Denmark more divided on how to support Baltic independence than previously thought

Had the relatively hawkish centre-right government not been in po­wer,it is very doubtful that we would have seen the kind of aggressive diplomatic support for Baltic independence that we saw from Denmark leading up to 1991.

This is the main conclusion of Mikkel Runge Olesen's research article recently published in theBaltic Journal of Political Science.

When the Baltic States regained their independence in 1991, Denmark had been one of their very strongest supporters, at a time when many European countries looked at the Baltic aspirations with caution. It was one of the first examples of the new “activist” Danish foreign policy strategy that was adopted as the Cold War came to an end, and the project has been widely hailed as a starting point for Danish domestic consensus on foreign policy activism.

The article argues that the Danish Social Democratic centre-left and Conservative-Liberal centre-right disagreed substantially on how to support the Balts in practice and at what price. The difference was rooted in a hawk-dove disagreement on how to prioritise efforts to ease tensions between East and West during the Cold War (détente). Government party colour is therefore likely to have been crucial for the Danish policy.