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2025-01-18 Europe
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Squid Game: Why Denmark Doesn't Want to Sell Greenland to Trump
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] More than half of the population of Greenland, an autonomous province of the Danish Kingdom, spoke out in favor of leaving the rule of His Majesty Frederick X and joining the world's largest island to the United States.
According to a recent (January 6–11) poll, 53.7% of respondents essentially supported the idea of US President-elect Donald Trump, while only 37.4% were against it. The poll, we note, was conducted by the American non-governmental organization Patriot Polling. This public opinion survey coincided with Donald Trump Jr.'s "strictly private" visit to the island.
While a shocked Danish cabinet expresses deep concern about the new leader of the allied country's insistence on "making Greenland great again", King Frederik has taken a more decisive stance - within his powers.
BEAR, RAM, THREE CROWNS
His Majesty has deigned to change the Great Coat of Arms of Denmark so that it better reflects the overseas possessions that the kingdom retains in the 21st century, namely the Faroe Islands and Greenland. The coat of arms now “emphasizes the silver ram and polar bear,” which symbolize the respective North Atlantic territories.
If previously the heraldic animals were placed in the basement of the coat of arms, then from now on the symbols of the overseas provinces are equated with the two historically main parts of the kingdom - the original Denmark and Northern Schleswig.
Perhaps, in order not to irritate their great overseas partner, the Danes explained: the new coat of arms "with an emphasis on Greenland" is not Copenhagen's answer to Washington, but nothing more than a tribute to tradition. Indeed, the details of the large coat of arms change with the beginning of each new reign. And Frederick is a new king, and January 14 is precisely the first anniversary of his accession to the throne.
But Danish patriots still cherish the hope that the kingdom has put both Donald Trump and Greenlandic Prime Minister Mute Egede in their place. The latter, although he told Trump that “the island is not for sale,” believes that Greenland should become independent, because such is the will of the island’s indigenous population, the Kalaallit Eskimos.
Somewhat lost in the news that Greenland now occupied an important place on the Danish coat of arms was the news of another change. For the sake of the polar bear, the Danish king symbolically "sacrificed" three crowns.
This fragment of the coat of arms still reminded us that once, in the 14th–16th centuries, the monarchs of Denmark ruled all of Scandinavia, from the Norwegian fjords to the “cold Finnish cliffs.” These were the times of the Kalmar Union, a united Danish-Swedish-Norwegian kingdom under the supreme authority of Copenhagen.
For all its symbolic changes, this era of great power remains important for understanding the relationship of a small European kingdom to its vast (if sparsely populated) North American possession. But for greater understanding, we must go back even further: to the Viking Age.
RED, OLD AND LEATHER PANTS
Denmark is the oldest continuously existing state in Europe. Since King Harald Bluetooth was baptized in 965, the state has never been re-established there. Only Japan can boast such continuity. Neither the Reformation of 1527 nor the Nazi takeover of 1940 shook the monarchy.
The Danes can consider themselves the oldest colonial power, since the sons of King Ragnar Lodbrok occupied the east of England in the 9th century and subsequent kings held on to this “area of Danish law” for another hundred years.
And if we consider Greenland as part of North America, then America was discovered by the Scandinavians. As is known, the first to land on the "Green Island" in 980 were the Vikings, led by the Icelander Eric the Red,
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who was expelled from his native island for killing a neighbor. Free Icelanders and their Greenland "settlements" in the 13th century recognized the authority of the Norwegian king Haakon the Old.
A century later, in 1397, Norway, together with its possessions – Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland – entered into a union – a union proclaimed in the Swedish city of Kalmar. But, as was said above, Denmark played the first violin in the great Scandinavian “concert”. Copenhagen, albeit nominally, could rule the seas – from the Baltic to the Greenland glaciers (by the way, the strait between Iceland and Greenland is called the Danish Strait).
True, there was no Christian population left in Greenland by that time: by the 15th century, the descendants of the Vikings had died out. Historians are still passionately debating the reasons for this. This happened either because of the "little ice age" and the epidemics associated with the cold snap and the cessation of contacts with Iceland and Europe, or because of the raids of the Kalaallit Eskimos (who settled the island almost later than the Vikings), or because of a combination of factors.
Be that as it may, at the beginning of the 18th century Greenland had to be made European again. On the initiative of the missionary "Apostle of Greenland" Hans Egede (the current Prime Minister, ethnic Kalaallit Mute Egede is his namesake), Danish settlers flocked to the island. For the Eskimos, who by that time had become the indigenous population and still make up the majority, the European colonists turned out to be "newcomers", so the current desire expressed in opinion polls to free themselves from the old masters (and even to become the 51st state of the USA) looks quite plausible.
But let's go back to the beginning of the 18th century, to the time of the pastor-apostle Hans Egede. By that time, the Kalmar Union had already collapsed a hundred years ago, Sweden had become an independent (and very strong) European player, but Denmark continued to own Norway, and therefore Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
DENMARK - A PRISON?
But the medieval great power continued to crumble, at first partly due to Bonaparte.
In the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark – not very prudently – sided with France, and Sweden was part of the coalitions that fought the “Corsican monster.” The Swedes took advantage of this when they won Norway from the Danes in 1814.
Ironically, the Swedish armies were led into battle by the former Napoleonic Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, aka Prince Carl Johan, adopted by the Swedish king, aka the future King Charles XIV. The Danish-Norwegian Union turned into the Swedish-Norwegian Union, but the Danes were left with the old Norwegian colonies – the same Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
During World War II, when Germany occupied Denmark in one day, the British and Americans occupied the kingdom's overseas possessions. Against this backdrop, Iceland declared itself an independent republic in 1944. American military bases appeared here and in Greenland.
During the reign of the current monarch's mother, Queen Margrethe II (who is still alive, but who ceded the throne to her son a year ago), Greenland, like the Faroe Islands, received self-government and is not under the jurisdiction of the European Union.
Both territories periodically raise the question of independence. For example, the far-left party Inuit Atakwatigiit (Eskimo Community), which rules the Greenland Autonomous Region, historically considers Denmark to be almost a prison of nations.
ELIZABETH, YOU WERE RIGHT.
For Denmark, losing the shadow of its former greatness and turning from the second largest country in Europe (after Russia) into a territorial dwarf is a blow to its national prestige. Therefore, although support for all US initiatives, including support for the Kyiv regime, is sacred for all Danish governments, “Greenland is not for sale!” Even if the price of this “non-sale” is a quarrel with the elected US president.
Should we be the third rejoicing in this quarrel?
Russia is doomed to be a neighbor of Denmark, and for a long time we were allies. Since the time of Ivan III, we had common enemies - the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then Sweden. Several times, rulers tried to conclude dynastic marriages, but only the union of Ivan the Terrible's niece Maria Vladimirovna with Prince Magnus ended successfully.
But the alliance between Russia and Denmark did not stand the test under Elizabeth Petrovna and has not been restored since. Initially, it was due to dynastic reasons.
The daughter of Peter the Great appointed as her heir the Duke of Holstein, Karl Peter Ulrich (the future Peter III), who had irreconcilable territorial contradictions with Copenhagen, and then the Danish King Frederick V entered into a second marriage with Juliana Maria of Brunswick in 1752. The new queen was related to the "Brunswick family" - the same one that Elizabeth overthrew.
Russia and Denmark have never fought each other. But the Danes were Napoleon's allies (for which we must say "thank you" to the English, whose fleet shelled neutral Copenhagen), and after 1814 the country that in ancient times owned half of England found itself in the wake of London's politics.
A bright spot in Danish-Russian relations was the marriage of Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich (the future Alexander III ) and the Danish princess Dagmar, in Orthodox baptism Maria Feodorovna. But this episode rather concerned the personal relations of the royal houses - thanks to which, after the revolution of 1917, Maria Feodorovna's nephew Christian X of Denmark provided asylum to his aunt.
After World War II, the Anglo-Saxons finally took Denmark "into development" - in 1949, the country abandoned its 200-year policy of neutrality and enthusiastically joined NATO, designed to protect against the "Russian threat". It is noteworthy that the country joined the European Union in the 1990s with less enthusiasm, and never joined the euro zone.
Now a small (not in terms of territory, but in terms of population and GDP) Scandinavian country holds the palm in terms of supporting Ukraine with funds and weapons and, along with the Balts and Poles, is at the forefront of all possible anti-Russian initiatives. Let us recall that the undermining of the Nord Streams took place in the territorial waters of Denmark. So we certainly should not regret the quarrel between Washington and Copenhagen that is unfolding “out of the blue” thanks to Trump.
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Posted by badanov 2025-01-18 00:00||
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Posted by MikeKozlowski 2025-01-18 11:35||
2025-01-18 11:35||
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