The Emotional Geopolitics Of Contested Peace: The Austerity Crisis And The Danish Minority Of South Schleswig

In 1920, the Treaty of Versailles attempted an innovative solution to the Danish German boundary dispute, known as the Schleswig-Holstein question . Two plebiscites asked the populations which state they wished to be governed by, and although the con ict was far from resolved by these votes, the subsequent century has witnessed the stuttering but gradual progression from war to a negative and subsequently a positive peace . However, austerity measures implemented by the German state in 2010 cut budgetary support for Danish minority schooling, threatening to undo decades of progress. This paper uses an ethnographic approach to the 2010 rsm de, an important annual Danish cultural festival in German South Schleswig, which coincided with the announcement of the budget cuts. Drawing on work in geographies of peace and emotional geopolitics, it interrogates community singing at public meetings as a way to broaden narratives of responses to the budget cuts from just elite political accounts, and to highlight the signi cance of everyday and emotional aspects of nationalism that serve to unsettle notions of successful peace-making. Whilst acknowledging the achievements of peace-making in Schleswig-Holstein, it is argued that peace is not an end point, but rather a continual process subject to contestation.