Greenland’s history is inseparable from colonial extraction and geopolitical projection. Long inhabited by Inuit societies with sophisticated social and ecological systems, the island was gradually absorbed into the Danish colonial sphere from the 18th century onward. For much of the modern period, Greenland functioned as a peripheral territory governed from Copenhagen, its population subjected to paternalistic policies and externally defined development agendas. Over the past decades, however, Greenland has gained substantial autonomy, culminating in self-rule in 2009, with the explicit right to pursue independence should its population choose to do so. Today, Greenland occupies a legally and politically complex position: formally within the Kingdom of Denmark, increasingly self-governing, and strategically central to global politics.
Against this backdrop, the renewed transatlantic debate over Greenland in 2026—sparked once again by Trump's reckless pursuit of "US strategic interest" and Europe’s defensive responses—has been framed largely as a clash between blocs. On one side, US rhetoric emphasizes security, military presence, and access to critical resources; on the other, European actors invoke sovereignty, international law, and a rules-based order. While the tone differs from earlier episodes, the structure of the debate remains strikingly familiar.
What is wrong with this discussion is not merely its content, but its framing. The Europe-versus-US narrative is deeply reductive. It treats Greenland as an object within a geopolitical chessboard rather than as a political community embedded in broader questions of justice. Once the issue is cast as one bloc versus another, the debate already accepts the primacy of power politics. The real stakes, however, are not best understood as a contest between a rules-based order and brute military might, but as a conflict between rival visions of justice.
On one side lies a model of unrestrained accumulation and extraction, where territory, resources, and strategic location are instrumentalized for competitive advantage. On the other lies the possibility—still fragile and underarticulated—of a politics willing to constrain itself in the name of the common good: ecologically, socially, and intergenerationally. This is the fault line that matters. And that is what Europe must stand up for if it wants to maintain any relevant legitimacy in the future.
Yet the current discourse on Greenland, on both sides of the Atlantic, largely ignores this. It remains trapped in a neo-imperial versus neo-colonial imaginary, recycling old power grammars under new labels. In doing so, it fails to point toward any genuinely emancipatory horizon—for Greenland or for global politics more broadly.
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