Postcolonising Danish Foreign Policy Activism in the Global South: Cases of Ghana, India and the US Virgin Islands

Abstract

There is a growing corpus of academic literature, which is aimed to analyse Danish activism as a new trend of the kingdom’s foreign policy. Different approaches, both positivist and post-positivist ones, study specific features of activism, as well the reasons of why this kind of foreign policy has emerged in post-Cold War Denmark. Nevertheless, little has been said on the role of Danish colonial past in the formation of strategies and political courses towards other states and regions. The heterogeneous character of Danish colonialism has also been overlooked by scholars: while Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands are thoroughly examined in Danish postcolonial studies, so-called ‘tropical colonies’ (the Danish West Indies, the Danish Gold Coast and Danish India) are almost ‘forgotten’. The aim of the thesis is to investigate how the Danish colonial past (or rather the interpretations of the past by the Danish authorities) in the Global South influences modern Danish foreign policy in Ghana, India and US Virgin Islands (the USVI) (on the present-day territories of which Danish colonies were once situated). An authored theoretical and methodological framework of the research is a compilation of discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and several approaches within postcolonialism, including Orientalism by Said (1978) and hybridity theory by Bhabha (1994). Postcolonial activism is coined as an overarching term for the discourse of Danish foreign policy in the Global South with specific variations in each of the studied contexts. It is found out that the Danish colonial past is interpreted as an ambiguous part of Danish presence in other countries’ histories, consisting of both “bright” and “dark” elements. While “dark” elements (slavery, brutality and power inequality) are ‘othered’ and marginalised, “bright” elements (shared cultural heritage) are used to legitimise further cooperation under Danish conditions. By splitting its colonial experience into pieces, the Danish ‘Self’ liberates itself from the nightmares of the past, whereas the burden of dealing with them is laid on ‘Exceptional Others’ – the USVI, Ghana and India.