What if Greenland Isn’t Denmark’s to Sell?

It turns out that, in order to establish sovereignty over the world’s largest island, President Trump may not have to purchase Greenland after all. The American explorer Charles Francis Hall claimed this vast land mass (or at least the northern third) for the United States on September 5, 1871.

In the summer of 1916, the U.S. signed an agreement to purchase the Danish West Indies, now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands, for $25 million ($595 million in current dollars). The primary ratification condition for this treaty, a major American concession, read: “that the government of the United States would not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests over the whole of Greenland.”

Note the liminal phrasing: If a nation exercises sovereignty over a given territory, how can it “extend” such control? Can you imagine a similar diplomatic stipulation appearing in a treaty involving Puerto Rico or Guam or any other U.S. territory? The obvious objection is that, when it comes to territories, actual sovereignty is not potential sovereignty.

At the time Danish and U.S. diplomatic officials signed this document, there was one Danish “town” on the island, Godthab (present-day Nuuk), located in the southwest, and two diminutive outposts, Dundas (present-day Uumannaq) on the western coast, and Thule, to the far northwest. There are probably more Danes on a 747 pulling out of a gate at JFK and headed to Copenhagen than there were in all of Greenland in 1916. That’s why that country’s diplomats were thinking in terms of “extended” territorial sovereignty: They were looking at an 836,300 square mile land mass that was over 78 percent ice-covered, some of which was almost two miles thick. It was a terra nullius (no man’s land).

The Norwegian Claim

Norway used this exact phrase in their defense when Denmark brought a claim before the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) in 1931, the year a group of Norwegian hunters and fishermen planted their country’s flag on the shores of Mackenzie Bay, on the eastern edge of the island, naming it Eirik Raudes Land. There had long been enmity between the two Scandinavian nations, with Norway subsisting as a virtual Danish province from 1380 to 1814.  The Danes were now asserting absolute and unambiguous sovereignty over the whole land mass.

This trial went on for two years, and the PCIJ eventually ruled in Denmark’s favor, stating that Danish diplomats had made their right to and intentions of attaining absolute sovereignty over all of Greenland clear to Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan in the aftermath of World War I and that a disputed communication, called the Ihlen Declaration (after Norway’s foreign minister Nils Ihlen) constituted a similar admission on the part of that country.

In an innovative dissent, Italian judge Dionisio Anzilotti cited numerous instances leading up to Norway’s territorial claim where Danish diplomats repeated the tentative language of the aforementioned Treaty of the Danish West Indies with the U.S., again speaking and writing of an “extension” of sovereignty and not a “recognition” of such. Denmark’s absolute control over all of Greenland hasn’t been questioned since.

Basis for America’s Claim

This takes us back to Hall’s 1871 flag plant. He was the second in a succession of American explorers: Elisha Kent Kane (the first), Adolphus Greeley, Donald MacMillan, and Robert Peary. These men had roamed the vast emptiness of the far north of Greenland for decades, becoming friendly with and trusted by the region’s native Inuit people. The earliest of these explorers didn’t even encounter any Danes until that nation’s first expedition to the area, Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen’s Danish Literary Expedition of 1902-04.

After that, and seeing themselves in competition with the Americans who’d established themselves at the top of the island, Danish authorities dispatched Knud Rasmussen (with explicit private funding to shield any overt sovereign interest) to “explore” the region and to establish a trading post called Thule, one of the two minor Danish settlements I mentioned earlier. Denmark clearly intended to give the Americans in the region a wide berth.

Hall had claimed for America the vastness of the rock-rimmed ice cap that stretched south of him. The Danes held only their diminutive coastal settlements.

Unlike Norway, the U.S. wasn’t bound by any previous agreements. No medieval Norse claims, no residue of a fractious 800-year relationship, no Treaty of Kiel (whereby Denmark, who had sided with Napoleon, was stripped of almost all of her overseas settlements upon his defeat, but was allowed to retain Godthab in Greenland), existed to cloud and complicate sovereignty disputes between America and Denmark.

America’s thus far incontesto right to Greenland’s north coast and the uninhabited interior has never been adjudicated. Much hinges on the language of the 1916 Treaty of the Danish West Indies: When can “extended” sovereignty be considered “established”?

An enlightened answer to this question could lead us to the discovery that the United States already owns most of Greenland.

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