- Liberal internationalism presents itself as universal and impartial but is structurally rooted in imperial conquest and racial hierarchies that exclude the ‘Other’.
- The debate over Greenland reveals how Indigenous Inuit agency is erased, mirroring South Africa’s internal marginalisation of Black rural and peri-urban communities.
- What appears as a crisis or deviation in liberal order is, in fact, continuity, a system that rhetorically universalises rights while governing through selective visibility.
Donald Trump first announced his plans to annex both Canada and Greenland early in 2026. While the Canadian threat appears to have faded into rhetorical spectacle, the US is now formalising its ambitions for Greenland, openly signalling that military action remains a possibility if diplomacy or purchase fail.
The boldness of this stance has shocked liberal commentators, who see it as a deviation from the “rules-based international order”. Yet this reaction itself reveals a deeper issue: a layered blindness within liberal internationalism that consistently fails to recognise the ‘Other’ as a subject, rather than an object, of geopolitics.
This blindness is not accidental. Liberal internationalism is structurally linked to international law, its most refined institutional expression. International law claims to be universal and impartial, yet it was created through imperial expansion, conquest, and the systematic production of societies without rights.
Its core categories, including sovereignty, territory, trusteeship, and recognition, were developed in a world already stratified by race, ‘civilisation’, and power. Africa, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and indeed parts of Europe itself were not simply excluded from early legal personality but were integral to the system precisely through their exclusion.
The current, emotionally charged debate on Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) exposes how little this architecture has changed. Liberal internationalism utilises international law for self-preservation and promotes its civilising mission, anchored in a racialised hierarchy of humanity, one that historically placed whiteness, or Europeanism, at its apex.
Whiteness is the basis of Western societies worldwide, including Australia, Canada, Europe, the US, and many places where European-descended people are present, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Israel, Mexico, and South Africa.
The rise of white supremacy across many of these societies, with Trump’s MAGA movement emerging as its latest epicentre, is not an awkward deviation from liberalism but an expression of its multiple shades. Intolerance and tolerance operate as two sides of the same racially blind coin, one that has shaped the modern world since the fifteenth century, if not earlier.
As a mode of thought, liberalism shapes how people around the globe behave, speak, and interpret political reality, defining not only what is considered acceptable but also what is made invisible or beyond questioning.
The erasure of indigenous agency in global politics
The current noise surrounding Greenland continues to invisibilise the Inuit, who fade from sight while Trump adopts an assertive stance and Denmark responds defensively. In this exchange, sovereignty is contested between powerful states, while the people whose habitat is at stake are sidelined rather than recognised as political subjects with agency and voice.
Although appearing remotely linked, the politics of service delivery in South Africa reflect a similar logic. Urbanism, as a form of liberalism, prioritises the interests of the métropole while systematically silencing the voices of those at the margins of society, particularly Black rural communities.
This article thus transplants the frameworks of scholars such as Antony Anghie, on international law and empire, and Mahmood Mamdani, on citizenship versus subjecthood, into a fresh, urgent examination of two seemingly disparate cases: Kalaallit Nunaat as a permanent terra nullius and South Africa’s internal ‘Other’. In doing so, it argues that what appears as a crisis or deviation in liberal order is, in fact, its operational continuity, an order that rhetorically universalises rights while governing through selective visibility and the systematic erasure of certain political subjects.
Kalaallit Nunaat as terra nullius: Liberal blindness and colonial continuity
The treatment of Kalaallit Nunaat within Western legal and political discourse is best understood through the enduring doctrine of terra nullius, the legal fiction that treats land as empty or politically ownerless when its inhabitants do not conform to European models of sovereignty, property, and governance. Inuit societies were never absent from Greenland, but they were rendered invisible to international law. Greenland was thus not claimed despite Indigenous presence, but because that presence was juridically negated.
This reasoning underpinned Denmark’s colonial consolidation of Greenland from the eighteenth century onwards. Sovereignty was asserted not through conquest or treaty with the Inuit, but through symbolic occupation and continuity claims connected to long-vanished Norse settlements. Inuit territoriality, based on collective use and mobility rather than exclusive ownership, was regarded as legally insignificant. Liberal international law thus transformed inhabited land into Danish Crown territory through abstraction rather than consent. This represents the fundamental blindness of liberal legality: it universalises its categories while denying legal personality to those who do not fall within them.
The persistence of this blindness became particularly evident in the mid-twentieth century. When Greenland’s colonial status was examined at the UN, the issue was narrowly framed as one of administrative integration rather than Indigenous self-determination. Denmark successfully reclassified Greenland as an ‘integral part’ of the Danish state in 1953, despite the absence of a direct popular referendum and the exclusion of meaningful alternatives such as free association or independence. Formal decolonisation, therefore, occurred without dismantling the colonial relationship. The Inuit were transformed from colonised peoples into internal minorities, without ever being recognised as sovereign political subjects.
This legal history outlines how easily Greenland remains a topic for discussion as a transferable strategic asset. The modern language of ‘buying’, ‘protecting’, or even forcibly acquiring Greenland echoes earlier imperial deals, most notably the seemingly non-colonial Russia’s sale of Alaska to the US in 1867. In both instances, territory was regarded as alienable property exchanged between imperial powers, while Indigenous peoples were seen as incidental attachments to land. Liberal outrage today concentrates on the breach of interstate norms, rather than on the deeper continuity of a system that has consistently normalised the exclusion of Indigenous agency.
Liberal international law and the production of strategic assets
What is at stake in Greenland is not merely a dispute over territory, but the very logic by which international law renders land, and by extension, its inhabitants, as assets to be negotiated, bought, or conquered by powerful states. The invisibility of the Inuit is not an accident but a function of a system shaped to serve imperial and metropolitan interests. The doctrine of terra nullius persists in modern rhetoric, allowing Western powers to imagine themselves as stewards or rightful owners of spaces already inhabited and governed by others.
This pattern is evident in the way Greenland is discussed in Western media and policy circles: as a “prize” in geopolitical rivalry, rather than as a homeland with its own political community. The Inuit, when referenced, are spoken for, not with—a passive presence in narratives of strategic competition. International law, in its liberal guise, continues to transform living territories into chess pieces, and Indigenous agency into a marginal footnote.
Urban liberalism and the Geography of exclusion
In South Africa, liberal constitutionalism coexists with profound structural exclusion. Urbanism, as a spatial expression of liberalism, privileges the métropole while marginalising rural and peri-urban Black communities from political consideration. Service delivery failures are presented as technical or administrative issues rather than as consequences of a governance model that systematically prioritises certain lives, spaces, and economic circuits over others.
Every complaint about a pothole, load shedding, or unemployment is rooted in the divisions that underpin the post-1994 state, which ‘sees’ some people and ‘others’ the rest. Urbanism, as a historically white philosophy in the African context, has always been linked to ideas of order, productivity, and modernity that are racially coded. Cities were designed as enclaves of accumulation and control, while Black populations were integrated as labour inputs rather than political constituencies. This logic has remained largely intact through constitutional transition, not only driven by Whites but Blacks too.
Even so-called progressive Black people do not understand the pervasive nature of white liberalism and how it continually shapes the perspective through which they view the world. All political debates are about the deterioration of Johannesburg’s CBD or Durban’s beaches, as well as the ‘best-run’ municipalities under the DA. Even the best infrastructure built after 1994, the Gautrain in Gauteng, universities in Nelspruit and Kimberley, and the Durban N3 causeway, has been about satisfying the needs of the métropole. No discussions ever focus on the ‘Other’ South Africa that has been invisibilised since colonial times.
Once again, this fixation is not an oversight but reflects a hierarchy of concern in which urban, commercially integrated spaces are regarded as proxies for national well-being, while vast rural and peri-urban regions are relegated to the status of administrative burdens. The internal ‘Other’ is thus fully incorporated into the constitutional order yet excluded from its operational priorities. As with Greenland, sovereignty exists formally but fractures in practice.
Selective visibility as governance: The mechanics of erasure
Liberalism reproduces its colonial inheritance not through overt exclusion but through selective visibility, governing some lives as central to the polity and ‘Others’ as peripheral to its future. Absorbed by the métropole and its mechanics, many Black people increasingly sustain and legitimise this model, even as it continues to govern against the majority in whose name it speaks. Two additional dynamics deepen this condition of internal othering. Fiscal federalism privileges revenue-rich metros while depoliticising rural exclusion as administrative failure; welfare substitutes delivery for voice, and investment follows urban corridors.
Greenland and South Africa reveal the same core truth: liberalism does not malfunction when it ignores the ‘Other’ but operates as intended. Inuit land becomes negotiable through doctrines that transform inhabited territory into strategic property, just as Black rural and peri-urban lives in South Africa are marginalised by metropolitan, fiscal, and epistemic hierarchies. In both cases, sovereignty appears in form but not in substance.
What is presented as deviation or crisis is actually continuity, an order that rhetorically universalises rights while governing through selective visibility.
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