Legal Identity, Development and Democracy in Northern Europe

Abstract

In circles of identity management scholars and practitioners, the general consensus is that the region of northern Europe provides a good practice example. The region has achieved birth- and death registration completeness. With regards to national IDs, which are “all the rage” in much of the world, the region is laid back. Out of the eighteen countries included in northern Europe in this paper, one has no national ID; another denies it has, and seven countries only have a voluntary ID. The extent of national ID coverage is hardly known. Also in the European Union, only six in ten countries have a mandatory ID. It does not matter.

According to World Bank gospel northern Europe’s frivolity about national IDs must mean big trouble. There is not, quite the contrary, at least not in the western part of the region. We have included Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine (the “red countries”) in our region, besides fifteen other countries (the “blue and yellow countries”) in the northwest. The fifteen were the world’s most affluent in 1550, when church registration started. The red countries were less prosperous, and they would remain so. The blue and yellow countries switched from church registration to civil registration in the middle of the 19th century (followed by the red countries 70 years later). Blue and yellow countries would, about a century later, perfect their civil registration through the development of population registers, which accelerated when electronic data processing had become possible. Instead, in the red countries, communism raged and people were issued internal passports. In the 1990s it would all come tumbling down in the red countries, administratively and economically. While the three red countries saw only 16 years of electoral democracy, the blue and yellow countries contributed almost thirty percent of the total of all years of electoral democracy across countries in the world, while they only account for a tiny percentage of the world’s population.

The blue and yellow countries have ended, literally and figuratively speaking, on top of the world. They, and also the red countries, did not accept papal authority from Rome. Ireland, which we added as a yellow country, forever poor, is now among the highest income per capita countries of the eighteen; and it was last to distance itself from Rome. Switzerland, another yellow (“borderline northern Europe”) country, also affluent, was the first to rebel against Roman Catholicism. There is a streak of love, of freedom among the countries. Northern Europe, the red countries excluded, is a miracle, considering how Europe has been an almost perennial battle-field of empires. In the east it still is.

Civil registration excellence is part and parcel of the miracle which is northern Europe. It certainly has made an important, if not essential, legal and administrative contribution to northern Europe’s multi-facetted success. This paper tells the story of civil registration over the ages, the waves of church- and civil registration, and the wavelet of national IDs (unremarkable in the region). Then it looks at all of the beneficial spin-offs, the windfall of having painstakingly spent centuries honing civil registration quality and veracity. There has been no “easy come, easy go”, no “quick (or quack) fixes”, in the northern European region. Just hard work, and its rewards.

Keywords: church registration, civil registration, national ID, identification, population register, well-being, social protection, trust, government effectiveness, citizenship, elections, democracy