Denmark

From the rune-stone kingdom of the Vikings to a Scandinavian monarchy that shed its empire and remade itself as a modern welfare state.

Denmark is one of the oldest continuous monarchies in Europe, its name first carved in stone on the great Jelling rune-stone of about 965, when King Harald Bluetooth proclaimed that he had won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian. From that Viking-Age core grew a North Sea power that briefly ruled England under Cnut the Great and that, under Queen Margaret I, joined Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the Kalmar Union of 1397. The Reformation made Denmark a Lutheran kingdom in 1536, but the early modern centuries brought repeated wars with Sweden and the loss of the eastern provinces of Scania at the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658. Defeat in the Napoleonic Wars cost Denmark Norway at the Treaty of Kiel in 1814, and absolute monarchy gave way to constitutional government with the June Constitution of 1849. The nineteenth century was scarred by the Schleswig-Holstein question, culminating in the catastrophic defeat of 1864; the present border was fixed only after the 1920 plebiscite returned Northern Schleswig to Denmark. Through the twentieth century Denmark endured German occupation, helped found NATO in 1949 and joined the European Community in 1973, while Greenland and the Faroe Islands remain self-governing parts of a Danish Realm whose last territorial dispute, over Hans Island, was settled with Canada only in 2022.