Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Denmark: Unity or Community?

To most of its citizens and for most social science scholarship, Denmark resembles the perfect nation state: homogenous, neat, and harmonious. This chapter explains the present paradoxes and dynamics of the ‘Community of the Realm’, linking the Faroe Islands and Greenland to Denmark by examining its colonial and constitutional history, its internal asymmetries, and its international context. The particularities of the two ‘Danish’ polities are illuminated by comparing the two of them and contrasting them with both neighbours in the North Atlantic and overseas autonomies. The chapter’s main argument is that Denmark greatly enhances the viability of the Community of the Realm by explicitly embracing its dissolution – in the form of Greenlandic and Faroese independence – as its ultimate goal. The chapter concludes that the main obstacles to further loosening the bonds of this ‘ever looser union’ comes not from Danish constitutional law and practice but rather from the US’ approach to geopolitics and from Faroese and Greenlandic priorities.