Denmark

Kongeriget Danmark Kingdom of Denmark
Motto: none (Royal motto: Guds hjælp, Folkets kærlighed, Danmarks styrke "The Help of God, the Love of the People, the Strength of Denmark")
Anthem: Der er et yndigt land (national) (There Is a Lovely Country) Royal anthem: Kong Christian (royal)
Location of Denmark Location of  Denmark (orange) – on the European continent (camel  white) – in the European Union (camel)   [Legend]
Capital (and largest city)		Copenhagen 55°43′N 12°34′E
Official languages		Danish1
Demonym		Danish
Government		Parliamentary democracy and Constitutional monarchy
-	Monarch	Margrethe II
-	Prime Minister	Anders Fogh Rasmussen
Consolidation		(prehistoric)
EU accession		1 January 1973
Area
-	Total	43,094 km² (134th²) 16,639² sq mi
-	Water (%)	1.6²
Population
-	2008 estimate	5,475,791 (108th)
-	Density	129.16/km² (78th²) 334.53/sq mi
GDP (PPP)		2006 estimate
-	Total	$198.5 billion (45th)
-	Per capita	$37,000 (6th)
GDP (nominal)		2006 estimate
-	Total	$256.3 billion (27th)
-	Per capita	$46,600 (6th)
Gini (1997)		24.7 (low) (1st)
Currency		Danish krone (DKK)
Time zone		CET² (UTC+1)
-	Summer (DST)	CEST² (UTC+2)
Internet TLD		.dk2,3
Calling code		+454
1 Co-official with Greenlandic in Greenland, and Faroese in the Faroe Islands. German is recognised as a protected minority language in the South Jutland (Sønderjylland) area of Denmark. Danish is recognized as a protected minority language in the Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany. ² For Denmark excluding the Faroe Islands and Greenland. ³ The TLD .eu is shared with other European Union countries. 4 The Faroe Islands use +298 and Greenland uses +299.

The Kingdom of Denmark is geographically the smallest and southernmost Nordic country. It is located in Scandinavia, a region of northern Europe. Although it does not lie on the Scandinavian Peninsula, culturally and linguistically it is very strongly connected to Norway and Sweden.

Denmark borders the Baltic Sea on the southeast and the North Sea on the west, and a majority of its land mass lies on a peninsula named Jutland that protrudes northward from northern Germany between the two seas. The rest of the territory is made of many islands, including a few relatively large ones, such as Zealand, Fyn, and Bornholm. Zealand, which is well to the east of Jutland, has the largest and densest concentration of the Danish population, centering on the national capital, Copenhagen. Germany is Denmark's only land neighbor, but Norway lies about 140 km to the north across a branch of the North Sea called the Skagerrak and Sweden lies both to the east, across a narrow strait off Zealand called The Sound, and northeast, across a 70 km-wide body of water named the Kattegat. Sweden is visible from Copenhagen on a clear day.

Denmark's area, slightly above 43,000 km², is about the same as Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. Its population, at nearly 5.5 million, is about the size of Wisconsin's.

Until 1848, Denmark's southern border lay approximately 40 km farther south than it does today. This area, known as Schleswig-Holstein, was lost in an armed clash with Prussia.

There are two Crown territories of Denmark, both well to the west of the mainland and each allowed political home rule: Greenland, the world's largest island, and the Faeroe Islands, located about midway between Norway and Iceland.

Geography

Along with the Jutland peninsula, Denmark consists of 405 named islands. Of these, 323 are inhabited, with the two largest being, in order, Zealand and Fyn or Funen in English.

Map showing location of Zealand within Denmark.

The island of Bornholm is offset somewhat to the east of the rest of the country, in the Baltic Sea between southern Sweden and northwestern Poland. (During the years of Soviet expansion, Poles would occasionally manage to escape the Communist rule of their homeland by fleeing at night by boat to Bornholm.) Many of the larger islands are connected by long bridges. One, actually a bridge/tunnel system, connects Copenhagen with Sweden's third-largest city, Malmö, at The Sound's widest expanse. Another spans the gap between Zealand and Fyn, carrying rail as well as highway traffic. The construction on both was finished in the late 1990s. The smaller distance between Jutland and Fyn was bridged in two places in the 1930s and 1970s. A plan for a bridge exists to connect the southern island of Lolland, south of Zealand, to Germany. Surface connection to the smaller islands, including Bornholm, is by ferry.

File:Oresund.ASTER.20040410.jpg

Satellite image of the Oresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö, Sweden.

Denmark is one of the world's flattest countries. There is little elevation to the Danish landscape at all; the highest point is a nondescript hill in the middle of Jutland, at 171 meters. The climate is generally temperate, with mild winters and cool summers. The seas that nearly surround the country are a great moderating influence. Because of the proximity to the water, no one in Denmark lives more than 52 km from the sea.

History

The origins of the Danish people are generally lost in prehistory, but there are some indications that their forebears moved into the area from what is present-day Sweden. In the fourth and fifth centuries C.E., peoples from the southeastern shores of the North Sea made a large migration to Great Britain's southeast coast. These were tribes such as the Jutes, who occupied parts of Jutland; the Angles, who lived in an area of Schleswig-Holstein named Angeln; and the Saxons, who inhabited an area further south along the German coast. Some believe they left their homeland because of pressure from the Huns, who were moving across Europe. Others make the case that groups moving west from Sweden forced them out. In any case, the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and others landed in waves on Britain's shores, pushed the occupying Celts westwards, began what has become known as Anglo-Saxon culture, and were the linguistic precursors of all English-speaking peoples. The words "England" and "English" come directly from the Danish place-name of Angeln.

The Danish tribes occupying Jutland concerned themselves with defense against Frankish peoples to the south as early as the eighth century by building the Danevirke (meaning "Danes' works"), a tall earthen barrier. It took more than two centuries to finish the structure of more than 30 km in length that stretched from marshes near the North Sea to an estuary on the east side of the peninsula. The Danevirke was also used as a rallying site by Danish kings for military excursions and was an effective buttress against foreign incursions through the Middle Ages. But by 1864 when the last battle was fought and lost over Schleswig-Holstein, the defense system proved to be no longer effective. Indeed, the wall is completely within German territory today.

The pagan groups occupying Denmark and other parts of Scandinavia became known as Vikings when they banded together and went colonizing, raiding, and trading in all parts of Europe from the ninth through eleventh centuries. They especially hit the British Isles hard, sailing quickly across the North Sea in superbly made boats and making off with all available treasure, particularly from monasteries. It was mainly Danish armies and later colonists who made multiple incursions into southern Britain. From 1019 to 1035, King Canute the Great was the monarch of both England and Denmark (and for the last six years, of Norway as well). Gradually as the Vikings became Christianized, they became a part of the fabric of the lands they settled after having marauded them.

File:Da-map.png

Map of Denmark

Over the centuries, Danes have managed to take over and rule momentarily several small parts of the world. They invaded and settled Britain and Ireland in various waves but were eventually subsumed in the larger population. France ceded Normandy to Danish Vikings in the tenth century; the Normans who invaded England in 1066 were people with mixed Danish blood. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the country's interests turned east for a while as it invaded and controlled Estonia. At times Denmark also held much of northern Germany's coastline. An exception was a large part of southernmost Sweden, which was considered Denmark proper for hundreds of years.

Denmark was able to dominate its union with Norway that began in 1380 and effectively took over the Norwegian claim to the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland at that time. From 1389 until 1523, all of Scandinavia was united under one monarch, a Danish one with power centralized in Copenhagen, when Sweden joined the Danish-Norwegian kingdom. After the union fell apart, a series of wars was fought between Denmark and Sweden that didn't draw to a close until 1658. Two years later, the current boundaries among all the Scandinavian countries were settled upon by treaty.

Meanwhile, Danish merchants entered the rush to trade in Asia by sending boats to India in 1620, where a base was established at a small port on the southeast coast. Other outposts were made near Calcutta and on small islands. Never a power in India, compared to Portugal, Britain, the Netherlands, and France, Denmark ceded its interests there by selling them all to the British by 1869.

Denmark also got involved with trade in the Caribbean Sea as early as 1672 when it made its first settlements in what later took the name of the Virgin Islands. By 1754, the islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John all belonged to the Danish crown. In 1917 the islands were sold to the United States, which wanted them as a strategic site for a naval base on the approach to the Panama Canal and to prevent Germany from seizing them during World War I.

The union with Norway was dissolved in 1814 after Denmark made an alliance and found itself on the losing side in the Napoleonic Wars. The Danish liberal and national movement gained momentum in the 1830s, and after the European revolutions of 1848, the country became a constitutional monarchy the following year.

After the war over Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, Denmark was forced to cede the province to Prussia in a defeat that left deep marks on the Danish national identity. At this point, Denmark adopted a policy of neutrality, which kept it out of World War I. However, the largest naval battle of that war, the Battle of Jutland, was fought in the North Sea off the Danish peninsula in 1916. The huge British and German fleets slugged it out in the war's only full-scale clash of battleships and fought to a draw, with 25 vessels—a tenth of the total on both sides—sunk among great loss of life.

In 1918, following the war, Iceland was granted independence, though Denmark remained in charge of its foreign affairs. The Treaty of Versailles offered Denmark the return of Schleswig-Holstein, but fearing future German claims on the southern Holstein section, Denmark refused to consider the return of Holstein. Instead, it insisted on a plebiscite on the return of the northern Schleswig section. The vote in 1920 showed that only the population of the northern half of Schleswig wished to return to Danish sovereignty. This was the only German border alteration after World War I that Adolf Hitler never objected to, and it remains Denmark's southern border today.

Despite its continued neutrality, Denmark was invaded by Germany in 1940. Though at first accorded self-rule (which ended in 1943 due to a mounting resistance movement), the Danes remained militarily occupied throughout World War II. The Danish sympathy for the Allied cause was strong; 1,900 Danish police officers were arrested by the Gestapo and sent, under guard, to be interned in Buchenwald. In 1944, disturbed by Denmark's inability to defend it, Iceland proclaimed complete independence.

After the war, Denmark became fairly quickly an integral part of the family of Western European countries attempting to build a strong political and economic union. It was a founding member of NATO (1949). In 1960, it also helped found the European Free Trade Association, an economic coalition of countries largely on Western Europe's outer ring, but in 1973, it joined the inner-ring nations of the European Community, which 20 years later changed its name to the European Union. The governments of Denmark since World War II have, with a few exceptions, been left of center as the Danish people seem to prefer policies of social liberalism.

Politics

The Kingdom of Denmark is a constitutional monarchy. As stipulated in the Danish Constitution, the monarch is not answerable for his or her actions, and his or her person is sacrosanct. The monarch appoints and dismisses the Prime Minister and other ministers. Before being validated through royal assent, all bills and important government measures must be discussed in Statsrådet, a privy council headed by the monarch. The Danish privy council's protocols are secret.

File:Dronning Margerethe 5 sep 2004 .jpg

Queen Margrethe II

While executive authority belongs to the monarch (as head of state), legislative authority is vested in the executive (Prime Minister) and the Danish parliament conjointly. Judicial authority lies with the courts of justice.

Executive authority is exercised on behalf of the monarch by the prime minister and other cabinet ministers who head departments. The cabinet, including the Prime Minister, and other ministers collectively make up the government. These ministers are responsible to Folketinget (the Danish Parliament), the legislative body, which is traditionally considered to be supreme (that is, able to legislate on any matter and not bound by decisions of its predecessors).

The Folketing is the national legislature. It has the ultimate legislative authority according to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, however questions over sovereignty have been brought forward because of Denmark’s entry into the European Union. In theory however, the doctrine prevails. Parliament consists of 179 members elected by proportional majority. Parliamentary elections are held at least every four years, but it is within the powers of the Prime Minister to call one at his discretion before this period has elapsed. On a vote of no confidence the parliament may force a single minister or the entire government to resign.

The Danish political system has traditionally generated coalitions. Most Danish post-war governments have been minority coalitions ruling with parliamentary support.

Since November 2001, the Danish Prime Minister has been Anders Fogh Rasmussen from the Venstre party, a center-right liberal party. The government is a coalition consisting of Venstre and the Conservative People's Party, with parliamentary support from the Danish People's Party (Dansk Folkeparti). The three parties obtained a parliamentary major in the 2001 elections and maintained it virtually unchanged in the 2005 election. On 24 October 2007 an early election was called by the Prime Minister for 13 November. Following the election the Danish People's party was strengthened while Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen's Venstre lost 6 mandates and the Conservative Party retained the same amount of seats in Parliament as prior to the election. The result ensured that Anders Fogh Rasmussen could continue as Prime Minister for a third term.

Economy

Denmark's market economy features very efficient agriculture, up-to-date small-scale and corporate industry, extensive government welfare measures, very high living standards, a stable currency, and high dependence on foreign trade. Denmark is a net exporter of food and energy and has a comfortable balance of payments surplus and zero net foreign debt. Also of importance is the sea territory of more than 105,000 km² (40,000+ sq mi).

The Danish economy is highly unionised; 75% of its labour force are members of a trade union. Most trade unions take part in the organized system of trade unions, the organization at the highest level being the so-called LO, the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions. However, increasing numbers in the labour force choose not to become members of a trade union or to become members of one of the trade unions outside the organized system (often referred to as the yellow, in Danish gule, trade unions).

Relationships between unions and employers are generally cooperative: unions often have a day-to-day role in managing the workplace, and their representatives sit on most companies' board of directors. Rules on work schedules and pay are negotiated between unions and employers, with minimal government involvement. The unemployment rate for December 2007 was 2.7%, for a total of 74,900 persons, a reduction by 112,800 persons - 2,400 per month - or 60% since December 2003. The number of unemployed is forecast to be 65,000 in 2015. The number of people in the working age group, less disability pensioners etc., will grow by 10,000 to 2,860,000, and jobs by 70,000 to 2,790,000. Parttime jobs included. Because of the present high demand and short supply of skilled labour, for instance for factory and service jobs, including hospital nurses and physicians, the annual average working hours have risen, especially compared with the economic downturn 1987 – 1993.Increasingly, service workers of all kinds are in demand, i.e. in the postal services and as bus drivers, and academics.In the fall of 2007, more than 250,000 foreigners are working in the country, of which 23,000 still residing in Germany or Sweden. According to TV2 (Denmark),3 January 2007, 66,000 jobs are not filled, but sometimes this regards jobs for which there isn't even labour available in Germany.

File:DanishKroners.jpg

Danish notes and coins

Denmark's national currency, the krone (plural: kroner), is de facto linked to the Euro through ERMII. The exchange rate is very steady at approx. 7.45 kroner per euro. Currently the krone converts to American dollars at a rate of about USD 0.20 per krone (about 5.1 kroner per dollar). (Exchange rates updated January 2008)

The government has met the economic convergence criteria for participating in the third phase (the common European currency - the Euro) of the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union (EMU), but Denmark, in a September 2000 referendum, rejected The Monetary Union. The Government of Fogh Rasmussen, re-elected in November 2007, announced a new referendum on the euro for 2008 or 2009 at the latest.

In the area of sickness and unemployment, the right to benefit is always dependent on former employment and at times also on membership of an unemployment fund, which is almost always -but need not be- administered by a trade union, and the previous payment of contributions. However, the largest share of the financing is still carried by the central government and is financed from general taxation, and only to a minor degree from earmarked contributions.

The Danish welfare model is accompanied by a taxation system that is both broad based (25% VAT and excise) and with high income tax rates (minimum tax rate for adults is 39.6%).

Denmark is home to many multi-national companies, among them: A. P. Moller-Maersk Group (Maersk - international shipping), Lego (children's toys), Bang & Olufsen (hi-fi equipment), Carlsberg (beer), Vestas (wind turbines), and the pharmaceutical companies Lundbeck and Novo Nordisk.

Main exports include: Animal Foodstuffs, Chemicals, Dairy Products, Electronic Equipment, Fish, Furniture, Leather, Machinery, Meat, Oil and Gas, and Sugar.

Demographics

The majority of the population is of Scandinavian descent, with small groups of Inuit (from Greenland), Faroese, and immigrants. Immigrants make up 6 percent of the total population, mostly coming from neighboring northern European countries, but a growing and increasingly disparaged number originate from southern Europe and the Middle East.

Danish is spoken in the entire country, although a small group near the German border also speaks German. Many Danes are fluent in English as well, particularly those in larger cities and young people, who are taught it in school.

Nearly seven out of eight Danes are members of the state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, also known as the Church of Denmark. In fact, at birth all Danes are considered to belong to the national church. The rest are primarily of other Christian denominations, and about 2 percent are Muslims. For the last decade, the Church of Denmark has seen a decline in its membership. In recent years, religious groups celebrating old Viking gods have appeared.

Great Danes

The most well-known Dane around the world is probably Hans Christian Andersen, a nineteenth-century writer famous for such children's stories as The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, and The Ugly Duckling.

Many Danes explored the North Atlantic and may have discovered America before Columbus. The most famous of these explorers was Vitus Bering. He traveled east between 1728 and 1741 in the service of the Russian navy and discovered Alaska at the northwest end of the Americas in 1741, the last year of his life. He died on what was later named Bering Island, near Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. His name also lives on in the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait.

Before that, Tycho Brahe, who lived and worked in the part of southern Sweden, then part of Denmark, made important advances in the field of astronomy in the late seventeenth century. His achievements were based on the pioneering technique of making many repeated observations of the heavens and cataloguing what he saw and measured. In his last years, his assistant was Johannes Kepler, a German who developed several astronomical theories from Tycho's data.

Søren Kierkegaard, a philosopher and theologian of the nineteenth century, is generally recognized as the first existentialist writer. Much of his work was done in reaction to the Danish Church and the emptiness he felt there. He had a profound impact on later philosophers, particularly of the twentieth century.

Culture

Though Denmark is known, like its Swedish neighbor, for a certain sexual permissiveness among its populace, the Danish government has gone a step farther to allow pornography, even of the basest variety, to be sold and distributed for many years before the same became widely available over the Internet.

Danes often disagree about the content and value of their culture and customs. In fact, one strong characteristic is their tendency to borrow easily from foreign cultures. If some cultural trait from overseas is seen and enjoyed firsthand by just a few people, it can spread and be adopted by the general population in a relatively short time.

A high regard for the national flag and its colors is common, especially on festive, celebratory occasions. Visitors have also noted an enjoyment by Danes of sitting, and even standing, in close and cozy arrangements.

Because the winter darkness lasts so long in Denmark, there is a strong tradition in Danish homes not only to have a fire blazing in the fireplace but to light up rooms with candles—even scores of candles—are said to bring as much light back into their lives and abodes as possible.

Most Danes feel, however, that the main cohesive factor in their national identity is their language. Danish gives them something that shows they are a community of common experience.

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Denmark  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Denmark"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.