Democracy and Power in Greenland - the Appearance of a New Class?

Still, twenty-three years after the inception of Home Rule the Greenland society has remnants from Danish colonialism, at the same time however, a new society is on its way. In a power perspective this lead to the presence of a new ruling class as seen in other post-colonial social formations since the end of the Second World War. As pointed out by Jens Dahl such comparisons raise another question. Could it be that the radicalised Greenland elite constitutes a new class despite the fact that it was the elite that originally was the backbone of the Home Rule movement (Dahl, 1986)? Fifteen years after Dahl presented his analysis of the post-colonial society, this question cannot be answered unambiguously, because the post-colonial heritage and with this the continued organizational dependency on Danish experts, administrators and executive managers is of equal importance. In this sense the new class in Greenland represents several layers of both the early radical elite and a techno-structure of both Danes and highly educated Greenlanders on their way up the ladder in the hierarchy. Within the framework of this new class, there are rivalling factions representing ideological contradictions extending from arguing for the prolongation of a ‘Statist' or ‘Etatist' society to a neo-liberal market society