THE STATE OF DENMARK

Anne Applebaum finds a country

at ease with itself despite not yet ratifying Maastricht

Homogeneity, cultural and political, probably explains it. Just about all Danes are direct descendants of the Vikings, and just about all Danes delight in deciding things by consensus. They have never had a revolution. The last absolute monarch's reign ended in 1848 when a group of Copenhagen burghers marched to the royal 'What sort of sick mind could have done this to a book?' palace and demanded democracy. The king saw their point, and by 1849 a consti- tutional monarchy was in place.

Things still happen that way. These days, there are eight parties in the Folketing, the Danish parliament, and their policies fade into one another like shades in a rainbow. Sharp distinctions are unknown — whatev- er their names, all but one of them could easily fit within the British Labour Party. This is partly thanks to proportional repre- sentation: the need to co-operate with small parties brought the Conservative-Lib- eral government well into the centre for the past decade, and the same need will keep the Social Democrats, now back in power again, in the same place. A distinct lack of problems, a phenomenon unknown elsewhere, helps too. True, it took the new prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, longer than expected to form a new gov- ernment. Among other things, there were serious disagreements about the method of financing unemployment benefit (not about unemployment benefit itself) and whether a new motorway should be built in Jutland.

But with near-consensus come other social ills. 'It takes courage to stick out here,' one newspaper editor told me. `Some talent is squashed by the fear of appearing different.' He had just finished speaking to the producer of a television show called Duel. Every week, Duel, like dozens of British talk-shows, presents two articulate people who disagree. This week, the editor was meant to go on the show, but the producer was frantic — he could find no opponents. 'It's not easy,' the editor sighed. 'If people do disagree, they will not say so — and most do not anyway.'

The desire to avoid conflict can lead to a peculiarly Danish form of political correct- ness. Faced with a controversy, Danish politicians tend to join what they believe to be the responsible centre, even if most of their constituents' beliefs lie elsewhere. That presumably explains why most politi- cians continue to support the country's lib- eral immigration laws, even though a recent poll showed that 70 per cent of the country does not. That also presumably explains why the country's political estab- lishment was so shocked last June, when Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty.

For Denmark, that was a momentous event. Some politicians still find the subject painful to discuss, speaking of their 'sad- ness' or 'disappointment' about the result. One Folketing member faltered while try- ing to describe how she felt after the vote: `When most politicians, journalists, trade union leaders and businessmen say one thing and the people vote another way strange things are happening in politics.'

Strange indeed: at the time, the Danish establishment assumed that opponents of the treaty were either right-wing national- ists (if there can be such a thing in Den- mark) or left-wing extremists, ignorant or irresponsible voters who did not belong within the happy Danish consensus and deserved mockery. The former foreign minister, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, told Danes that, if they did not vote Yes, they would be isolated 'like a cheese beneath a bell jar'. That was fine, he said, 'if you want to be a cheese.'

Yet the majority of Danes are certainly not extremists, and they did not oppose the treaty out of ignorance. Over 500,000 actu- ally purchased copies of the treaty, a lot in a country of 5 million. Nor did they oppose the treaty out of irresponsible opposition to the Community, as it is hard for anyone not to recognise that trade with other EEC countries accounts for Denmark's current prosperity. They did not even oppose the treaty out of traditional, nationalist fears of Germany. On the contrary, opponents of Maastricht say they fear not Germany but Italy and France, where weaker democratic controls and dirtier corruption lead to pre- cisely the kind of straying from the voters which Danes suspect their politicians had begun to indulge in.

And Danish standards are high. This, after all, is a country whose prime minister was recently forced to resign because, six years ago, his justice minister illegally delayed the entry of 28 Tamil refugees into the country, and then lied about it in the Folketing. While unpleasant enough, this hardly compares with the French officials who allowed haemophiliacs to use Aids- tainted blood, or Italian politicians who do deals with the Mafia or even British ones who lost £1.5 billion in an afternoon trying to save face by salvaging ERM member- ship. There is hardly another country in Europe where a long-standing refugee issue would bring about the fall of a long- standing government.

The Danes, accustomed to very direct forms of democracy, fear the coming of a super-European government more than most. 'If French culture is at one extreme, our Nordic cultures are at another,' says Ebbe Klobedal Reich, a Danish novelist. `Elites, which are powerful in France, have little to say in Nordic countries, where the strongest cultural forces are always broad people's movements.' He points to the Tamil case as an example of how even the best politicians misbehave without proper controls. 'In my opinion, a democracy which is not constantly striving to become more direct is a democracy in decay.'

Simply put, the Danes, who (somewhat creatively) trace their domestic traditions back to Viking days, opposed the treaty because they dislike the way bureaucratic decisions are made in the EEC: it goes against their consensual grain.

The Edinburgh summit changed none of that. Over 80 per cent of Danes still oppose closer political union with Europe, and the same polls show that a majority do not want to join a common currency or a com- mon defence policy — plans which lie at the heart of the Maastricht Treaty. Thus the next referendum, now scheduled for April or May, will not be about the treaty itself, but about whether the Danes believe that they will be exempt from its most important goals.

That puts Danish politicians in an odd position. Perhaps embarrassed abroad by their recalcitrant voters, perhaps shamed by their own failure, they are arguing for a Yes vote — but doing so without advocat- ing the treaty itself. To achieve this, a cur- tain of political correctness is required once again. The No campaigners are called inward-looking (not true — most talk pas- sionately about the need to include other Nordic and east European countries in the EEC) and businessmen are trotted out to prove that Denmark will lose investment if it says No again (also not true — the single market continues, whether Maastricht goes ahead or not). Most of all, they try to ignore the democratic qualms which lie at the heart of Danish opposition sentiments. `You are still considered a bit of a weirdo, if you want to vote No,' says Henrik Over- gaard-Nielsen, a leader of the anti-Maas-

tricht June movement. 'It is supposed to be more modern, more international to vote Yes.'

Victims of twisted logic are everywhere. The small Socialist People's party, one of two which opposed the treaty the last time around, changed its policy after the Edin- burgh summit. Officially, that was because the summit succeeded in changing the treaty to Denmark's satisfaction. Unoffi- cially (according to others), the party's leaders believed that moving closer to the centre, nearer to the golden Danish con- sensus, might help them get into govern- ment — which, incidentally, it did not. Now the party will have trouble convincing its voters, almost all of whom voted against the treaty, to change their minds. 'We will need to have a long campaign to win their support,' admits Steen Gade, one of the party's deputies.

Others approach the problem differently. Ivar Norgaard, a former cabinet minister, argues that Denmark must accept the treaty in order to change the EEC from within. 'There is no doubt that some Euro- pean politicians want a federation,' he says, tut we do not. Perhaps they hope that we will change our minds, but we hope that they will become wiser.' Elisabeth Arnold, another deputy, agrees that the Exchange Rate Mechanism limits Denmark's eco- nomic flexibility, and concurs that the sin- gle currency would do so even more. But that doesn't matter, she says, 'because we haven't used those sorts of economic tools for ten years anyway'.

When Danish politicians do talk about Edinburgh itself, they speak carefully, argu- ing for the summit's symbolic importance rather than its content or legality. Mr Gade, for example, claims that the summit changed the political context of the treaty if not its substance, and says Edinburgh proved that the discussion of transparency will continue. That is plausible — but if Danish voters decide that changed contexts and continuing discussions are not enough to keep them out of a single currency, a common defence policy, and a European federation, they are likely to vote No again.

Even if their new government, untainted by scandal, convinces them otherwise, the original No should not be forgotten or cov- ered over in the subsequent establishment glee. Within the EEC, Danish opposition to the political union will continue to ham- per Eurocrats who want to move faster. For unlike the Italians, who gain better economic policies, and unlike the other southern Europeans, who might get a lot of money, and unlike the French, who think a united Europe will be a French Europe, the Danes will not profit from a closer European political union. They already live in a nearly perfect country, they already have the single market to do busi- ness in, and nothing — not the joy of Euro- citizenship, the glory of a Euro-army or the convenience of a Euro-currency — could be better than that.