Transforming Greenland: Imperial Formations in the Cold War
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Kristian H. Nielsen
Abstract
Historians have identified a few important overlaps between the concurrent processes of militarization and modernization in Greenland. Following World War II, the US wanted to strengthen its military presence in northern Greenland in order to be able to deploy nuclear bombers against the industrial centers of the Soviet Union. Denmark had little option but to consent. The postwar modernization of Greenland was enacted in response to requests on behalf of the Greenlandic community and the growing economy in Greenland mainly due to increasing cod fisheries from the 1920s onward. It was also a response and to the military build-up during the early Cold War, which placed Greenland, situated on the Arctic beeline between Washington and Moscow, right at center of the world. In order to maintain provisional sovereignty over Greenland, establish closer economic ties within fisheries and natural resources, and prepare Greenlanders for more frequent relations with other nations, Denmark had to manifest its ambition and its ability to gradually transform Greenland into a modern society and a (semi-)autonomous nation.
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©2013 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin / Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editors’ Forum: The Global Arctic
- Preface
- Introduction: The Practice of Arctic Governance – Historical and Contemporary Cases
- Imagining the Arctic, the Russian Way: Concepts and Projects for the Arctic Ocean in the Eighteenth Century
- Scientists and Heroes: International Arctic Cooperation at the End of the Nineteenth Century
- Between Facts and Fiction: Greenland and the Question of Sovereignty 1945–1954
- Transforming Greenland: Imperial Formations in the Cold War
- From International Governance to Region Building in the Arctic?
- All Is Well in the High North? Contemporary Sources of Tension in the Arctic
- Book Review
- Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, Jeffrey M. Pilcher Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 300 pp. ISBN 978-0199740062
- Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order, Ryan M. Irwin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, xi–244 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-985561-2
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editors’ Forum: The Global Arctic
- Preface
- Introduction: The Practice of Arctic Governance – Historical and Contemporary Cases
- Imagining the Arctic, the Russian Way: Concepts and Projects for the Arctic Ocean in the Eighteenth Century
- Scientists and Heroes: International Arctic Cooperation at the End of the Nineteenth Century
- Between Facts and Fiction: Greenland and the Question of Sovereignty 1945–1954
- Transforming Greenland: Imperial Formations in the Cold War
- From International Governance to Region Building in the Arctic?
- All Is Well in the High North? Contemporary Sources of Tension in the Arctic
- Book Review
- Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food, Jeffrey M. Pilcher Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 300 pp. ISBN 978-0199740062
- Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order, Ryan M. Irwin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, xi–244 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-985561-2
