Maximum Denmark
Everyone is talking about the 150th anniversary of the War of 1864. The characters on Borgen will re-enact it. There’s a campaign to renovate Dybbøl Mølle, the site of a crucial battlefield of the war. There’s new best selling historiography. There’s the requisite counterfactual history. There is, of course, a live blog, from which I stole the map above.
I argued yesterday that Germany’s southeastern border should be expanded. Today we ponder Germany’s northern border.
Let’s set the scene: from 1815 to 1864, the Danish Monarchy—that is, the lands that were reigned in personal union by the King of Denmark—consisted of the Kingdom of Denmark and various territories to the southwest of the Kingdom on the European continent, as well as assorted North Atlantic and West and East Indian possessions. (Today, the Danish monarch only reigns over the Kingdom, which also includes Greenland, previously a colony.) The full title of the monarch was:
By the Grace of God King of Denmark, the Wends and Goths, Duke of Slesvig, Holsten, Stormarn, Ditmarsken, Lauenborg and Oldenborg
German was spoken in most of the duchies except the northern half of Slesvig. Slesvig was an ancient Danish fief, but the other duchies were part of the Holy Roman Empire and later the German Confederation, with the Danish monarch sending a representative to the Bundestag in Frankfurt.
There had been a war in 1848–50 when Danish troops suppressed a German separatist rebellion. A crisis was brewing in the early 1860s, however: First, there was a succession crisis with the coming death of the childless Frederik VII. But Slesvig and Holsten were supposed to be subject to Salic law, so it would appear that they could not be inherited by the the later Christian IX of the House of Lyksborg. A rival claim was announced by the House of Augustenburg, whose head claimed the title “Duke of Schleswig–Holstein”. As Christopher Clark points out in Iron Kingdom, this looked like “an old-fashioned dynastic crisis, triggered, like so many seventeenth and eighteenth-century crises, by the death of a king without male issue. In this sense, we might call the conflict of 1864 ‘the War of the Danish Succession’.”
The memory of the war survives mainly in the context of the Danish and German nationalist movements. The Danish nationalists wanted to annex Slesvig—whose population was roughly half Danish—into the Kingdom and leave Holsten as a separate state in the Monarchy, thus violating a possibly misunderstood convention that Slesvig would not be placed constitutionally closer to Denmark than Holsten. The ascendant German nationalist movement definitely didn’t approve of that. The efforts culminated in November 1863 in a joint constitution for the Kingdom and Slesvig; the slogan for the movement was “Denmark to the Eider,” the river that formed the southern boundary of the Duchy of Slesvig.
SPOILER ALERT Denmark lost, of course, and had to give up all of the duchies, not just the German speaking parts, up to Kongeåen. The Danish speaking parts returned after the First World War and a referendum in 1920.
That was a lot of scene setting for the question of the day: why didn’t Denmark get its lost territories back after World War II?
The boring answer is that nobody wanted it. There was no appetite for a binational state in Denmark, with possibly violent resistance from the Germans in it. You might have thought that the Germans (with whatever the opposite of 20/20 hindsight is) would have wanted to throw their hat in with a country that had not just lost a world war and would be under military occupation for the indefinite future, but no. There was some whispering, though, and a prime minister lost his job because of it, but even he only wanted to go to the Eider, not the River Elbe, where the Danish monarchy ended in 1863.
A slightly less boring answer is that it would have required a small, but non-trivial, round of ethnic cleansing.
How would a Denmark to the Elbe have looked?
We have to decide whether the Kingdom itself would expand to the Elbe, or whether a union would be established with each part of the Monarchy as a semi-independent state along the lines of, well, Germany. We can imagine a federal state consisting of Denmark, Slesvig, Holsten and the smaller duchies, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. You might even have pulled off an expanded Danish Monarchy without ethnic cleansing. The real post-1945 diplomatic coup would be to convince the Allies to include Hamburg in this federation as a Free (and Hanseatic!) City.
In this scenario, the most important and consequential objection to Denmark-to-the-Elbe—that we would have to drive all the way to Hamburg to buy cheap German booze—would not necessarily apply because Slesvig–Holsten might still have lower taxes on alcohol than Denmark proper.
The Sound of German Unity
The National Broadcasting Company is engaged in an epic round of trolling tonight, with half the population of Twitter joining in, which requires some additional trolling about German unification and Anschluss:
Anschluss was the culmination of a century long process of German unification and justified as the firm wish of all Germans. #slatepitches
— myrrh (@guan) December 6, 2013@guan Genuinely puzzling that this wasn’t revisited in 1989.
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) December 6, 2013@mattyglesias @guan They had a lot on their plate in '89. But if they wanted to do it now, it would be ok. Would probably help the CDU.
— Nick Rizzo (@nickrizzo) December 6, 2013It’s well established today that nations should, when the residents wish, be formed based on linguistic criteria. Germany and Austria are both German countries; it’s only 150 years ago that they allied to defeat my own country in the cause of German unity.
There are, of course, historical reasons for a degree of skepticism about German unity. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany reminds us that the “confirmation of the definitive nature of the borders of the united Germany is an essential element of the peaceful order in Europe.” That’s well and good, but the borders of both the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria are as definitive as they could be, and it’s hard to see how one more round of unification hurts that peaceful order.
There are two impediments to German unification: the Treaty on the Final Settlement precludes Germany from expanding its borders, and the Austrian State Treaty, which ended the military occupation of Austria, specifically prohibits “political or economic union between Austria and Germany”, restricts Austria to its pre-1938 borders, and mandates Austrian neutrality.
Austria joined the EU in 1995 and adopted the euro, so there is already a precedent for violating the treaty. Here is my suggested compromise: Germany and Austria can reunite, but Germany–Austria has to leave the euro zone.
Kill Sticky Nav
This Safari extension will make sticky nav bars unstick, so they will only appear at the top of the page.
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I currently support these sites that, in my opinion, have particularly annoying sticky nav. That is usually because they are big and obtrusive, or because they cause unnatural scroll pagination.
The United States has not (yet) defaulted
As the maintainer of didtheunitedstatesdefault.com, I was a bit worried when I saw the headline on Felix’s latest post. Here’s the core of his argument:
Right now, with the shutdown, we’ve already reached the point at which the government is breaking very important promises indeed: we promised to pay hundreds of thousands of government employees a certain amount on certain dates, in return for their honest work. We have broken that promise. Indeed, by Treasury’s own definition, it’s reasonable to say that we have already defaulted: surely, by any sensible conception, the salaries of government employees constitute “legal obligations of the US”.
Nope. No federal employee, contractor, or anyone else with a claim on the United States government, is promised to be paid from the Treasury in excess of appropriations. That’s clear from the US constitution, which provides thatNo Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
This provision has remained unchanged since the Constitution was adopted, so no federal worker could have been under any illusion that he or she was promised any amounts on any dates in return for anything, if appropriations have lapsed. Section 9 is implemented in part through the Anti-deficiency Act (ADA), which forbids federal and DC government employees from incurring obligations on behalf of those governments in excess of appropriations, or to accept voluntary services “except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,” because whoever provided those services might later have a claim for compensation. Section 1342 further states thatAs used in this section, the term “emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property” does not include ongoing, regular functions of government the suspension of which would not imminently threaten the safety of human life or the protection of property.
What is actually going on then? Some “essential” federal workers are, in fact, working, and they may expect to be paid when this is all over. Furloughed workers may also expect to be paid. But they have no legal claim to do so and their expectations do not constitute legal obligations of the United States.If, contrary to what I claim here, some employees have nonetheless been promised to be paid for the period from October 1, then it would not only be unconstitutional to pay them: whoever made that promise violated a federal law, and could be fined not more than $5,000, imprisoned for not more than 2 years, or both.
Maybe they’ve been promised something that’s weaker than a legal obligation of the US, but that wouldn’t constitute a default. The US does make weird promises, the enforceability of which is hard to determine, from time to time. For example, the federal government backs the FDIC with the “full faith and credit” of the US government, but the FDIC itself writes on their website that
While any final conclusion on this matter rests with the Attorney General of the United States and ultimately with the courts, it is our opinion that Title IX of CEBA merely represents an expression of the intent of Congress to support the FDIC's deposit insurance fund should the need arise.
I would say that whatever promise has been made to the federal employees who are working or furloughed right now, it is weaker than the one made to depositors at federally insured depository institutions, since the employees cannot even point to a Sense of Congress statement.