The satirical history of England by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, 1066 and All That, explained that history came to a full stop after the First World War, when America overtook England as Top Nation.

The concept of Top Nation was very much on the agenda at a Königswinter conference I attended recently. Attendees were preoccupied with the contest between  China and the United States to become the Top Nation of the  twenty-first century.  And yet as parallel sessions debated the future of the European Union, I realised that there was an underlying debate between two different views of the world.  For foreign policy experts, America is Top Nation.  But from an economic perspective, perhaps the Top Nation is Denmark.

For Sellar and Yeatman, Top Nation  was defined by its ability to push other people around.  The British Empire, on which the sun never set, in which Queen Victoria was Empress of an India she had never even visited, and in which Palmerston sent a fleet to defend the interests of Don Pacifico,  epitomised Top Nationhood.

           But Denmark has lost interest in pushing other people around.  In the last two centuries, Denmark has lost Norway, Schleswig Holstein, and Iceland, and Greenland will probably find its own resource rich independence before long.  But no one much minds. Denmark is small, socially cohesive, and  very rich.  In international surveys of happiness , the country is usually at or close to the top.

Of course, Denmark is also rather boring.  Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People describes Jante Law, the crushing conformity and self-satisfaction of small towns in his adopted country.  But, after a century in which the European continent was riven by two catastrophic wars that now seem both distant and absurd – there was something surreal about travelling to that Königswinter conference through a landscape that still bore the scars of the 1945 battle for Berlin – most Europeans think boring is good, 

          We once suffered from Norman Angell’s Great Illusion – prosperity was the product of aggressive control of territory and resources – and now we know better.   The wealth of Denmark is instead built on exporting bacon, and drugs to control diabetes– an appropriate combination – around the world.   That kind of global engagement is now enough for most Europeans.  The Scottish independence referendum was, to a degree, a choice between political and economic concepts of Top Nationhood.  Did Scots  want to renew the UK’s Trident nuclear submarines – the enfeebled modern assertion that Britannia rules the waves – or would they rather be like Denmark?

As aspects of that Scottish debate illustrated, complacency and insularity can be taken too far.  In the 1970s, Mogen Gilstrup’s Progress Party, which proposed to replace Denmark’s defence forces by a recorded announcement in Russian saying ‘we surrender’, became the second largest party in the country’s parliament.  Another candidate for economic Top Nation is  Switzerland which has for centuries now successfully maintained the slightly more assertive principle of ‘if you do not bother us, we will not bother you’.  Gilstrup went too far when he sought to declare Denmark a Muslim free zone. Yet in last week’s election,  the Danish People’s Party, successor to his Progress Party, won over twenty per cent of the vote.

Some economists view Top Nationhood in a different way.  Has Chinese GDP yet overtaken that of the United States?   Will India’s burgeoning population and economic growth eventually give it the largest GDP of all? But I have never understood why this competition is interesting – except as a guide to the resources available to support a military version of Top Nation.  And that is not a competition which India, like Denmark, seems to want to enter.  To the benefit, not just of Indians and Danes, but of the whole world.