Greenland and Canada
CrowdSource 1.13.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: colonialism, the Greenland question, and the meaning of “Canada.”
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Dreams of Expansion
Trump says he wants Greenland, the Panama Canal, and all of Canada. Is he an imperialist?
No. So says
: “Trump’s naked expansionism is … a marker of imperial retrenchment. Shoring up Washington’s core empire, including its control of current and future trade routes in Central America and the Northwest Passage is a reversion to America’s 19th century mean as the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere rather than the provider of global order.”Yes. Argues John Nichols: “It is no secret that Greenland is located in a strategically significant region of the world for the US and neighboring Canada, as well as Russia, China, and a host of other countries.”
Maybe. Arne O. Olm argues that Trump’s real aim is putting NATO on the defensive: “It remains to be seen what is real in Donald Trump’s threats against Greenland, Denmark, and NATO. But he has, perhaps, already gained what he wanted.”
Concept Update
While real-life imperialism and colonization seem to be getting a reboot, intellectuals have recently been rethinking the concepts behind them.
“Decolonization Talk.” Historian Lydia Walker makes a new distinction: “As the actual events of historical decolonisation grow more distant, forms of decolonisation talk increase. Decolonisation was once primarily a scholar’s term that effectively depolarised violent national liberation. Now it ascribes radicalism to projects in the realms of economics, culture, education and ideology — spheres whose purpose is not violent regime change.”
“Settler Colonialism.” Poet and critic Adam Kirsch redefines a term: “The ideology of settler colonialism thrives … by insisting that settler colonial societies are guilty of an irredeemable crime, [and] validates the most extreme criticism and denunciation of those societies, as long as it can be cast in the language of decolonization. The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.”
A Fair Deal for Greenland
Combining theory and practice, journalist
makes sharp observations about Danish colonialism in Greenland, and imagines what a worthy offer by the US might look like:Whatever the Danes might claim, Greenland is a colonial territory with a subjugated native people — you know they know this, because however hostile to the idea they might be, the Danes don’t dispute that they could sell the place, lock, stock, and oil barrel, if they wanted to.
I don’t think we should buy it, though. Not from the Danes, anyway.
Better would be to simply recognize the free determination of the people there and make them a big, open, offer of entry into the U.S. with an “admin fee” of, say, $5 million for each of its citizens and a fast track to statehood.
Two-hundred and eighty million dollars is a very competitive price for adding such an important territory to the country.
From the Crowd
’s essay, “Does Canada Exist?” has provoked a lot of responses, including from the paper of record.In his Sunday column,
of the New York Times quoted from Polansky’s article to make his own case for Canada joining the Union:And, of course, permanently adjacent to America itself, whose global hegemony may be threatened but whose influence over the English-speaking world is being magnified by our very-online age. Which leaves Canadians in an unenviable position — pinned under American hegemony and buffeted by American culture war, but without the agency and influence that actual Americans enjoy.
Which is the simplest case for just becoming American, for adding some number of new stars to our flag. As the Canadian political theorist David Polansky puts it, “Why shouldn’t a country that abjures all national identity and interests seek advantage in a kind of geopolitical merger?” Because there would be clear advantages:to participate in the great drama rather than watching from across the border, to shape the imperium rather than negotiating a position in its shadow.
In this exchange,
turns the tables on Polansky:
- tries to define Canadian identity:
I appreciate the provocativeness of this piece, but I’m not a fan of how it partakes in the usual skepticism about whether English Canadians have a shared identity if you rule out defining yourself by what you are not. (I say English Canadians for obvious reasons; Polansky conveniently ignores French-speaking Canadians, who don’t suffer from this identity anxiety.) Non-elite English Canadians have plenty of touchstones for their shared identity. The problem is that the intellectual elites of English Canada have done a piss-poor job of developing narratives that put it all together. But the fact that English Canada is short on unifying narratives doesn’t mean that ordinary English Canadians are short on unifying emotions.
Here’s a short list of emotional touchstones: Paul Henderson’s goal in ‘72, Crosby’s golden goal in 2010, Terry Fox, SCTV, Gordon Lightfoot, Gord Downie, and the name “Gord.” I’m deliberately leaning on hockey here, along with a few other things that members of the elite habitually look down on. Maybe this list is low-brow, or middle-brow, but the emotional resonance is undeniable, at least it is for me and for a lot of other people who are comfortable with being Canadian.
See you next week!
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