Sara Olsvig & Ulrik Pram Gad
The management of foreign and security policy within the Kingdom of Denmark has continually undergone a series of changes in response to shifting great-power dynamics and structural conditions. Not least, Kalaallit Nunaat’s Home Rule Government and later Self-Government has attained increased formal and substantive authority over aspects of foreign policy, as well as a distinct influence on the Realm’s security policy in the Arctic. Both the evolving geopolitical environment and the internal reconfigurations of the Realm generate new strategic challenges for the Kingdom as a whole, for its individual constituent parts, and for external powers. In this context, understanding Kalaallit Nunaat as a security-policy actor becomes essential.
This chapter first outlines the formal frameworks that constitute the Self-Government as an actor, along with the historical developments that produced them. It then characterizes Kalaallit Nunaat’s foreign-policy identity and the central goals and interests pursued on that basis. Finally, it examines the information and decision-making structures between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat and within the Self-Government, shaping how these goals and interests are pursued both proactively and reactively in practice. The chapter concludes by discussing how the boundary between “security policy,” on the one hand, and “ordinary” foreign policy withing legislative areas taken home by Kalaallit Nunaat on the other, emerges as the central challenge for both the realization of Kalaallit Nunaat’s long-term ambition for further self-determination and for its internal decision-making structures.
