Will Greenland become “the first sovereign nation state created by global warming” (Rosenthal 2012)? Will Asian interests in new shipping routes and extractive industries in the Arctic generate a sustainable economy in Greenland and, eventually, make possible Greenland's political independence from Denmark? Have these developments been made possible by climate change?
At least in the prevalent climate change narratives on global warming impacts in the Arctic, focusing on growing accessibility of natural resources and emerging possibilities of new shipping routes, the increasing ice sheet and sea ice melting is constructed as the reason for these possibilities. Thus, Asia has become an important part of this development due to the global aspects of climate change and the Asian interests in the Arctic. Furthermore, the Asian economies themselves are growing at a rapid pace with the highest GDP growth rates on a global scale, and might comprise over half of the global GDP by 2050. The paper, therefore, will analyze the background, character and different explanations of the Asian interests in the Arctic and the impacts on developments in Greenland.
Asia itself, however, is more diversified than at times acknowledged in the discussion on Asia and the Arctic. Even the three most important players in East Asia - China, Japan and South Korea - are very diverse nation states concerning both politics (democracy vs. authoritarianism) and economics (state interventionism vs. market economy) but may have important cultural characteristics in common (”Asian values”?). One question to explore will be the Asian political and economic and cultural mismatch vs. match with the Arctic and Greenland. Another will be the explanation of Asian interests in the Arctic. From a geographical perspective, Asia is not Arctic, but from a geopolitical perspective, the Arctic is explicitly a global issue according to e.g. China, and not just a regional issue. In addition to economic interests (Arctic shipping routes and extractive industries), China and other Asian states have also asserted their legitimate political interests in the Arctic region and have been granted rights as ‘observers’ in the Arctic Council since May 2013.
A final issue of the paper will be the impacts of Asian interests in the Arctic on developments in Greenland, not least the political debates on Greenland in the Danish Commonwealth on transfer of policy areas from Denmark to the semi-autonomous Greenland that tends to divide opinions between seeing Asian engagement in Greenland, especially the interest of China in natural resource exploitation, as a political threat rather than a driver of economic development.