Greenland, the most expensive Danish word

Written for Kosovo Online by Muharem Bazdulj

Even before taking office, the re-elected American President Donald Trump publicly expressed, as it is said, territorial claims towards Greenland, a large island which within the Kingdom of Denmark has autonomous status. The intensity of enthusiasm this move aroused in the Serbian public is hard to overestimate. The reasons for this are not hard to recognize. For a quarter of a century, NATO members and Western countries have been persuading the Serbian public to accept the change of their country's state borders, although this is a severe taboo everywhere else in the world.

Now, when suddenly, at least rhetorically, the possibility appeared for the strongest NATO member to reach for part of the territory of another, much weaker one, it, of course, perfectly illustrated the hypocrisy of the entire official “Kosovo narrative.” Particularly attractive are additional similarities between the two cases, such as the autonomous status that according to the Danish constitution Greenland has, or that which Kosovo and Metohija had under the Constitution of Serbia.

Across social networks, particularly (former) Twitter, for days, people shared more or less witty remarks like “more than autonomy, less than independence,” “Greenland is the heart of Denmark,” “hear Danish volunteers, gang of Vikings,” and so forth, and similar. Such collective witticisms are not unimportant, but they somewhat divert attention from the essence. Such humor, along with a superficial interpretation of Trump's policy reduced to voluntarism and foolishness, ignores the essence that manifests in forms of "long duration."

Far from it that Trump sucked this idea out of his thumb. And far from it that Trump is the first American president who thinks Greenland should belong to the USA. He is not even the first to officially raise the question. He follows the stance of the first American Cold War president, a Democrat, who shares the same initial of the surname as Trump. Naturally, this refers to Harry Truman.

Less than eighty years ago, in 1946, delegations from the Danish Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department met in New York. The Americans presented the Danes with an official offer to buy Greenland. The price was very concrete: $100 million in gold, which today would be equivalent to one billion and six hundred million dollars. The Danish delegation declined the offer, and the matter was not known to the world public for decades. Only towards the end of the twentieth century did Denmark's leading printed daily, Jyllands-Posten—the same one that came into global focus due to the publication of cartoons with the image of the Prophet Muhammad—find evidence of this meeting in the archives, making the story widely known.

Yet, whether due to Truman's character or other circumstances, America did not insist after the Danish refusal. Though the historical moment was quite special. The recent American ally, the USSR, was slowly becoming an enemy. Fear of a conflict with the communist superpower was growing in the United States. In the upcoming Cold War, Washington tried to take control of key areas on the geopolitical chessboard. Greenland was ideal as a base for strategic bombers. Even if they did not succeed in making Greenland part of America, the then American authorities achieved part of their goal in another way. In the early fifties, Denmark gave permission for NATO to build a large air force base in northwest Greenland. Also, with the Kingdom of Denmark joining NATO, Greenland's strategic position fit into American plans.

It should also be emphasized one thing: the idea of buying territory was not at all seen as something overly unusual until recently. After all, even in relations between America and Denmark, there was already a precedent. The U.S. bought the current Virgin Islands from Denmark for 25 million dollars in 1917. Incidentally, similar transactions between the U.S. and European states were once more the rule than the exception. The U.S. bought Louisiana from France, Florida from Spain, and Alaska from imperial Russia.

As one Swiss analyst writes these days, Trump's fixation on Greenland has nothing personally bizarre in it; it is a very rational choice—considering the new confrontation with Moscow, the U.S. has every reason to focus on this key strategic zone. Be that as it may, observing this from a Serbian perspective, it is increasingly clear that the Kosovo case can hardly be seen as some kind of precedent anymore. The parallel with Greenland in the context of the American military base is so obvious that it is practically impossible to ignore. The Danes have every chance to profile themselves as the Scandinavian Serbs.