Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump
When the king visited Greenland in April – looking relaxed and at ease as he sailed on a fjord with the prime minister and took a coffee and cake break with locals at a cultural center in Nuuk – the contrast with Vance’s somber trip could not have been more stark. Shortly before the royal visit, the king published an updated coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark, in which the symbols of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the other Danish territory, take up more space. On the new flag it is easier to see that the Greenland polar bear is roaring.
Denmark recently pledged to give Greenlanders an additional quarter of a billion dollars in investments in health care and infrastructure. Trump’s overtly imperialist rhetoric has also prompted Danish leaders to more honestly examine their own role as a colonial power. In August, for example, Frederiksen issued a formal apology for a program started in the 1960s and continued for decades, in which Danish doctors fitted thousands of indigenous Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine contraceptive devices, often without their consent or full knowledge.
Such calculations should have been made long ago. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, published a pioneering book, “Children of the Empire,” in which she recounts how Greenlanders had little say in Denmark’s decision to incorporate the former colony into its kingdom, rather than grant it independence. Hermann told me: “The Danes are not used to being bad guys, we are do-gooders. But Greenland has a completely different experience.”
Pernille Benjaminsen, a human rights lawyer in Nuuk, said the Danes have always compared themselves favorably “to what happened in North America: putting indigenous people on reservations and killing them.” But, she noted, “a lot of bad things also happened in Greenland: we had segregation between white Danes and Greenlanders, there were times when we were asked to leave stores when Danes wanted to enter. ” She added: “We need to end the narrative that there can be a ‘good’ colonizer. »
Benjaminsen thanked Prime Minister Frederiksen for being more direct about the colonial past. Around the time Trump was returning to power, Frederiksen posted online that Danes and Greenlanders were “living through dark chapters in our history together, which we on the Danish side must face.”
Some people in Copenhagen told me that, for young Danes, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States had prompted soul-searching about their own country’s racism toward Greenlandic Inuit. But Denmark’s sudden attention to Greenland was also an unintended gift from Trump. Hørlyck, the photographer, told me: “He activated the link between the Danes and Greenland. » Danes of his generation asked themselves, as they never had before: “What do I really know about Greenland?” speak to the Greenlanders? He continued: “It’s quite funny that Trump’s strategy opens up something positive here.”
Trump’s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed the Danish vision of European unity. In the past, the Danes were moderate Eurosceptics. They joined the EU in the 1970s, but kept their own currency, the crown, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which strengthened European compliance on security, citizenship and other issues. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged that “European cooperation has never really been a favorite of many Danes.” They had complained, she said, about everything from “twisted cucumbers and the ban on plastic straws” to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen’s government had rejected.
Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a “sort of anti-EU sentiment, with many of the same arguments you saw during Brexit: ‘Oh, it’s a big bureaucracy,’ ‘Brussels is far away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ Such attitudes, Wæver said, helped push Denmark to “go too far” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, columnist for Policytold me: “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You can’t put a piece of paper between me and the United States, I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.
