When Land Becomes 'Empty': The Echoes of Colonial Acquisition
The Deutsche Welle article notes Trump's description of Greenland as 'essentially a large piece of ice' and connects it to historical instances where colonial powers declared lands 'not used' or 'uninhabited.' This observation, while accurate, understates the material implications of such rhetoric. The underlying premise is that a territory's value is defined by its usability to the acquiring
power, rather than its inherent sovereignty or the existence of its inhabitants. CASE A: The Trump-Greenland Framing (2019) When then-President Trump floated the idea of purchasing Greenland, the framing in some U.S. media, and his own comments, reduced an autonomous territory with a population of over 56,000 (Statistics Greenland, 2019) to a geophysical asset. His rationale appeared to be
primarily strategic (military placement, resource access) and transactional. The concept of self-determination for Greenlanders, an autonomous constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, was largely absent from the initial discourse, supplanted by the transactional language of real estate. CASE B: Historical 'Discovery' and Terra Nullius This framing has extensive historical precedent. In 1788,
when the British colonized Australia, they employed the legal fiction of terra nullius , Latin for 'nobody's land.' This doctrine permitted the seizure of land despite the presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, effectively deeming them non-sovereign and their occupation as non-possession (Mabo v Queensland, 1992). Similarly, the U.S. 'purchase' of Alaska from Russia in 1867,