Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2016

Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2016 is now available. It offers an overview of Danish foreign policy and the role of Denmark regionally and globally. Minister of Foreign Affairs Kristian Jensen writes about Denmark and the international situation, while Minister of Defence Peter Christensen describes Denmark in a complex security environment.

The three research articles:

• Denmark takes a relatively unsentimental approach towards Nordic cooperation generally, looking for comparative advantages and practical benefits. Alyson Bailes analyses how these fundamentals were reflected when Denmark chaired the Nordic processes, as it did in 2015 with the Nordic Council of Ministers, the Nordic-Baltic Eight and the Haga civil security programme.
• Denmark’s relationship with Turkey is characterized as increasingly pragmatic by Cecilie Stokholm Banke, at least compared to the early years of the AKP government, when then Prime Ministers Fogh Rasmussen and Recep Tayyip Erdogan clashed in public. In recent years, this value-based position towards Turkey has been replaced by a cautious and pragmatic approach.
• Carsten Staur demonstrates that Denmark took a relatively more activist position in relation to the Middle East than the very cautious UN policy it otherwise adhered to in the late 1940s and 1950s. In the Danish view, Israel’s application for UN membership should be viewed as an element in the complex peace negotiations following the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49, emphasizing the need to base a political solution to the Palestinian refugee problem on the principle of the right of return.

These articles are abstracted in English and Danish at the outset of chapter one.

After the articles follows a selection of official documents considered to be characteristic of Danish foreign policy during 2015. This is supplemented by essential statistics as well as some of the most relevant polls on the attitudes of the Danes to key foreign policy questions. Finally, a bibliography offers a limited selection of scholarly books, articles and chapters published in English, German or French in 2015 within the field covered by the yearbook.

The editors of the Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2016 are director Nanna Hvidt and dr. Hans Mouritzen.