What Europe learned from the Greenland crisis

But Davos presented another lesson to Europe. Standing together on the principle of territorial integrity and sovereignty, while warning of severe economic countermeasures, the Europeans achieved an apparent retreat from Trump over Greenland.

Sovereignty and the inviolability of borders are fundamental tenets of the European project, built out of the ruins of World War II, when the aggressive imperialism of big powers led to millions of deaths. The lesson was clear: Defending borders collectively is the only way small states are protected from the predations of larger ones.

Now Europe finds itself again confronted by big powers with expansionist goals. Russia continues its effort to conquer Ukraine, whose sovereignty it had recognized in numerous treaties. And the United States has been demanding that Denmark, an EU and NATO ally, hand over Greenland.

But preserving territorial integrity and sovereignty is the red line, expressed both in the European Union, a collective of 27 nations, and in NATO, a military alliance of 32 nations. It can seem quixotic in the current world to be defending international law, the U.N. Charter and the Helsinki Accords, which all insist on the inviolability of borders, but in a sense, that is Europe’s fate.

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“That borders can be challenged by force, and the threat of force threatens the core tenets of European security and aspirations since the end of World War II,” said Ian Lesser, the head of the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund.
“The war in Ukraine brought it to the fore,” he continued, “but the idea that the United States, the principal guarantor of European security, should be challenging the concept of sovereignty and territorial integrity is a serious concern.” Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the Continent has been rediscovering the importance of sovereignty in the face of challenges from the “great powers” of China, Russia and the United States.

“Most of European history since World War II has been about taming sovereignty and pooling it” in multilateral institutions, he said. But the new world is “fundamentally changing the nature of the EU,” he said.

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Europeans realize that they cannot defend the old, rules-based order on a global level, “but they can be sure it survives in Europe,” he said. “Thus the importance of Ukraine and Greenland.”

Leonard said he hoped that “Europeans will take the lesson of the last few days, that when they stand up for sovereignty and territorial integrity and these rules they can defend them.”

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Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada won praise for a speech in Davos in which he said that the old international order was dead. “Middle powers” like Canada and Europe, he said, must form new alliances as the great powers abandon postwar international norms and treaties and rely instead on “economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”

There is a rupture in the old order, Carney said: “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”

Europe has been absorbing that lesson.

Europeans have resisted Trump’s demands that Ukraine hand over to Russia territory that Moscow has not conquered. And the Europeans have insisted that even if a peace deal left Russian troops occupying 20% of Ukraine, the occupation would never be recognized as permanent, not even in Crimea.

The Europeans have come up with more money and military aid for Ukraine than the United States, and they have largely picked up the slack after Trump cut off funding for Ukraine. They recently agreed to another 90 billion euros ($106 billion) in economic and military aid to Kyiv.

And it has been the Europeans who have expressed solidarity with Denmark and Greenland against Trump’s demands to annex the island on the same principle of territorial integrity, and who seem to have caused him to back down.

President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke for many Europeans at Davos when he said, “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them.”

Prime Minister Bart De Wever of Belgium was harsher. “So many red lines are being crossed,” he said at the forum. “Being a happy vassal in one thing, being a miserable slave is something else.”

Smaller European nations, like the Baltic and Nordic states, are deeply worried about the great powers’ attack on sovereignty, said Jana Puglierin, head of the German office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“This is the end of their business model,” she said. “It’s the very foundation of the European Union and the postwar order, where one country gets one vote, no matter how small.”

Russia, China and the United States are trying to change the entire international order, she said, and Europe is in the middle. All of those countries “are trying to split us,” she said, “because it is easier to deal with us when we are divided.”

The fundamental question is whether the European Union and NATO can still function in this new, more rapacious world, she said. These institutions “are based on the invulnerability of sovereignty and the principle of consensus, and the challenge now is to the very existence of the organizations that have brought peace and prosperity to Europe.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.