DANISH FOREIGN POLICY
Denmark's Day of Doom. By Joachim Joesten. (Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) Tins is a singularly mischievous book. Mr. Joesten's exag- gerations are so palpable, and his conclusions so far-fetched, that he has not only destroyed his own case, but gravely embarrassed all those conscientious and patriotic Danes who have tried for years to make their fellow-countrymen realise the traps into which their Government's foreign policy was leading them. Mr. Joesten's book seems to have been written in a fit of bad temper : the Danish Government have made him angry—therefore they must be punished.
I have no doubt that Mr. Joesten has been gravely provoked. The Danish Foreign Office as a whole (as distinct from the many charming persons on its staff) is tactless in the extreme in dealing with foreign journalists. So long as they write the sort of stuff of which the Ministry approves, all is well; but the moment they leave the beaten track and give expression to unorthodox opinion, the air is thick with papal bulls. The poor journalist who thought he had got hold of something very near the truth soon discovers that he is a busybody and a snooper. The Government Press tells him he is a super- ficial nitwit who has been bamboozled by fools or knaves. No doubt Mr. Joesten, from the moment that he discovered the extent of German influence over Denmark, was made to feel the full blast of official disapproval and resented it. But he is not the first to suffer from official pressure ; and if he had only kept a cool head he might have written an extremely
useful book. For the full story of Nazi pressure upon Den- mark, of the arrogance of the German Legation in Copenhagen, still has to be told.
Mr. Joesten begins badly. He makes a slashing attack on those British journalists who pay a " lightning visit " to Copenhagen, who speak no language but their own, who never escape from the clutches of Danish official guides, and who return to London with glowing accounts of Danish prosperity and the strength of Danish democracy. Mr. Joesten, evidently, thinks he is ever so much better. But I am afraid that he is at least as superficial as the people he criticises. He has made not the slightest attempt to understand the psychology of a small Power, and he is shocked and angry to find that Denmark is determined to keep outside the European Power groupings, and that she is not prepared to join an anti-German coalition. I can only say that any man who writes a book on the assumption that these things are possible has not even begun to scratch the surface of Danish mentality. And not only Danish mentality, but small-Power mentality. Why did Belgium break away from the French alliance system? Why is Holland so unwilling to accept either a German or a British guarantee of her territorial integrity? Why did the Czecho- Slovak experiment end in disaster? The answer to the first two questions is that neither of these two countries wants to be mixed up in a struggle between the Great Powers—neither wants to take sides. Czecho-Slovakia tried to do so—with disastrous results. Neither Denmark nor any of the Scandi- navian States is going to take sides if it can possibly be avoided—Denmark in particular, because her proximity to Germany and her dependence upon the German market, make her especially vulnerable. Mr. Joesten will no doubt say that it cannot be avoided. But the Danish Government and the Danish people are better qualified to answer that question than Mr. Joesten. After all, the first and paramount duty of the Danish Government is to keep their country out of war—at almost any price ; and the fact that Denmark kept out of the Great War is, in spite of Mr. Joesten's contemptuous reference to good luck, a vindication of Danish neutrality policy.
Mr. Joesten asserts that the Danish Government torpedoed both the attempt to lay the basis for a Northern Defensive Alliance and the effort to widen the Oslo Convention, made by Dr. Colijn, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. As I had the best of opportunities to follow all the negotiations to which Mr. Joesten refers, I can only say that both his state- ments are wrong. At no time has there been any question of a Northern Defensive Alliance—as Mr. Joesten suggests ; and while it is quite possible that the matter may have been dis- cussed in irresponsible political circles, I can say categorically that no Scandinavian Government either could or would discuss such a possibility. And as for the Oslo Convention, it is quite wrong to suggest that any proposal for collective Danish - Swedish - Norwegian - Finnish - Dutch - Belgian bargaining as against any one of the Great Powers was ever contemplated. Mr. Joesten's imagination is too fertile ; after all, a serious book on Danish foreign policy is not quite the same thing as a Phillips Oppenheim novel.
Of Danish defence policy Mr. Joesten also has a good deal to say—and most of it ignores the real problem. He winds up with a criticism of British economic policy, which he holds to be responsible for many of the Danish difficulties, and which he suggests should be relaxed. Here, again, his argu- ments are superficial. The fact of the matter is that the British quota on Danish bacon has made pig-breeding the most profitable part of Danish agriculture ; while in the two or three years preceding the quota, when Denmark could send all the bacon to London that she could produce, pig- breeding was carried out at such a heavy loss that Danish agriculture was bleeding to death. It is true that the British market for Danish butter and eggs is not as good as it was before the great depression ; but it seems likely that the higher profit on bacon more than compensates for this loss. What about British economic pressure on Denmark—can it be relaxed? Can we afford to allow our trade balance with Denmark to fall back again to its old very unfavourable level? (It has gradually become less unfavourable.) Of course not. Sterling must be defended. And Mr. Joesten must bear in mind that much of the present sterling balance credited to Denmark on account of Anglo-Danish trade goes to finance German rearmament. We do not want to encourage that.
TI G.- BARMAN.
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