DENMARK AND GERMANY (3)

Readers of this blog will know that for centuries, the Kings of Denmark were also Dukes of Schleswig-Holstein in personam. They lost nearly all of the duchies to Prussia following the catastrophic 1864 defeat. But this was partially redressed in the aftermath of the First World War, when a plebiscite was held in 1920 in Schleswig, the more northerly of the two duchies. The result of a complex series of votes designed to maximise Danish territorial gains was that the northern half of Schleswig, from the current border north to just below Kolding, would go to Denmark; the southern half remained in Germany.

The plebiscite left some Danes in the "wrong" country; and the "Syd Slesvig" Danish minority occupies a disproportionately large place in the national pysche. Queen Margrethe II, for example, goes out of her way to greet them (along with former colonies Greenland and the Faroe Islands) in her annual New Year's Eve address to the country. And the Danish People's Party pop up there from time to time, as if to give the impression that the current borders are merely temporary.

Against that background, it is worth noting the recent election of Simon Faber from the Syd Slesvig minority party to be the mayor of Flensborg (Flensburg in German), the major town just south of the current border. It was the first time in more than 60 years that this had happened. In order to beat his CDU opponent in a run-off, Mr. Faber gathered support from the other parties on a platform of increased cross-border trade and other links. Until Schleswig-Holstein became a "question", this was the norm in this part of the world, as Danes and Germans mingled in an area more in thrall to the Hanseatic League than to any monarchical power. If Mr. Faber has his way, then we should expect more bilingual noises, and a softening of Denmark's historical antipathy towards its larger southern neighbour.

Walter Blotscher