Canada vs. Denmark: The story of Hans Island and the ‘Whisky War’

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan You may not be old enough to remember this, but once upon a time, our very own peaceful nation of Canada was standing toe to toe with the Kingdom of Denmark, fighting for land, unwilling to give up an inch, a rock or an island. It was a dangerous time. The world was on tenterhooks. After all, who knows what happens if you push Canada or Denmark too far? But finally, after nearly 50 years of geopolitical tension, what had come to be called the Whiskey War came to a peaceful end.

Clip A nearly 50-year conflict over this tiny island now resolved. Clearly, what we’re showing today is that you don’t redraw boundaries or the barrel of a gun.

Jordan That was back in June of this year. Hans Island so long fought for, metaphorically speaking anyway. Nobody actually fought. But each of these two nations was divided down the middle and the world could rest easy. This is the story of that decades-long conflict. Again, conflict is metaphorical. There were no actual shots fired or anything. Its resolution and what a peaceful end to an Arctic border dispute means for the future of the Global North. Because while the story of Hans Island is lighthearted and warm, the future of Arctic territories, in the climate age, is very much not. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Martin Breum is a Danish journalist who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Whiskey War and that little island way up north. Hello, Martin.

Martin Breum Hello there, Jordan.

Jordan Why don’t we begin with the island in question? Can you just tell me about Hans Island? Like, where is it? What’s it like there?

Martin Breum It’s very hard to describe. It’s very, very far away. It’s way north of any human settlements in Greenland. If you know of Grise Fiord in the very high north of Canada, very close to Greenland, it’s as far as that and some more up there. It’s in a very narrow strait between Greenland and Canada. This strait is only 35 km wide and the island is smack in the middle there. So it’s basically embraced by sea ice most of the year. Sometimes there’s open water around it. I happened to be there in 2018 on a scientific expedition that was in the neighbourhood, so to speak. We had a very large helicopter to our disposal, just for the interest of it. We landed on Hans Island briefly for some hours, just simply to check it out. So I happen to know what it looks like. But first of all, I want to tell you that it’s very beautiful there because sometimes we regard that part of the Arctic as dangerous and hostile. But it was a very, very nice day. It was calm, sunny, it wasn’t very cold, so it was a perfect day to visit. But of course, most of the year it’s stormy and extremely cold. It’s dark for many, many months every winter. But I was there on a particularly beautiful day. Blue skies, sunny. And the interesting thing is, when you’re on Hans Island, you can actually see Greenland right there and Canada right there. And that, of course, is the very specific signature of Hans Island that it’s exactly between Canada and Greenland. But looking at it when you arrive, if you come from the south, you will see a very, very stiff, very sort of almost vertical cliff face that rises out of the sea ice to a point of more than 150 meters, because it’s 180 meters at its highest point. So seen from the south is like a solid wall of rock. And then on top, it slants down towards the north, where it hits the water or the ice again. And there is a little, tiny little bay where if there is open water, and if you happen to have a boat there, which very few people do, then you can actually lay in there and you can walk up. I understand. I’ve never tried it. We had a helicopter, as I said, but apparently, there is someplace there which you could theoretically land a boat if you had one.

Jordan You almost made me want to go there. That sounds beautiful.

Martin Breum It is. It was very, very beautiful. We had a wonderful time.

Jordan So it’s right in the middle of a strait between Greenland and Canada. Can you tell me what Hans Island is known for and where the dispute about it started?

Martin Breum Yes. And maybe we should hack right into the core of it and say, no, there is no oil, no, there is no minerals, no, it has no military significance even if there is all the trouble with the Russians and the Arctic, you have the big power games up there with the US, China and whatever, but everybody agrees, all the security services agree, that Hans Island has no military significance. And the geologists tell us there are no minerals to be found on Hans Island that is anywhere near commercial value. Also, the island is so small that it would make no sense to have a mine there. It’s simply too small for any, let’s say, mineral exploitation to really take place there, even if you have something to mine which nobody has ever found. So it has no, let’s say, commercial value of any kind or any significant military value. But the idea here is that the states, Greenland, which is part of the Danish Kingdom, sorts under the government in Copenhagen, in Denmark and of course, the Canadian government and those two governments, they could not agree when they found out back in the 1970s. It’s more than 50 years ago. They found out that this island is very, very precisely located in the middle between the two nations. So they simply could not figure out where do we draw the line to sort of make a border here. They found out how to do it in the waters surrounding the island, that was no problem. But borders on land is something very different. So that’s where the trouble started. They didn’t agree back in the ’70s and it just went on like that. They tried for decades and couldn’t figure it out. So this simmering little conflict, which started out as a nothing, sort of grew into something. And then about 20/25 years ago, things began to sort of turn a little nasty. Even further back, there was a Danish minister who raised a flag. There were Canadians who raised the flag there. It became a fairly serious conflict simply because the governments were reluctant to give up even this tiny little island or even find out how to separate it in two or give it to the Inuit in the area or any kind of suggestions were just rejected by the government. Both governments, you have conservative governments, you probably remember much better than me how strongly they felt about the Arctic and the defence of any Canadian territory in the Arctic. And the Danish government was no better. And there were soldiers going there raising the Danish flags. There was a Canadian Minister of Defense back in, I think, 2005 who went there and he actually downed the Danish flag and now we’re talking serious business. I mean, a Minister of Defense from a foreign country enters something that the Danish government says belongs to them and he downs the flag. It was delivered very politely so to the Danish Embassy in Ottawa and duly returned to Copenhagen. But that was sort of… now things got pretty nasty at the time and what happened, because we are civilized countries, of course, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs got together. They were coincidentally at the same time in New York for some meeting there. So they sort of met and said, hey, let’s stop this nonsense. And since then there have been no flags there, no sort of national posturing, but the conflict was still there. So another 25 years or so or more than 20 years went past And now we’re at the point we’re at now.

Jordan Can you describe maybe after the nastiness had kind of passed, but before we’re getting towards the resolution that we are today, what was it like there on the island when people would visit? I’ve heard anecdotes specifically about liquor being exchanged.

Martin Breum Yeah, that’s the part the journalists like to talk about. And I agree, it is funny. The story goes, I don’t know to what extent is true that when the soldiers were there, they would leave a bottle of liquor. From the Danish side, it would be Schnapps, our sort of national kind of liquor. And the Canadians suggestedly would leave a bottle of whiskey. And so it came into being, the media at some point it was nicknamed the Whiskey War, which of course I think to a certain degree signifies the level of conflict here would never get out of hand, of course, because these are civilized nations. But to me, this conflict represents also something we should take quite seriously that we are not immune to the material, the kind of sentiments that drive other nations into war. I don’t want to mention the war in Ukraine basically but because there is no comparison here. But I’m just saying the Canadians have shown, the Danes have shown that we are not immune to this kind of sentiment and the disability to agree on even the simplest of territorial disputes.

Jordan On an island that has no value.

Martin Breum Exactly.

Jordan So what changed recently? As I understand it, we’re now at the close of this saga. What changed recently to spark that?

Martin Breum Well, that is really anybody’s guess, but let me give you mine. The government changed in Canada about five or six years ago and you had the Trudeau government. Of course, they have not had the same very defensive approach to any kind of territory in the Arctic. That’s not, as far as I understand has not been a political issue. Likewise, we have had a change of government in Copenhagen and the two governments now we have a social democratic government in Copenhagen that is, let’s say on the same line as the Trudeau government. They have the same value-based kind of foreign policies and so forth. So I think there was a political window of opportunity here and the diplomats got together and they simply said let’s try and do it. Let’s try and sit down and see if we can work something out. And it also squares into the geopolitics of the Arctic that if you can show that we can settle a territorial dispute by legal means using international law that will be a signal to Russia, look, it can be done. We should remember there is a conflict coming or at least a conflict of interest coming up in the Arctic Ocean closer to the North Pole where Canada, Russia and Denmark disagrees on who owns the rights to the seabed. And here we’re talking massively larger parts of the seabed. Very, very, very, very gigantic part of the seabed in the Arctic Ocean has to be settled. The ownership to the rights there has to be settled sometime in the future. So there is a signal sent here by the government simply by closing this conflict over Hans Island, which includes also it’s not only Hans Island, it’s connected to the actual maritime border between Canada and Greenland, which has also been settled now. That is the longest maritime border in the world. We’re talking close to 4000 kilometres of maritime border, which has now been finalized alongside the conflict over Hans Island, which is now over.

Jordan So what is the ultimate settlement on Hans Island? Who gets what?

Martin Breum Basically, Canada gets half, Greenland/Denmark, gets the other half. Very, very simple.

Jordan So after all that, after 40, 50 years they just drew a line down the center of the island.

Martin Breum Yes, exactly. It’s not a straight line as such because the diplomats agreed we will use not a straight line, but we will follow international norms and we will follow sort of a natural phenomenon. It’s not a river, it could be a river, it could be a mountain range. Here they chose, there’s sort of a rift that goes almost smack in a straight line but not quite a straight line across the island. And what they’ve also accomplished by following this rift is that the little bay I mentioned, the only landing place on the island will be split in two. So basically Canada has the right to the same bay as the Greenlanders the Danes have. And of course, they will just use the bay as if it was anybody’s bay. In the real world, I mean, this border doesn’t mean a thing.

Jordan Right.

Martin Breum There is nobody who uses this island for anything. But the government in Canada is happy. They can claim we got half, Denmark got the other half. And there are some very subtle details because they also managed in the same deal to draw a line down in the Labrador Sea south of Greenland, close to Canada. And there might be valuable minerals and oil on the bottom of the ocean. So that was a very fine-cut deal down there as well. And apparently, both governments got what they wanted there. Both governments got what they wanted basically on Hans Island and somehow a compromise was worked out here so everybody’s happy. And now I said the island has no value and we should of course remember it has a lot of value to the people who live in the region. There are very few people who live there, but those who do of course regard the island as part of Inuit territory. It has from old days and still to this day has value as a hunting ground for the hunters from North Greenland hunt polar bears there now and then. So it’s not in that sense, not of value to the locals. Obviously, it has some value and especially the uncertainty of living in an area with no precise border has had some impact over the years and now that is gone.

Jordan Well, I’m glad you mentioned the Inuit because I wanted to ask you about their role in this process and ultimately leading to this settlement. But as I understand it, Canada has the Inuit to thank for most of their territory in the Arctic.

Martin Breum Well, so does Denmark. I mean, you are much more of an Arctic country than Denmark. Denmark is 4000 km away from the Arctic. We are only an Arctic nation because Greenland belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark. Hans Island has nothing to do basically geographically with Denmark. It’s a Greenlandic island. And the Greenlandic government, the self-rule government, is sort of a semiautonomous government in Nuke, the capital of Greenland has been deeply, deeply involved in the negotiations with Canada. It’s been sort of a tandem ride between the diplomats from Copenhagen and Nuke. They have coordinated their views and priorities before any talks with your government. How it works on the Canadian side, I have no idea, so you’ll have to ask them. But on the Danish Kingdom side, it’s been a very, very close collaborative process and we should remember here that one of the results of the deal, in the actual deal between the government of Canada and the Green landing and the Danish government on the other side, there is also mention of a potential greater Inuit control not only over Hans Island but of larger parts of that whole region up there in the very far north. So there is an opening here. A diplomatic opening. Both by the government in Ottawa and that in Copenhagen. That if the Inuit in Canada and Greenland get together and say we have ideas on how to manage, let’s say fish stocks, game, hunting, other resources in the area, we would like to suggest the following so that we take more control over the area regardless of what they say in Ottawa and Copenhagen. Well, in the deal it says the government will be willing to discuss such future potential Inuit control solutions to other, let’s say, regulatory issues in that region. So that might be basically the real deal here that throws us into a future where the Inuit take greater control of what happened to be for thousands of years before we even thought of borders Inuit land.

Jordan That would be really impressive to see. I will hold on for a second on congratulating those governments for doing that until they actually

Martin Breum yeah, no, Jordan, I think that’s very, very wise of you to be reluctant to buy this wholesale because I should specify that what I’ve just said about Inuit control and the governments being open for this type of dialogue. It’s all in the sort of non-binding clauses in the preamble to the actual binding legal deal. So, yes, we’re talking of promises, wording promises of dialogue and so forth, but nothing binding on the government.

Jordan I mean, I will just say that’s very typical of how this Canadian government or all Canadian governments have dealt with Indigenous people. So, yeah, lots of promises to listen and discuss and no concrete handing over of any land just yet. I want to ask you before I let you go, you mentioned earlier when we were talking about water borders versus land borders, that land borders are ultimately just much harder to figure out and achieve. So what does it mean now that Canada shares a land border with Europe? This is our first one, I believe, probably our last. What are the implications of that?

Martin Breum Well, on the interesting legal side, this also means, if you look at it from our side, this is a European border to Canada, which means that the European Commission in Brussels is actually involved because this is part of Schengen, which is the area where Europeans can travel without any principally without any passport controls and so forth. So principally, this is a European border, and I know there are negotiations. The Commission in Europe, in Brussels, has to accept that there is no border control there. I think that will be, let’s say, a no-brainer. Even in Brussels, you don’t have to have passport control and armed guards there. So it is a European border to Canada. As you say, this is a novelty. I don’t think it will cause any practical problems, but from a legal side, yes, there are issues to be resolved here. And again, to me, this means also we have to start learning that the Arctic is, let’s say, no special place. It’s a place where all political, let’s say agendas and priorities now count. We have to remain cognizant of the need for maintaining peace and tranquillity in the Arctic. Also, in those parts that we have usually regarded as basically uninhabited, almost, or at least very, very sparsely inhabited those areas, let’s say it’s no refuge from world politics anymore. So let’s regard the border on Hans Island as reminder of our own vulnerability, our own sentiments, the fact that we’re not immune to territorial disputes over very little. Our sentiments are not different from any other nation. So in that sense, I think the border and the fact that it’s Canada’s border to Europe, it’s Europe’s border to Canada and it’s a land-based border should remind us of the new status of the Arctic, the new importance of the Arctic for world politics.

Jordan Well, you segue perfectly into the last thing that I wanted to ask you about, which is the big picture. This island is a tiny one. The resolution was peaceful. That’s great. You’ve already mentioned a potential seabed conflict with Russia, and again, I might get this wrong, but as I understand it, more areas of the Arctic will become accessible as the climate crisis continues. So is this dispute just a taste of what’s to come? What do you expect to see in the next five to ten years of Arctic territories?

Martin Breum Well, the world has changed, of course, with the war in Ukraine, it’s very hard to predict what the Russian government will do and not do in the future. But let’s not get excited too early. The Russian government has so far shown no desire to solve the conflict or the conflict of interest over the borders in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland and Canada, in other than illegal, peaceful ways. That said, the Arctic is very important to Russia. Also, the seabed in the Arctic Ocean, the North Pole, plays a symbolic role. So Russia will do a lot to win the rights to the seabird in the Arctic Ocean up close to the North Pole, which is, of course, disputed by Denmark and Canada. So we have a long process of negotiation ahead of us. The UN is involved. They have a special committee for solving such issues, and Russia subscribes to the rules of the game. So does Canada. So does the Kingdom of Denmark. Let’s assume that the conflict will remain a simple diplomatic conflict of interest that will be resolved by legal means. But that said, we are, of course, entering a new period of Arctic politics where nobody really knows what’s happening because Russia has shown itself as very, very unpredictable, to say, at least through the legal invasion of Ukraine. So I think the jury is out. We still don’t know how the conflict in the Arctic Ocean over the borders on the seabed at the North Pole will be resolved. But all signs so far are that Russia still subscribes to peaceful means in the Arctic Ocean, as they have done over many years. So I’m remaining optimistic, but also cautious, of course, based on what’s happening in the Ukraine.

Jordan Martin, thank you so much for this. I really feel like I learned a lot.

Martin Breum Well, I hope this was useful. It was a great pleasure to be on your program.

Jordan Martin Breum, Danish journalist, expert on the Whiskey War. That was The Big Story. For more head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryFPN. Email us [click here!]. And, of course, call us at 416-935-5935. This episode of The Big Story was produced by Rachel Despres. Thank you for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. It’s so good to be back and we’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page