Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1940, Blaðsíða 173

CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT IN DENMARK 167
establishing societies for the purchase of important household ar-
ticles. Both in the towns and the rural areas the co-operative store
movement development in the first years on the basis of these
views, but gradually various conditions, such as a certain an-
tagonism between the peasant population and the tradesmen of
the towns, led to the co-operative stores becoming essentially a
link in the circulation of ordinary consumption goods, and other
objects of a more practical and commercial nature were brought
into the foreground. It is a peculiarity of the Danish co-operative
movement that in this country — unlike the majority of other
countries — its followers were after a few years to be found
chiefly among the rural population and not in the towns. The
attitude of the town labourers in this respect was fundamentally
due to the fact that as late as in the present century the leaders
of the Social Democratic party were openly or passively opposed
to the co-operative societies which they regarded as a worthless
or even harmful substitute for what they considered the real ob-
jects of the labour movement. Only in the course of the last de-
cades a change of view has taken place to the effect that co-
operative societies or other forms of co-operation have now been
introduced to a greater extent in labour circles in the towns.
Whilst the form which the co-operative movement was given
in the co-operative stores was based in principle on a foreign
model, the next step forward was taken on an independent Danish
initiative and as the result of experiences gained from Danish
conditions. This was at the beginning of the 1880-ies when the
principle of co-operation was adopted by the ordinary Danish
farming population with a view to safeguarding their common
interests by joint endeavours. The material change in agricultural
conditions which set in at the close of the 1870-ies practically all
over the world led in the case of Denmark to a greatly increased
production of refined animal products — particularly butter,
bacon and eggs — with a view to exports. This partial reorgani-
sation of agriculture was a decisive factor in the development of
the co-operative movement, the principle of co-operation being
employed in the organisation of these branches of production. In
this way there was an interdependence between the new forms
of farming and the co-operative movement, on the one side be-
cause those branches of agriculture which determined the economy
°f farming were developed through co-operative enterprises, and
on the other side because the entire development of the co-opera-
tive movement in the agricultural industry found its proper form