Greenland

Greenland's earliest documented inhabitants belonged to a sequence of Paleo-Inuit cultures that crossed from the North American Arctic beginning around 2500 BCE. The first of these, known to archaeologists as the Saqqaq, settled the western and southern coasts and were followed by the Independence I, Independence II, and Dorset cultures, each adapted to different climatic phases of the Arctic. These small, mobile populations subsisted on seal, walrus, caribou, and seabirds, and at various points they vanished from the island, leaving long stretches of apparent depopulation before the next wave arrived.

Around 980 CE, Norse settlers led by Erik the Red established the Eastern and Western Settlements on the southwestern coast, an offshoot of the Norse expansion through Iceland. The Greenland Norse maintained a tributary church under the Archbishopric of Nidaros, traded walrus ivory with Europe, and at their peak numbered several thousand. Around the same period, the Thule culture, the direct ancestors of the modern Kalaallit Inuit, migrated eastward from Alaska and gradually occupied the entire coastline. Contact between the two populations was limited, and by the mid-fifteenth century the Norse settlements had disappeared, owing to a combination of climatic cooling, isolation from Europe after the integration of Norway into the Kalmar Union, and economic decline. The Thule descendants remained the sole inhabitants for roughly three centuries.

Formal European recolonisation began in 1721, when the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede founded a station near present-day Nuuk under royal charter. Greenland was thereafter administered as a Danish dependency, with trade monopolised by the Royal Greenland Trading Department from 1776. The territory remained under Copenhagen's authority when Norway and Denmark separated in 1814, and Norway's competing claim over uninhabited Eastern Greenland was settled in Denmark's favour by the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1933. During the Second World War, with Denmark under German occupation, the United States assumed the defence of Greenland under a 1941 agreement with the Danish ambassador in Washington, establishing bases that would endure into the Cold War, most notably Thule Air Base, opened in 1951.

In 1953 a constitutional revision integrated Greenland fully into the Kingdom of Denmark as a county, ending its formal colonial status, and Greenlanders became Danish citizens with parliamentary representation. The post-war decades brought a state-led modernisation programme that concentrated populations in larger towns and was later criticised for its social costs. A referendum in 1979 introduced Home Rule, transferring substantial domestic competences to a locally elected parliament, the Inatsisartut, and government, the Naalakkersuisut, both seated in Nuuk. In 1985 Greenland withdrew from the European Communities, which it had entered with Denmark in 1973, becoming an Overseas Country and Territory associated with what is now the European Union.

A second referendum in 2008 approved the Self-Government Act, which took effect on 21 June 2009 and extended Greenlandic authority over additional policy areas including natural resources, justice, and policing, while recognising Kalaallisut as the sole official language and the Greenlandic people as a people under international law. Foreign affairs, defence, and monetary policy remain reserved to Copenhagen. Greenland today is a self-governing nation within the Kingdom of Denmark, operating under a parliamentary system in which the Naalakkersuisut is responsible to the Inatsisartut, and it sends two members to the Danish Folketing.