Kingdom of Denmark

The Kingdom of Denmark (Kongeriget Danmark), ordinarily Denmark or Danmark, is a sovereign parliamentary constitutional monarchy in northern Europe and the southernmost member of the Scandinavian Union. It occupies the Jutland peninsula and an archipelago of some four hundred islands between the North Sea and the Baltic, and it is the only Nordic state with a land frontier on the European mainland. That frontier is with the German Empire, and it runs across a province Denmark used to own.

The Kingdom is not one country but three under one Crown. Denmark proper is governed from Copenhagen; the Faroe Islands hold home rule; Greenland, which is fifty times the size of Denmark proper and holds less than one per cent of its people, holds self-government. The three are described together as Rigsfællesskabet, the community of the Realm, a term that is doing a great deal of work and is understood by everyone to be doing it.

Denmark is governed under the Constitutional Act of 1849, the oldest working constitution in the Nordic countries, revised five times and never replaced. King Frederik X reigns and does not rule. The Folketing of a hundred and seventy-nine members has been unicameral since 1953, minority government is the ordinary condition rather than a crisis, and the country has been governed by coalition or by agreement for almost the whole of its democratic history.

The single fact that shapes the modern kingdom is a subtraction. In 1864 Denmark fought Prussia and Austria over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, lost, and lost them. It has never had them back. The German province of Schleswig-Holstein still contains a Danish-speaking population in its northern districts, and those people live under a binational settlement negotiated between Copenhagen and Berlin and administered jointly, which protects Danish schools, churches, newspapers and political representation inside German sovereignty. Denmark did not recover the territory. It recovered the standing of the people on it, and it now exports the arrangement as a model. The settlement is the most admired thing the kingdom has made and it is also the instrument that makes return permanently unnecessary, which is a thought Danish politics has never been entirely comfortable holding.

Etymology

Denmark is among the oldest continuously used state names in Europe. The first element is the ethnonym of the Danes, a people named in Latin and Greek sources from the sixth century; the second is mark, a march or borderland, the same element that gives the German marches their name and the March of Arizona its title in the Realm.

The name therefore means the borderland of the Danes, and the border it originally described is the one the kingdom has argued about ever since: the southern land frontier, at the neck of the Jutland peninsula, where Danish speech met German. The Dannevirke, the great earthwork thrown across that neck, was raised to hold precisely that line, and the abandonment of it without a battle in February 1864 is the most bitterly remembered night in Danish military history.

The name is first attested in Denmark itself on the larger of the two Jelling stones, raised about 965, in the inscription in which Harald claims to have won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. The stone is the oldest surviving statement of Danish nationhood and the country has never stopped citing it, to the extent that a cast of it stands in the courtyard of the National Museum and the inscription is on the Danish passport.

Kongeriget Danmark, the Kingdom of Denmark, is the formal style and is used on instruments. The community of the Realm, Rigsfællesskabet, is the term covering Denmark proper with the Faroes and Greenland, and it is a word rather than a legal category.

History

The making of Denmark

Before the kingdom

The Danish tribal groupings consolidated into something like a kingdom in the tenth century under Gorm and his son Harald, who put up the stone at Jelling claiming to have won all Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. That claim is the oldest surviving statement of Danish nationhood and the country has never stopped citing it. The Viking centuries that followed took Danish rule to England, Normandy and the Baltic shore, and left a settlement pattern in eastern England that philologists still trace.

The composite monarchy

Medieval and early modern Denmark was not a nation state and did not pretend to be one. It was a composite monarchy: a bundle of territories held by one king on different terms, comprising Denmark, Norway with its Atlantic dependencies of Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, and at various times Skåne, Halland and Blekinge on the Swedish side of the Sound.

The Kalmar Union of 1397 put all three northern crowns on one head under a Danish queen, and Denmark ran it. It broke in 1523 when Sweden left, and the seven centuries of Danish and Swedish enmity that followed produced more wars between the two than any other pair of European states has managed. The Union that governs the north today is named for that town deliberately, and the naming is understood by every Dane as an admission that the first attempt was Danish and failed because it was.

Holstein is the complication that eventually destroys the composite state. It was German, it was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, and its duke was the King of Denmark, who therefore sat in the Empire’s councils for his German lands and held three votes there. A Danish king voting in a German constitutional order for a duchy attached to a Danish duchy attached to a Danish kingdom was workable for as long as nobody insisted on knowing what any of it was. The nineteenth century insisted.

The losses begin

The Napoleonic wars ended Denmark’s standing as a power. It had tried to remain neutral, been attacked twice by Britain, lost its fleet at Copenhagen in 1807 and gone bankrupt in 1813. In 1814 it surrendered Norway to Sweden at the Treaty of Kiel, keeping the Atlantic dependencies of Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland only because Sweden did not think to ask for them.

The country that came out of 1814 was a third of what had gone in. Danish historiography treats it as the first of the amputations and the mildest, because the second one was worse.

The Reformation and the early modern wars

The Reformation reached Denmark as a royal act rather than a popular one. Christian III imposed it in 1536 at the close of a civil war, dissolved the monasteries, confiscated the episcopal estates and made the Crown the wealthiest landowner in the kingdom at a stroke. The Church that resulted was Lutheran, national and financially dependent, and it is the direct ancestor of the established Church of today. The Danish Reformation was therefore a transfer of property administered as a change of doctrine, and the country has never pretended otherwise.

The two centuries that followed were spent losing wars to Sweden. The Torstenson War, the Second Northern War and the catastrophe of 1658, when a Swedish army crossed the frozen belts and appeared outside Copenhagen, cost Denmark the eastern provinces of Skåne, Halland and Blekinge, which had been Danish for as long as Denmark had existed and are now the southern third of Sweden. The siege of Copenhagen in 1659 was held, which is the reason the kingdom survived at all, and the defence was conducted by the citizens as much as by the army.

Absolutism followed directly from that. The estates surrendered their powers to the Crown in 1660 on the argument that the nobility had failed in war and the burghers had not, and the Royal Law of 1665 wrote the surrender down. The Danish nobility never recovered its political position, which is why the country entered the nineteenth century with a weaker aristocracy and a stronger peasantry than its neighbours, and why the agrarian reforms of the 1780s, which converted tenants into owner-occupiers across much of the kingdom, met less resistance here than anywhere else in Europe.

The constitution of 1849

Absolutism in Denmark had been unusually complete. The Royal Law of 1665 is the only fully written absolutist constitution any European state produced, and it vested everything in the king in terms so explicit that later Danish constitutionalists found them useful: a power granted in writing can be surrendered in writing.

Frederik VII surrendered it in 1849 without a shot being fired. The revolutionary year had reached Copenhagen as a march of citizens to the palace and a request; the king met it by dismissing his ministry and agreeing to a constitution. The Constitutional Act of 5 June 1849 created a bicameral legislature, a responsible ministry, freedom of the press, assembly and association, and a franchise that at the time was among the broadest in Europe.

Constitution Day on 5 June is the Danish national day, and the fact that the country’s founding civic festival commemorates a king giving power away rather than a people taking it is the first thing a foreign reader ought to notice about Denmark. The Register notes it because it recurs: the Danish national story is repeatedly one of conceding gracefully and being praised for it, and the country’s own historians have been arguing for a century about whether that is a virtue or a habit.

1864

The question nobody could answer

The duchies were the unanswerable problem of nineteenth-century Denmark. Schleswig was a Danish fief with a German-speaking south and a Danish-speaking north. Holstein was wholly German and a member of the German Confederation. The two had been administered together for four hundred years under a formula, op ewig ungedeelt, for ever undivided, which Danish nationalists read as a piece of medieval conveyancing and German nationalists read as a constitution.

Danish liberal nationalism wanted Schleswig incorporated into Denmark to the Eider. German nationalism wanted both duchies in Germany. Both positions were popular, both were sincerely held, and they could not both be satisfied because they described the same ground.

The First Schleswig War of 1848 to 1851 was fought over it and settled nothing, ending in a European agreement that preserved the composite state on the express condition that Denmark not incorporate Schleswig. In November 1863 Denmark adopted a constitution doing exactly that.

The war

Prussia and Austria acted together, and the Kingdom of Prussia article records the campaign from the winning side: the war of 1864, fought jointly, brought Schleswig and Holstein under joint administration and then supplied the quarrel that produced the war of 1866.

From the Danish side it was a rout. The old defensive line at Dannevirke was abandoned without a battle in a night march that the country has never forgiven and never stopped commemorating. The stand at Dybbøl on 18 April 1864 was a defeat, and it is the most important date in the Danish national calendar after 5 June. The redoubts were taken in a few hours by a bombardment against which the Danish position had no answer. The peace surrendered both duchies and about a third of the kingdom’s remaining population, several hundred thousand of whom were Danish-speaking and became German subjects.

What Denmark concluded

The conclusion the Danish political nation drew from 1864 is the hinge of everything after it, and it was not the conclusion a larger country would have drawn.

It concluded that it could not fight. Not that it had fought badly, or been betrayed by the powers, though both were argued at length. The settled national judgement was that a state of that size, on that ground, against those neighbours, had no military answer available at any price it could pay, and that a policy resting on the hope of one was a policy resting on nothing.

Everything characteristic of modern Denmark follows from that sentence. The inward turn of the late nineteenth century, the reclamation of the Jutland heath under the slogan that what was lost without should be won within, the cooperative movement, the folk high schools, the design of a national economy around adding value to other people’s raw materials, the refusal of a great-power foreign policy, and eventually the surrender of 1940, all rest on a judgement formed in the spring of 1864 and never seriously revisited.

The Register states the uncomfortable half plainly. The judgement was correct. Denmark has been proved right about its own military position repeatedly and at length. It is nonetheless a judgement that made the country’s later choices easier to reach and harder to examine, and Danish historians have been saying so since the 1970s without much effect on the national story.

The inward turn, 1864 to 1914

The half-century after the defeat produced the Denmark that the world now recognises, and it produced it deliberately.

The cooperatives

Danish agriculture met the world grain price collapse of the 1870s by refusing to compete on grain. It converted instead to butter, bacon and eggs for the British market, and it did so through cooperatives owned by the farmers who supplied them: the first cooperative dairy at Hjedding in 1882, then creameries, bacon factories, egg-packing societies, purchasing societies and credit associations, until by 1914 a majority of Danish farm output passed through a body its own producers owned.

The cooperative was not a Danish invention and the Danish application of it was unusually complete. It produced a countryside of small and middling owner-occupiers with a common commercial interest, which is the social base of Danish politics for the next century and the reason the country’s agrarian party was liberal rather than reactionary.

The folk high schools

N. F. S. Grundtvig is the figure the nineteenth century leaves behind. A clergyman, historian, hymn-writer and educational theorist, he argued for a national education of the living word rather than the dead languages, aimed at adults, resident, non-examined and non-vocational, intended to make farmers into citizens. The first folk high school opened in 1844 and the movement spread across the countryside after 1864 carrying the recovery slogan with it.

The schools are the reason Danish democracy arrived with a literate rural electorate that already had institutions of its own, and they are why Danish public life still expects a farmer to have opinions about hymns.

The parliamentary struggle

Denmark’s constitutional crisis lasted thirty years. The upper house was weighted towards property, the Crown appointed ministries the lower house did not support, and from 1875 the Conservative Estrup governed by provisional finance decrees against a hostile Folketing. The Change of System in 1901 conceded the principle that a ministry must command the lower house, which is the moment Danish parliamentary government properly begins, and it was conceded rather than won.

Women and the franchise

Danish women received the municipal vote in 1908 and the parliamentary vote with the constitutional revision of 1915, at the same moment as servants and the propertyless, the franchise having been restricted by household position as much as by sex. The suffrage campaign had been long, respectable and unusually successful at persuading men, and the enfranchisement was carried without significant public disorder on either side.

Denmark’s subsequent record is strong and not unblemished. It was among the first countries with a female prime minister, its labour-market participation rates for women are at the top of the international tables, and its parental leave and childcare provision are the material basis of both. The pay gap persists at a level Danish economists attribute mainly to occupational segregation, the public care sector being overwhelmingly female and comparatively poorly paid, which is the cost of the model rather than a failure of it and is generally discussed as though it were an anomaly.

The First Great War

Denmark was neutral in the First Great War and stayed neutral by a margin narrower than it usually admits, since both belligerent groupings had immediate interest in the straits. It mined its own waters at German request, fed both sides at a profit, and came out of the war richer and unharmed.

The question the war raised for Denmark was north Schleswig, and the answer such questions ordinarily receive is a plebiscite of the kind proposed in 1920, which would have returned the northern zone to Denmark. It was not held, because Germany did not lose. The German Empire emerged from the war a victorious Allied power alongside Great Britain and the United Kingdom of America, and no part of Schleswig-Holstein came back.

This is the single largest turning point in Danish history and it produced the single largest Danish achievement.

Between the wars

The Social Democrats took office in 1924 and again from 1929, and the Danish version of the interwar settlement was made by a party of workers governing in permanent alliance with a party of smallholders. The Kanslergade Agreement of 1933, negotiated overnight at the Prime Minister’s flat, devalued the krone, supported farm prices and enacted a comprehensive social reform in a single instrument. It is the founding document of the Danish welfare state and it was a deal between town and country rather than a victory of either.

Denmark spent the 1930s doing what it had concluded in 1864: nothing military. Defence spending fell to a level its neighbours found remarkable, on an explicit doctrine that a Danish army sufficient to matter was unaffordable and a Danish army insufficient to matter was a provocation. The doctrine was argued out in public, adopted by a democratic parliament, and understood by every voter. What happened in 1940 was not a surprise, a betrayal or a failure of nerve. It was the plan.

The Second Great War

The strike north

With the German Empire fighting as an Allied power, the northern war was fascist France’s, launched to seize Swedish iron ore, take the Norwegian coast for the Atlantic campaign and turn the German flank. Denmark was not the object. Denmark was the road, and it was also the airfields from which Norway could be reached.

Six hours

French forces crossed the frontier and landed at the ports before dawn. The Danish army fought at the border and in south Jutland for a few hours, took some scores of casualties, and was ordered to lay down its arms by a government that had met through the night and reached the conclusion its predecessors had reached in 1864.

Denmark surrendered on the first morning, and the terms it obtained were the mildest any occupied country in Europe received. The King remained. The government remained. The Folketing continued to sit and to legislate. The police, the courts, the civil service and the press remained Danish. There were no French governors, no direct administration, and for the first years of the occupation there was very little French presence outside the ports and the airfields.

The arrangement had a name in the occupier’s files and a different one in Denmark. Paris called it the cooperative model and held it up to the rest of occupied Europe. Danes called it samarbejdspolitikken, the policy of cooperation, and have been arguing about the word ever since.

What it bought and what it cost

It bought a great deal. Denmark lost fewer people in the Second Great War than any other occupied nation in Europe. Its cities were not bombed, its infrastructure was not destroyed, its institutions were not dismantled and its constitutional order resumed in 1945 without a break, because it had never stopped. The Danish state that emerged from the war was the same state that entered it, which no other occupied country in Europe could say.

It cost the country its account of itself. Danish agriculture fed the French war effort for four years at a good price. Danish industry took French contracts. Danish police assisted with French requirements in the early years, on the argument that Danish police doing it was better for Danes than French police doing it, which was true and remains the most difficult sentence in modern Danish history. A Danish government sat in Copenhagen and passed laws while the country was occupied by a regime whose stated purpose was the elimination of the non-French as a category, and it did so with the consent of a Folketing elected by Danes.

The occupier’s programme reached Denmark late and unevenly, and that is the fact the country has never been able to place. The extermination that fell on the east and on France’s own minorities was applied in Denmark with a slowness that owed something to Danish obstruction, something to the cooperative arrangement’s usefulness to Paris, and something to the simple fact that Denmark was a supply depot rather than a theatre. Danish accounts have emphasised the first. Foreign accounts have emphasised the second. The Register does not adjudicate between them and notes that both are supported by the documents.

The break and the resistance

The arrangement collapsed in the summer of 1943. Strikes spread from Odense across the country, the occupier demanded the death penalty for sabotage, and the government refused and resigned rather than sign. From August 1943 Denmark was under direct French administration and the permanent secretaries ran the country without ministers.

The resistance that Denmark remembers dates almost entirely from after the government stopped cooperating, which is a chronology the country states accurately in its museums and skirts in its speeches. It was real, it was effective in sabotage and intelligence, it cost lives, and it was small until it was safe to be large. The Freedom Council formed in September 1943; the general strike of Copenhagen in the summer of 1944 was the largest civil action of the occupation; and the country was liberated in May 1945 by Allied forces including German ones, which is a sentence Danish schoolchildren find harder than any other in the syllabus.

The rescue

When the deportation order came in October 1943 it was leaked to Danish officials and passed on, and what followed is the episode Denmark leads with. Over a fortnight, fishing boats and coasters carried some thousands of people across the Øresund to neutral Sweden, organised by nobody in particular and paid for by whoever was asked.

The Register records the achievement and the arithmetic together. The crossing was possible because Sweden was neutral, near and willing, because the sea is at its narrowest four kilometres wide, and because the occupier’s own local administration was slow and in several documented cases deliberately slower. It was organised by Danes at real risk and it saved almost everyone it set out to save. It also came in the fifth year of an occupation during which the Danish state had cooperated, and it was carried out largely by people who had no part in that cooperation and against the wishes of some who had.

Denmark has spent eighty years telling the second story more loudly than the first. That it has both stories to tell is the point. Most occupied countries have only one.

The reckoning, 1945 to 1950

Denmark held a legal reckoning after the liberation and it was a difficult one, because the country had to prosecute conduct that its own lawful government had authorised.

The Folketing legislated retrospectively, reintroducing the death penalty, which Denmark had abolished in practice in 1892, and applying it to acts committed before the statute existed. Both measures were plainly contrary to principles Danish lawyers had spent a century defending, and both were passed by large majorities. Something over thirteen thousand people were convicted. Forty-six death sentences were carried out.

The distribution of the punishment is the part that has not aged well. Informers, collaborationist militiamen and volunteers for the occupier’s service were tried and convicted in numbers. Businessmen who had built for the occupier at great profit were very largely not, on the reasoning that a contract is not treason and that the state itself had encouraged the trade. Civil servants who had administered the cooperative arrangement continued in post, several to distinguished careers. The country punished the people who had served the occupier personally and left alone the people who had served it profitably, and Danish historians have described the result as a purge of the poor.

The women who had associated with occupation personnel were not prosecuted, there being no offence, and were dealt with by their neighbours. The Register records this because the country now does: the treatment of those women, and of the children, was for fifty years the part of the occupation nobody wrote down, and the acknowledgement when it came in the 2000s was official and late.

Iceland

Iceland had been a separate kingdom in personal union with Denmark since 1918, sharing a monarch and its foreign policy and nothing else. It left during the occupation, when Copenhagen could not object.

The Althing declared the union at an end and the republic established while the Danish government was under French administration and physically unable to answer. There was no negotiation, because there was nobody to negotiate with. Iceland argued that a personal union with a monarch who could not act was already dissolved in fact; Denmark, when it could speak again, argued that a treaty is not dissolved by its counterparty’s misfortune.

Neither has ever formally conceded the point, and both have behaved for eighty years as though the other had. King Christian sent a telegram of congratulation in 1944 that acknowledged the republic without accepting the manner of its founding, and it is still the most carefully drafted document in the Danish archives. The two states sit as equals in the Scandinavian Union, cooperate completely and have never signed anything settling how the union ended.

The Icelandic manuscripts are the residue. The great medieval codices of Norse literature had been carried to Copenhagen in the seventeenth century and held there ever since. Denmark returned them, over twenty-three years from 1971, by a decision of the Folketing and against the advice of its own university, and the returns are the reason the quarrel about 1944 has never needed settling. A country that has given back the Codex Regius is not usefully accused of resenting the republic.

Kalmar, the cold war and the Union

The Winter War on the Finnish frontier in the late 1940s produced the Treaty of Kalmar of 1949, and Denmark signed it as the member with the least to contribute and the most exposed position. Denmark also joined the Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the two commitments have never been in conflict because the Union’s defence provisions were drafted to sit underneath the alliance rather than beside it.

Denmark’s cold war was about the straits and about Greenland. The first made it the alliance’s cork in the Baltic bottle, with a defence plan that assumed the country’s job was to close the belts for as long as it could and be reinforced. The second made a Danish dependency the most important piece of Arctic real estate in the northern hemisphere, which is treated below and is the part of Danish twentieth-century policy that stands up worst.

The country’s standing position on nuclear weapons was adopted in 1957 and has never been amended: no nuclear weapons on Danish soil in peacetime. The words in peacetime were inserted deliberately and their meaning has never been tested in public.

Geography

Denmark proper is small, low and almost entirely made of ice-age debris. Nothing in it stands two hundred metres above the sea, the highest ground being a scatter of moraine hills in eastern Jutland that the country calls mountains with full knowledge of the joke. The land is the terminal deposit of glaciers that stopped here and melted, which is why the west of Jutland is sand and heath, the east is heavy clay and good corn ground, and the islands are the drowned tops of the same material.

No point in the country is more than about fifty kilometres from salt water. The coastline runs to more than seven thousand kilometres around a land area smaller than the Province of Maine, and the effect on the national character is the one usually claimed for it: Denmark has never had an interior to retreat into, and has never fought a war on the assumption that it could trade space for time.

The parts of the country

Jutland is the peninsula, two thirds of the land and rather less than half the people, running north from the German frontier to the Skaw where two seas meet visibly and dangerously. Its west coast is dune, lagoon and wind, its east is fjords that are not Norwegian fjords but shallow drowned valleys, and its centre was heath until the nineteenth century reclaimed it.

Funen and the smaller islands of the belt sit between the peninsula and Zealand, orchard country and manor country, and are crossed rather than visited.

Zealand holds the capital and a third of the population. It faces Sweden across the Øresund, a strait narrow enough that the two shores have argued about tolls, smuggling and now commuting for six hundred years.

Bornholm lies far to the east in the Baltic, granite rather than moraine, closer to Sweden and Poland than to the rest of the kingdom, and has spent its history being taken by whoever was winning.

The water

The Danish straits are the reason the country exists as a state at all. Everything moving between the Baltic and the North Sea passes the Great Belt, the Little Belt or the Øresund, and for four centuries Denmark charged it for the privilege. The Sound Dues were abolished by treaty in 1857 and the strategic fact was not. A power that holds the Danish islands closes the Baltic, which is why Denmark has been invaded by almost everyone who has wanted the Baltic and why it has spent the modern period trying to make the question uninteresting.

Wind is the other water. The North Sea coast is among the windiest inhabited places in Europe, and Denmark has built an industry on it that is treated below.

Environment and climate

Denmark’s land is almost entirely worked. It is among the most intensively farmed countries in the world, with something over sixty per cent of its surface under the plough, and the consequence is a nature that is small, fragmented and managed.

The nitrogen problem is the country’s environmental question and it is agricultural. Runoff from the most intensive pig and dairy production in Europe has produced oxygen depletion in the enclosed Danish waters severe enough to kill the sea floor across substantial areas in bad summers. The problem has been documented since the 1980s, addressed by successive action plans, and not solved, because solving it requires reducing the herd, and the herd is the cooperative economy that the countryside built after 1864.

Denmark is therefore in the position of being a world leader in clean electricity and a laggard in agricultural emissions at the same time, and its climate diplomacy abroad is conducted by a state whose own largest emitting sector is politically untouchable. The country adopted a binding climate act with a legislated target and a council to report on progress, and the council’s reports on agriculture have been received by every government with the same expression.

Government and politics

The Constitutional Act

The Act

The Constitutional Act of 1849 has been revised five times and never replaced, and the current text dates from 1953. Its most consequential revisions abolished the privileged upper house in 1915, abolished the second chamber altogether in 1953, admitted female succession to the throne in the same year, and permitted Denmark to transfer defined powers to international authorities by a majority of five sixths or by referendum.

Amendment is deliberately close to impossible. A bill must pass, a general election must intervene, the new parliament must pass it unchanged, and it must then carry a referendum at which the yes votes exceed forty per cent of the entire electorate. The 1953 revision is the only one to clear that bar in the modern period, and it did so on the same day it was used to alter the succession, which was popular.

The Folketing

One hundred and seventy-nine members, of whom a hundred and seventy-five are returned in Denmark, two in the Faroes and two in Greenland. Elections use proportional representation with a two per cent threshold and a system of supplementary seats that corrects the constituency results almost exactly to the national vote, so that the chamber’s composition matches the ballot more closely than in any other Nordic parliament.

The consequence is that no Danish party has held a Folketing majority alone since 1901. Government is by coalition or by minority, minority government is the ordinary case rather than the crisis, and Danish ministries survive by negotiating each budget and most substantial bills with parties outside the government. Danish political vocabulary has a word for the resulting settlements, forlig, and a convention that a party which joins one does not leave it when it changes side of the chamber.

Negative parliamentarism

A Danish government does not require a vote of confidence to take office. It requires only that no majority exists against it, which is the doctrine of negative parliamentarism and the reason minority ministries are stable here and fragile elsewhere. The Speaker conducts the formation, the monarch appoints when the formation is complete, and the Crown’s role is to be told.

The Crown

The House of Glücksburg

The House of Glücksburg has reigned since 1863, when Christian IX succeeded under the London Protocol as the compromise candidate acceptable to the powers and to nobody in particular. His accession was contested in the duchies and was among the proximate causes of 1864, so the present dynasty arrived with the disaster attached to it and spent a century living that down.

Frederik X has reigned since 2024. He succeeded on the abdication of his mother Margrethe II, who had reigned for fifty-two years and who announced her decision in a New Year address without having told her government.

Denmark had no tradition of abdication. No Danish monarch had voluntarily surrendered the throne in something close to nine hundred years, and there was no constitutional machinery for it, the Act contemplating only death. The Folketing passed the necessary instrument in a fortnight, the succession took effect on the anniversary of the accession, and the country treated the whole thing as a sensible administrative arrangement, which is the most Danish available response.

The precedent travelled. When Grand Duchess Amalie of Wisconsin abdicated in 2028, the argument that a reigning monarch may lawfully judge when to stop was made in the Landtag with the Danish case cited, and the Danish foreign ministry declined to comment on it with visible satisfaction.

What the Crown does

Very little, and the Danes prefer it that way. The monarch signs, opens the Folketing, receives ministers, holds the Council of State and represents the country abroad. There is no reserve power in practice and the last attempt to use one destroyed a ministry, when Christian X dismissed the Zahle government in 1920 over the Schleswig question and provoked a constitutional crisis that ended with the Crown accepting, in writing, that it would not do so again.

The Nordic crowns are described in the Union’s own account as plain bicycle monarchies, and Denmark’s is the plainest. The court is small, the security is light, and the deliberate contrast with the ceremonial of the United Kingdom of America is understood on both sides and enjoyed by both.

Parties and elections

Danish politics runs on a bloc system that is looser than it looks. The Social Democrats have been the largest party for almost a century and have governed for most of it. The Liberals, descended from the smallholders’ party and still called Venstre, meaning left, for reasons that stopped applying in the 1890s, are the principal party of the centre-right. Between and around them sit a social-liberal party that has decided most governments by choosing which side to sit on, a conservative party, a green left, a hard left, and a nationalist right that entered the mainstream in the 1990s and has shaped immigration policy from outside government more effectively than most parties do from inside it.

The distinctive feature is the settlement. Large policy questions are removed from the electoral cycle by cross-party agreements binding their signatories for a defined period, and the parties keep them across changes of government. Defence, energy, pensions and the arrangements of the Realm have all been governed this way for decades. The practice makes Danish policy unusually stable and Danish elections unusually low in consequence, and critics of it, who are not few, say that a country which agrees everything in advance has arranged not to be able to change its mind.

Immigration is the exception that proves it. Denmark’s immigration and citizenship rules are the most restrictive in the Nordic countries and among the most restrictive in Europe, they were tightened by governments of both blocs, and they are the one field where the settlement convention has repeatedly broken down and been rebuilt on harder terms. The Register notes without comment that the country most admired for its handling of a minority abroad is among the least accommodating in Europe to minorities arriving at home, and that Danish public debate does not often place the two facts on the same page.

Immigration and citizenship

About a seventh of the population has a foreign background, the largest groups being Turkish, Polish, Syrian, Iraqi, Somali and Ukrainian, and the arrival of most of them is recent enough to be within adult memory.

Danish policy is the most restrictive in the north and is a settled cross-party position rather than a contested one. Permanent residence requires years of employment, language qualification and a clean record; citizenship requires a test on Danish history and culture that a substantial minority of Danes cannot pass; family reunification rules are tight; and a policy of dispersing residents of designated neighbourhoods, which the statute for some years defined by the proportion of residents of non-western origin, has been the subject of litigation and of considerable international criticism.

The Register sets out the two facts the Danish debate keeps apart. Denmark’s minority settlement in Schleswig is the most generous arrangement of its kind in Europe and is offered to the world as a model. Denmark’s arrangements for minorities inside its own borders are among the least generous in Europe and are defended as a necessity. The distinction the Danish state draws between them is that the Schleswig minority is indigenous, ancient and reciprocal, and the distinction is real. Whether it accounts for the whole of the difference is the question the country is least willing to have asked of it, and it is asked most often by the Danish minority’s own institutions in Flensburg, which is why it stings.

The Realm

Greenland

The size of the thing

Greenland is fifty times the area of Denmark proper and holds about fifty-six thousand people, the great majority of them Kalaallit, an Inuit people whose ancestors reached the island from the Arctic of New Albion and who have lived there continuously for some eight hundred years. It is the largest island in the world, it is four fifths ice, and it has been attached to the Danish Crown since the Norwegian dependencies came with the composite monarchy.

It holds self-government. The Inatsisartut in Nuuk legislates for almost every domestic field, the Naalakkersuisut governs, Greenlandic is the sole official language, and the Self-Government Act recognises the Greenlandic people as a people under international law with the right to independence whenever they choose it by referendum. Copenhagen retains the constitution, citizenship, the currency, the supreme court, foreign affairs and defence, and pays an annual block grant that is a little under half of Greenland’s public revenue.

What the arrangement is built on

The record before self-government does not bear examination, and the Register states it rather than manages it.

Greenland was a closed colony until 1953, administered as a trading monopoly by a Danish state company that controlled prices, movement, employment and supply. Danes could not enter without permission and Greenlanders could not leave. The stated purpose was protective and the effect was proprietary.

In 1953 the colony was abolished by amending the Danish constitution to make Greenland a county, which conferred citizenship and removed the island from the League’s list of non-self-governing territories without asking Greenlanders about either. The consultation that a decolonising power would have been required to run was avoided by declaring that there was nothing to decolonise.

The modernisation that followed was administered from Copenhagen on a theory. Scattered settlements were held to be uneconomic, and the population was concentrated into a small number of towns by closing services in the places people already lived. Families were moved. Hunting economies were ended by the relocation rather than by choice. The largest single case, the clearance of a northern settlement in 1953 to make room for an American air base, was carried out at four days’ notice and was found unlawful by a Danish court forty-six years later, which awarded compensation that the community regards as an accounting entry.

Children were taken to Denmark for schooling in the 1950s to be returned as a Danish-speaking elite, and returned unable to speak to their families. Tuberculosis campaigns were run with genuine medical benefit and without consent. A programme of involuntary contraception was applied to Greenlandic women and girls from the mid-1960s into the 1970s, in numbers amounting to a substantial proportion of the fertile female population, and it was not disclosed, investigated or apologised for until this century.

Where it stands

Successive Danish governments have apologised, in stages, for parts of this. The apologies have been criticised in Greenland for their sequencing, which has generally been that an apology follows a documentary rather than an inquiry. A joint historical commission reported in the 2020s and its findings are not disputed on the facts. What is disputed is what follows from them.

The independence question is live and is not urgent. Every Greenlandic party supports independence in principle; none proposes it for a date, because the block grant is a little under half of public revenue and no substitute exists. Mineral and hydrocarbon wealth is the assumed substitute and has been assumed for fifty years. Rare earths, uranium and offshore oil have each in turn been the thing that would make independence affordable, and each has been delayed by price, by environmental objection or by the practical difficulty of working an Arctic coast.

The Register does not predict the outcome. It records that Greenland can leave whenever it votes to, that it has not voted to, and that Denmark’s position is that the choice is entirely Greenland’s while its finance ministry publishes the figures that make the choice what it is.

The Faroe Islands

Eighteen islands in the North Atlantic, some fifty-four thousand people, and home rule since 1948 on terms that predate Greenland’s and are in several respects broader. The Løgting legislates, the Landsstýri governs, Faroese is the principal language and the Faroes are not part of the European Concert’s arrangements even though Denmark is, having negotiated an exemption to protect the fisheries that are the whole of the economy.

The Faroese constitutional position is unusual and is unusual on purpose. The islands describe themselves as a nation within the Realm rather than a part of Denmark, they fly their own flag by Danish statute, they run their own trade policy, and their two members of the Folketing sit in a parliament that legislates for them in a diminishing list of fields. A draft constitution passed the Løgting in 2018 and was met by Copenhagen with the observation that a constituent part of the Realm cannot adopt a constitution, an objection the Faroes noted and did not act on.

The whale drive, the grindadráp, is the Faroese practice that reaches the outside world. It is a communal non-commercial hunt of pilot whales, regulated, ancient and legal, and it produces more foreign correspondence to the Danish government than any other subject. Denmark’s position is that it is a Faroese matter under home rule. The Faroes’ position is that it is nobody else’s.

The former colonial empire

Denmark was a colonial power for three hundred years, on a small scale and with a full share of the practices, and the Register sets the record out because Danish public memory has been slow to.

The possessions

The Danish East India Company took Tranquebar on the Coromandel coast in 1620 and held it and a scatter of Bengal factories until 1845, when they were sold to Britain. The Danish Gold Coast, a chain of forts on the West African shore centred on Christiansborg at Osu, was held from the 1650s until 1850 and sold to Britain likewise. The Danish West Indies, the islands of St Thomas, St John and St Croix, were taken between 1666 and 1733 and held until the twentieth century.

The three together formed a triangle, and it worked in the ordinary way. Goods went south to the Gold Coast, enslaved people went west to the islands, and sugar and rum came north to Copenhagen, where the refineries, the warehouses and the merchant houses of the harbour were built on the proceeds. The Danish share of the Atlantic trade was small in the aggregate and very large in proportion to Denmark. Something in the order of a hundred thousand people were carried in Danish ships.

Abolition, and what abolition meant

Denmark was the first European state to prohibit the transatlantic slave trade, by an ordinance of 1792 taking effect in 1803, and the fact is the first thing Danish accounts have historically reported about the whole subject.

The ordinance prohibited the trade and not slavery. It contained a ten-year delay, and the delay was used: Danish planters imported at an accelerated rate throughout it, deliberately and with the government’s knowledge, in order to build a population that would reproduce itself once importation stopped. The measure was in substance a stock-building programme with a humanitarian preamble, and the enslaved population of the Danish islands was larger in 1803 than in 1792.

Slavery itself continued for a further forty-five years. It ended in 1848 when the enslaved population of St Croix assembled in numbers that could not be dispersed and the governor-general emancipated them on his own authority, without instructions, to avoid a rising. He was reprimanded and the emancipation stood. Denmark did not abolish slavery in its islands. Its islands abolished it and Denmark accepted the fact, which is a sentence that appears in Danish school syllabuses only recently.

What replaced it was a labour regime of annual contracts, fixed wages and restricted movement that the freed population regarded as slavery under another name and said so. It produced the Fireburn of 1878, a labour revolt on St Croix led substantially by women, which burned a large part of the plantation infrastructure and the town of Frederiksted and was suppressed with considerable loss of life. Its leaders are national figures in the islands and were unknown in Denmark until the last twenty years.

The sale

Denmark tried to sell the islands from the 1860s onward and failed twice, once in 1870, when the treaty of 1867 lapsed unratified at the American end, and once in 1902, when the Danish upper house would not ratify. The sale was completed early in the twentieth century after a referendum among Danish voters and none among the islanders, whose views were not solicited on either occasion. The proceeds went into the Danish treasury.

The islands were sold to the United Kingdom of America in 1917 and remain its Crown territory, the American Virgin Islands, and the Danish legal residue in their property law survives, since land titles registered under Danish ordinance did not cease to exist when the flag changed.

The reckoning that has not happened

Denmark marked the centenary of the sale with an official apology for the sale and not for the slavery, which was noticed. A Danish government has expressed regret for the slave trade; none has apologised for slavery, the distinction being maintained on legal advice about liability that successive governments have declined to publish.

The statue of a Fireburn leader erected in Copenhagen harbour in 2018, the country’s first public monument to a Black woman and its first to anyone who rebelled against it, was privately commissioned. The state contributed nothing and has not objected, which is the exact posture Denmark has held on the subject for a century.

Law and administration

The courts and the Ombudsman

Danish law is a Nordic civil-law system without a code, built from statute, precedent and preparatory works, and it is unusually short. Statutes are drafted to be read by the people they bind, the preparatory documents are published and are treated by the courts as authoritative, and a Danish act on a subject is characteristically a third the length of a German one.

There is no constitutional court and judicial review is used sparingly. The Supreme Court has held statutes unconstitutional a very small number of times in a hundred and seventy years, and the restraint is doctrinal rather than accidental: the Danish position is that a democratically enacted statute is presumed lawful and that the remedy for a bad law is an election.

The Ombudsman, created in 1955, is the institution Denmark has exported second most successfully after the Schleswig settlement. It investigates the administration on complaint or on its own initiative, publishes, and has no power to compel anything, which has not prevented it from being obeyed almost without exception.

Local government was reorganised in 2007 from 271 municipalities and 14 counties into 98 municipalities and 5 regions. The municipalities run schools, care, planning and most of what a citizen meets; the regions run the hospitals and very little else and are widely expected not to survive another reorganisation.

Foreign relations

The joint settlement in Schleswig

What was made instead of a border change

The Danish government’s position after 1919 was that if the frontier could not move, the frontier should stop mattering. What it negotiated with Berlin over the following decade, and completed in stages down to the 1950s, is the arrangement the German Empire article describes as a province-wide binational settlement negotiated with Denmark and administered jointly.

Its provisions are unremarkable individually and unusual together. Danish-language schools in the northern districts are publicly funded on the same terms as German ones and are run by a Danish school association. Danish congregations hold their churches. Danish newspapers publish. The Danish minority’s political party sits in the provincial diet and is exempt from the electoral threshold, so that it is represented whenever it has the votes for a seat rather than whenever it has the votes for a percentage. A standing joint commission of Danish and German officials administers the arrangement and meets in Flensburg. Its Danish members are appointed by Copenhagen and its German members by Kiel and Berlin, and its decisions bind both.

The mirror provisions apply to the German minority north of the frontier, in Denmark, on the same terms. The symmetry is the whole of the design. Neither government can improve its own minority’s position without improving the other’s, and neither can weaken the other’s without weakening its own.

Why it is Denmark’s proudest export

The settlement is cited at the League of Nations, in the European Concert, and by every state in Europe with a minority on the wrong side of a line. Denmark sends officials to explain it, hosts study delegations at Flensburg, and has attached the model to more than one peace settlement it had no other stake in. It is the only thing a country of six million exports that the great powers actually want, and Danish diplomacy has built a reputation on it out of all proportion to Danish weight.

And what it cost

The settlement protects the Danish minority as a minority, permanently, and it is the instrument that makes recovering them unnecessary. A generation of Danish nationalists understood that at the time and said so. The arrangement’s success removes the grievance that would otherwise have kept the claim alive, and a claim that is not kept alive lapses.

Denmark did not abandon the Danes of Schleswig. It arranged their affairs so well that nobody now proposes to reunite them with the kingdom, including, for the most part, themselves. Polling in the Danish districts has shown a majority content with the settlement and against any frontier change for six decades, and the Danish party in the provincial diet does not campaign for one. Whether that is the settlement working or the settlement having worked too well is a question Danish politics raises about once a generation and does not answer.

The Scandinavian Union

Denmark is the smallest mainland member, the most southerly, the one with a land frontier on a great power and the one that joined with the least to offer. Its position inside the Scandinavian Union reflects all four facts.

It is the Union’s advocate of looseness. Danish governments have consistently preferred cooperation to institution, opposed a common currency, resisted transfers of competence and argued for the Union as a market and a defence pact rather than a state in embryo. The Danish position has generally prevailed, which is why the Union has five currencies and no parliament.

And Denmark carries a private asterisk on the founding story. The Union’s own account holds that the Second Great War welded the five and that the shared ordeal did what no treaty had. Denmark’s ordeal was the shortest, the mildest and the least costly, and it was mild because Denmark surrendered on the first morning while Norway fought. Norwegian and Danish historians say this to each other at conferences and nobody says it at ministerial councils, and the asymmetry sits under the Nordic relationship like a stone under a carpet. It has never produced a quarrel and it has never gone away.

The United Kingdom of America

The two kingdoms have almost nothing in common constitutionally and get on unusually well.

Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United Kingdom of America in 1917 after decades of trying, having found the islands unprofitable since the end of the sugar economy and having twice failed to complete a sale on terms its own parliament would accept. The transfer removed the last Danish possession in the Americas and left a Danish legal residue in the islands’ property law that occupies a small number of American and Danish lawyers to this day. The islands are still the Realm’s, held as a Crown territory outside its polities, the American Virgin Islands.

Danish emigration to America was proportionally among the heaviest in Europe, running through the second half of the nineteenth century and settling most densely in the upper midwest, where the Danish-descended population of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa built churches, folk schools and cooperative creameries on the model of the ones at home. The cooperative creamery in particular was carried to the American midwest by Danes and Swedes together and is the reason a Danish agricultural historian in Iowa feels at home in the archives.

The Realm’s Crown and the Danish Crown are on cordial and slightly puzzled terms. The Danish court regards the American ceremonial as excessive and the American court regards the Danish as austere, both are correct, and the state visits are conducted with the elaborate mutual courtesy of two institutions that have decided not to discuss it.

Defence

Forces and posture

Denmark maintains small professional forces on the assumption that they will fight as part of somebody else’s plan. Its defence policy is settled by cross-party agreement, its planning is Nordic and Atlantic simultaneously, and its strategic value is entirely positional: it holds the straits, and Greenland holds the northern approaches.

Danish foreign policy has two modes. The first is activist and has sent Danish forces on expeditions well outside the country’s interests, on the reasoning that a small state buys standing with allies by turning up. The second is the mediating tradition that produced the Schleswig settlement, and it has made Denmark a persistent supplier of good offices, rapporteurs, commission chairs and formulas of words.

The two are not always compatible. A country that markets itself as the author of the best minority settlement in Europe and also as a reliable provider of troops has occasionally been asked which it is, and its usual answer, that a small country must be useful in more than one way, satisfies nobody entirely.

Economy

Denmark is a small, open, high-cost, high-productivity economy that exports about half of what it makes and has no significant natural resource except wind.

Flexicurity

The Danish labour model is the one the country is asked about. Employers may dismiss almost at will; the unemployed receive generous and lengthy benefit; and an active labour market policy of training and placement is attached to the benefit as a condition. The three parts are called flexicurity and were assembled piecemeal rather than designed. The model rests on collective agreement rather than statute, since Denmark has no statutory minimum wage and does not want one, wages being set by bargaining between organisations that cover about two thirds of the workforce.

It is admired abroad and has been copied nowhere successfully, because the copying tends to take the flexibility and leave the security.

What the country sells

Pharmaceuticals are now the largest single export and the largest company in the Nordic countries by value is Danish. Shipping is the second, and a Danish firm operates one of the world’s largest container fleets from an office in Copenhagen, which gives a country of six million a position in world logistics that periodically surprises the countries whose goods it carries.

Wind is the third and is the one Denmark made deliberately. The industry began with rural engineering firms and cooperative ownership in the 1970s, was sustained by policy through two decades when it was uneconomic, and now supplies turbines and offshore construction to the world. About half of Danish electricity comes from wind on an annual average and considerably more than half on a good day, and the country exports the surplus to Norwegian and Swedish hydro storage and buys it back when the wind drops, which is an arrangement that only works inside the Union.

Food remains substantial and is still cooperative in structure, the dairy and bacon societies of the 1880s having merged their way into multinational companies that are still formally owned by farmers.

The krone

Denmark keeps its own currency and has never seriously proposed abandoning it. The krone is pegged narrowly to the Concert’s exchange-rate mechanism, anchored on the German mark, without membership of it, which delivers most of the stability and none of the say, and the Nationalbank’s entire monetary policy consists of defending the peg. Danish economists have described the arrangement as a currency union in which Denmark has no vote, and Danish voters have twice declined to change it, in 2000 and in 2015, when they were asked to join the old Mitteleuropa arrangement that the Concert took over.

Transport

Denmark is a country of bridges, and building them has been the national infrastructure project for a century. The Little Belt was bridged in 1935, the Great Belt in 1997 after eighty years of argument, and the Øresund in 2000. A fixed link under the Fehmarn Belt to Germany has been under construction for years and will, when it opens, put Copenhagen within a few hours of Hamburg and complete the land route from Scandinavia into the Empire.

The rail network is dense, the ferry network that the bridges replaced survives on the routes they did not reach, and Copenhagen’s airport is the Nordic hub, a position it holds partly by geography and partly because the Scandinavian carrier is jointly owned by three governments and has to be based somewhere.

Demographics and society

Language

Danish is spoken by essentially the whole population and is the hardest of the mainland Scandinavian languages to hear, having reduced its consonants and swallowed its endings while its spelling stood still. Danes read Swedish and Norwegian easily and understand spoken Norwegian better than spoken Swedish, and Swedes and Norwegians find spoken Danish harder than either. The Union’s institutions work in the three languages without interpretation, which functions in writing and requires patience in committee.

Faroese and Greenlandic are official in their own parts of the Realm, and Greenlandic is the only Inuit language anywhere that is the sole official language of a jurisdiction. German is a protected minority language in south Jutland under the mirror provisions of the joint settlement, and Danish holds the same status across the frontier.

Religion

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark is established, is funded partly by a church tax paid by its members, and has the monarch as its head. About three quarters of Danes belong to it. Substantially fewer believe its doctrines and very few attend, and the institution is best understood as a civil registry with a spire: it conducts the baptisms, confirmations, marriages and funerals of a population that does not otherwise think about it.

Danish religious politics is therefore not about belief but about the establishment itself. Proposals to disestablish are made periodically by parties of both blocs and defeated by the same coalition of the devout and the indifferent, the latter voting to keep a church they do not attend because the alternative would require a decision.

Egalitarianism and its critics

The Danish social ideal is a levelling one, summarised for eighty years by a novelist’s satirical list of small-town rules known as the Jante Law, whose first article is that you are not to think you are anything special. Danes quote it constantly, ironically, and with a good deal of accuracy.

The criticism made of it is that a society organised around not standing out is hard to enter. Denmark scores at the top of international measures of trust, satisfaction and equality among Danes, and considerably less well on the integration of people who arrive. Both facts are documented, they are related, and the relation is the central unresolved question of Danish domestic politics.

Welfare, health and education

The Danish welfare state is universal, tax-financed and municipal in delivery, and it is expensive. Total taxation is among the highest in the world as a share of the economy, the income tax is steep and begins early, and value added tax is a flat twenty-five per cent with almost no exemptions, which is regressive and is defended on the ground that the spending is not.

Health care is free at the point of use and organised by the five regions, with a general practitioner acting as gatekeeper. Waiting times are the standing political complaint and the treatment guarantee that answers them is the standing political promise.

Education is free through university and students are paid a grant to attend, the SU, which is unusual internationally and is periodically attacked at home as a subsidy to the children of the comfortable. The folk high schools survive as a live sector rather than a heritage one, still residential, still non-examined, and still attended by about ten thousand people a year who are mostly between eighteen and twenty-five and are mostly deciding what to do.

The distinctive institution is the free school. Danish parents have a constitutional right to educate their children outside the state system and a statutory right to public money for doing it, on the Grundtvigian principle that the state may require education and may not require its own. About a sixth of Danish children attend schools that are privately run and publicly funded, and the arrangement has been in place since 1855.

Cities

Copenhagen

Copenhagen holds about a third of the country’s people in its metropolitan area and everything else in its capital. The name means merchants’ harbour, which is what it was, and the city was fortified, burned, bombarded by the British twice and rebuilt each time on the same street plan.

It is the seat of the Folketing, the court, the Nationalbank, the university and the head offices of most of what Denmark sells. It is also, by a margin that its neighbours find tiresome, the most successful piece of urban policy in the Nordic countries: a finger plan adopted in 1947 directed growth along five suburban rail corridors and kept green wedges between them, and it has been substantially adhered to for eighty years, which is rarer than the plan itself.

The bicycle is the thing visitors report. Something close to half of journeys to work and education in the city are made by bicycle, on a network built continuously since the 1970s, and the policy that produced it was not environmental in origin but a response to the oil crises and to a citizens’ campaign about children being killed by cars. Copenhagen exports the consultancy as it exports the Schleswig settlement, and for the same reason: a small country’s influence is in its methods.

The Øresund bridge and tunnel to Malmö, opened in 2000, made the Danish capital and the third city of Sweden into one labour market across an international frontier, which the Union’s passport and market arrangements had made legally simple and the water had kept practically impossible.

Elsewhere

Aarhus, on the east coast of Jutland, is the second city, the second university, and the counterweight that keeps Denmark from being a city-state with a hinterland. Its relationship with Copenhagen is the ordinary one of a national second city and is conducted almost entirely in jokes.

Odense on Funen is the third, an old cathedral and market town that industrialised, deindustrialised with the closing of its shipyard, and rebuilt around robotics and the university.

Aalborg in the north was cement, tobacco and heavy industry and is now energy and engineering. Esbjerg on the North Sea coast did not exist before 1868, was built as a port when the loss of the duchies cut Denmark off from its Elbe outlets, and is now the base of the offshore wind industry. Esbjerg exists because of 1864, which is the most direct economic consequence of the defeat still visible on the map.

Culture and daily life

Culture

Danish cultural production is disproportionate to Danish size and is characteristically small in scale and exact in execution.

Design is the export. The mid-century furniture, silver, ceramics and lighting that carried the phrase Danish modern were made by a small number of workshops applying craft training to industrial production, and the tradition survives in a national preference for objects that are quiet, expensive and made to last.

Literature runs from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which are read abroad as children’s stories and at home as something considerably darker, through Kierkegaard, whose Either Or and Fear and Trembling founded a philosophical tradition the Danes are slightly embarrassed to be responsible for, to Karen Blixen and a strong contemporary novel.

Film is the field where a country of six million has been conspicuous out of all proportion, having produced first the silent-era Nordisk company, then Dreyer, and latterly a movement whose manifesto of self-imposed restrictions was half a serious argument about the corruption of technique and half a very good joke that the international press took entirely straight. Danish television drama of the 2000s and after was watched across Europe subtitled, which had not happened to a small language before.

Food was industrial for a century and became serious in about 2004, when a Copenhagen restaurant argued that a northern cuisine could be built from northern ingredients and was believed. The consequence for ordinary Danish eating has been real and is not to be overstated: the country still eats a great deal of rye bread, pork and pickled herring, and is right to.

Media

Denmark has a public broadcaster funded from general taxation since the licence fee was abolished, a commercial competitor part-owned by the state, and a national press of four serious papers that between them cover a country the size of a mid-range American polity with a seriousness that surprises visitors.

Press freedom is close to absolute and defamation law is weak, and the country has twice been the centre of an international controversy about publication that it did not seek and handled by insisting on the principle rather than the wisdom. The Danish position, stated by governments of both blocs, is that the state does not apologise for what a newspaper prints because the state has no standing to.

The press is also, by common consent at home, insular. Foreign coverage in Danish media is thin outside the Nordic countries and the Empire, and the standing joke that the world map in a Danish newsroom ends at Hamburg is repeated most often by Danish journalists.

Sport

Danish sport is football and handball, and the country is disproportionately good at both. The national football side won a European championship in 1992 having failed to qualify and been called up at ten days’ notice when another country was excluded, which is the single most beloved event in modern Danish public life and is invoked as a national metaphor at every opportunity. Handball is the winter game and the women’s and men’s sides have both been world champions.

The sailing tradition is old and the Olympic record in small boats is out of all proportion to the population, which follows from a country where nowhere is fifty kilometres from the water.

Symbols

The flag

The Dannebrog is a white Nordic cross on a red field, the cross offset toward the hoist, in the proportion 28 to 37. It is the oldest continuously used national flag in the world, and Denmark’s use of it is the origin of the cross device that every other Nordic flag now carries.

The national legend holds that it fell from the sky during a battle in Estonia in 1219 at the moment the Danish cause was lost, and that the army rallied and won. The story is not history and the Danes are entirely aware of it, which has not affected the flag’s standing at all: it is flown domestically at a rate that visitors find remarkable, on birthdays, on garden flagpoles and on cakes, and its everyday use is closer to a household object than to a state emblem.

The arms

The royal arms show three pale blue lions passant among nine red hearts, properly water-lily leaves, on gold. The national arms are the same shield without the supporters and crest. The Order of the Elephant is the senior order of chivalry and is among the oldest in Europe.

The anthem and the observances

Denmark keeps two anthems, which is unusual and is not a redundancy. Der er et yndigt land is the national anthem and is sung at civil and sporting occasions. Kong Christian stod ved højen mast is the royal anthem and is played when the monarch is present, so that a state occasion attended by the sovereign uses both.

Constitution Day, 5 June, is the national day, and commemorates the surrender of absolutism in 1849 rather than any victory, foundation or independence. It is a half-holiday rather than a full one, marked by outdoor political meetings at which every party speaks, which is the form it has taken since the 1850s.

Assessment

Denmark is the country that lost every argument about territory and won the argument about people, and it is not certain that it chose to.

The losses are the spine of the history. Skåne in the seventeenth century, Norway in 1814, Schleswig and Holstein in 1864, the West Indies by sale, Iceland during an occupation it could not answer, and Greenland and the Faroes by degrees and by their own choice whenever they take it. A kingdom that once ran the north from Copenhagen now administers a peninsula, some islands and a block grant.

Against that, the accommodations. The Schleswig settlement is the best minority arrangement in Europe and Denmark wrote it with the state that beat it. The cooperative economy converted a defeat into a farming system that outlasted the empires that inflicted it. The constitutional order has run without a break since 1849, through an occupation, and is the oldest working constitution in the north. The country is rich, equal, trusted and pleasant, and it manages all of that on wind, pigs, insulin and freight.

The question the Register leaves open is which of those two lists caused the other. The Danish account is that the country learned, painfully and early, that a small state’s power is in arrangements rather than in ground, and that everything good about modern Denmark follows from having learned it in 1864 rather than in 1940 like everybody else. The uncomfortable account, which Danish historians have been putting since the 1970s and which the country hears politely, is that a nation which concludes it cannot fight will find that conclusion available every time, and that the line from Dybbøl to the surrender of 1940 to the cooperative arrangement to the four-year profit on feeding an occupier is a single line and not a series of separate prudences.

Both accounts are supported by the record. Denmark’s judgement about its own weakness has been correct every time it has been tested, which is precisely what makes the second account difficult to dismiss and impossible to prove.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Scandinavian Union, the confederation of the five Nordic nations and the treaty that binds them
• Kingdom of Sweden, the largest member and the seat of the Union’s institutions
• German Empire, which holds Schleswig-Holstein and administers the joint settlement with Copenhagen
• Kingdom of Prussia, whose war of 1864 took the duchies
• West Indies Federation, which includes the islands Denmark sold
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, the alliance Denmark joined alongside the Union