I was recently torrenting a 1950s Danish comedy movie called Father of Four on Bornholm, and while waiting for the download to finish, I decided to read what NATOpedia had to say about that island, Bornholm. For the uninitiated, Bornholm is an island of metropolitan Denmark which is notably distant from the rest of the country. It is essentially a vestige of Denmark’s historical rule of Scania, which is now part of Sweden: Bornholm in fact was going to be transferred to Sweden along with the rest of Scania as part of the Treaty of Roskilde (1658), but the Bornholmers revolted and basically ceded themselves back to Denmark immediately afterwards. It’s worth noting that Bornholm has a very strategic location in the Baltic Sea, so control over Bornholm has historically and into the present day meant control over a lot of lucrative shipping and trade if not infrastructure in general. Notably, the Nord Stream explosions in 2022 were just off the coast of Bornholm, the Hanseatic city of Lübeck also controlled Bornholm for a while, and this isn’t to mention the island’s history in WWII and the Cold War.
Linguistically, Bornholmsk is the last surviving form of East Danish, or at least the only form of East Danish for which Danish never ceased to be the Dachsprache. In Scania, Blekinge, and Halland, Danish was replaced by Swedish as a Dachsprache after the territories were ceded to Sweden, and so the dialects of these regions — while they share many historical sound changes with Bornholmsk and other Danish dialects — have in the 300+ years since their cession to Sweden been very strongly influenced by Standard Swedish as well. The point is in any case that Bornholmsk has historically been a bit, well, insular, compared to most other Scandinavian dialects, and accordingly notably divergent from both Standard Danish, Standard Swedish, and Scanian; at the same time as mass media and all has marginalized Bornholmsk compared to Standard Danish, as so often seems to happen with highly divergent rural dialects. And this is where Bornholm’s historical independence movement comes into the picture.
The Bornholmer Party (pre-2015: the Bornholm Self-Government Party) was a socially conservative, right-wing political party active on the island from the 1990s until 2021. Never a major force in Danish politics, it disbanded when its founder, Tonny Borrinjaland, left the party as a decrepit old man and dropped most regional issues from his politics to join the far-right Danish People’s Party instead.
CW suicide
Borrinjaland’s official lore behind why he started the Bornholmer Party was that he was rejected by a girl in the 1960s, became suicidally depressed by it, then went on a years-long voyage of self discovery across the world by boat, and during this voyage became very homesick and discovered a calling to preserve the Bornholmsk dialect from encroachment by Standard Danish. The party, put simply, was his vehicle for doing so.
The Bornholmer Party variably advocated for total Iceland-style independence and simple Faroes-style autonomy from Denmark. It expressed admiration for the Scottish independence movement, and said that Malta and Singapore were models that Bornholm could learn from as an independent country, even supporting the idea of turning Bornholm into a duty-free zone. At the same time, the party’s economic policy had it very closely aligned with the island’s declining fishing industry. Most of all, though, the party’s main stated interest was in developing the Bornholmsk language and making it an official language of instruction and mass media on the island, as well as promoting a Bornholm regional identity in general through e.g. promoting a flag for the island, a flag which I understand is a common tourist souvenir to this very day, often known as the “tourist flag”. This flag was however designed well before the party was founded, in or about 1975 — the party just promoted it.
All of this put together to me signals that the Bornholmer Party, while never a major political force in part due to its dogmatism (e.g. they never participated in TV/radio debates because that would mean speaking Standard D*nish), was essentially a party representing the interests of the island’s fishing and tourism industries, i.e. a party of Bornholm’s local bourgeoisie. One part of this bourgeoisie pushed to “revolutionism” by its vexing, faltering relevance; another part of this bourgeoisie doing well for itself but still hoping to rise higher; together they figured that turning their base of operations into some sort of tax haven of duty free shopping, would be in their best interests, and they had just enough of a strong sense of local identity to work with that they just might’ve been able to convince Bornholm’s proletariat to join them if they just really push this language conflict thing and have this inspiring story about a guy’s journey of self-discovery. But this pipe dream obviously didn’t pan out for them. And this isn’t to mention how forces outside of Denmark might have interests in Bornholm becoming some sort of neocolony to more efficiently balance different countries’ geopolitical interests in the Baltic Sea.
Or something. I’ve basically just read three NATOpedia articles and some old Danish news articles and tried to read between the lines, but this being a flop of a local political party, it really could’ve just been the pet project of one “crank”. But I never like being so dismissive of class dynamics, because Borrinjaland was far from the Bornholmer Party’s only member, and the party did in fact receive hundreds of votes and some amount of media coverage, and the party lasted for some 20-30 years. It had to represent some sort of class interest, right? It had to come from some sort of context, right?
The case of Bornholm, in any case, could be an interesting case study in why some independence movements tend to be left wing and progressive and others are right wing and reactionary, why some independence movements take off and others don’t. What do you all think?
Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.