Re-Privatizing Minority Difference: Representation, Recognition, and Redistribution in the Municipal Politics of Religious Accommodation in Denmark

This article examines an issue that highlights intimate connections between minority and migration politics, namely, politics of religious accommodation. It does so through analyzing a conflict between the Copenhagen municipality and a Jewish kindergarten that resulted in an enforced privatization. Conceptualizing it as a part of wider struggles over recognition (broadly conceived) of migration-pertaining difference in Denmark, I analyze the case through Nancy Fraser’s (2009) theory of justice as comprised of singular but interrelated arenas of (cultural) recognition, (institutional-political) representation and (economic) redistribution, bound together by a norm of participatory parity. I argue that while the negotiation was characterized by instances of both misrepresentation and misrecognition, the municipality’s preference for the institution’s privatization reflects not only a return to the traditional preference for the privatization of difference but also the centrality of the redistributive arena of justice in Denmark. If the latter tends to be in welfare contexts understood by the majority as always already expressing recognition, from a minority perspective, the state’s embrace of such a recognition-through-redistribution approach can entail an injury of lacking or erroneous recognition. Whether the minority will perceive a single case as such an injury depends on the broader tenor of politics of minority and immigrant difference at the time.