The realm

Since 1973, there have been no changes to Denmark’s territory. In 2023, the Danish realm consisted of the same territories as in 1973, namely Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Appearances can be deceiving, however, because there have been increasing demands for independence in both the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The relationship between Denmark and Greenland in particular has changed. In 1979, Greenland was granted home rule; at a referendum in 1982, it voted to withdraw from the EC and in 2009 it achieved self-governing status. As a result, it has gradually come to assume responsibility for a number of political and administrative functions that were formerly handled by Denmark. Its self-governing status even means that, according to international law, Greenland can now decide for itself whether it wishes to be fully independent. However, both the Faroe Islands and Greenland continue to receive financial subsidies from Denmark, and while these subsidies corresponded to approximately 5% of the GDP of the Faroe Islands in 2014, they accounted for more than 25% of the GDP of Greenland. In the short term, independence thus seems easier to achieve in the Faroe Islands than in Greenland. On the other hand, the latter is much coveted by the USA due to its strategic location. In the summer of 2019, the USA’s President Trump reiterated an American desire from the early Cold War period to buy the country – presumably from Denmark, though due to its self-governing status any sale would essentially be a decision for Greenland itself. These developments continue to put pressure on the unity of the Danish realm (Rigsfællesskab).

The population

In 1973, the population of Denmark was around 5 million. In 2018, Statistics Denmark put the figure at almost 5.8 million, with approximately 50,000 in the Faroe Islands and 56,000 in Greenland. In other words, the population increased by approximately 800,000 in forty-five years, slightly less than the million that was added between 1945 and 1973. This increase was primarily due to longer life expectancy, and since 1980 an increase in net migration. Immigration has meant that immigrants and their descendants accounted for approximately 13% of the population in 2016, where ‘descendants’ (efterkommere) were defined by Statistics Denmark as individuals both of whose parents were born outside Denmark and did not have Danish citizenship. Of these, almost 60% were immigrants from so-called ‘non-Western’ countries, who mainly came to Denmark as asylum seekers or through family reunification programmes, while immigrants from ‘Western’ countries settled primarily because of marriage or work. For Statistics Denmark, ‘Western’ referred to the twenty-seven members of the EU, together with Andorra, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the USA and the Vatican. The EU’s single market means that citizens from other EU countries are free to apply for jobs in Denmark and can secure their residence if they find work. Of the approximately 200,000 full-time foreign employees in the Danish labour market in 2017, 130,000 came from the Nordic region or the EU, with Polish and German nationals making up the largest single groups.

Danish society has found it difficult to deal with immigration, and whilst most Danes have welcomed the pizza, shawarma and sushi that come with a diverse population, there has been profound opposition to embracing the idea of a multicultural society. The debate on immigration and integration has largely focused on the rise of particularly vulnerable public housing areas (often referred to as ‘ghettos’) and accompanying parallel societies with an over-representation of criminality and an under-representation on the labour market, especially for non- Western immigrant groups. This debate has proved so heated that it has occupied a dominant position on the political agenda for most of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, in May 2018, Denmark’s leading political-economic magazine, Ugebrevet Mandag Morgen, stated: ‘Never have so many nydanskere [‘new Danes’, that is immigrants] been employed than today. Employment is increasing. More are getting an education. And criminality is falling. All in all, a positive story. But the domestic immigration debate does not reflect this.’

The main premises of this module

The debates on immigration and the EC/EU thus constitute two of the most important Danish political topics in the period after 1970. They show how political orientation no longer simply followed the traditional right–left division, but became increasingly influenced and even governed by the citizens’ view of the interplay between the national and the international. This shift was by no means a uniquely Danish phenomenon, since it was fundamentally linked to the wider issue of globalisation.

With this in mind, the final module in this book is based on three main premises: firstly, that the history of Denmark after 1973 cannot be detached from its European and global contexts; secondly, that Denmark has had to adapt to and has been fundamentally altered by major global changes; and thirdly, that the advances in IT technology from the 1970s onwards have had an important dynamic effect on many of the cultural and societal processes of change.

Global times

The global increase in international co-operation can be illustrated by the dramatic growth in world trade. For the Western countries in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), trade more than doubled between 1960 and 2016. Denmark did not experience such an increase, but this was largely because the Danish starting point in 1960 was higher than the OECD’s average in 2016, namely 67% of GDP, while its level in 2016 was calculated at as much as 101%. This means that the value of imports and exports of goods and services had exceeded the value of the total annual production of the country.

However, trade is only one aspect of economic globalisation. Another and more qualitative aspect is growth in the number of transnational corporations (TNCs), which are defined by the UN as companies with operations or production departments in at least two countries other than the country of registration. In 1970, there were approximately 7,000 TNCs, while forty-five years later there were more than 100,000 worldwide. Such corporations include a number of large car manufacturers and oil companies, but increasingly also companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as banks and investment firms. In 2015, the two hundred largest TNCs produced around 40% of all the industrial goods in the world, and some of these companies even had a market value that equalled the GDP of a large country. Danish transnational corporations include Novo Nordisk (pharmaceutics), Maersk (sea transportation), ISS (facility management) and Vestas (wind power), which generate only a limited share of their earnings in Denmark. These global companies are important for the world’s economic and political development, and – through their technological innovations and applications – they also shape societies culturally.

Adapting to Europe and the world

The impact of Europeanisation and globalisation in the form of increased integration and interdependence has been reflected in, among other things, the way the Danish Folketing and Danish ministries work and organise themselves. As mentioned above, a large part of Danish legislation today originates in the EU system, while parliamentary committees and ministries have been reorganised and expanded several times in response to Europeanisation and globalisation. In some cases, the intention was to increase control over Danish politics, for example through the Folketing’s European Committee, while, in others it was to liberalise control in order to ensure greater integration in international networks. Such liberalisation includes deregulation of finance and capital controls, which have been implemented since the 1980s.

The impact of globalisation on Danish society can be exemplified by its relationship with China, a country that can be described as the economic and commercial ‘new frontier’ of the twenty-first century. Led by the crown prince and the prime minister, the Danish business community has turned out in force when trade deals needed to be made, and the Danish police – with or without political instructions – have suppressed constitutional freedom of expression by obstructing pro- Tibet demonstrations, such as those which took place during the Chinese state visit in 2012. At the same time, Danish consumers sit at home filling their online baskets with cheap goods from Chinese web shops. This complex relationship creates jobs and income for Danish companies on the one hand, but leads to unemployment, shop closures and challenges to Danish democracy on the other.

A clear and radical example of this was the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was first detected in the large Chinese city of Wuhan and quickly spread to the rest of the globe, including Denmark, in early 2020. The pandemic not only constituted a severe health crisis but also triggered a global economic earthquake, since the exchange of people, goods and services across borders was deeply affected as countries entered national lockdowns. The COVID-19 crises revealed not only the vulnerabilities of globalisation but also the latent tensions between the national and the global. This nexus has developed further due to China’s suppression of democracy in Hong Kong and its increasingly tense relationship with Taiwan, leading to a recalibration of relations with China for Denmark and the whole of Europe in the 2020s.

During a state visit to China in 2017, the Danish prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen signed an agreement that Copenhagen Zoo would receive two giant pandas from China. This photo was taken at the beginning of the construction of a new panda compound in November the same year. The donation of pandas is an honour that China only grants to its carefully selected friends, and the agreement thus sealed the good relationship between the two countries. The agreement probably also suggests that, for the Danish prime minister, the pursuit of economic relations between the countries meant more than addressing the issue of democracy and human rights in China. In ‘panda diplomacy’, it is rarely value politics that count. Photo: Finn Frandsen, Ritzau Scanpix

This development has shaken basic worldviews and is perceived by many as a threat to their livelihoods and ways of life. This certainly formed much of the background for the revival of nationalism experienced in the twenty-first century, with slogans such as ‘America First’, ‘Britain First’ and ‘Give Us Back Denmark’, and the strengthening of nationalist-patriarchal leaders from Putin in Russia to Erdoğan in Turkey and Orbán in Hungary. Contrary to the title of social scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, history has certainly not ended – either as a frame of reference or as lived experience. In fact, in the twenty-first century there has been an increasingly tense clash in values over history – a clash reminiscent of the struggle that, as we have seen, also took place in the inter-war period.