GORM WINTHER
Statistics Greenland
In the context of power analysis, Greenland is concidered a post-colonial social formation dominated by the Home Rule State. These Etatist power structures are a remnant of Danish Colonialism officially abolished in 1979 with the inception of Home Rule. Nonetheless in the following decades, it was not quite possible to to get rid of the organizational dependence of Danish experts, managers and administrators, and together with highly educated Greenlanders a new class or post-colonial elite emerged. In the late nineties a new era was proclaimed - in the future social formation, the OECD virtues of privatizations, free markets and the socalled globalization are supposed to substitute the post-colonial socio-economic structures. As seen in recent writings from the self-government commission, these structures are concidered paramount for the process of increasing self-government within the framework of the Danish Kingdom.
As a result of this, Greenland may become a hybrid of Etatism and Capitalism. Based on the Galbraithian concept of conditioned power, it is argued that large corporations either state owned or privately owned control the environment of the corporation and have potentials regarding influencing the political and administrative decision processes. Furthermore in the context of Giddens writings on the stake holding society, it is warned that the development represents an inherent danger of the local people becoming alienated spectators to development as seen before in the fifties and sixties. The concept of self-government is not just something that can be related to macro-organization and centralized decision making in Greenland. Self determination requires local participation and ownership of the assets hitherto owned by the Home Rule State. It is a choice between local stakeholding or the introduction of neo-imperialist power structures, or at least combinations of them that secure local participation.