Greenland’s Arctic advantage: Articulations, acts and appearances of sovereignty games
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836719882476 |
| Author | Marc Jacobsen |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
882476CAC0010.1177/0010836719882476Cooperation and ConflictJacobsen
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Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(2) 170 –192
Greenland’s Arctic
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acts and appearances of
sovereignty games
Marc Jacobsen
Abstract
Greenland representatives successfully use the renewed international geostrategic interest in
the Arctic to enhance Greenland’s foreign policy sovereignty. This is facilitated by Denmark’s
dependence on Greenland’s geographic location and continuous membership of the Danish
Realm for maintaining the status of an Arctic state, which recently has become one of the five
most important security and foreign policy priorities. The dependency gives Greenland an
‘Arctic advantage’ in negotiations with Denmark, while turning circumpolar events into strategic
arenas for sovereignty games in the aim to move the boundary of what Greenland may do
internationally without Danish involvement. This article analyzes how these games unfold in
the Arctic Council, at the high-level Ilulissat meetings and at circumpolar conferences where
Greenland representatives articulate, act and appear more foreign policy sovereignty through
outspoken discontent, tacit gestures and symbolic alterations. Altogether, this contributes to the
expanding of Greenland’s foreign policy room for maneuver within the current legal frameworks,
while enhancing Greenland’s international status and attracting external investments, important
in their striving towards becoming a state with full formal Westphalian sovereignty.
Keywords
Arctic, foreign policy, geopolitics, Greenland, identity, international relations, postcolonialism,
sovereignty games
Introduction
In the Arctic, nation states and the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) disagree whether
the rightful meaning of ‘sovereignty’ is either a fundamental binary concept or a con-
tested concept in flux. As a state-in-the-making with almost 90% of its population being
Inuit, Greenland is situated between those two oppositions. On the one hand, their
Corresponding author:
Marc Jacobsen, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353
Copenhagen K, Denmark.
Email: Marc.Jacobsen@ifs.ku.dk
Jacobsen
171
self-government is part of the transnational Inuit community while it, on the other hand,
aspires to become a state in the traditional sense with full formal Westphalian sover-
eignty. In this striving, the development of more foreign policy sovereignty is an impor-
tant factor in the enhancement of Greenland’s international status and in their ability to
attract external investments. The governmental arrangement with Denmark allows the
Government of Greenland some foreign policy competence on areas of exclusive con-
cerns and which entirely relate to fields of responsibility that Greenland has taken over.
As this definition is open to interpretation, it gives rise to the question: how do repre-
sentatives expand Greenland’s foreign policy room for maneuver by playing sover-
eignty games in the Arctic?
In attempting to answer this question, it is relevant to take into consideration the
renewed geopolitical interest in the Arctic region, welcomed by changing Greenlandic
governments as an opportunity for establishing new international relations in their aim to
loosen dependence on Denmark. Meanwhile, the Arctic has also become one of
Denmark’s top-five foreign policy priorities (The Danish Government, 2017, 2018),
causing a somewhat reverse dependency as Greenland’s geographic location and mem-
bership of the Danish Realm is the only thing legitimizing Denmark’s Arctic state status.
This gives Greenland an ‘Arctic advantage’ in negotiations with Denmark, while making
circumpolar events well-chosen strategic arenas for playing sovereignty games seeking
to move the boundary of what Greenland may do internationally without Danish involve-
ment. Following the tradition of analyzing foreign policy as discourse and praxis, this
article investigates how Greenland representatives make use of the international Arctic
interests and Greenland’s geostrategic location to articulate, act and appear a more sov-
ereign position in international politics. In contribution to the sovereignty games litera-
ture, this article will make use of ethnographic observations from central Arctic related
events, hence showing how otherwise undocumented empirical data may reveal more
latent moves in the sovereignty game. In a broader perspective within the study of
International Relations (IR), this article will also contribute to the understanding of quasi
states’ international roles which too often are treated by mainstream IR as having no
separate agency.
As the analysis will show, Greenland’s foreign policy sovereignty is successfully
enhanced via outspoken discontent and tacit gestures in the Arctic Council, at the high-
level meetings in Ilulissat and at circumpolar conferences, highlighted by shifting
Greenlandic governments as some of the most important foreign policy arenas. Before
turning to the analyses of these three cases, the analytical strategy of how to study sov-
ereignty games will be explained, followed by a brief introduction to Greenland’s official
foreign policy competence and international priorities as stated in the Self-Government
Act and the Foreign Policy Strategy.
Sovereignty games
The concept of sovereignty is constitutive of modern politics as other concepts are
defined in relation to it and depend on it for meaningful use within specific discourses
(Bartelson, 1995: 12–13). Within law, for instance, sovereignty defines the scope of a
polity’s authority in geographic and material terms, whereas in political terms it defines
172
Cooperation and Conflict 55(2)
the supremacy of a state’s institutions and its internal and external infinitude (Espersen
et al., 2003: 142). The juridical understanding is similar to the ontology of conventional
IR, referring to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 as the birth of the modern international
system with sovereign states at its center (e.g. de Carvalho et al., 2011: 738). Here, sov-
ereignty is a binary question that leaves no agency to hierarchically subordinated non-
states such as Greenland. Challenging this dominant understanding, an alternative
literature has revisited the theoretical assumption of sovereignty as inseparable from the
state (e.g. Albert and Brock, 2001; Bartelson, 1995; Habermas, 2001; Krasner, 1999),
most radically claiming that the Westphalian definition was a fallacy and that sover-
eignty is today not a prerogative of the state (Agnew, 2005; Ruggie, 1986, 1993).
Following this critique, Jessica Shadian has argued that the ICC – representing the
approximately 160,000 Inuit in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Chukotka since 1977 – is
an example of a polity which transcends the state-centered theoretical legacy by having
sovereignty (understood as authority) in international legislations, in regional institu-
tions and in local land claim agreements (Shadian, 2010: 503). In this way, she argues,
the ICC ‘has been central in helping reshape the inside–outside boundaries which have
constituted the global political system throughout Westphalia’ (Shadian, 2010: 504),
demonstrating how sovereignty rather should be seen as ‘a constitutive process of power
construction’ (Shadian, 2010: 487).
At first, Greenland seems to have a foot in both camps: on the one hand, the Parliament
of Greenland pays a substantial part in the local body of the ICC’s annual expenses and
appoints members to official delegations participating in international ICC meetings; and
on the other hand, all but one of the total seven political parties currently in parliament
agree that Greenland’s ultimate and overarching goal is state formation. However, as the
analysis will show, representatives of the Greenland Government do not share the concep-
tual contestation but rather subscribe to the traditional sovereignty understanding. In the
aim to move Greenland closer towards this ideal of full formal Westphalian sovereignty,
representatives seek to expand the room for maneuver within foreign policy by acting more
state-like in Arctic international politics. To analyze these movements, I use the concept of
‘sovereignty game’ to grasp the strategic uses of language by a ‘constitutional-hybrid’ such
as Greenland which currently maneuvers between self-determination and dependence
(Loukacheva, 2007: 5, 109). Relating back to Robert Jackson’s (1991) analysis of the
emergence of quasi-states during decolonization processes, studies of sovereignty games
draw on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1958) elaboration of language games in which the use of
language itself is compared to making a move in a game. Central to this analogy is that the
common understanding between the involved actors depends on a system of shared rules:
the constitutive rule defining the game is the traditional either/or understanding of sover-
eignty, while regulative rules may evolve as the game develops (cf. Aalberts, 2012: 92–95),
hence potentially changing the criteria for participation in international agreements and
modifying the roles of the players (Adler-Nissen and Gad, 2014: 18).
The concept of sovereignty games has been further refined by, most notably, Karin M.
Fierke and...
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