No more Christmas cards in Denmark
On e-government, the 1916 Easter Rising, and why it sounds off-key to hear that one of the world's most highly-regarded states is shutting down its postal service
Denmark is widely regarded as having world-class quality of life. But one of the things that it will soon no longer have is a functioning postal service. The Danish postal service is closing down on December 30th.
■ Mail volumes have collapsed in Denmark, declining by 90% over the last quarter-century, according to The Economist. Among other reasons, Denmark has been remarkably successful at moving government services online: The United Nations ranks it #1 in the world on the E-Government Development Index.
■ Yet something still seems amiss about a government without a postal service. A functioning postal service is one of the textbook signs of a legitimate state. If you overthrow a dictator or declare independence from another country, one of the first things you do to show that you’re serious is to take over the existing postal service or start a new one.
■ The United States Postal Service was chartered by the Continental Congress in 1775, when Benjamin Franklin was appointed as the first Postmaster General. In 1790, French revolutionaries signaled their break with royal customs by requiring an oath of confidentiality from their postal employees. German unification was sealed, in part, by the consolidation of a national postal service in the 1870s. Perhaps most dramatically of all, Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising was declared from and headquartered at the General Post Office in Dublin.
■ The choice to shut down Denmark’s postal service isn’t some logical inversion of the formula, of course; Denmark is still a completely functional, legitimate, and even hyper-competent state without it. But it certainly presents a symbolic challenge to the conventional order: If postal services become like vestigial organs, what signals of legitimacy and basic state capacity take their place?
