Those who liked the book ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller will appreciate the following story: as I was preparing for our move to Denmark, I did some online research to find out what I needed to do as a European citizen immigrating to Denmark. Let me just digress for one small moment to say how great it is that Denmark has so many official websites in English that explain how things work to all those newly-arrived. I mean, is that a country that welcomes immigration or what!
But back to our story. Having immigrated twice before, I knew there must be some bureaucratic stuff to be done, and my online research confirmed that I needed to register and get a CPR number. I wasn’t quite sure what a CPR number was for at the time, but boy do I know it now. Simply put, one does not exist in Denmark without a CPR number. Want to get a mobile phone? Need your CPR number. Open a bank account? CPR number. Get medical care? OK, that one actually makes sense. Get free Danish classes? Get a credit card? Shop online? Sign your child up for nursery? We’re talking way beyond the American social security number, not to mention the British National Insurance number (both of which I got but was rarely asked for).
Anyway, as soon as we arrived here I went, as instructed, to Statsforvaltningen (could they come up with a more difficult word for non-Danish-speaking foreigners?) to get my registration certificate, so I could then get my CPR number. Allow me one last digression – I just can’t get over how great it is that everyone – and I mean everyone – speaks such good English here! Politicians and policemen, shop assistants and street cleaners, train conductors and post-office clerks – and apparently civil servants, too. In what other non-Anglo-Saxon country could you get all these formalities done without needing one word of the local language? Well, maybe in The Netherlands and other Scandinavian countries, but nowhere else. I think.
OK, so here comes the promised catch: I go to Statsforvaltningen to register (and thank God for my British passport – apparently they treat non-EU citizens very differently…) and they tell me that I’m perfectly entitled to settle down in Denmark, only I need to show I have enough money to be here for a year without needing state support, since I don’t have a job here yet. Fair enough, they don’t want people to come here and leech on the system, I accept that. So how do I show I have enough money? I need to open a bank account and transfer money to it. Cool. So I go to the bank to open an account. Ahh – but they want a CPR number in order to open the account. But I can’t get one without getting the registration certificate, which I can’t get without showing I have enough money, which I can’t do without opening a bank account! And there’s a perfectly formed Catch-22 for you.
Fortunately, this being Denmark, you can actually talk to institutions, and so I convinced my bank to open a temporary account without a CPR number, and the rest was easy. So yes, rules are rules, but people are people and are willing to show flexibility. I could forget about doing something like that in the US, where a bank teller behind a glass partition 2 inches thick once told me 5 times “sorry Sir, that’s our policy and I can’t do anything about it” when I needed to complete a transaction requiring two forms of ID, and my passport and student ID weren’t good enough because the latter was missing the current semester sticker, making it ‘invalid’.
So it’s true that Denmark is a bureaucratic monster, with more and larger government institutions than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, a police-state-like approach to address registration and an annoying identity numbering system that reveals to any person giving me any kind of service exactly how old I am! But with the flexibility, directness and efficiency it shows – it’s the kind of bureaucracy I can live with. I think.
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