US president Donald Trump has been escalating his rhetoric on taking over Greenland. — AFP
THE Europeans have had a dispiriting January. In the snowy landscape of Davos, leaders of the major European nations had to have a huddle about US President Donald Trump’s escalating rhetoric on taking over Greenland recently. There were righteous speeches and statements by them about how such a takeover would be the end of the rules-based international order.
Canada, which Trump had also threatened with a takeover, got into the game, too, with Prime Minister Mark Carney decrying the rupture in North Atlantic relations and the imminence of a world where force eliminates respect for sovereignty.
It was oddly gratifying to see the world’s political and economic elite, mostly white men and some white women, having to consider how devastating attacks on sovereignty can be and how a superpower gone rogue is a global threat.
The rest of the world saw this face of the Unites States post 9/11, in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, both under the label of ‘protecting US national security’. At that time, Europe joined forces with the US. So, why is Denmark suddenly so bothered with the details of sovereignty, especially given its part in the US-led Nato effort in Afghanistan?
Nor did the US care when Barack Obama ordered unmanned aerial bombings of places in Pakistan. Definitions were altered to justify the US bombings in Yemen as well. All this is to underscore that the international rules-based order that all the white men in Davos are weeping for died a long time ago.
Or perhaps their tears simply affirm the truth that these rules were never considered applicable when the sovereignty of various brown and black people was at stake to ensure no one attacked the lands of the white colonisers.
Listening to Carney’s much-lauded speech, for instance, it was impossible not to recall that Canada’s white people stole land from the First Nations. The temerity of white men who rule stolen lands and then chastise the world about further theft of land represents the disordered ethics that have made white and Western cooperation against the rest of the world a ‘legitimate’ exercise.
In all the outcry, no one has acknowledged that Greenland’s indigenous Kalaallit populations don’t want to be ruled by either Denmark or the US. As Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research notes: “Greenland is always a place that someone else must hold, but not the Kalaallit. For people like Trump, or indeed for generations of Danish prime ministers (despite soft statements about the path to self-determination), the Kalaallit have no role as political subjects.”
The true solution is not some backroom deal where the US can get what it wants while leaving Denmark with face-saving control, but a return of Greenland to its people.
The entire debacle underscores what the rules-based international order was really for. True to its origins, which go back to the time when the Great Powers carved up what remained of the Ottoman Empire, the rules-based international order ensures that white and Western nations, either colonisers or settler colonialists, do not mess with each other’s illegitimate claims on territory. It also exists to legitimise the use of force impacting the sovereignty of brown and black countries when the aggressor is one of its own.
For most of the world, the international rules-based order has never provided safety. The brutish world where force means the power to bully is one which everyone, except white and Western countries, has experienced. Currently, Europe is in a bind. It had saved money by not spending on military and defence, which allowed Europeans to have easy lifestyles. Europe has now discovered it has no recourse against Trump.
Whatever happens to Greenland, Europe, home to so many colonising powers that caused devastation and pain around the world, is getting its just desserts. Its weak economy and ageing populations are festering problems which America under Trump is likely to exploit.
It’s possible that Europe, while superficially independent, will be reduced to a functional colony of the US – dependent economically and militarily on the Americans. If it does, history will have come full circle: that which Europe did to others will now be done to Europe. — Dawn/ANN
Rafia Zakaria is an attorney and human rights activist.
