Return after 10 years, a new season of ‘Borgen’ (Netflix), which for me is still the best political series of the 21st century. In this fourth season the heroine, the politician Birgitte, She is no longer Prime Minister of Denmark: she is Minister of Foreign Affairs. And this whole installment is about the discovery of oil in Greenland. oh!
Although we cannot make comparisons between the ‘indepe’ feeling of Greenland, with that of Scotland, or that of Quebec, the plot is extremely enjoyable. Greenland is an autonomous territory that belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the largest island in the world after Australia, but it barely has 58,000 inhabitants. In other words, they all fit in Castelldefels, let’s say. The series tells us that suddenly they find oil in the subsoil of Greenland, and the ‘indepe’ feeling grows because they believe that with oil independence is coming.
Related news
Birgitte tries to make them see that going to independence thanks to oil is a colossal mistake. She argues it from the ecological and climatic point of view: the future does not lie in solid fuels, on the contrary. And the ‘Inuit’ people get angry, but they witness the arrival of the Russians and the Chinese with all their industrial power to extract crude oil, to the anger of the Americans. And then they realize that the Russians, the Chinese, and everyone else don’t give a damn about their independence. They want the oil, and enough. She draws the series well the stark pragmatism of current geopolitics. As the Corleones used to say almost 100 years ago: it’s just business, no personal motives. In other words, we are still in the jungle of the mafia and wild economy. The presence of the Russians, with soldiers momentarily invading Greenland, is a welcome touch. Very current for what is being lived in Ukraine.
Surely the recording of this series is prior to the last Greenlandic elections (April 2021), in which the Inuit Party won. Despite being a clearly ‘independent’ formation, they have decided to suspend oil extraction. Environmental damage is not acceptable. In a way, reality gives reason to fiction. Birgitte ends up accepting an oil extraction, controlled by Denmark, but she resigns as minister. She knows that drilling into the subsoil will leave Greenland without fishing, without ice… An independence towards nothing.