Changing Lifestyles : Hippie Paradise Hits ‘Big Chill’ in Copenhagen: It’s Going Legal : Christiania squatter town is finally being nudged into the mainstream by fed-up Danish citizens.

The mud-walled hash haunts and dusky bazaars of Afghanistan have been swept away with the anti-Soviet war and its endless aftermath. The high-altitude enchantments of Peru have been turned into killing fields by ultra-hard-line guerrillas. Bangkok has become a traffic jam, and Kashmir is a powder keg.

All around the world, cherished way stations on the old hippie trail--the string of charming foreign backwaters where American flower children by the thousands once came of age aboard rattletrap Volkswagen vans enveloped in clouds of marijuana smoke--have been overtaken by time, by war, by their own self-infatuation.

Here in Copenhagen, however, the old hippie paradise known as Christiania is meeting a “Big Chill” fate all its own: It is being “legalized” by the Danish government.

“Christiania has been the most-debated single matter in the Danish Parliament,” says Bo Christensen of the Danish Ministry of Defense, which has authority for the troublesome counterculture haven, made up as it is of abandoned military buildings. “Now it’s like Neville Chamberlain: ‘Peace in our time.’ ”

An unfortunate analogy, perhaps, but an intriguing prospect. As outlaw European squatter colonies go, Christiania is one of the biggest and most firmly entrenched. It has inspired plenty of legislative blustering, newspaper headlines and university theses.

And now that the Danish authorities are finally showing some success in nudging the colony into the social mainstream, observers are touting the Christiania experience as a model for other cities with problem neighborhoods.

A visitor enters Christiania through the gaily painted brick walls of an old naval complex in Copenhagen’s gritty Christianshavn District--and immediately gets the feeling of having traveled backward in time to an American college campus somewhere in the sex-and-revolution belt of the 1960s.

Here, sprawling across 85 acres of erstwhile barracks, munition depots and officers’ quarters, are all the free-running mongrels, long-haired youths, tie-dyed T-shirts, experimental bicycles, macrobiotic food stands, psychedelic murals, cannabis and purple houses on stilts that a nostalgic child of the Age of Aquarius could ever want.

One of the main “thoroughfares” of Christiania--which, as it happens, does enforce a ban on cars--is Pusher Street, where hash dealers in roadside stalls ply their trade without hindrance from the state. Unconventionally designed houses--one is pyramidal--hug the shoreline of a narrow lake, an in-your-face violation of the city’s building code. Wall paintings of a camera with a red slash through the middle warn the visitor not to photograph any of the extralegal transactions.

The first residents moved here in 1971, when the Danish military was scaling back and left the aging waterfront compound standing empty. By 1973, about 1,500 squatters were tapping into the Copenhagen power grid, helping themselves to free water from the city mains and writing themselves a three-part code of conduct: No violence, no hard drugs, no cars.

Beyond that, all was anarchy. Christiania declared itself a “free town”--free from NATO, free from the European Economic Community, free from taxes, free from all manner of normal civic obligations and responsibilities.

The radical intellectuals who supplied the sustaining ideology--to the extent that there was one--argued that, far from being deadbeats and parasites, the Christianites were “paying” for their homes in sweat equity, by keeping prime downtown real estate in habitable condition after the Danish armed forces had abandoned it.

Hordes of tourists, particularly from Sweden, started coming every summer to partake of the hippie colony’s freely available hashish and live-and-let-live ways. And over the years, many Danes have told opinion pollsters that while they would not want to live in Christiania themselves, they like having the settlement there, perhaps as an enriching social experiment, or perhaps just as a handy and low-cost place to keep urban undesirables--drug abusers, alcoholics, the deranged--cooped up and out of the way.

But for every Dane who is amused by the presence of a “free town” in the heart of the national capital, there is another who sees the place as an affront. Why, Christiania’s critics have long wanted to know, should ordinary people pay for electricity and water when Christianites are allowed to steal whatever they fancy? And why should everyone else be obliged to follow the building codes, or pay taxes, when Christianites live as they please, evade all taxes--and score handsomely from Denmark’s bountiful social-welfare system in the bargain?

About 70% of Christianites, after all, are on the dole.

Some of the loudest objections have come from Copenhagen’s tavern keepers, who do not like having to compete with Christianite bars that keep haphazard books, pay no taxes and let patrons light up unauthorized smoking materials. The police have also been frequent adversaries, complaining that they can’t patrol normally in Christiania, and that for all its fine talk of no hard drugs, the place has been something of a free haven for heroin dealers.

All these bad feelings seemed to come to a head at election time, recalls Peter Barsoe, a former computer programmer who now lives in Christiania with his family and runs a “social office” where residents can find out what they have coming to them from Denmark’s groaning smorgasbord of state social services. The Danish Defense Ministry pays his salary.

“Every two years, we had these riots going on,” Barsoe says. “It tended to be unbearable for everybody.” The riot police would barge into the settlement--unnecessarily and provocatively, in Barsoe’s view--and bust this or that unlicensed bar or hash dealership.

The Christianites would, in turn, drive the police away with rocks and gasoline bombs and turn over a few vehicles in the neighborhood for good measure.

“(The compound) was built for the military, so it’s very easy to defend,” Barsoe says. “You really can’t clear it.”

It was only in the late 1980s that the Danish authorities came to the conclusion that it was physically impossible to evict everyone from Christiania and fence the place off. So the government turned to a strategy of patience and negotiation instead. And until now, the low-pressure approach appears to have paid off.

“You know that a dilemma is not the same thing as a problem,” says the Defense Ministry’s Christensen, who views the situation pragmatically. “You can solve a problem. You cannot solve a dilemma. You have to manage it.”

Instead of sending in the police with batons waving, the government sent plenipotentiaries in search of Christianites who might be willing to negotiate a “legalization” pact. This was a delicate business: What self-respecting anarchist wants to be seen parlaying with the Establishment?

But the government was able to win some Christianites over by reminding them that their utopia was becoming a hide-out for drug lords and other criminals, and that without officialdom’s help, it might not survive.

“Those people aren’t rebelling anymore,” says Christensen, who was active in the negotiations. “They want a quiet life without any interference or any revolution. In a way, they are conservative. They want to live and watch their children grow up, just like the rest of Denmark.

“I think they realized that they had to do something with their own structure or it would be the end of Christiania,” the Defense Ministry man adds. “We went to them and said, ‘You have, for the first time, the possibility to make your own laws--if you come to us and make an agreement.’ ”

About 300 meetings between the government and the Christianites followed. Typically, when a peace treaty made it into final form, the Christianites got anti-authority cold feet at the last minute and would not sign. The government won their signatures by resorting, one last time, to eviction threats.

The pact makes special provisions for Christiania, concessions unknown elsewhere in Denmark. The settlement’s taverns, for instance, have a unique and flexible licensing process that involves the Defense Ministry. And the minimum wage at Christiania’s businesses is lower than the national norm.

“It’s our job to legalize Christiania, not to normalize it,” explains Christensen, the resigned pragmatist.

Christiania residents, meanwhile, have begun paying the Defense Ministry something that none dare call rent but that works as a rent-like fee for the use of the complex and the provision of utilities. Each Christianite chips in; Barsoe, for instance, pays about $150 a month for the apartment he occupies with his wife and two children.

And since they are now paying for their power and water, the residents have substantially reduced their utilities consumption.

All is still not peace and light in Christiania. The squatters have not yet torn down those illegal houses rimming the lake, and the odd tear-gas canister is still apt to be sent flying over the issue of open-air hash sales.

But most of the major provocations have been addressed--and the Christianites are still able to cling to their heritage as anarchists, in more or less good conscience.

“No matter how good you make your social welfare programs, you will always have some people who don’t like the system,” says Barsoe, explaining why anyone would want to rebel against such an accommodating state as Denmark.

“They don’t like the habit of getting a job and getting a villa and having an expensive wife and those expensive kids and an expensive car. You will probably have people like that in any society, at any time. They tend to run here.”