A brief history of Denmark
I’ve recently had to study a lot of stuff about Denmark for a test I had to do. So I decided to put some of it here, in point form. Here’s a bit of Denmark’s history.
- Denmark is a small country today (over 220 times smaller than the USA), but during the Viking era (ca. 750 to 1035) it was the center of a bigger kingdom that included today’s Sweden and Norway.
- The word “Denmark” comes from “daner”, which was the name of the people, and “mark” which means border area or field. So it literally means “field of the Danes”. The name dates back to the end of 800, when the Danish area bordered that of the Saxons of northern Germany.
- The Danish writing system in those days was based on runes (which back then meant “secrets”). The use of runes later spread to Sweden and Norway.
- Viking ships were exceedingly seaworthy, so they could cover great distances. This allowed the Danes to have contact with merchants from Russia and Arabic countries.
- Knud the Great (King Canute) conquered and ruled England from 1016 to 1035. He also ruled Denmark and Norway during approximately this time. This was the high point of Danish rule. From here everything went downhill.
Danish negotiations
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- Denmark went through a series of events during which it had a well-defined class system, became protestant and lost a lot of wars and land area, mostly to Sweden. During one of these wars (1658) Sweden wins, but then, later that same year, the Swedish king thinks, “Wait a minute, why not conquer the whole of Denmark?”
Sweden attacks again, but Copenhagen pulls through by the skin of its teeth. - During this time the Danish economy is in tatters. The Danes decide to abolish the nobility, who until then had been running the whole show (the nobility elected the new kings). It is decided that the kingdom should be inherited (go from father to son), and the official Danish royalty is born. The king was now autocratic, which means that he could call the shots.
- King Frederik the 3rd establishes a foundation for the current Danish model, including a royal constitution and rule of law (1660). Things begin to look good for a while.
- During the Napoleonic Wars England attacks Denmark (which at this point was neutral). Denmark sides with France, but it is an expensive war. In 1813 Denmark goes bankrupt.
- The French revolution had given everyone in Europe a lot of crazy ideas about individual freedom. The Danes decide that they want a free constitution. King Frederik the 7th agrees, and the first democratic constitution is signed on 5 June 1849.
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- England was the world leader in industrialization with the invention of the steam engine. Denmark and many other European countries only began to catch on about 100 years later. It was only after WW2 that Denmark went from being an agrarian society to an industrial one.
- A workers’ movement, the social democrats, begins to emerge in the 1870s, and becomes an independent party in 1878.
- A historic agreement is made between workers and employers in September 1899, in which they acknowledge each other’s rights.
- Other political parties are Venstre (literally: left), who represent farmers (today they are conservative and represent business) and Højre (literally: right) who represent the conservatives (today they are called the Conservative Folk Party).
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- During WW1 Denmark is neutral, but Germany forces Denmark to lay mines in the Baltic Sea in order to prevent ships attacking from there.
- The USA worries that Germany will build military bases on Danish-owned islands St. John, St. Croix and St. Thomas in the Caribbean. So it buys the islands from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million.
- The constitution is amended in 1915, and women get the vote.
- The constitution is amended again in 1920. The king loses all political power.
- During WW2 Denmark is neutral again, but Germany doesn’t respect it. Germany invades on 9 April 1940 and occupies Denmark for the duration of the war.
- An underground resistance movement is formed. Of the 8000 Jews living in Denmark, 7000 of them are successfully moved to Sweden.
- Denmark comes through WW2 mostly unscathed. After the war the old political parties are soon back in business.
- At the end of the 50s Denmark becomes an industrial powerhouse, and the economy sky-rockets.
- In 1953 there is no male heir to the Danish throne, and the constitution is changed to allow women to inherit the throne (though only if there is no male in the family to do the job). This is the 4th and last time the constitution is changed. Margrethe the 2nd becomes queen and regent in 1972. When the constitution is amended in the future, it will most likely allow for eldest daughters to succeed to the throne, irrespective of male siblings.
- The welfare system begins to take shape.
- In the 70s there is a short supply of manual labour. Many workers are invited from Turkey, Pakistan and Yugoslavia.
- Many things happen in 1973. Denmark joins the EU. The economy is experiencing a downturn because of high oil prices. Foreign workers are not needed any more, and immigration is stopped. Until this point there were only 4 parties in parliament. During a historic election, two more parties join the government. One is the Progress Party (they don’t like income tax, the EU, foreigners and the bureaucracy of the welfare state) and the Christian Folk Party (they don’t like the new abortion law).
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- Denmark doesn’t have many natural resources besides oil and gas. Today it has moved from being an industrial society to a service-based and knowledge society (excelling especially in alternative energy and medicine).
- Education in Denmark takes much longer than in other countries, so Danes are a bit older when they begin to work. There is also a tendency to retire younger, which is beginning to challenge the welfare model.
- In spite of a bit of a rough history, Denmark is today one of the richest countries in the world, and one of the few countries that meets the UN’s target of giving 0,7% of its gross national product to third-world development.
30% of Danes cycle to work (ca. 1% in the US)
I found your text extremely informative. And your writing is very captivating and humorous. I especially liked the bit about coming back home from a long stay in a different country. You could not have described the feeling I also experience every time I visit my family and friends any better than you did. Your text has inspired me to continue to learn Danish.
hmmmm – a potted history that manages to avoid even a single mention of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig??????
if you want to understand the intensity of contemporary Danish ethnic nationalism, then you can’t avoid the man. Because he invented it. His national revitalisation movement signlehandedly welded “Danishness” out of nothing. Prior to Grundtvig the Danish state was a multi-ethnic, multi-national enterprise. “Danes* hadn’t been invented yet. In fact ‘Danish’ referred to the Danish royal house. Period. Which owned (feudal absolutism) and presided over a kingdom of Norwegians, Schleswig Germans, Icelanders, Greenlanders, Farøese, Jutes of various micro-ethnicities, Fynbos, Bornholmers, etc, etc…. each of whom spoke mutually-incomprehensible dialects. The 4-fold national calamity (an insane degenerate monarch backing Napoleon, Nelson buring the Danish fleet, the resulting national bankruptcy and the soon-to-follow loss of Norway), followed by the stirrings of nationalism in the German-speaking provinces left the Danish monarch in possession of the rump of the former Empire. Grundtvig amalgamated the various micro-ethnicities by his movement for universal literacy among the peasantry – which moulded a national normative literary –and slowlty, spoken – language. He of course was inspired by the earlier romantic-era nationalisms sweeping the German speaking world [whose instigator - one Johann Gottfried Herder --coined the concept of "Blood and Soil", comprising the idea that an ethnic group has a mystical relationship with the landscape it inhabits- which is the roots of the "Völkishness" which is the full flowering of these concepts seen in the first half of the 20th century]. Yes, Grundtvig has the patent on ‘folklelighed’. And that is to this day the burning concern in Denmark [an interesting sidebar is how this Danish variant of 'völkishness' provided legitimacy for the Nazi regime via the Folkehøjskole movement in the form of one Niels Bukh...]
also, really: did “The French revolution had given everyone in Europe a lot of crazy ideas about individual freedom. The Danes decide that they want a free constitution. King Frederik the 7th agrees, and the first democratic constitution is signed on 5 June 1849″?
Or: did the revolutions of 1848 put enough fear into the Danish ruling elites that they wisely bought off their national bourgeoisie by making timely reforms rather than face the street fights then erupting throughout Miteuropa?
and while we’re at it let’s open up that can of worms called denmark during world war II. Denmark indeed “comes through WW2 mostly unscathed. After the war the old political parties are soon back in business”. One reason is that those old political parties stood united in a 5-party coalition that supported the German occupation —for 3½ years. And it wasn’t just a matter of the Germans holding a gun to their heads either. As long as the war was running in Nazi Germany’s favour, Denmark enjoyed a special status as the “model Protectorate” of the Third Reich – and this had broad political as well as popular backing within Denmark. Why? Because in Depression-era Europe, the German delivery on their promise to buy all Danish agricultural produce at higher than world market rates, and their opening the doors to the employment of Danish workers in German armaments industries was seen by the Danish ruling elites as the road to full employment & prosperity. And they went along with it — signatory to the Anti.-Comintern Pact, rounding up the Danish communists on Germany’s behalf and packing them off to concentration camps, allowing the recruitment of Frikorps Danmark — the Danish division of the Waffen SS –to fight on the Ostfront [there's a stunning photo published in a DSB magazine a decade or so ago of thousands of Danes crowding Københavns Hovedbanegård to wave off the trains filled with their sons volunteering for SS fighting]. And during this period only a tiny percentage of Danes supported the Resistance. Only when the tide of the war turned after Stalingrad and it became clear that Germany was not to be the winning side did the Resistance take off. The actual date was 23 August 1943, when the British & the Communists collaborated in sparking the Odense General strike, which resulted in the imposition of martial law. No, Danes didn’t have the stomach for killing Jews [although the pre-August 43 Danish govt sent German Jewish refugees back to the Nazis knowing full well what would be their fate]. But the notion promoted by Danish ruling elites (& Hollywood) after the war of plucky Danes heroically rescuing Danish Jewry simply has no basis in fact. Danish Jews rescued themselves. And one can to this day see the villas constructed along the shoreline in Helsingør, paid for by the payments made by Danish Jews to the local fishermen who sailed them over to Sweden. Denmark had the highest percentage of collaborators of any ‘occupied’ nation during the War, and afterwards there was the predictable bloodletting. And the creation of a mythology of national resistance that has only in the last decade been challenged by a new generation of Danish revisionist historians. A lot of grey shady-nuanced areas there [and a very impelling reason to learn Danish - to read this stuff]
Additional facts about Denmark:
- First country to legalize porn (late 60s)
- First country to legalize same-sex marriage (early 90s)
So if you watch porn, are gay, or watch gay porn, be sure to thank a Dane!
denmark – one of the first, if not the first country to ban slavery
Samuel: Yes we did, and something we were very proud of – we just forget to mention that we only forbid it in Denmark, and that we had slavery on our islands in Caribbean a lot longer xD
Also, Douglas: Same-sex marriages are still not possible in Denmark. You can get something that’s very close to being a marriage, but it is not quite the same (I, however, am not completely sure of the differences). But they are trying to allow it now.