This was published by The Times Magazine, early 90s

Thank God for the Danes! If it weren't for the marvellous moment in June when a 51/49 majority punted the Maastricht treaty into touch, it would have seemed that doubts about the European dream were the preserve of a ragged radical right rump and the Luddite loony left. But the Danes, now? Surely the most sensible people on earth? Affluent, charming, people. Good sorts. It will be good fun to see how they handle the Presidency of the European Community which they taker over on the first day of the New Year. Excellent to see them take serious flak, instead of us, for a change.

If they continue to wobble on union, then it is certainly open to an English person to do so. After all the Brit is historically dedicated to anarchy and anachronism, sceptical of improvement and progress. Indeed, it is galling for a Briton to note that it was the Danes who pulled the Maastricht Euro-tour bus in for speeding. They - unlike us - are not hooligans and are good Europeans. Clearly, there's more to them than Legoland, polite football fans and Hans Christian Andersen.

The Danes share our latitude, but not our attitudes. You realise there's something different about them the moment you hang out late at night at a few of Copenhagen's exquisite cafes: beautiful, unself-conscious people who love their surroundings to be elegant and theatrical. The men fancying themselves as lady-killers, but washing the dishes at home. The women, liberated, but comely and homely too. Everyone smoking like crazy. Candles everywhere, testimony to the aesthetic of hyggelig ("hew-ger-li"): cosiness, but real chic too. Or try Tivoli: inspired by London's Vauxhall Gardens, a last homage to the ordered pleasures of classical Rome is being played out any summer night. Or Bakken: a working class Tivoli with transvestism as a spice.

To be fairly precise: Denmark lies alongside Newcastle in the south and Aberdeen in the north. It's a bit colder than Britain. So you expect a misty, frosty, troublesome place. It should recall the geordies and perhaps a certain Edinburgh snootiness where there's any class at all. Alcohol and shopping malls and rather desperate nationalism; sawn-off humour and a certain scuffed gentleness; great formal education and an odd legalism: these are the things we know of the northern Britain which faces Denmark and which we might expect in our neighbour across the North Sea.

What do we find? None of that tragi-comic rebelliousness alongside that lurking, almost French, refinement, that's for sure. Perhaps we can feel our way towards saying why, remembering always that Denmark has about a tenth of the British population on a fifth of the British land surface, which may explain almost everything. It perhaps explains the slight claustrophobia about the place: only over-crowded anonymity sets us free.

Inland Denmark is physically very like Suffolk. Indeed a distinguished ex-pat Danish lawyer, a silk who lives and works in Britain and loves its vigour, remains patriotically so true to his birthplace that he lives within a snipe's cry of the Maltings at Snape in Suffolk, because "it smells of Denmark". Outside his adopted county, he could perhaps have found the same quality in the Lincolnshire Wolds, but no coastline of course. Certainly, Denmark is never as crushingly boring as East Anlgia's fenlands can be, but its highest mountain is less than 600 feet high. Denmark undulates, like a sigh, and - in summer especially - sometimes a very contented one. Denmark has a shoreline as extensive as that of Britain, Italy or Greece among Europeans: they could all have been designed by computer with a fractal programme, finding ways of putting as much edge as possible to a given mass. Unlike the others', its shoreline is often sand dunes, sometimes almost dramatic, or at least dramatic-seeming after a day spent in such mild farmscape.

Barbados, Bangladesh and Mauritius share with Denmark the distinction of having well over half of their land as productive farmland. All are small, but none is remotely as rich as Denmark (arguably head of the European affluence league as it is). Denmark is blessed with something more than excellent soils and growing weather (though it has those). A stable population is only part of it. Years ago, Denmark discovered a trick, shared by Canada, but never given to Britain: it early sold foreigners far more food than it bought from them. In the opening years of this century, for instance, a third of the world's butter came from these Baltic-fringed fields. The reason was simple: when the price of grain crashed in the late nineteenth century, the Danish farmers switched from trying to sell oats, barley and wheat and instead started shoving them into cows, pigs and hens whose produce or flesh they sold instead. Then as now, the farmers make this intensive production a miracle of scent-free neatness.

As Hendrik Van Loon, the Dutch genius and historian pointed out in 1933, most of Danish farm trade was with Britain: "which for some mysterious reason [has] been satisfied until now to allow foreign farmers a free and open market". Even now, it amazes the Danish people how committed the British are to free trade, even when it seems so often to kick us in the teeth. They marvel at our quixotic devotion to bringing down the Common Agricultural Policy of the EC, and our passion for the GATT trade reform process.

There are important human differences tucked away in this Danish picture of early and continuing agricultural affluence. Danes think they were amongst the first countries to liberate their peasants from feudal ties, in the eighteenth century. Looking around their Continental neighbours, this looks usefully true. They also did so bloodlessly, and at the behest of enlightened landowners. Did you have a revolution, I asked a diplomat? "Well, not a revolution, exactly", he replied, spreading a little more salted pork fat - delicious - on a cracker: "more a little uprising". A man in a Copenhagen bar once explained to me that there was once nearly a revolution, but one of its bloodiest crews was passing a bar on its way to some mayhem, was invited in for a drink instead, and that was that.

The Danes forget that they still had peasants in the eighteenth century, whilst the British were getting rid of the idea of tied men communally working the open fields of their masters something like four hundred years before. They had peasants whilst we had yeomen and farm-workers. Much later, they had farmers and smallholders free to starve on their own land (but many prospered), whilst we had a vast army of redundant farm-workers with which to staff the industrial revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Danes also lost a land-grab war with Germany, the only country with which they are put to what a Briton thinks is the indignity of sharing a land border. They realised that they had better make their own land rich since foreign fields looked impossible to gain, proving again that the humiliation of losing wars is almost always worthwhile on the grounds of the profitable redeployment of energies it so often brings.

All round, the Danes have had the better end of these arrangements. Once freed, the farmers soon remembered their recent tradition of communal work on another man's fields, and learnt another trick which has evaded their feistier British neighbour: they formed the co-operatives which were brilliant at disseminating the latest techniques and good marketing ploys to the less imaginative. Even now the movement is far weaker, the Danish family farmer does better out of the EC than our small farmers do.

Utterly bereft of raw materials (oil and gas were found later), the Danes let the heavy end of the industrial revolution bypass them. This spared them the twin trauma of building smokestacks and then of knocking them down; and it spared them building an economy on uneducated labour, so they adjusted smoothly to the modern world in which a knowledgeable workforce makes profit, not dissidence.

Their most famous capitalist is a shipping and oil magnate (but diligently unostentatious: how different from those Greeks). They had until his recent death a loud-mouth sensualist of an entrepreneur in the travel business. He was loved because he was un-Danish in his lavishness and vulgarity. His nearest rival was a money-making pastor, and they must have made a hilarious pair. The Danes have hundreds of small entrepreneurs seeking high-powered brain-work export niches. They are brilliant at pharmaceuticals, bio-technology and valve-making and complain they have too many consultant engineers. Of course, they also invented the stacking chair and KD (knock-down) furniture-in-a-pack; they gave us the G-Plan we remember.

All this makes the Danes rich. But it is not that which makes them remarkable. The Danes individually and nationally have been freed of the need to dominate. There was of course a moment when they learned one way of terrorising a big area: to become devoted guerrillas. The Vikings were the SAS of their day and the British, naturally piratical, appreciate their skill. The Vikings could not have taken over Britain if they tried. For that they would have had to be more efficient and conventional imperialists: they could not have succeeded where the Romans had failed. They bullied us like snipers in the ruins of a town: clearly, the lords of all they surveyed, but unable to command. Only when the Danes married Frenchmen, and became the Normans, did they finally have the consistency and arrogance to rule.

By the way, it benefited the Danes that their much later colonies were always few and small: they were thus freed of the guilt of having ruled other peoples, and the wounded pride of those who have to evacuate former territories. It also reinforces their quiet but definite distaste for, and successful resistance of, immigration, which contributes to Denmark's untroubled dullness. Even so, immigration remains a hot issue. The bungled and possibly illegal exclusion from the country of families of Tamil refugees has been a running political sore since 1987, and may yet bring the right-centre government down.

One pastor has become famous for expressing what he believes is the suppressed voice of the real Denmark: "Eighty or 90 per cent do protest very hard against immigration", he insists. "They say this is our country, we do want guests, but we want to decide who is the master. But the press and media and politicians try to impose the immigration that the population does not want." Like it or not, some similar dislocation between people and politicians must lie behind the surprise Maastricht vote.

Anyway, the stay-at-home Danes became social philosophers. Two early- and mid-nineteenth century figures people made modern Denmark, and everyone admits it. Firstly, and cordially disliked by most Danes, there is Siren Kierkegaard. Gloomy, prolix and rich, Kierkegaard pointed out that Danes had a good opinion of themselves only because they did not to expose themselves to the outside world. As a proto-existentialist he also reminded them that a man is alone and everything in which he seeks comfort is empty. Roughly speaking, he said that whatever you do, you're going to be full of regrets. But a man is his own measure, and had better stand on his own two feet. To this philosophy, Danes attribute their devotion to the idea that one man's opinion is as good as another's, and so their appetite for democracy.

It probably was the stream of fin-de-sie[[accent]]cle consciousness which gave them Carl Nielsen, a composer loved by the English for his delicious tunes and sounds, and for his excitement at keeping them shaken and disturbed. Romance, reasonableness and chaos: these are the British preoccupations and we salute anyone who addresses them creatively.

The other of the pair is even more important, and though the two men apparently hated each other, he shared an attitude which stresses individual responsibility. But he placed the individual firmly in a supportive community. N F S Grundtvig is unknown outside the country he helped form. He was a Lutheran pastor, a hymn-writer, and a rebel. "He was married three times, and was often in love, yes, but I am not sure you could call it having mistresses", says a Danish woman pastor and ex-member of parliament of the great romantic, pointing out that he advocated female priesthood in the 1860s. He was a passionate admirer of the British way of life: its democracy and individualism. In streams of writings and lectures he told the Danes that they were a great nation and that the new freedoms that the decline of kingly absolutism brought required that people should be educated after the school years. In school or church, not Latin and foreign ideas and intellectualism were what mattered, but a comprehensible, useful, Danish style. The upshot was a deliberately folksy adult education programme, and an attitude to schooling which is like our comprehensive ideal, but a hundred years older and more comfortable. The Danish state also funds any school any committed group of parents agree to start. It has the most progressive welfare service in the world which survived even a Conservative-Liberal government's neo-Thatcherism. Not even that new toughness could stop the Danes being nice to each other. They just worked harder and paid themselves less wages. No wonder they have tolerated Christiania, the micro-city of hippies in the middle of Copenhagen: the whole country is a social experiment.

In the nick of time, I found a Dane who dissents from the Danish consensus, and it is expressed by his reversal of the usual judgement on Denmark's heroes. The novelist Henrik Stangerup, who has excoriated Danish peninsularity, says: "the majority of intellectuals prefer Grundtvig instead of Kirkegaard. Indeed, Grundtvig is a genius as a poet, but he is extremely dangerous in my eyes, because he's a national chauvinist. This is Danish National Socialism, really. He was not a Nazi, of course not. But he talks about Danes as the best, as pure, innocent, elected. That sort of thing. What I would call 'soft fascism'. But he was pro-Jewish, mind you. But Kirkegaard is for the individual: that is why he is read all over the world."

Even this dissenting voice has a patriotism which is sweet compared to a British equivalent. Everyone in Denmark flies the national flag, the white cross on red, outside his house. But it carries no stigma of jingoism. Perhaps a Briton thinks of a football hooligan's vest when we think of the Union Jack with mixed feelings. Mr Stangerup keeps an unsullied affection for his flag.

The Danes have found, of course, an acceptable relationship with their monarchy. In an age where the people do not know how to grovel and where the royals cannot appear mysterious, the Queen of Denmark is an unremarkable book illustrator, a designer for the unpretentious Royal Theatre, and has no crisis of grandeur as she commands the nation's unfussed affections. She pays no tax.

I asked several people for guidance about the extraordinary agreement throughout the nation that Denmark is really an all right sort of place. Where are the Danish Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones, the sheer rebelliousness which is the British birthright? Where's the anger? "It doesn't exist", they all said, without sadness.

But where is the underclass, driven mad by dependency? Don't people go crazy with boredom living in so rational and good a place, I asked a high court judge? He replied: "Of course we have one third of the population living in the Copenhagen area which is a relatively strong concentration of the population and there is quite a concentration of problems. So we know biker gangs, professional drug dealers and violence. It is not a church school we are dealing with in Denmark."

Typically, however, they deal with crime and punishment a little differently. Open prisons are common, where, says the judge, gaolbirds "have every day the decision whether to stay or run away". But if they did make a dash for it, there would be nowhere to hide in so small a place. In any case, not many people are in gaol: faced with crimes against property rising in line with those in the rest of the industrialised world, Denmark decided to reduce the duration of prison sentences and the range of offences for which they were meted out. Britain's prison population has risen fast, Denmark's has not; Denmark's citizens are not more burgled as a result. The judge points out that everyone knows prison doesn't work, but in Denmark's small world, the enlightened perception can become public policy. Sex crimes have fallen since the liberalisation of pornography.

"If you are rebellious, you go away, and maybe stay away", said one ex-pat. Certainly some money makers stay away to avoid the very high taxes. But more often, it is the lure of a bigger pond, or the avoidance of claustrophobia rather than taxes, which keep people away. Karen Blixen, the writer, took her furious nature away and beat it up so hard, she needed to get out of Africa and come home to rest up.

You look around for a dark side to Denmark. Perhaps there is something sinister in a country whose adults seem so proud of the fairy tales of a neurotic misfit, Hans Andersen: surely something odd in a people given to so mawkish a school of literature? "These are stories my mother read to me, and they have a powerful moral content", said the ex-pat in Snape, and sounded a little irritated. One might make quite a good case that the Danes are xenophobes: there are precious few black faces in the country. There is quite a high suicide rate.

There is also some grisly modern painting, but you get that anywhere. I was drawn to Denmark most and first, by its straightforward narrative, but luminous, middle-brow nineteenth century painting, part of a wider, vibrant Scandinavian school. Yes, there was plenty of preoccupation with gaunt peasants, dead babies, drownings and murders. But there was also a warm eroticism and sheer joie de vivre in pictures of parties and even plain domesticity. They were pictures of a society which prizes affection and conviviality, and pays for them in conformity.

The Danes are uncertain about Maastricht because they have fashioned a society to chafe against, not hate. They know it is distinctive and democratic; it is supportive and small. If they are a little precious about its values and virtues, it is only because it would be a fool who undervalued them. But I think I would go mad if I lived there.