ABSTRACT
‘There are two kinds of European nations’, Danish Finance Minister Kristian Jensen told the audience including the British Ambassador to Denmark at a Brexit conference in the Danish Parliament in June 2017. ‘There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations’ (Boffey 2017). Jensen’s remarks, provoking a spirited response from the British ambassador, signalled the bafflement – rather than disappointment or anger – from a small European state, which had allied closely with the United Kingdom on numerous issues concerning security, transatlantic relations, economic and political freedom and the institutional development of the EU. The Danish finance minister was not the only prominent representative from a small state trying to make sense of the British decision. Economic policymakers from small states inside and outside the EU were ‘consistently pessimistic about Brexit’, noting the experience of small EU outsiders having to limit their scope for domestic policymaking considerably in order to benefit from EU integration (O’Sullivan and Skilling 2017).
