The 2011 Debacle over Danish Border Control: A Mismatch of Domestic and European Games. EU Diplomacy Paper 01/2012, January 2012

In May 2011 the Danish minority government successfully obtained the support of the Danish People’s Party to carry out a comprehensive pension reform. In return, it was agreed that Denmark would reintroduce border controls. However, this appeared to be at odds with the Schengen Agreement and prompted a heated response from Berlin and Brussels. The Danish government had to backtrack and insist that the proposed initiatives would not violate the Schengen acquis. This paper examines how a purely domestic issue galvanized into a strong diplomatic pressure on Denmark, and what that tells us of modern diplomacy in an integrated Europe. It argues that by linking its pension reform with border controls, the Danish government introduced the international level into its national negotiations. This illustrates that the two levels cannot be kept entirely separate in the European Union and diplomacy increasingly becomes a part of daily policy-making