As an American of mixed Danish and Indian heritage, who is also a citizen of France and, therefore, of the EU, Donald Trump’s contempt for the rule of law fills me with dread. “I don’t need international law,” he boasted on 7 January in an interview with the New York Times. For Louis XIV, it was “L’état, c’est moi”. For Trump, it’s the “Donroe doctrine”, or “the western hemisphere is mine for whatever profit I and my elite group of loyal courtiers can wring from it”.
At the same time, Trump’s honesty about his intention to use the astonishing military power he wields for unfettered plunder is at least refreshing. No more American pieties to democracy and human rights. The world hasn’t seen this kind of unabashed dedication to amassing wealth since the British East India Company. All hail the new king emperor! Or else.
As an American, I am horrified by the lethal violence unleashed by ICE thugs across the US, even if, on my Danish-American mother’s side, I am descended from the “right” kind of immigrants, according to Trump: white, Protestant northern Europeans. By a twist of history involving the 1911 utopian Danish settlement of Solvang in California, I have a slew of cousins in Denmark. I keenly feel their anguish at what is happening with Greenland. They are good, kind people who can’t understand why the US is now turning against one of its most loyal allies.
As a citizen and resident of France, I feel like standing up and singing the Marseillaise with tears in my eyes, as in the famous scene of defiance in Casablanca, only this time it’s to protest against American fascism, not the Nazis. Do my neighbours in a little village south of Paris think l’américaine is an internal enemy? Neighbours who, just a year and a half ago, gratefully celebrated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of France by the Americans?
On my paternal, Indian side, it’s a different story. My father was born in 1930 as a subject of the British empire. Like many Indians of his generation, he bears lifelong psychological scars from his perceived position of inferiority. Though the postwar US of 1949 was hardly free of racism, it offered him educational and professional opportunities he did not have in India, and may not have had anywhere else in the world.
But under Trump, the old wounds of empire are being reopened. This 95-year-old man, a naturalised citizen of the US since the 1960s, who, as an aeronautical engineer worked on the Apollo mission to put a man on the moon, helping the US win the space race against the Soviet Union, confided last December that he is afraid ICE will come to his care home, seize him in his wheelchair and deport him. He’s brown. He knows he is no longer wanted in Trump’s US. This is the kind of fear the Trump regime, aided by far-right European parties who pine for the white dominance of lost empires, wants to bring to Europe. It terrifies me.
The Danes, like all other Europeans, are no strangers to imperialism. Denmark had its own East India Company back in the day. Its main Indian factory was located on the Coromandel coast south of Chennai, formerly Madras, in Tranquebar. Indian Tamils were trafficked to Denmark as enslaved servants. With support from the Danish crown, Danish Lutheran missionaries had arrived in Tranquebar in the early 1700s.
As they did in Greenland. After neglecting the island for many years, the Danish crown sent a Lutheran missionary, Hans Egede, to Greenland in 1721. He went about converting the native people to Christianity. Such were the beginnings of Denmark’s efforts to civilise the Indigenous people of Greenland, resulting centuries later in shameful social engineering projects such as forced sterilisation and taking children away from Greenlander parents.
It is an ugly history but, sadly, no worse than the treatment of native peoples by other European powers elsewhere. Under “manifest destiny”, the celebrated ideological underpinning of Trump’s white supremacist Maga movement and of his project of imperial expansion, the extermination of native peoples in the US was enthusiastically pursued. If anyone thinks the racist Trump lot will be more respectful of native Greenlanders’ human rights than a now chastened Denmark, they’re a fool. Wait until US ICE units, finally appropriately named, arrive in Greenland.
Denmark’s Caribbean possessions, a legacy of the era of slavery and plantation sugar production, were sold to the US in 1916, becoming the US Virgin Islands. In exchange, the US secretary of state signed a letter stating that “the government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland”. This is the basis of Denmark’s claim to sovereignty – over any by the US – over the now autonomous territory of Greenland: a land deal between one big new imperial power and a much smaller, older imperial power.
My father’s fear as an immigrant of colour to the US is similar to the fear of recent immigrants in Denmark who face eviction and deportation under a Danish “ghetto law” that the European court of justice ruled just last month may be illegal under EU law. (The current UK government wishes to emulate Denmark’s immigration policy.) Breaking the law to get rid of unwanted, dark-skinned foreigners? That sounds more like Trump than what one would hope from Denmark, whose only protection from the new imperial raider is respect for the rule of law.
It should be clear by now that the existence of the rule of law anywhere – whether in Minneapolis, in Brussels, or in the Greenlandic capital Nuuk – is an insufferable affront to Trump’s power. It’s an affront we in Europe must be prepared to deliver if we wish to preserve ourselves.
