The Øresund Bridge was completed and opened to traffic in July 2000, but ideas for a fixed link connecting Sweden and Denmark across the Øresund Sound had been discussed since the late nineteenth century. Serious proposals for a Copenhagen-Malmö link were raised in 1930, but they never got beyond the planning stages as international uncertainty increased in the years before World War II. Following the war, Nordic politicians searched for ways to encourage greater economic and political cooperation among their countries, including the formation of a Nordic Council and a Nordic passport union in the mid-1950s. Buoyed by these events, in 1954 an earlier bridge proposal was resuscitated and revised, but disagreements over the bridge's location undermined that plan.
The impetus for an Øresund Sound crossing decreased in the 1960s and 1970s as Denmark focused on increasing its ties to the rest of mainland Europe and expanding the market for its agricultural exports, and Denmark joined the European Economic Community (the forerunner to the European Union) in 1973. However, despite the prior difficulties in finding an acceptable location for a crossing of the Øresund Sound, the potential benefits of such a project caused proposals to continue to be advanced. Crossings were examined at various locations, including a rail tunnel between Elsinore (DK) and Helsingborg (SE), which are further to the north where the Øresund Sound is narrower.
The situation finally changed in 1986 when Denmark decided (after many decades of similar hesitation) to proceed with the construction of the Great Belt Fixed Link. The Great Belt link, which opened to rail traffic in 1997 and road traffic one year later, connects the Danish island of Zealand (which includes Copenhagen) to the island of Funen to the west, which then connects on to Jutland and the road and rail networks of mainland Europe. With the Great Belt project underway and a rail link between France and England established in 1995 with the opening of the tunnel under the English Channel, the Øresund Sound then remained as the only barrier to a seamless and integrated European surface transportation network.