Danish Cold War Historiography

SURVEY ARTICLE Danish Cold War Historiography ✣ Rasmus Mariager This article reviews the scholarly debate that has developed since the 1970s on Denmark and the Cold War. Over the past three decades, Danish Cold War historiography has reached a volume and standard that merits international attention. Until the 1970s, almost no archive-based research had been conducted on Denmark and the Cold War. Beginning in the late 1970s, however, historians and political scientists began to assess Danish Cold War history. By the time an encyclopedia on Denmark and the Cold War was published in 2011, it included some 400 entries written by 70 researchers, the majority of them established scholars.1 The expanding body of literature has shown that Danish Cold War policy possessed characteristics that were generally applicable, particularly with regard to alliance policy. As a small frontline state that shared naval borders with East Germany and Poland, Denmark found itself in a difficult situation in relation to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well as the Soviet Union. With regard to NATO, Danish policymakers balanced policies of integration and screening. The Danish government had to assure the Soviet Union of Denmark’s and NATO’s peaceful intentions even as Denmark and NATO concurrently rearmed. The balancing act was not easily managed. A review of Danish Cold War historiography also has relevance for contemporary developments within Danish politics and research. Over the past quarter century, Danish Cold War history has been remarkably politicized.2 The end of the Cold War has seen the successive publication of reports and white books on Danish Cold War history commissioned by the Dan- ish government. To a large degree, these reports served political motives and were widely debated after their release. Mainstream historians, though never uncritical, usually defended the reports, whereas politicians and right-wing 1. John T. Lauridsen et al., eds., Den Kolde Krig og Danmark: Gads Leksikon (Copenhagen: Gad, 2011). The present article is a rewritten, updated, and abridged version of an essay originally published under the title “Den Kolde Krig i international og dansk historieforskning,” in Lauridsen et al., eds., Den KoldeKrigogDanmark, pp. 720–746. 2. Thorsten B. Olesen, “Under the National Paradigm: Cold War Studies and Cold War Politics in Post–Cold War Norden,” Cold War History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May 2008), pp. 189–211. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 20, No. 4, Fall 2018, pp. 180–211, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00825 © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 180 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00825 by guest on 28 September 2021 Survey Article opinion-makers, backed by a smaller group of historians, strongly criticized the reports. The most telling episode occurred in May 2006 when the Dan- ish parliament decided by a small majority that a four-volume report on Denmark during the Cold War years of 1945–1991 (commissioned by the previous government and published in 2005 by the Danish Institute for Inter- national Studies) was “preliminary.” The parliament went on to commission a new report from the Center for Koldkrigsforskning (Center for Cold War Research) intended to be more acceptable and reliable. The center was subse- quently founded in 2007, whereupon a government-selected board appointed a leading neo-orthodox historian as director.3 Phases in Danish Cold War Historiography Danish Cold War historiography has largely followed general trends in international scholarly debates on the history of the Cold War, although this progress was often delayed. Compared to other Western countries, historical enquiry into Cold War Denmark developed relatively late.4 Among the nu- merous factors accounting for this state of affairs, the most notable is the fact that, for decades, World War II was the focus of enquiry for the vast majority of contemporary historians. A further explanation is that, until 1968, Danish historians—to an overwhelming degree—were compelled to base all research concerning the period after 1945 on material in the public record. However, the end of the 1970s generated the onset of archive-based publications, and these sorts of studies gathered pace throughout the 1980s. Nonetheless, not until the 1990s and the early twenty-first century—that is, after the end of the Cold War—were larger comprehensive analyses of this period in Danish history published. Two important reasons for the inception of detailed archival research include the battle among Nordic politicians over their subsequent political reputations and the approach of the year 1969, when Denmark’s NATO 3. Nikolaj Petersen, “Kampen om den kolde krig i dansk politik og forskning,” Historisk tidsskrift,Vol. 109, No. 1 (2009), pp. 154–204. Full disclosure: I co-authored the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Danmark under den kolde krig: Den sikkerhedspolitiske situation 1945–1991, Vols. 1–4 (Copenhagen: DIIS, 2005), and PET-Kommissionens beretning, Vols. 1–16 (Copenhagen: Ministry of Justice, 2009). 4. Nikolaj Petersen, “Den kolde krig og Danmark,” in Erling Ladewig Petersen, ed., Den kolde krig og de nordiske lande (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1984), pp. 7–23; Thorsten B. Olesen, “Dan- mark og den kolde krig 1945–1969,” Historie, No. 2 (1995), pp. 233–260; and Poul Villaume, “Den- mark during the Cold War, 1945–1989,” in Thorsten B. Olesen, ed., The Cold War—and the Nordic Countries (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2004), pp. 17–41. 181 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00825 by guest on 28 September 2021 Mariager membership was up for renewal. At the end of the 1940s, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had conducted negotiations on the establishment of a Nordic defense union. However, no such union ever materialized. All three countries were disappointed by the failure to find a Nordic solution, and over the years the politicians involved blamed one another for the unsuccessful negotiations. In a book published in 1966 Norges vei til NATO, the former foreign minister of Norway Halvard Lange declared that Norway had been interested in forming a Nordic alliance but was deterred by Sweden’s attitude. The former Swedish Prime Minister Tage Erlander rejected this notion and instead blamed Norway in his memoirs published in 1973. The Danish Prime Min- ister Hans Hedtoft maintained until his death in 1955 that the unsuccessful negotiations were “our generation’s first large defeat.” In 1966, the government of then-Danish Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag commissioned a White Paper on Danish security policy from 1948 to 1966, and around the same time the Norwegian government granted the historian Magne Skodvin access to the Norwegian archives pertaining to the defense negotiations. The results were made available a few years later. In 1968, the Danish Foreign Ministry published the two-volume report Dansk Sikkerhedspolitik 1948–1966,andin 1971 Skodvin published his book Norden eller NATO? In the beginning of the 1970s, interest in Denmark’s position at the start of the Cold War was thus awakened both among politicians and historians. From the outset, it was clear that writing the history of the Cold War would be inextricably linked with politics.5 The opening in 1974–1975 of the U.S. and British official archives re- lating to the early years of the Cold War profoundly influenced the incipient Danish scholarship. At first, the newly opened archives caused Norwegian historians to travel to the United States and the United Kingdom, where they studied Scandinavia’s position in international politics. Danish historians soon followed. Around the same time, Udgiverselskabet for Danmarks Nyeste His- torie (Society for the Publication of Contemporary Danish History, or DNH) launched a research project on Danish foreign policy from liberation in 1945 until Denmark’s accession to the Atlantic Pact in 1949, granting privileged access to material from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Access to U.S. and British materials, Norwegian inspiration, and the DNH research project led, along with the interest generated within the Dansk Udenrigspolitiks Insti- tut (Danish Foreign Policy Institute), to the publication of pioneering studies heralding hope for future Danish Cold War scholarship, as well as publication 5. Thorsten B. Olesen, “Kampen om eftermælet,” in Carsten Due-Nielsen, Ole Feldbæk, Nikolaj Petersen, eds., Danmark i syv sind (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000), pp. 125–147. 182 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00825 by guest on 28 September 2021 Survey Article of yearbooks that included articles on recent developments in Danish foreign policy. Of special note is a series of articles by Nikolaj Petersen on the options available to Denmark in 1948–1949, the question of Nordic defense negotiations, and Denmark’s decision to seek membership in tthe Atlantic Pact in 1949, all of which provided new perspectives and important results.6 Stud- ies by Ib Faurby, Hans Henrik Bruun, Niels Amstrup, and Erik Beukel also provided encouragement to those who were interested in Danish security policy during the Cold War’s infancy.7 The Danish Cold War research milieu was nonetheless modest, containing at this time only about a dozen active scholars—primarily political scientists—albeit some of whom were historians by training. In the 1980s, interest in the Cold War was further stimulated by political conflict over the so-called footnote policy. The controversy stemmed from the intensification of the Cold War in the late 1970s and 1980s. As in most West European countries, this intensification gave rise to a domes- tic debate in Denmark over NATO policies.8 From 1982 to 1988, the Dan- ish parliamentary majority opposition, led by the Social Democratic Party, imposed “footnotes”—that is, Danish reservations appended to a series of NATO’s communiqués—on the Conservative-Liberal minority governments.

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