Zulfiqar Ali Shirazi
USA’s President Donald Trump’s talk of “taking” Greenland has dragged an ancient instinct into a world that claims it has outgrown it: the idea that territory can be owned, traded, or seized like a strategic asset. He has doubled down publicly, saying there is “no going back” on the objective of acquiring Greenland and even floating coercive options, while Denmark and EU leaders have treated the rhetoric as an attack on sovereignty. The immediate drama is transatlantic. The deeper issue is historical: how humanity moved from “possession by force” to “sovereignty by consent,” and why that shift is now being stress-tested.
A peek into prehistoric and early human societies reveals that “ownership” of land was not a document or a statute, but was contingent upon its availability, use, and the ability to defend. Nomadic people followed game, water, and seasons; the boundaries were porous and enforced by perceived reputation and quantum of retaliation. As agriculture spread and settlements became permanent, land transformed into a core of survival. Fields, irrigation, granaries, and trade routes created incentives to mark territory and punish trespass. That is the first big transformation: from open pastures to bounded space.
Ancient states turned bounded space into sovereignty and, in turn, ruled over people within a defined area. Empires expanded, producing increased tributes, security buffers, and a sense of prestige. The legal and moral lingo varied from divine mandate, civilising missions, to imperial order, but the tacit test of conquering remained administering and thus holding.
Medieval Europe complicated the picture by layering authority rather than clarifying it. Feudalism treated territory as a web of obligations: lords held land from kings, kings claimed titles through marriage and inheritance, and the Church asserted a moral jurisdiction that often competed with rulers. Borders were more like zones of influence. What mattered was who could extract taxes, raise troops, and enforce judgments in practice. The core idea, however, remained stabilisation; territory was akin to something that can be “held” under a recognised title, not merely occupied.
The modern state system shifted territory from a spoil of conquest into a legally bounded space of exclusive authority, a change often symbolised by the Peace of Westphalia, a set of treaties signed in 1648 that ended two major European wars. The foundations of the modern state system gradually evolved, promoting three core ideas of sovereignty, territorial integrity and non – interference. This model was later exported through European colonialism, where conquests were sugarcoated with legal doctrines like “terra nullius;” a Latin term meaning “land belonging to no one”, to justify seizure. Over time, international law replaced these justifications with principles like self-determination, sourcing legitimacy from the rights of people.
The twentieth century further catalysed the shift to legality. World War I introduced self-determination as a political ideal, which was applied inconsistently. The League of Nations mandate system claimed to prepare territories for self-government while often extending imperial control under the garb of management. Then World War II and its aftermath produced the most important legal line in modern territorial history: the United Nations Charter’s prohibition on the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states. This undoubtedly was the foremost legal attempt to bury the old “right of conquest.”
After the Charter, the international community tried to close loopholes. UN General Assembly Resolution 2625 (the “Friendly Relations” declaration) states plainly that no territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognised as legal. Resolution 3314 (Definition of Aggression) reinforces the same idea that no territorial acquisition or special advantage resulting from aggression shall be recognised as lawful. This is not a mere aspiration; it underpins the modern expectation that borders do not change because a powerful state desires so.
Decolonisation then gave the principle a human subject. UN Resolution 1514 declared that all peoples have a right to self-determination and that colonial subjection is contrary to the UN’s purposes. In other words, territory is not just soil. It contains people whose political will matters. You can hear the moral reversal: the land is no longer “owned” by whoever can take it, rather sovereignty belongs to a political community, and legitimacy flows from consent.
Above is an overview of the rulebook that USA President Donald Trump’s Greenland talk collides with. Greenland today is not an ownerless expanse. It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark with extensive self-government. Crucially, Denmark’s 2009 Act on Greenland Self-Government explicitly recognises that “the people of Greenland are people pursuant to international law with the right of self-determination.” Whether Greenland eventually becomes fully independent is a live political question, but the pathway runs through Greenlanders and not through purchase offers, tariffs, or threats of annexation.
The post-1945 shift from “possession by force” to “sovereignty by consent” is being stress-tested today because great-power politics is resurging faster than the legal restraints designed to contain it. Strategic geography, like Arctic routes, islands, chokepoints, and resources, is once again being framed as a bounty or likely spoils of war. International law, lacking any global enforcement authority owing to a weakened veto-infested UNO, depends largely on voluntary compliance. If continuous governance, legal recognition, and historical sovereignty are no longer valid bases for territorial legitimacy, the same logic can be applied to the USA’s own origins and even to Israel’s contested claims. Application of raw power jeopardises every state’s conceptual boundary.
In the modern system, territorial status can change only through lawful means such as mutual treaties, self-determination, or internationally supervised processes; coercion and takeover by threat are explicitly illegal. Normalising annexation will be reviving “might makes right”. It is not about access, but about sovereignty and precedent, testing whether today’s order still rests on law and consent or is sliding back towards rule by raw power. Therefore, the Greenland issue needs to be identified as a crossroads junction or a world crossing swords for good.
The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at zulfiqar.shirazi @gmail.com
