reliably use force in response to aggression.
Perhaps the most important international norm that has been in place since 1945 is the norm against using force to acquire the territory and resources of another sovereign state. This norm has been much more powerful than the norm against the use of military force per se, and it was followed by the United States up until recently, even as America fought numerous wars and launched multiple military interventions around the world. The United States justified its actions in defensive terms, or in terms of preventing adverse political change. The Korean War and the 1991 Gulf War were both fought explicitly to uphold the principle of no territorial conquest. The Vietnam War was fought to prevent the takeover of South Vietnam by the North; the invasion of Afghanistan was fought to eliminate the threat from al-Qaida, which had just attacked the Twin Towers in New York, while the 2003 Iraq War was launched to stop postulated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In the end, many of these fears proved to be vastly exaggerated, but the problem was faulty judgment, and not the pursuit of self-interest.
This brings us to the events of earlier this year, and Donald Trump’s demand to take over Greenland. What was particularly shocking about this move was that it was not justified by any principle of self-defense or the defense of political values. Rather, it was a naked and self-interested grab for the territory and resources of a sovereign country that was a loyal treaty ally of the United States. This was in line with Donald Trump’s belief that the United States should have seized control of Iraq’s oil after liberating the country from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. This mindset predominated in the 19th century world of clashing imperial powers, but was banished following the tragic history of the early 20th century when territorial ambitions provoked two world wars.
Today, Donald Trump’s foreign policy has joined hands with his domestic policy. Since returning to office in January, the president has sought to rule the country by executive order, bypassing the many checks and balances established by the U.S. Constitution to limit his powers. He is, in other words, a would-be authoritarian. Similarly, he has ignored the legal and normative constraints on American international behavior. He has imposed tariffs, now determined by the Supreme Court to be illegal, on virtually every country in the world (whether they were inhabited by human beings or not).
President Trump has used force unilaterally on nine occasions, culminating in the joint attack with Israel on Iran on February 28. In doing so, he has bypassed the United Nations Security Council, as well as the U.S. Congress, which is given responsibility for authorizing wars under the Constitution. When Trump was asked by a journalist what would constrain him from acting unilaterally on the global stage in the future, he said “my own morality.” Given that his morality often seems to be akin to that of a Mafia boss, this is not very reassuring.
By his threats against Greenland, Donald Trump has destroyed all remaining trust in the North Atlantic relationship. Europeans have been rightly asking themselves whether the United States can ever be trusted again. And at this point, I would say that the answer is no.
There are several reasons for this. The most important is that the Republican Party has been changed beyond recognition. Before 2016, it was a party committed to free trade, limited government, openness to immigration, the strong defense of allies, and a democratic world order. Since the rise of Donald Trump, it has coalesced around an “America First” agenda that wants to close off the United States to the outside world. Trump has openly favored dictatorships like Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, and Xi Jinping’s China over democratic countries in Europe and Asia. He has visibly eroded trust within the United States, attacking domestic opponents as enemies and traitors, and degraded the quality of discourse through vicious personal attacks on perceived enemies. I noted earlier that trust depends on the moral virtues of honesty and reliability, something that is foreign to a leader who lies shamelessly, virtually with every sentence he utters.
I think that Europeans would be foolish to believe that America can be trusted in the future to meet its treaty obligations to NATO. This is not a legal matter but a moral one: if the U.S. president is uninterested in supporting allies, then Article 5 is a dead letter whatever its legal status. Europe has no choice but to take full responsibility for its own security, and to reshape both NATO and the European Union to permit much stronger collective action. Europeans hoped in 2020 that the United States would return to its old self with the election of Joe Biden, and yet American voters managed to re-elect Donald Trump in 2024, despite the fact that he sought to overturn the earlier election.
I want, however, to end on a more optimistic note. Despite the damage to institutions that has occurred over the past decade, I believe that the checks and balances built into the American system continue to operate. The most important of these checks are elections. There is a great deal of evidence that Donald Trump will be strongly repudiated in the midterms this coming November, and that the Democrats may retake not just the House of Representatives, but the Senate as well. The recent Hungarian election showed that voters can make clear choices and reject authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán. I do not believe that the fears that many people had last year about a rising populist tide sweeping Europe will come to pass. Donald Trump has not proven to be the unifying glue that holds the European far right together. No party will want to bind itself closely to an aging, mentally deteriorating 80-year-old man who seems to be losing control of events both at home and abroad.
International trust radiates outward from high levels of trust at home. This is where Denmark can play an important leadership role. The strength of Denmark’s domestic institutions is ultimately what guarantees its position in Europe as a bulwark of democracy and effective government that is a model for many other countries to follow. And I hope that “getting to Denmark” will be an inspiration for Americans as well as they seek to recover from the current assault on their institutions.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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The US is no longer a wuss country with weak leaders being taking advantage of and paying for other country's dinner every night,
Who the hell cares that other moocher and looter countries are upset that the spigot is being closed and they have to pay their own way?
Does the rest of the world trust China? Do they trust China more than the US? If so, then in confirms they are just throwing an entitlement tantrum being forced to pay their own way.
The mainstream globalist corporatist media reporting the drop in trust for the US while it foments it. But in terms of trust, the mainstream globalist media polls as being the most distrusted institution on the planet. It is driven by corporate interests... you know the corporate interests that the US-funded global order continues to support corporate profit maximization and corporate primacy until the US is nothing but an empty shell.
Yes, Trump has broken many norms. And perhaps it is related to a drop in societal trust within America. Certainly Trump wasn't the first to show or increase the mistrust. I keep hearing "deplorables" ringing in the back of my mind. Of course it goes much further back. You could also argue that progressive pushes starting in the 90s (or earlier) were a cause of societal mistrust.