Forerunner, follower, exceptionalist or bridge builder? Mapping Nordicness in Danish foreign policy

ABSTRACT

Since the early Cold War Denmark has been part of a cluster of Nordic states characterized by their commitment to Scandinavian welfare state values at home and abroad. However, today Danish foreign policy is at the same time super-Nordic, un-Nordic and anti-Nordic. The role of Nordicness in Danish foreign policy has been largely overlooked in the literature on post-Cold War Danish foreign policy, but I identify four different roles for Nordicness in Danish foreign policy: forerunner, follower, bridge builder and exceptionalist. I explore each of these roles discussing what they tell us about the role of Nordicness in Danish foreign policy, and how the roles play out in different issue areas and to which extent the importance of each role has changed over time. I argue that while each role depicts Denmark as a fringe Nordic country, Nordicness continues to play an important, but mostly uncredited, as a source of ideas for Danish foreign policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Danish foreign policy
• Nordic foreign policy
• Scandinavia
• small states
• role theory

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Douglas Brommesson and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Anders Wivel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2429-1506

Notes

1 See also the discussion of the role of Nordicness in Danish EU-scepticism in Wivel (2018).

2 Denmark as a “forerunner country” (“foregangsland”) was the subject of several speeches by the Social Democratic Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, see e.g. his opening speech of the 1997 Danish Globalization Conference (Rasmussen, 1997). This exemplifies how Danish policy makers actively used the forerunner analogy, but not that it was successful outside Denmark, where the Nordic model or the Swedish model may be used more often. However, there is some evidence that Denmark may be viewed as a forerunner country (although often as one among other Nordic countries), see e.g. Francis Fukuyama’s argument that a central challenge of democratic institutions is “getting to Denmark” (Fukuyama, 2014), and Martin Marcussen’s discussion of the international reputation and recognition of the Nordic countries (Marcussen, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by Navigating the Storm: The Challenges of Small States in Europe under Grant Agreement 587498-EPP-1-2017-1-IS-EPPJMO-NETWORK.