ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the way that a small open economy could attempt to shape the international framework to suit the choices which emerged from the interplay of domestic politics. The distinction between farmers and smallholders in the landholding structure of Danish agriculture, crucial to the original success of the agricultural sector in the nineteenth century, was crucial, too, to the shifting attitudes of Danish parties to international economic arrangements. The inherited framework of interdependence, as it developed in the immediate post-war period, was thus singularly unsuited for the advancement of Danish policy objectives. Protectionism in Europe also raised the daunting prospect of a rapid decline in Danish agricultural income. Denmark, the government hoped, would be accepted as a structural debtor within the European Payments Union. One of the major factors behind the choice of integration, the desire to commit the Federal Republic to the pattern of trade which developed in Western Europe after 1949, was therefore missing in Denmark.
