‘Trumping’ the Danish Self-Image: Danish Ontological Security and Colonial Complicity in the Geopolitical Contest over Greenland

Sammanfattning

As Trump's pursuit of Greenland escalated throughout 2025 and into 2026, the Danish government has faced mounting pressure to justify its authority over the territory, both on the international stage and within its domestic sphere. This thesis examines how Danish officials discursively construct and legitimize that authority in response to repeated threats from Trump. Drawing on Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its primary methodological framework and ontological security theory as its main theoretical lens this thesis analyses two data categories of official political Danish discourse, official speeches and statements by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responding directly to Trump on an international stage, and new policy initiatives and symbolic governance text addressing the Danish-Greenlandic relationship within a domestic framework. The analysis finds that Danish legitimisation operates through an external and internal level, where externally Denmark is constructed as a rational, democratic rule-based actor, in line with literature on Nordic exceptionalism. Internally, the narrative of shared history and collective belonging reinforces emotional attachment and produces a shared identity. Understood through a lens of ontological security, both levels are attempts to stabilize the Danish ontological security at a geopolitical moment of crisis, where an established biographical narrative is being challenged.