Cycles of Decolonization

Between Copenhagen and Washington: The Kalaallit Still Wait

By Elias Stumpf

The climate is getting milder, curiosity is growing. For now, the North Pole remains closer than the nearest McDonald's. Yet in Greenland, beneath the melting ice lies a struggle that reveals how colonial power structures persist, transform, and re-emerge even as they claim to dissolve. Throughout this article, Greenland will be referred to by its Indigenous name, Kalaallit Nunaat (Land of the Kalaallit), its people as Kalaallit (singular: Kalaaleq), and the language as Kalaallisut, centering Indigenous terms rather than colonial designations.

America once presented itself as the peacemaker of the world. After World War II, it built houses, exported progress, blue jeans, and rock 'n' roll. It fashioned itself as the world's policeman. Now we must recognize that this America, if it ever truly existed, no longer does. What remains is a pattern of imperial ambition that Kalaallit Nunaat has experienced throughout its modern history, caught between competing powers that have consistently treated the island and its people not as sovereign actors, but as objects of geopolitical strategy.

The Weight of Colonial History

Since 1721, when Danish missionary Hans Egede established the first permanent colonial settlement, Kalaallit Nunaat has existed under Danish rule. This colonization followed familiar patterns: religious conversion imposed upon Indigenous peoples, economic monopolies that extracted resources while creating dependency, cultural suppression that sought to replace Kalaallisut language and knowledge systems with Danish ones, and political structures that systematically excluded Kalaallit from decisions about their own land.

Already in 1914, the Kalaallit priest and politician Mathias Storch published his novel Singuagtugaĸ (The Dream), presenting a vision of a future Kalaallit Nunaat rooted in Inuit culture and inhabited by modern, self-reliant Kalaallit. Storch called for decolonization through gradual, well-planned reforms decided by Kalaallit in collaboration with Denmark, keywords that would resound in Kalaallit political discussions for decades to come.

Yet even as Kalaallit articulated visions of self-determination, they remained caught in what postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha terms colonial ambivalence, simultaneously resisting colonial rule while unavoidably engaging with colonial institutions, languages, and frameworks to make that resistance heard. This ambivalence would become a defining feature of Kalaallit Nunaat's path toward autonomy.

The Kaufmann Agreement: From One Empire to Another

In 1941, as Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, the United States and Danish ambassador Henrik Kaufmann signed an agreement granting the U.S. the right to establish military bases in Kalaallit Nunaat. Officially, this was to protect Kalaallit Nunaat and prevent Nazi control. The agreement was signed without any Kalaallit participation, a classic colonial pattern.

Read through a decolonial lens, the Kaufmann Agreement reveals several critical dynamics.

First, it demonstrates the suspension of colonial guardianship: even in crisis, colonial subjects were not recognized as political actors capable of determining their own security. Second, it marks the transition from European to American imperialism. As decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo emphasizes, coloniality does not end, it shifts spatially and institutionally. Danish control weakened, but U.S. military, economic, and epistemological presence took its place.

The agreement did not mark a break with coloniality, but rather an imperial rearticulation. Kalaallit Nunaat was treated primarily as strategic space, as a source of raw materials (particularly cryolite for aluminum production), and as a military outpost, not as a social or political space inhabited by people with their own knowledge systems, needs, and rights to sovereignty.

The narrative of "protection" functioned as colonial justification. Decolonial theories reveal how "protection," "security," and "development" often serve as civilizational justifications for colonial control. The security discourse masks power asymmetries, presenting imperial domination as benevolent necessity.

A Pattern Older Than the Cold War

For Europeans, Donald Trump's renewed interest in acquiring Kalaallit Nunaat may seem unprecedented. But for those familiar with American imperial history, it represents nothing new, merely the first time in recent memory that Europe finds itself on the receiving end of American territorial ambition.

The pattern is well established. In 1950, the United States argued it needed to control Guatemala to secure the Caribbean for its own safety. The Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Grenada all experienced U.S. interventions justified by security concerns. Vietnam was framed as a fight against communism. Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan followed similar logics of intervention.

Perhaps most starkly, the case of Bikini Atoll reveals the human cost of this strategic thinking. In 1946, the U.S. forcibly relocated the Indigenous inhabitants of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to conduct nuclear weapons tests. The islanders were told they were making a sacrifice for "the good of mankind" and for global peace. Sixty-seven nuclear tests later, the atoll remains uninhabitable. The Bikinians remain displaced, their homeland poisoned for generations.

The pattern extends to regime change. Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro represents just the latest in a long line of leaders the United States has sought to remove or delegitimize when they conflict with American interests. The question of truth, of genuine democratic will, often plays no role. What matters is control, diffusely about oil, about domestic political distraction, about neighborhood dominance.

Trump's interest in Kalaallit Nunaat is not primarily about American security, despite the rhetoric. It is about real estate, about making the United States "look bigger," about changing borders. It reflects a regression to 19th century territorial expansionism, echoing the Monroe Doctrine's assertion that no other country should dominate the Americas, only the United States may dominate. Trump acts as manager of a declining world power, refocusing on the "backyard" in a sign not of strength but of weakness.

The Irony of Denmark's Position: Colonial Mimicry

Here we encounter a remarkable irony. Denmark, itself Kalaallit Nunaat's colonizer, now positions itself as protector against American imperial ambition. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has firmly rejected American overtures, asserting the right to self-determination while emphasizing Kalaallit Nunaat's place within the Kingdom of Denmark.

This mirrors an earlier historical moment. During the 1931 to 1933 case before the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, when Norway laid claim to East Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit National Councils walked a narrow path: supporting Denmark against Norway while insisting that Kalaallit Nunaat ultimately belonged to Kalaallit. Then as now, Kalaallit Nunaat found itself caught between competing colonial powers, forced to choose the lesser threat.

Denmark's current stance exemplifies what Bhabha calls colonial mimicry, the colonizer adopting the discourse of rights, self-determination, and anti-imperialism, but only when facing a rival power. Denmark mimics the language of decolonization while maintaining its own colonial relationship with Kalaallit Nunaat. It is "almost the same, but not quite," defending Kalaallit autonomy in principle while preserving Danish sovereignty in practice.

Kalaallit Ambivalent Choice

Faced with American pressure, Kalaallit leaders have made pragmatic statements suggesting they prefer to remain with Denmark, not out of colonial loyalty, but because Danish association may better guarantee their freedom and autonomy in the future than American domination would.

This represents profound postcolonial ambivalence, Kalaallit find themselves in the impossible position of seeking protection from their colonizer against a potentially more aggressive imperial power. They must strategically deploy colonial frameworks, appeals to Danish sovereignty, to the Kingdom of Denmark, to existing territorial arrangements, to defend against worse alternatives.

The ambivalence runs deeper still. Kalaallit Nunaat has achieved significant autonomy through Home Rule in 1979 and Self-Government in 2009. The 2009 act recognized Kalaallit as a people under international law with the right to self-determination. Yet economic dependency on Danish subsidies, approximately 3.4 billion DKK annually representing half of Kalaallit Nunaat's government budget, constrains the path to full independence.

Kalaallit Nunaat's economy relies heavily on fishing, tourism, and the promise of future mining revenues from rare earth minerals and other resources. Yet developing these resources requires infrastructure, investment, and technical capacity that Kalaallit Nunaat currently lacks without external support. This creates a trap: independence seems economically impossible precisely because colonial structures have prevented the development of economic self-sufficiency.

Kalaallit Nunaat thus inhabits Bhabha's "third space", neither fully colonized nor fully independent, neither fully Danish nor fully sovereign, navigating between competing imperial powers while articulating indigenous identity and aspirations. This liminal position is not weakness but realistic engagement with complex historical realities.

The Broader Threat: Trump, Vance, and Thiel

The Kalaallit Nunaat question must be understood within the broader ideological project of Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and their backer Peter Thiel. At the Munich Security Conference, Vance argued that Europe's freedom of expression was threatened when hate content on social media and the internet was restricted, a remarkable inversion that positions regulation of harmful speech as tyranny while ignoring how unregulated platforms enable manipulation, disinformation, and erosion of democratic discourse.

This ideology, libertarian oligarchy combined with nationalist expansionism, leads the world into a dangerous trap. It destroys everything that makes social cohesion, political stability, and economic progress possible. It undermines trust, weakens institutions, divides societies, and intensifies conflicts. It encourages national egoisms and global rivalries. It eliminates states' capacity to solve global problems like climate change, inequality, and geopolitical conflicts, problems that can only be addressed through close cooperation and global community.

The path of libertarian oligarchy does not lead to the future but to a new form of medievalism, technologically advanced, politically hollowed out, socially fractured. If we want to solve the central problems of our time and defend democracy and open society, we must strengthen their foundations: rules, solidarity, global cooperation, institutional stability, and fair competition.

The Collapse of Treaty Obligations

The American position on Kalaallit Nunaat reveals a deeper crisis in international order. By suggesting it might simply take Kalaallit Nunaat through purchase, pressure, or other means, the United States rejects the most fundamental principle of international law: pacta sunt servanda (treaties shall be kept). Kalaallit Nunaat's status within the Kingdom of Denmark is established by treaty, by historical agreement, by international recognition.

The United States simultaneously rejects this legal framework while asking to be taken seriously as a treaty partner. This incoherence is not accidental, it reflects the logic of imperial power, which reserves the right to honor or violate law depending on strategic convenience. For smaller nations and colonized peoples, this represents an existential threat: if the powerful need not respect agreements, what protects the vulnerable?

Conclusion: Who Decides?

Throughout these cycles of decolonization, from Danish colonization to wartime American protection, from Cold War militarization to contemporary great power competition, one constant remains: the Kalaallit continue to be those who are decided over, rather than those who decide.

Even as Kalaallit Nunaat achieved Home Rule and Self-Government, even as Kalaallisut became the official language, even as international law recognized Kalaallit right to self-determination, the fundamental power dynamics persist. When great powers compete for strategic position, when security discourses override sovereignty claims, when economic dependency constrains political independence, colonial patterns reproduce themselves in new forms.

The ambivalence Kalaallit experience, seeking Danish protection against American domination, using colonial frameworks to defend against worse colonization, inhabiting the space between autonomy and dependency, is not a failure of decolonization but evidence of its incomplete, cyclical nature. True decolonization would mean the Kalaallit determining their own future without having to choose between competing imperial powers, without economic structures that make independence appear impossible, without being treated as strategic objects rather than political subjects.

As the climate warms and the Arctic opens, as rare earth minerals become more accessible, as great powers intensify their competition, Kalaallit Nunaat's position becomes only more precarious. The cycles of decolonization continue, but they have not yet reached their conclusion. That conclusion can only come when the Kalaallit, not Washington, not Copenhagen, not Beijing, determine their own fate.

Until then, Kalaallit Nunaat remains caught in the trap of postcolonial ambivalence: formally recognized as having the right to self-determination, yet structurally positioned as an object of others' determination. The dream Mathias Storch articulated in 1914, of a Kalaallit Nunaat rooted in Inuit culture, inhabited and administered by self-reliant Kalaallit, remains a dream deferred, waiting for the cycles of decolonization to finally break rather than merely repeat.

In Kalaallit Nunaat, the climate continues to get milder. Curiosity continues to grow. And for now, the North Pole still remains closer than the nearest McDonald's. But beneath the surface, the deeper struggle persists, the cycles turn, and the Kalaallit still wait for the day when they alone will decide their destiny.