Publications

This chapter elucidates the Nordic islands: the Åland Islands, Faroe Islands and Greenland in comparison with the Portuguese autonomous islands of Azores and Madeira. The questions answered are what kind of constitutional and political development these island autonomies have been encountering and what their characteristic features are regarding their relationship with their respective metropolitan state.

Greenland and the Faroes are autonomous jurisdictions within the Danish Realm, having undertaken a continuous process of extended self-determination in the post-WWII era. In both jurisdictions there are strong movements of secession and counter-secession, whose respective strengths are largely achieved through external relations. This paper will first provide an introduction to the historical background and the formal relationship between the two jurisdictions and their metropolitan state. We will then extend the two cases with a description of how increased internal autonomy has evolved in a dynamic interaction with changes in international affairs. Whether the two jurisdictions may move towards full secession or new forms of unity is difficult to predict, but external relations keep on pushing at the formal structures and limits of the realm, which we will briefly reflect upon in the final section.

Since the Greenland Self-Government Act came into force in 2009, economic development and the right to utilize natural resources in Greenland lies in the hands of the Self-Government. Earlier efforts to establish this authority were made back in the 1970s, when discussions on Home Rule were first on the agenda. Mining industries are not a new activity in Greenland. During the Second World War, Greenlandic cryolite was used to produce aluminum for the North American aircraft industry. Other essential natural resources, such as gold and gemstones, have also recieved international interest over the years. Greenland's new development aim is to build up a large-scale mining industry. This article elucidates the form of public consultation processes followed in Greenland in connection to two large-scale mining projects and the different views various actors have regarding these events. How did the deliberative democratic process unfold in Greenland regarding these projects? Was the process followed and effective way to manage these kinds of projects? The article shows that two projects that received a lot of media attention: the 2005 iron ore mine project Isukasia, and the 2001 TANBREEZ-project to extract rare earth elements, used highly different approaches when it comes to deliberative democracy. In the former case, a limited degree of deliberative democracy was used, while in the latter case, the opposite applies.