The Nordic Countries and the European Security and Defence Policy

DENMARK AND THE ESDP 43motions to their colleagues at NATO meetings and on a few occasions wereforced to express dissent in the form of footnotes to otherwise agreed NATOpolicy papers. When the government finally called an election in May 1988over one of these motions and won, the Social-Liberal Party joined the rulingcoalition. The ‘alternative’ majority was dead, but the Social Democratsremained on the sidelines until they finally made another U-turn in January1990 and rejoined the mainstream, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the endof the cold war.What had been especially galling to the government and to the DanishForeign Minister, Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, during the ‘footnote’ period was thefact that, when the cold war intensified and the two sides confronted each otherface to face, Denmark had not stood by its allies and helped win the contest.The actors of the ‘alternative’ majority, on the other hand, argue that theycontributed greatly to ending the cold war peacefully by showing the SovietUnion the gentle face of the West. This view seems to have the backing of theauthors of the recent Danish Institute of International Studies report onDenmark and the cold war, 16 but not of the present author. 17It can plausibly be argued that the ‘alternative’ majority of the 1980s was thelast significant expression of the ‘1864 syndrome’. It can also be argued that itwas nothing of the sort, but simply an example of tactical use of foreign andsecurity policy in a domestic political power play.IV. The 1990s: Denmark as producer rather than consumer ofsecurityThe material in the previous section shows that several significant aspects ofpresent-day Danish government policies may be traced back to origins in the1980s. First, it is argued above that the Danish opt-outs from a number of EUpolicies were emergency tools to salvage the Treaty of Maastricht. The treatymight not have needed salvaging if the Social Democrats had stuck with theirpolicy stance of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, instead of abandoning it and criticizingdefence, NATO and European integration. Second, it may be argued thatDenmark’s new assertive foreign, security and defence policy has become soassertive today partly in order to compensate for the sins of the 1980s and, moreparticularly, to compensate for the consequences of the defence opt-out of1993.The new policy was championed by Ellemann-Jensen, Minister for ForeignAffairs between September 1982 and January 1993, during his last years in thepost. His primary focus was on the Baltic Sea region and the crisis in the formerYugoslavia. In the Baltic Sea region, Denmark was the sole country that was at16 Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS), Danmark under den kolde krig: den sikkerhedspolitiskesituation 1945–1991 [Denmark during the cold war: the security policy situation 1945–1991],4 vols (DIIS: Copenhagen, 2005), URL .17 Carsten Pedersen, K., ‘Kold krig’ [Cold war], Udenrigs, no. 3/2005 (Sep. 2005), pp. 65–78