White Men Squabbling in Davos

It has been oddly satisfying to watch European leaders weeping and wailing as they (belatedly) realize that the international order is in fact dead. The French President has decried the end of the “rule based order.” The Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered similar condolences decrying the “fading” of the rules based order and describing the present moment as a rupture. adding a scolding for those who “Go along to get along.” All the powerful white men gathered at the Swiss ski resort are having their moment of collective hand wringing over the threats lobbed by President Donald Trump who in his speech demanded “immediate negotiations” through which the US could “acquire” Greenland. Soon after, Trump announced that the framework of a deal had been reached with the Danes

It is nevertheless fascinating to hear Carney-the head of a settler colonial country to be so incensed about Greenland. The legitimacy of settler colonial takeovers of territory attached as it was to the British crown was premised on the idea that the colonial powers could divvy up Black and Brown countries among themselves. In Canada’s case the British took over swathes of territory in North America displaced, disenfranchised and wiped out Native populations. Then they sent on white settlers that would work the land and make it “productive” and called it theirs.

The Middle East after all was divided among the Great Powers after the end of the Ottoman Empire with no one bothering one bit at all as to what the populations of these territories wanted. The “rules based order’ was thus born out of the Great Powers divvying up the rest of the world, the Brown and Black World that is among themselves. Much of international law, weakened and frail as it is today, was born not out of protecting the rights of the world’s non-white others but rather white powers respecting each others thefts of other people’s lands. For all of these reasons its important to remember that the current furore over Greenland is not the product on any principle of human dignity or legal equity owed to indigenous populations but rather over American refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Danish ownership of Trump’s description of this “piece of ice”

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Denmark-for all its righteous anger-is a colonial master. Greenland is a colony and continues to stay so because Danish traders in the 1700s declared it to be so. The trade and governance monopoly that was imposed was not based on any legitimate claim but rather the superior force of the Danes and the trade monopoly that was imposed on it immediately after. Nor have the Danes shied away from offering up what should be the rights of the indigenous populations to other White powers when it suits them. During World War II when Denmark was taken over by the Nazis-the Danish Ambassador to the United States entered into a number of treaties with the United States allowing for the permanent establishment of US military bases on its territory.

To the rest of tbe world, the woeful cries decrying the end of international law and the rules based order can seem quite disingenuous not least because no such dirge was delivered when the United States began to gobble up Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, as now, the argument made by the United States was that these invasions were necessary and crucial to US national security and the security of the world in general. That was a US/NATO joint project and the question of national sovereignty bothered no one at all.

Back in the early 2000s this argument of permitting everything that the US deemed necessary for its national security saw the popularization of arguments in which the United States could basically go into any country where it suspected terrorists may be. This was not a theoretical proposition, it actually happened and was championed by all US Presidents including President Barack Obama who authorized the US military to use drones to drop bombs anywhere it wanted from Yemen to the tribal areas of Pakistan. None of it yielded a victory but the alleged principle behind these incursions was that Brown and Black sovereignty was a figment of the imagination.

White sovereignty of course is real. It is why all the white men of Europe got together to argue with Great White hegemon that is the United States on behalf of Denmark’s rights over Greenland. The irony of all of it is not subtle-all these white men in suits, the beneficiaries of colonialism and its illegitimate takeovers suddenly moaning and wailing when the big Thug tries to take the spoils from the little thieves.