When Nazi Germany started its profession of Denmark in April 1940, Greenland all of sudden discovered itself bring to an end from its colonial energy and thrust into the centre of North Atlantic wartime technique. The United States took keep an eye on of Greenland briefly, setting up bases and defence perimeters there to forestall Germany from the use of the island.
Greater than 80 years later, Donald Trump invoked that second on the Global Financial Discussion board in Davos. In his speech on January 21, the United States president claimed his nation “gave Greenland back” to Denmark after the second one international warfare. This historical past, Trump implied, nonetheless offers the United States a declare to Greenland as of late.
Trump’s declare rests on a selective studying of wartime historical past. It additionally displays a colonial and imperial frame of mind about territory, sovereignty and possession. To know why his declare is deceptive, it is helping to apply the series of agreements that ruled Greenland prior to, all the way through and after the warfare.
In 1916, Denmark bought its Caribbean colony, the Danish West Indies, to the United States (which then modified its identify to the United States Virgin Islands). That very same conference incorporated an specific American declaration that the United States would no longer object to Denmark extending its “political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland”. As one colony was once transferred, sovereignty over any other was once reaffirmed.
However all the way through the second one international warfare, wartime instances and US strategic wishes drove any other settlement between Denmark and the United States that allowed the American citizens to think accountability for Greenland’s defence. That association was once formalised within the 1941 Greenland Protection Settlement, drawn up by way of the American state division and signed by way of Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish envoy in Washington.
The settlement explicitly said that the United States authorities “fully recognizes the sovereignty” of Denmark over Greenland. It added that the United States is “animated by sentiments of the completest friendliness for Denmark and believes that by taking these steps, it is safeguarding the eventual re-establishment of the normal relationship between Greenland and the Kingdom of Denmark”.
In apply, the United States did protect Greenland all the way through the warfare. It constructed airstrips and army installations there, whilst additionally working patrols and integrating the island into wider allied logistics.
An deserted US army automobile in Ikateq, jap Greenland.
Michelle van Dijk / Shutterstock
In 1945, after the tip of the warfare, Kauffmann wrote a diplomatic notice to the United States. He declared that it had “been a source of great satisfaction to the Danish people” that Denmark had an “opportunity to contribute to the war effort through the placing of Danish territory at the disposal of the United States in the fight against the common enemy”.
Kauffmann added that Denmark didn’t want “to receive any payment” for the United States army’s use of Greenland all the way through the warfare. The notice framed Denmark’s wartime cooperation as a voluntary contribution, once more declaring Danish sovereignty over Greenland.
The wartime association was once later translated right into a post-war safety dating. In 1951, with Denmark and the United States now formal allies inside the UN and Nato, the 2 international locations concluded a brand new defence settlement. This granted the United States intensive and everlasting army rights in Greenland, now inside the framework of peacetime alliance politics.
The post-war length represented a prison consolidation of a US presence in Greenland that had begun beneath wartime exception. This incorporated the development of installations such because the Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Area Base) on Greenland’s north-west coast. The bottom turned into a cornerstone of US strategic operations within the Arctic, and stays the one energetic American base in Greenland as of late.
The development and enlargement of Thule entailed the compelled relocation of the native Inuit inhabitants in 1953. This transfer was once later recognised as unjust by way of the Danish court docket device, resulting in reimbursement awarded by way of the Danish state in 1999.
Colonial entanglements
Those preparations stabilised Danish sovereignty over Greenland and strengthened the island’s safety. However they left the colonial dating itself in large part unexamined. In 1953, within the context of rising UN norms on decolonisation, Greenland’s colonial standing was once officially lifted, and the territory was once built-in into the Danish state.
This administrative transformation allowed Denmark to provide its dating with Greenland as post-colonial, with out attractive in a broader reckoning with the political, cultural and financial legacies of colonial rule. Next reforms may also be understood as belated makes an attempt to deal with this unresolved colonial dating.
Those come with house rule in 1979, which transferred accountability for many home affairs from Denmark to a Greenlandic parliament. Self-government in 2009 additional expanded Greenland’s political autonomy and recognised Greenlanders as a other people beneath global legislation.
Fresh trends underline simply how new the participation of Greenlanders in their very own affairs is. The inclusion of Greenland’s international minister, Vivian Motzfeldt, in high-level January talks in Washington marks a transparent spoil with previous apply, the place Greenland’s strategic long run was once negotiated with out Greenlandic representatives on the desk.
Trump’s try to revive imperial language of possession sharpens the distinction between older colonial tactics of pondering and rising efforts to incorporate Greenlandic political voices in discussions over their long run. In this terrain, the competition is not most effective concerning the previous, but additionally which events will probably be a part of the dialogue concerning the long run.
