Riots in the "Happiest Place on Earth"

Just last summer, Denmark was being called the "happiest place on earth." That isn't much solace to the citizens of Copenhagen who are witnessing the worst violence in a decade:

As the smoke and tear gas cleared Saturday morning, the police said 188 people were arrested overnight, while more than 200 were arrested the day before …

“In the last 10 years we haven’t had riots like we’ve seen in the past two days,” a police spokesman, Flemming Steen Munch, said.

The violence started Thursday after a police antiterror squad evicted squatters from a downtown building that for years had been a popular cultural center for anarchists, punk rockers and left-wing groups.

The eruption of violent riots in Denmark is a very troubling to me, although its full meaning eludes me. Perhaps it suggests that the serious social issues behind the far more violent riots in France last year are not as isolated as Europeans like to think. The willingness of disaffected youth in Scandinavia, of all places, to resort to violence to challenge state authority does not seem like a good omen for Europe's future.