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Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says that she agrees with Donald Trump on Venezuela, but disagrees with him on Greenland. I share her opinion in both cases. We in Iceland are Greenland’s closest neighbours, and I have myself written a bit in English about this extraordinary island: a paper on the discussion in the United States in 1867 about purchasing Greenland and Iceland, and the short biography of an adventurous Icelandic woman, Gudrid Thorbjornsdaughter, who went with her father to Greenland at the close of the tenth century and then with her husband to North America. The record should be set straight on our neighbour.
1815: Greenland Goes to Denmark
Greenland was settled from Iceland in 985. The settlers formed small farming communities on the southwestern side of the island. They adopted Christianity in 1000 and swore allegiance to the Norwegian king in 1261. But in the early fifteenth century, the Icelanders and other Europeans lost contact with Greenland. The communities disappeared, possibly as a result of global cooling, or perhaps they were destroyed by Inuits migrating from North America in the fourteenth century. When Norwegian and Danish missionaries arrived in the early eighteenth century, they found only some Inuits.
At the time, the Danish king was also king of Norway, and therefore king of the Norwegian possessions in the North Atlantic, including Greenland. But he found himself on the wrong side in the Napoleonic wars, and had to cede Norway to Sweden by the Treaty of Kiel in 1814. The Swedish negotiator in Kiel seems to have been unaware that the North Atlantic islands had long been tributaries of the Norwegian king. But it was probably Great Britain that brought about this outcome: She wanted the Royal Navy to dominate the North Atlantic, so a weak power like Denmark was preferable to a stronger one like Sweden-Norway.
1940: The Americans Gain Control of Greenland
In 1867, after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, she also wanted to purchase the Danish West Indies from Denmark. The Congress turned down the deal on the West Indies. The expansionary Secretary of State, William Seward, also had a report prepared on purchasing Greenland and Iceland from Denmark, but Congress laughed down any idea of buying worthless Greenlandic glaciers and Icelandic geysers.
In the early 1930s, Norway claimed Eastern Greenland, but the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Denmark held sovereignty over the whole of Greenland under the 1815 Treaty of Kiel. Norway accepted the ruling. In the spring of 1940, the Nazis occupied Denmark. But the Danish Ambassador in Washington DC, Henrik Kauffmann, refused to recognise their authority. He single-handedly allowed the United States to establish military bases in Greenland, which were therefore, in effect, controlled by the Americans during the war. The Danish government protested vehemently, dismissed Kauffmann, and charged him with high treason. Both Kauffmann and the American government ignored this. Of course, after the defeat of the Nazis, the sentence against Kauffmann was revoked.
From Self-Rule to Independence
Soon after the end of the war, the American government secretly proposed purchasing Greenland from Denmark. The offer was turned down, but Denmark allowed the United States to maintain military bases in Greenland. During the Cold War, there were several American bases in Greenland, but now there is only one. In 2009, Greenland gained self-rule, with Denmark retaining control over foreign affairs.
The logical next step is for Greenland to become an independent and sovereign state and to negotiate a defence treaty with the United States, while possibly entering into a personal union with the Danish king and maintaining her membership of the Nordic Council. This should be agreeable to both the United States and Denmark, and, most importantly, to the Greenlanders. Greenland belongs to them.