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Denmark's Global Role

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Denmark's Global Role Danish approaches to security and aid Denmark’s global role Denmark was among the most generous aid donors from 1960 to 2000. A new government in 2001 reduced Danish assistance considerably and put more emphasis on security issues. Denmark now has a renewed focus on aid, particularly in Africa. enmark did not get Summary D involved in development cooperation • From 1960 to 2001, development assistance became a key focus until the early 1960s. for Denmark. There was rapid growth in the scope of assistance, However, it quickly agreed to and collaboration between political parties and Danish civil society. adopt the UN standard of • From 2002 to 2005, cutbacks in development and environmental Alamy / Flag illustrations rich countries dedicating assistance were imposed by a new government. It was a period 0.7% of their gross national product (GNP) to official of parliamentary disagreement and strong criticism of the development assistance (ODA). By1979, in spite of its government from the civil society organizations. relatively late start, the country was among the first to attain • Between 2002 and 2005 a new activist foreign policy placed this target. greater emphasis on security. New attempts were made to link In 1992, Denmark’s ODA passed the 1% mark, and with civil assistance to military actions. Denmark had a close alliance minor fluctuations it stayed at that level for the next nine with the US and participated in the Iraq invasion without a UN years. In 1993 Denmark began giving special environmental mandate. assistance to both low- and medium-income countries. The • From 2006 until the present, there has been a gradual increase in Danish parliament, or Folketinget, set the target for development assistance to a level slightly above 0.8%. environmental assistance – in addition to development • Renewed interest in Africa has led to growth in African assistance assistance – at 0.5% of its GNP. and the establishment of an international Africa Commission Over the years, Danish political parties have held different chaired by the prime minister. views on development assistance. Right-wing parties such as the Progress Party and the Danish People’s Party were very critical of large-scale government spending on assistance. government supported by the right-wing Danish People’s The extreme left wing argued that assistance was overly Party. The new prime minister was Anders Fogh Rasmussen supportive of the Danish business community. But the of Venstre. dominant parties – both in the traditional labour movement, V and K had promised to improve the Danish health the centre and the centre-right – agreed that Denmark had a system, and argued that funding new investments in Danish duty in the world, and that it benefited Denmark to fulfil. health would require cutting back on assistance to poor Doing so made little Denmark ‘larger’ on the world scale. countries. The new target for ODA became 0.8%. Special In 2001 the political situation in Denmark changed environmental assistance was reduced by more than half and drastically. At the parliamentary elections the social- was later dismantled and integrated into the reduced democratic minority government under Poul Nyrup development assistance fund. Rasmussen lost to a coalition of two centre-right parties: the A memo from 2003 compares budgetary estimates from traditionally liberal Venstre and the Danish Conservative the outgoing government with the new government’s Party. This coalition, called V and K, formed a minority projections. 1 The total Danish development and environmental assistance for 2002 had been planned at DKK 12.5 billion (approximately US$2.2 billion), but was cut By Knud Vilby a journalist and writer specialised in development and back to DKK 11 billion. Environmental assistance was to environment topics. grow from 2002 to 2005 to close on DKK 2 billion annually according to the former government’s plans, but instead was 8 www.thebrokeronline.eu ANP / Rune Evensen Danish Minister for Development, Ulla Tørnæs, and Professor Bjorn Lømborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, present the planet’s 10 biggest challenges at the Copenhagen Consensus, 30 May 2008. frozen at DKK 500 million annually and subsequently The left thought there were too many Danish business absorbed into development assistance. Development subsidies built into the assistance policy. For many years assistance was locked at 0.8%, which was DKK 10.5 billion assistance operated with firmly fixed return percentages in 2002. In 2005 annual savings was DKK 4.5 billion. – 50% of assistance was supposed to make its way back to Denmark by being spent on Danish wages or supplies, and Pioneering in development and environmental for a long time government loans were tied to purchases of assistance Danish goods. With the wave of decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s, But Danish assistance also had strong idealistic Danish NGOs and committed politicians saw a potential for components. One was intense support for multilateral a Danish presence beyond Europe. There was political deployments through the UN system. Denmark, like other consensus on the importance of development assistance Scandinavian countries, was politically influenced by its based on: geographical position between East and West during the • Humanitarian considerations that were partly rooted in the Cold War. The partition of Europe placed the UN high on tradition of Christian relief work. the Danish foreign policy agenda. The large-scale Danish • The Scandinavian welfare model was seen as a ‘golden multilateral assistance formed the basis for a policy of ‘active mean’ between capitalism and socialism, and hence as a multilateralism’. Denmark attempted to be active both in model that would inspire newly independent states. strategy development and reform processes within the UN Denmark barely had a colonial past, which eased political system. cooperation with new nations. Its philosophy of solidarity Civil society was heavily involved in early Danish appealed to many parliament members, particularly the assistance. A Danish International Development Assistance centre-left. (Danida) advisory board was established in the early 1960s • Development assistance could open up new markets to with representatives from both the business sector and trade and industry. NGOs. The board continues to deal with all major assistance • Development assistance could help give Denmark, a small grants. Danish NGOs engaged in development and relief country, greater international gravitas. work were granted sizable state subsidies, and for over ten Only tax resisters and the extreme left wing were sceptical. years more than 15% of the total Danish bilateral assistance > The Broker issue 13 April 2009 9 was channelled through these NGOs. A large part of the • The implementation of a new defence agreement in 2004 Danish public information work relating to development and the shift in focus from domestic defence to greater problems was also undertaken by NGOs, backed by active Danish participation in international military DANIDA funding. The Danish programme for sending deployments. volunteers out to developing countries was run by an NGO, In assistance policy terms, the interaction between civil and the Danish Association for International Cooperation (MS), military deployments became an important new topic after with government funding. Denmark became involved in military deployments in both With increasing emphasis gradually being placed on Iraq and Afghanistan. The debate was coloured by partnership and local ownership in the recipient countries – Denmark’s membership in the United Nations Security in line with developments in international assistance policy Council in 2005. – project assistance was eventually superseded by assistance In pivotal speeches in 2003 about Denmark’s international for selected government sectors in the individual programme duties, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen clearly said countries. There were no more tie-ins to purchases of Danish the focus was on security rather than development assistance. goods. In a September 2003 speech on the new world order, Almost from the start the focus of assistance was on Rasmussen did not mention Danish development assistance poverty. The fundamental principle of bilateral assistance explicitly, and focused on the fight against terror, democratic was that cooperation would be concentrated on a number of development in the Arab countries, international free trade programme countries. But there were political disputes over and Danish interaction with the EU and US. which would be chosen. Did the poverty focus mean that In a speech to the Royal Danish Defence College only the very poorest countries should receive assistance, or Rasmussen declared that Denmark ‘must produce more were slightly richer countries with massive poverty problems soldiers for the international operations’. Danish national also eligible? In practice, most Danish programme countries defence was to ensure greater visibility of Denmark were in Africa. internationally. He also stressed the importance of Denmark A distinctive feature of Danish aid, however, was its size in improving its record at co-conceptualizing military relation to the other foreign-policy areas. While defence deployment with development assistance, reconstruction spending in most countries is far greater than spending on assistance and humanitarian assistance. ‘It is important that assistance, this was not so in Denmark. In the 1997 Danish the local population
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