By Julian Wood
Greenland is everywhere at the moment. At no other time has it felt that the media were more interested in this huge Arctic territory and its frozen expanse of over 2 million square kilometres. With a US president, not for the first time, advocating a purchase (or a even military seizure), the world over has rightly returned its attention to Greenland’s geostrategic location and the possibility of untapped mineral wealth below its fraying carpet of ice.
The media blizzard has also highlighted the important but under-appreciated role of the EU in Greenland’s future. It re-cast attention to the recent raft of EU-Greenland agreements, ranging from areas as diverse as fisheries to minerals, which culminated in last year’s opening of an EU office in Greenland’s largest city, Nuuk. Long-neglected, Greenland’s relations with the EU have hardly felt so relevant, not least so friendly.
The media snowball has paid remarkably little notice to fact that the Inatsisartut – the 31-seat, unicameral legislative body of Greenland – called a snap election on 11 March. Only weeks after new bans against foreign political donations, it is a poll with serious potential implications for Greenland’s future with the EU.
This is because Trump’s remarks will surely feed into the icy winds of political change curving through Greenland’s voters. The territory is famously a place for which “no data” is available: only c. 57,000 inhabitants, at a record-breaking density of approximately 0.14 people per square kilometre. While speculative polls wonder how the election will relate to interest in independence (with strong, but perhaps contingent support), or even in joining the USA, polls also suggest a crucial role for Europe in the campaign. A 2025 survey suggests that a record-high 60% of Greenlanders are in favour of joining the EU, and there is every reason for Brussels to wonder whether 2025 could spell a new direction for Nuuk.
In the absence of reliable polling data, we may look at Greenland’s current relationship with the EU, how it began, and how last-minute ballot choices can rapidly change its outcome.
Greenland’s population is overwhelmingly Inuit, and the largest minority, about 7%, are Danes, who – since settling around the Tenth Century – controlled Greenland as a colony until 1953, when Greenland became a part of the “Danish Realm”. This changed status meant that it then participated in Denmark’s 1972 referendum on joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Danes chose in favour, but over 70% of Greenland’s voters were against membership. Such disparity galvanised a push for autonomy, achieved on 1 May 1979 with the creation of the Inatsisartut, which is responsible for a range of devolved policy areas and functions alongside 2 Greenlandic MPs sent to Copenhagen. The EU, or its predecessor organisation at least, was thus tightly bound with the birth of modern-day Greenlandic politics.
This is further demonstrated by the fact that Greenland’s second-ever national vote as an autonomous territory was a referendum on continued EEC membership. Decades before Brexit, on 23 February 1982, Greenland voted to leave by a margin of 53% on an over 74% turnout. Three years later, it exited the EEC to remain an OCT, or Overseas Country and Territory, of the bloc.
The fascinating aspect of this process is that political attitudes to Europe were in flux before the vote. Christian Rebhan’s remarkable study on Greenlandic euroscepticism notes that Greenland’s MPs in Copenhagen between 1961-1971 supported Denmark accession to the EEC, as did the executive committee of Greenland’s pre-1979 provincial government (the Landsrådand). Such developments further remind us that anything could happen in 2025.
Three of Greenland’s parties from the 1982 campaign will be competing again in 2025. Those currently in the territory’s governing coalition campaigned in 1982 for an EEC “exit”: the left-wing, pro-independence party Inuit Ataqatigiit (“Community of the People”), and the centre-left, gradualist-separatist Siumut (“Forward”). During the referendum, these parties faced Atassut (“Solidarity”), a centre-right and historically pro-EU party. Interestingly, only months before the 1982 referendum on 8 December 1981, the pro-EEC Atassut actually received the most votes among all parties vying for Greenland’s two Copenhagen seats, 11.11% of the vote above its rival Siumut. Again, 1982’s changing party fortunes leave us much to anticipate in 2025.
The forthcoming election sees four other parties competing, who can be mapped onto a cline of pro-Denmark and pro-independence views. From the former are the centrist, pro-EU, anti-independence Suleqatigiissitsisut (or the “Cooperation Party”), and the centre-right Demokratii (“Democrats”), who accommodate independence proposals but consider EU membership an “open question”. On the “sovereigntist” side are the centrist-populist Naleraq (“Point of Orientation”), firmly committed to immediate independence, and the more left-leaning Nunatta Qitornai (“Descendants of Our Land”), about whom little is known. The respective opinions of each towards the EU are unclear.
The long dominance of Siumut and Inuit Ataqatigiit in Greenlandic politics may suggest a eurosceptic course in 2025; especially because the pro-EU Atassut’s vote has collapsed since the 1990s. Yet, it is not that simple. Even traditional rivals Atassut and Siumut, who campaigned on different sides in 1982, have served together in coalitions, and the previously Eurosceptic Inuit Ataqatigiit-Siumut led the recent EU cooperation agreements. Historic party preferences are neither dogmatic nor absolute. They bely a flexible pragmatism which – combined with changeable Greenlandic attitudes to Europe – suggests that Brussels and Nuuk have everything to play for in 2025.
The 2025 election promises to be exciting. A party only needs 3% of the vote to enter the Inatsisartut and represent Greenland at large. Coverage will doubtless be difficult to find, not least when the Greenlandic language (or Kalaallisut) is not available on Google Translate and must be rendered through other apps. Yet, the results will be worth watching. In 1982, an unnamed Siumut official – reflecting on the decision to leave the EEC – declared that:
We have so little in common with the Europeans. Our natural affinities, if you look at a map, are with the North American continent.
We may wonder, considering warming EU ties and Trump’s inflammatory comments, whether this assessment will ring true 43 years later.
About the Author
Julian is a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, finishing a thesis on religious violence in the medieval Levant. Originally from Leeds in northern England, his first chance to campaign and vote was during the divisive 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum. He is particularly interested in the relationships between heritage and societal cohesion, and in how these might shape elections.
European Studies Review 