Denmark
| |||||
| Location of Denmark | |||||
| Principal language | Danish | ||||
| Capital | Copenhagen | ||||
| Queen | Margrethe II | ||||
| Prime minister | Anders Fogh Rasmussen | ||||
| Area - Total - % water |
Ranked 131st 43,094 km² 1.6% | ||||
| Population - Total (2005) - Density |
Ranked 108th 5,415,978 125/km² | ||||
| Currency | Danish krone | ||||
| Time zone | Universal Time +1 | ||||
| National anthem | Der er et yndigt land (There Is a Lovely Land) | ||||
| Internet TLD | .dk | ||||
| Country calling code | 45 | ||||
The Kingdom of Denmark is geographically the smallest and southernmost Nordic country. It is located in Scandinavia, a region of northern Europe, but it does not lie on the Scandinavian Peninsula.
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. 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 the Iron Curtain, 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.
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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 m. 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 presentday 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 father 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 11th 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.
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 13th and 14th 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 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; 1900 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.
The Monarchy and the Realm
Denmark is the second-oldest monarchy in the world. Only Japan, with its emperors said to date back to the seventh century B.C.E., has a longer-running line of successive rulers. Denmark's line of sovereigns begins in the ninth century C.E. Two of them have been queens, both named Margrethe. Margrethe II has been on the throne since 1972. In 1849, after the revolutions that shook Europe the year before, Denmark became a constitutional monarchy with the adoption of a new constitution restricting regal powers.
Because of Greenland's size, more than 2 million km², it can facetiously be claimed that Denmark is the greatest imperialistic force remaining in the world. Though the scattered overseas possessions of France, Holland, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. may all have more people than Denmark's territories, the sheer size of the world's largest island makes its Danish overseers, by this viewpoint, the holders of the most global real estate to which complete independence isn't bestowed.
Both Greenland and the Faeroe Islands have autonomous status within the Kingdom of Denmark and are largely self-governing, but each is allowed two seats in the national parliament in Copenhagen.
Economy
Denmark has a thoroughly modern market economy that features high-tech agriculture, up-to-date small-scale and corporate industry, extensive government welfare measures, comfortable 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.
The Danish economy is highly unionized; 75% of its labor force belongs to a union in the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions. Relationships between unions and employers are cooperative: unions 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 government was clearly successful in meeting, and even exceeding, the criteria for participating in the European Union's common currency, the euro. However, by two popular votes, the last being in 2000, the Danish population decided against joining the 12 other EU members in adopting the euro. Even so, the Danish currency, the krone, remains pegged closely to the euro.
Demographics
The majority of the population is of Scandinavian descent, with small groups of Inuit (from Greenland), Faroese, and immigrants. Immigrants make up 6% 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 world's most famous Dane is most likely a mythical figure: Hamlet, the title character of William Shakespeare's greatest play, which was set in a real castle (Kronborg) in Elsinore. Helsingør is the Danish name for Elsinore and is a town north of Copenhagen on the narrowest part of The Sound separating Zealand from Sweden.
The factual Dane most well-known around the world is probably Hans Christian Andersen, a 19th-century writer famous for such children's stories as The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, and The Ugly Duckling.
For all the exploring that Danes and other Vikings did in the North Atlantic in the direction of the New World, it is Vitus Bering, who traveled east between 1728 and 1741 in the service of the Russian navy, who is Denmark's most famous explorer. Bering 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 that then belonged to Denmark, made important advances in the field of astronomy in the late 17th 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 19th 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 20th century.
Culture
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