How a Baltic power learned to be a small country

Where the kingdom came from

The unified Kingdom of Denmark emerged in the eighth century AD as a maritime power, in the middle of a long struggle for control of the Baltic Sea. Its history was shaped throughout by its position between the North and Baltic seas and between Sweden and Germany, which brought economic benefits and repeated conflict in equal measure.

The Viking period is the part the country is known for internationally and it is a smaller share of the story than the reputation suggests. What matters more for what followed is that the same seafaring capacity, once the raiding stopped, became a trading and taxing position: whoever controlled the straits controlled the traffic between the Baltic and the rest of Europe.

The conversion to Christianity in the tenth century is recorded in the country's own founding document, the runic stones and mounds at Jelling commissioned by a king, which state the claim in stone in a way very few European states can match: a monarch naming himself, his parents, his kingdom and his religion in a single inscription.

Long disputes followed with Sweden over the provinces of Skåneland and with Germany over Schleswig, a Danish fief. Those two disputes, one to the east and one to the south, run through the next eight hundred years and account for most of the territory Denmark eventually lost, one province at a time and almost always after a war it had started.

What the union was and why it broke

In 1397 Denmark formed the Kalmar Union with Norway and Sweden, bringing the three Scandinavian crowns under a single monarch. For a period, one ruler governed a territory stretching from Greenland to Finland, which is the largest political unit northern Europe has produced, and it lasted a century and a quarter.

The union persisted until Sweden's secession in 1523. What remained was the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway, still a substantial power holding both sides of the entrance to the Baltic, the North Atlantic islands and, later, colonies further afield.

The seventeenth century ended that position. Denmark and Norway endured a series of wars that resulted in territorial losses, chiefly to Sweden, and the eastern provinces went permanently. A country that had expected to dominate the Baltic found itself contesting it and then losing.

The Sound Toll is the mechanism that made the position pay while it lasted. Danish warships collected it from merchants, mainly Dutch, passing through the straits, in exchange for protection, and Nordic rulers before the mid-seventeenth century welcomed Dutch traders for what they brought. Improvements in shipping technology eventually allowed traders to sail around Jutland and into the Baltic directly, which removed part of the advantage without anyone fighting over it. A monopoly that depends on geography lasts exactly as long as the technology that makes the geography matter.

How the country became a democracy

A liberal and national movement gained momentum in the 1830s, and after the European revolutions of 1848 Denmark became a constitutional monarchy peacefully on 5 June 1849. A new constitution established a two-chamber parliament, and the transition from absolute to constitutional rule happened without a revolution of its own.

The press was part of the change and part of its effect. The first liberal newspaper appeared in 1834, emphasising news content over opinion, the newspapers championed the revolution of 1848, and the constitution of 1849 liberated the Danish press, after which newspapers proliferated.

That is the sequence a great deal of Danish institutional history follows: pressure builds, a concession is made before it becomes a crisis, and the concession is written down and then treated as permanent by everyone including the people who opposed it. The same pattern produced the extension of the franchise, the recognition of trade unions and the early welfare legislation.

The unresolved question at the moment of that settlement was territorial. Much debate took place over how to handle Schleswig-Holstein, with National Liberals demanding permanent ties between Schleswig and Denmark while accepting that Holstein could do as it pleased, and international events overtook the domestic argument.

What losing Schleswig did

Denmark faced war against both Prussia and Austria over the duchies, and it lost. The defeat removed a substantial share of the kingdom's territory and population at a stroke, and it ended any remaining idea that Denmark was a European power.

What followed was a turn inward on a national scale. The country began industrialising in the middle of the nineteenth century and became a major agricultural exporter, building cooperative dairies, slaughterhouses and purchasing organisations that let small farmers reach the scale of large ones without consolidating the land.

Education was the other half of it. Folk high schools spread across the countryside, giving a rural population the training to run those cooperatives and a shared civic formation that fed directly into the political culture. They taught history, song and citizenship rather than trades, on the argument that people who understood their own country would organise it better.

Social and labour market reforms in the early twentieth century then formed the basis of the present welfare state model and advanced mixed economy. The Denmark that exists now was designed in the decades after a military defeat, by a country that had decided to stop competing for territory and to organise what it had instead.

What the wars did

Denmark remained neutral during the First World War, and the conflict affected the country considerably regardless. An economy heavily based on exports was badly disrupted by unrestricted German submarine warfare, and Denmark had to sell to Germany what it could no longer ship overseas, with widespread war profiteering following.

In 1939 Hitler offered non-aggression pacts to the Scandinavian nations. Sweden and Norway refused and Denmark readily accepted, and when war began that autumn Copenhagen declared neutrality. Germany invaded and occupied Denmark on 9 April 1940 anyway, in order to secure communications for its invasion of Norway.

The occupation took an unusually light form for several years, and the reason is agricultural. Roughly 10% of the German army's food supply depended on Danish agriculture, which gave the occupier an interest in a functioning country and the Danish authorities a degree of room that occupied populations elsewhere did not have. Government, parliament, police and courts continued to operate under German oversight for three years.

That arrangement ended as the war turned, and the period remains a difficult one in Danish public memory, because cooperation, resistance and the rescue of the Danish Jewish population all belong to the same few years and are not easily told as a single story, which is why Danish accounts of the war have been rewritten more than once.

What the empire was and where it went

Denmark held colonies outside Europe for around three centuries, in the Caribbean, on the Indian coast and on the Gold Coast of west Africa, and it participated in the Atlantic slave trade before abolishing its own involvement in it.

The scale was small by British, French or Dutch standards and the profits were not. Sugar from the Caribbean possessions and the trade that supplied the labour for it produced wealth that financed building in Copenhagen, and the merchant companies that ran it were chartered by the crown and financed by the same families who financed everything else in the city.

The disposals were commercial rather than forced. The Indian and African holdings were sold in the nineteenth century and the Caribbean islands were sold in the twentieth, so Denmark's colonial empire ended by transaction rather than by independence movement, which is a different exit from the one most European powers made and a quieter one.

That difference shaped how the period was remembered, or not remembered. A colonial history that ended in a sale rather than a war leaves no obvious date to mark and no confrontation to process, and public reckoning with it in Denmark has been late and is recent. The North Atlantic remains the part of the old realm that stayed, and its status is negotiated rather than settled, which keeps the question of what the realm is open rather than historical.

What held through all of it

Reading the sequence in one go, the striking thing is how much continuity sits under the losses. The same royal house has occupied the throne through most of it, the constitution of 1849 has been interpreted rather than replaced, and the institutional method visible in 1834 and 1849 is the one still visible in the way modern Danish reforms are agreed across parties before they are passed.

The territorial story and the institutional story run in opposite directions. Denmark got steadily smaller from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, and its institutions got steadily broader, more capable and more trusted over the same period.

That is not a coincidence. A country that stops being able to expand has to make what it holds work, and Danish cooperatives, folk high schools, welfare legislation and labour market agreements were all built in the decades when the alternative uses of national energy had been closed off.

The current position follows from it directly. A small state with high institutional capacity, an open economy, a strategic location and two self-governing North Atlantic territories is what twelve centuries of that process produced, and it is a better outcome than the one most of the powers that defeated Denmark achieved. Sweden, Prussia and the Habsburgs all won the wars in question, and none of their nineteenth-century states exists in the form that fought them. Denmark: overview sets out what the country looks like now.

What was settled afterwards

Denmark ended a two-hundred-year policy of neutrality after the Second World War and joined NATO at its founding in 1949, and membership has remained highly popular since, despite several serious confrontations with the United States over security policy.

The realm was reorganised in the same period. Home rule was granted to the Faroe Islands in 1948, and political reform in 1953 abolished the Landsting, the elected upper house, ended colonial status for Greenland and allowed female rights of succession to the throne. Three constitutional changes of quite different kinds arrived in a single reform, which is a characteristically Danish way of clearing a backlog.

European membership followed in 1973, with opt-outs from several areas of integration including the single currency, and Greenland, which had entered with Denmark, later left by its own vote while remaining part of the realm.

The through-line across twelve centuries is a country that kept losing the argument about territory and kept winning the argument about organisation. Denmark has been smaller after almost every war it fought, and it has ended up with a state that works better than most of the ones that beat it. Denmark: politics goes into the institutions that resulted.