This has been achieved under difficult conditions by only around 55,000 inhabitants on a vast island in the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, isolated from the rest of the world. True, the people of Greenland were not asked to consent when they were integrated into the Danish kingdom in 1953, after more than 200 years as a Danish colony. But in referendums in 1979 and 2008 a majority of them voted in favour of a revised arrangement that allowed them to expand political control over their own territory and resources. Greenland’s constitution calls the period from 1953 to 1979 a phase of “hidden colonisation”, but also recognises that the next decades constitute an era of “decolonisation”.