It might seem strange that we should envy the people of Greenland. This enormous island is almost the size of Western Europe. It is 85 percent covered with an ice cap 4km thick. In this enormous space a population of 60,000 huddles into some 18 towns the largest of which has a population of 14,000. Nearly everything except meat and fish is imported from Denmark, which is a four-hour plane trip away. If it is space you are after, Greenland has to be the place. The strange optical effects of its mirage-inducing atmosphere might also have a certain interest. As Lonely Planet puts it: "Any land that has ... an atmosphere capable of conjuring up an entire city out of thin air, or turning a dog turd on the horizon into a sailing ship, has got to be worth visiting." Otherwise, however, it might be difficult to imagine how wealthy high-tech Taiwan might look with jealousy at one of the world's quietest communities.
Nevertheless jealous we must be and especially so tomorrow, as the citizens of Greenland go to the polls to choose a new Landsting, the territory's 31-member parliament. For Greenlanders share one freedom that is denied to Taiwanese -- they are free to decide who and what they are.
Greenland was long a colony of Denmark. Currently it has an intriguing dual status whereby it is represented in the Danish parliament by two deputies, as if it were a part of metropolitan Denmark, yet under a 1979 autonomy agreement controls its own affairs through the Landsting. While its foreign policy is generally controlled by Denmark, Greenland has certain important opt-out rights. It is not, for example, a member of the EU, although Denmark is.
Happy the residents of myth-shrouded Ultima Thule who enjoy such an arrangement. Even happier perhaps in that the irreproachably liberal Danes have given them the right to declare independence whenever they want to. And some do. One of the issues of the current election campaign is exactly how much independence to aim for, given the Denmark contributes a hefty financial subsidy to Greenland every year without which it might find itself in trouble. Money is not the only issue in the election however. A conservative wing of the social democratic Siumut party for example is trying to establish Greenlandic, a dialect of Inuit, as Greenland's single official tongue -- currently Greenlandic is used along with the Danish of the one-time colonial master.
Taiwanese should be so lucky! The last time dethroning the dominance of Mandarin Chinese, imposed as part of the KMT's colonialism, was raised here, cold feet stamped all over the debate. Greenlanders' quarrel, by the way, is that the civil service is monopolized by Danish-only speaking colonials. When is speaking another local language other than Mandarin going to become a mandatory requirement of joining the civil service here in Taiwan we wonder?
Readers will quickly point out that one difference between Greenland and Taiwan is that Denmark is offering it independence, not threatening to reduce it to ashes. But Greenland's position has not always been so uncontroversial. The International Court of Justice played an important role in deciding questions of sovereignty both in the 1930s and in 1953. If only Taiwan had a leader bold enough to seek a court decision on the nation's sovereignty, rather than content to characterize it as an evolution of the military occupation -- and illegal annexation -- of the ROC.
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