Aircraft flew north into Pituffik today, on what NORAD described as routine operations, and Denmark announced that it would move a substantial number of soldiers to Greenland. Ships load, transports turn around, people who were in Denmark last week will be on an island a third the size of the continental United States by the end of the month.
All of that motion is organized around a question that was answered on 27 April 1951, in a document that almost nobody arguing about Greenland this month has read.
The date
On that day the United States and Denmark signed an agreement concerning the defense of Greenland, concluded under the North Atlantic Treaty. It replaced a wartime arrangement of 1941 and it gave the United States the right to expand its military presence on the island far beyond anything it had held during the war.
The mechanism was territorial. The agreement, with a technical schedule attached, demarcated defense areas inside which the United States could build and operate as it saw fit: Narsarsuaq, where there had been an American air base since 1941, Sondrestrom, and the ground around Thule in the far north west, where the largest of the installations was then going up. Outside those areas the United States would need Danish agreement to take more.
That is a considerable grant and it has never lapsed. It has been amended, most substantially in 2004, and it remains the instrument under which the American presence in Greenland sits.
What it turned out to mean, first
The first thing the 1951 agreement turned out to mean is that the question of American access to Greenland has been settled, in America’s favor, for seventy five years.
This is worth stating plainly because so much of the current argument proceeds as though it were not true. A state that wishes to operate a radar and a space surveillance installation at the top of the world, watch the polar approaches, and keep an airfield on the shortest line between two continents, already does all of those things there, by treaty, with the consent of the sovereign, and has since before most of the people arguing were born.
Whatever is being pursued now, it is not access. Access is the one thing already held.
Which leaves the other things. There is sovereignty, which is symbolic until it is not. There is the seabed and what is under the ice, which is a resource argument conducted in the future tense. And there is the general question of whether an ally’s consent is a satisfactory basis for something a state regards as vital, or whether only ownership will do. That last is the real question in the room, and it is not new either; a serious American offer to buy Greenland was made in 1946 and declined.
What it turned out to mean, second
The second thing has a date of its own. On 25 May 1953, Danish officials informed twenty seven Inughuit families, one hundred and sixteen people, that they would have to leave the place they lived, to make room for the base at Thule. They were not given a season to arrange it.
Most went to Qaanaaq, more than a hundred kilometers to the north. They lived in tents. Building materials and workmen could not be shipped in until July, so the settlement they had been sent to did not exist yet when they arrived at it.
It took fifty years for that to be adjudicated. In November 2003 the Danish Supreme Court found the relocation to have been an expropriation, and the Danish government accepted in the proceedings that it had been a serious interference and an unlawful act. The tribe was awarded five hundred thousand kroner. Individuals who had been moved received fifteen or twenty five thousand each.
That is the other half of what the 1951 agreement meant. Two governments agreed on a map, and the map had people on it who were told in May and moved before the ships could reach them.
The party that is not in the argument
Greenland’s legal position is not what it was in 1951, and this is the part most likely to decide how the present business ends.
Start with what the 1951 agreement did not have, which is a Greenlandic signature. Greenland in 1951 had no parliament and no government of its own. The agreement of 1941 was signed by a Danish ambassador acting without instructions from an occupied country, and the agreement of 1951 was signed between two states about a territory belonging to one of them. On neither occasion was there any Greenlandic body that could have been consulted, and none was.
That changed on 6 August 2004, at Igaliku in southern Greenland, where the 1951 agreement was amended and supplemented. The American secretary of state signed, the Danish foreign minister signed, and so did the deputy premier of Greenland’s home rule government. The substance was permission to upgrade the radar at Thule for missile defense, and alongside it two political declarations establishing a joint committee covering environment, science, health, trade, education and culture.
The committee matters less than the signature. It was the first time the arrangement governing foreign armed forces on Greenlandic soil was made with a Greenlandic party present, fifty three years after the arrangement was made.
In November 2008 Greenlanders voted, 75.5 percent in favor, for expanded self government. The Act on Greenland Self-Government, Act no. 473 of 12 June 2009, took effect that June. It transferred a long list of competences, recognized Greenlanders as a people under international law, and set out a route by which Greenland may become independent: a decision taken by the people of Greenland, negotiated between the two governments, and confirmed by referendum.
So the constitutional answer to who decides Greenland’s future is already written, and it is neither Washington nor Copenhagen. It is fifty seven thousand people, by vote, whenever they choose to hold it.
They are also the party least visible in a month of announcements about troop movements and tariffs, which is a familiar shape. The 1951 agreement was made between two governments about a territory belonging to one of them and inhabited by neither.
Pituffik
The base at Thule was renamed in April 2023. It is now Pituffik Space Base, which is the Greenlandic name of the ground it stands on, adopted seventy years after the people who used that ground were told to leave it.
Qaanaaq is still there, north of it, with a population of 591. The aircraft went in this morning.
