GREENLAND’S WITHDRAWAL FROM THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY:CONSTRUCTIVIST ANALYSIS OF DECISION-MAKING ON GOVERNMENTAL AND SOCIETAL LEVELS

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify and explain the rationale behind Greenland’s  decision to leave the European Economic Community. The reasoning follows the two-levelled analysis of decision-making: governmental  and societal.  Based on the Process  Tracing  of Greenland’s  way to the self-determination and Discourse Analysis of the 1982 pre-referendum  campaign, the article affirms that the interest of the autonomy expansion backed by the plan of economic well-being outside the Community encouraged the governmental  decision, while on the societal level, the interest of preserving Greenlandicness  against Eu- ropeanization is claimed to have been decisive. Findings are simultaneously  interpreted according to Alex- ander Wendt’s National Interest categories of autonomy, economic well-being and collective self-esteem to conclude that the withdrawal from the Community  was a reverberation of Greenland’s  national inter- ests in their Constructivist sense. As a complement  to Wendt’s  conceptualization  of National Interests, Weaver’s Securitization Theory is used as a theoretical tool for analysing the pre-referendum  campaign as a securitization act. It is argued that the government directed Greenlanders’ Collective self-esteem against the EEC membership and thus constructed the societal security threat out of a purely political issue.