Why not buy Greenland?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2019
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does Donald Trump's shock proposal to buy the island from Denmark tells us about modern-day sovereignty and Arctic geopolitics?
Manuela Saragosa puts the question to two law professors. Joseph Blocher of Duke University explains why the practice of nations buying and selling large tracts of land fell out of favour, and whether it could make a comeback, while Rachael Lorna Johnstone of the University of Akureyri in Iceland says the reaction from the Danish government to Trump's Greenland offer shows how Europeans take the self determination of formally colonised peoples seriously.
Plus Mikaa Mered, professor of Arctic & Antarctic geopolitics at the Ileri School of International Relations in Paris, says the Trump's offer belies his administration's claim not to believe in climate change.
And if you cannot buy another country, why not just carve out your own one? Kevin Baugh is the self-styled President of the Republic of Molossia, a few acres of desert in Nevada and California that has its own customs, passports and national anthem.
(Picture: Old map depicting Greenland and Iceland; Credit: JeanUrsula/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, President Trump, |
| 0:07.4 | Greenland and the business of buying and selling countries. There are still echoes of that old market. |
| 0:13.1 | Nations still engage in leasing and other kinds of sort of smaller than an outright sale. But it is |
| 0:19.2 | just kind of a callback to the way that nations used to |
| 0:21.7 | barter and buy and sell sovereign territory. And if you can't buy a country, why not make your own? |
| 0:28.0 | Alassia is a dictatorship, and I am the dictator and sovereign ruler of our sovereign nation. |
| 0:32.8 | A benign dictator, I hope. Of course, absolutely. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:41.9 | Could you buy a country? President Trump reportedly offered to buy Greenland last week. He was widely |
| 0:48.3 | mocked. But Mr. Trump's offer did say something about changing Arctic politics and economics. |
| 0:54.0 | More on that in just a moment. |
| 0:55.6 | First, though, just how absurd is it to offer to buy a country in our day and age? |
| 1:00.2 | Over to Joseph Blocker, a professor of law at Duke University in the U.S. |
| 1:05.8 | It's been a century, as far as my research has been able to uncover, |
| 1:09.6 | since we've seen anything like this, |
| 1:11.3 | a nation buying sovereign territory outright from another. Now, there are still echoes of that |
| 1:16.7 | old market, nations still engage in leasing and other kinds of sort of smaller than an outright |
| 1:22.3 | sale. But it is just kind of a callback to the way that nations used to, at least sometimes, barter and buy and sell sovereign territory. |
| 1:30.0 | So what changed? Why did it stop? |
| 1:32.2 | It's a great question. I think a few things. One is that powerful nations figured out ways to exert their influence and sort of get what they want without having to purchase territory. |
| 1:41.8 | So if you're a nation that wants access to markets, for example, or to resources, there are ways to do that now without having to purchase territory. So if you're a nation that wants access to markets, |
| 1:44.4 | for example, or to resources, there are ways to do that now without having to take on the burdens |
| 1:49.5 | of governance. You can engage in treaties and things like that, which sort of makes it less |
... |
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