Hygge, Andersen & The End of the Rules-Based Order

Growing up, listening to Hans Christian Andersen’s tales felt hygge.Hygge – an untranslatable Danish word that was added in 2017 to the Oxford English Dictionary (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, n.d.) – goes far beyond a simple definition. It is not just a term, but a concept, a way of living and of being, "a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being; contentment from simple pleasures, such as warmth, food, friends" (Oxford English Dictionary, 2017).

For me, hygge lived in my mother’s voice as she read Andersen aloud. I was a child, still untouched by the gravity of life, unaware that I was building a memory that would one day become refuge. They were fairy tales, yes, but never naïve stories that carried meanings and moral lessons far beyond my understanding at the time. I sensed their importance without fully grasping it.

This Christmas felt different.

After months of work far from home, away from those who ground me, I felt that same Danish hygge return – not as nostalgia, but as recognition. It was the feeling of coming back, of warmth rediscovered, of roots remembered, of a feeling that, like Andersen’s tales, does not fade with time. They wait patiently for us, until we are ready to understand them.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

As a child, I found Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes hilarious. How could an emperor, blinded by ego and vanity, believe he was wearing a magnificent new suit while, in reality, he was walking naked through his own kingdom? How could an entire village follow that lie, pretending to admire what did not exist?

Back then, the answer seemed simple: it was a children’s story. A moral tale about pride, foolishness, and the innocence of a child who dares to speak the truth.

Reading it today, it no longer feels like a fairy tale: it feels uncomfortably familiar.

Because the true tragedy of Andersen’s story is not that the emperor is naked. It is that everyone can see it – and yet chooses silence. Fear, convenience, calculation, and the instinct to belong weigh more than truth. The lie survives not because it is convincing, but because it is collectively tolerated.

And that is precisely what makes The Emperor’s New Clothes less a story about one ruler, and more a story about a system.

Because fairy tales, when they endure, do so for a reason. They survive because they reveal something essential about human nature, about power, and about the fragile architecture of order.

Today, the emperor has many faces.

The Law of the Strongest

When Donald Trump speaks of Greenland as something to be bought, acquired, or taken (Fitzgerald, 2026), it is tempting to dismiss it as provocation, spectacle, or eccentricity. But to do so would be a mistake. Beneath the theatre lies a worldview that feels disturbingly old: territory as property, power as entitlement, sovereignty as negotiable for the strong.

The logic is simple: it is the law of the strongest.

Man and gun. Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash

A logic that Europe believed it had buried in the ruins of the twentieth century. A logic that international law, multilateralism, and collective security were designed to overcome. A logic that assumed borders were not commodities and that nations were not prizes.

Trump’s Greenland fantasy is not an isolated anomaly. It is a symptom. A crack in the fragile façade of a rules-based order that many of us still cling to out of habit, perhaps out of hope.

And when the most powerful country in the world speaks the language of annexation, others listen; it becomes easier for Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to justify the invasion of Ukraine or to present Taiwan as a matter of historical entitlement.

When power replaces principle at the top, principle collapses everywhere else.

There is, in this moment, a certain nostalgia for a world where law restrained power. Where norms mattered. Where violations provoked not only statements, but consequences. But nostalgia, however comforting, is no longer a strategy because the world has changed.

Power has returned as the primary language of international relations. Not hidden, not disguised, but openly asserted. And pretending otherwise does not make Europe principled, it makes Europe irrelevant.

For decades, the European Union was built as a project of peace. And rightly so. Peace is its greatest achievement. But a peace project alone cannot survive in a world that no longer organizes itself around peace.

If Europe wishes to defend the law, it must first be able to defend itself.

If it wishes to protect sovereignty, it must possess power.

Yet too often, Europe behaves like the silent villagers in Andersen’s tale: aware, uncomfortable, but ultimately passive. Issuing statements that "strongly condemn". Expressing a "deep concern". Hoping that the parade will simply pass, when it has been clearly demonstrated that it will not.

Silence does not preserve order. It erodes it.

And in a world rediscovering empires, those who refuse to think in terms of power do not become morally superior, they become subjects.

In Andersen’s tale, it is not a king, nor a minister, nor a general who speaks the truth. It is a child, someone with no army, no throne, no institutional power. Only clarity.

The child does not shout. He does not threaten. He does not negotiate. He simply names what everyone else sees and refuses to say: the emperor is naked.

Perhaps Europe does not need to become an empire. But as Former EU High Representative Josep Borrell Fontelles (2020) said, "Europe must learn quickly to speak the language of power": a power capable of speaking uncomfortable truths, of drawing red lines, of accepting that friendship is not submission and alliance is not obedience.

Because there are moments in history when silence is not neutrality, it is alignment.

And today, Europe stands before the same choice as the villagers in Andersen’s story: to applaud, to look away, or to speak.

References

1. Andersen, H. C. (n.d.). Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy tales and stories. https://hca.gilead.org.il/

2. Borrell Fontelles, J. (2020, October 29). Several outlets – Europe must learn quickly to speak the language of power. European External Action Service. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/several-outlets-europe-must-learn-quickly-speak-language-power_und_en

3. Fitzgerald, J. (2026, January 22). Why does Trump want Greenland and what could it mean for NATO and the EU? BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74x4m71pmjo

4. hygge. (n.d.). In Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/hygge_n?tl=true

5. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. (n.d.). What do we mean by “hygge”? Denmark.dk. https://denmark.dk/people-and-culture/hygge

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