Indigenous Affairs 3-4/08: Self-rule in Greenland towards the world's first independent Inuit state?
On 25 November 2008, 75.5% of the electorate of the world’s largest island voted in favour of greater autonomy. Greenlanders, who became the first population of Inuit origin to achieve a degree of self-government when Denmark granted them Home Rule in 1979, have given their political leaders a mandate for significant and far-reaching change. There are many in the Home Rule government who dream that this historic vote will see Greenland move from being a semi-autonomous territory to an independent state within a generation – Greenland’s Premier Hans Enoksen has expressed a desire for independence in 2021, a date marking three hundred years since Danish colonization. The realities of selfrule leave others – particularly those critical that the referendum was too early in Greenland’s recent political history – unconvinced that independence is just over the Arctic horizon.