All eyes last week were on the Danish referendum on the euro. Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's eyes, in particular, seemed distinctly red-rimmed and occasionally teary as he took note of his people's rejection of the European Union's struggling currency.
Newspapers have since filled endless columns on the meaning of the Little Denmarkers' victory and its boost for the fortunes of the Little Englanders' campaign to keep Britain similarly isolated on the fringes of the EU.
Politically, they have a point. The ramifications for both Britain's and Sweden's future euro entry are immense. But economically, Denmark is already much closer to the eurozone than it is to Britain.
Denmark has deliberately shadowed the euro since its introduction in January last year. Already, the country is a member of the European exchange rate mechanism, which forces it to adjust its interest rates to keep its currency, the krone, within a narrow band of plus or minus 2.25 per cent against the euro.
It is thus operating a kind of currency board system similar to Hong Kong's mechanism for maintaining the US dollar peg. The krone is, in that sense, already a eurozone currency (second class) and has largely given up its much vaunted sovereignty in monetary policy. Britain went that route briefly, and with disastrous consequences, in the early 1990s. It tried to shadow the German mark - only to find the pound was ejected from what was then the European monetary system in the most ignominious manner in 1992.
That experience, more than any other, marked the British Conservative Party and turned it firmly against monetary union. Denmark, in thrall to the mighty German mark even then, found rather less difficulty than Britain, Sweden or Italy in fending off the speculators. It stayed in the system. Its economy was, and remains, much closer to those of its euroland neighbours.
