President Trump’s stated desire to purchase the island of Greenland has met everything from laughter and ridicule, to serious discussions about what his resulting tantrum with Denmark means for the future of NATO. But it has set me thinking about what our current government believes about national sovereignty, and how that will impact us ordinary citizens. After all, America hasn’t gained territory through purchase since before the Civil War.
Clearly our President, thinking he can purchase sovereignty over occupied territory through financial transaction, has his ideas of state authority stuck in the early 19th Century. Between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, America repeatedly expanded its territorial claims through cash transactions, almost entirely without consent of the people residing on that land. Then, almost as quickly, the practice stopped.
There are significant differences. Though Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase virtually doubled America’s land-area claim, the only meaningful European settlement in that area was New Orleans; to secure the claim, America prosecuted a number of Indian Wars. It also secured massive land grants from Mexico at gunpoint, though again, the territory was mostly unoccupied by Europeans. Even the tiny, arid Gadsden Purchase became populous only after the railroad came through.
I already anticipate someone mentioning the Alaska Purchase of 1867, which transferred nearly as much land as the Louisiana Purchase. This is sophistry: besides it not being contiguous, Russia was actively looking to unload Alaska, which it couldn’t settle or govern while conducting expensive wars with England in Afghanistan and Crimea. Besides, both Russia’s and America’s claim to Alaska was purely nominal until serious investment during the Cold War anyway.
So basically, America hasn’t attempted to purchase territorial sovereignty, except in purely ceremonial fashion, in 165 years. It’s almost like territory purchases represented the dying gasps of European feudal oligarchy in a land too large and diverse to govern that way. A disinterested observer might suggest that territory purchases occurred to give aristocrats a face-saving maneuver to retire politely from government without the indignity of being overthrown.
No wonder that a President who identifies himself with Andrew Jackson, whose insults for opposing politicians reference colonial times, whose awareness of American history in short appears to have stopped in high school, wants to revive the practice. The man literally regards himself as a modern-day aristocrat, somebody whose wealth and breeding entitle him to rule his country—and, by extension, to purchase rule over others from a fellow monarch.
This isn’t a personal slam at Donald Trump, however. It’s a serious challenge to how ordinary citizens like us use and occupy the land we nominally own. It’s important to understand that the word “real” in the phrase real estate doesn’t mean, in Oxford’s definition, “Actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact.” This version of “real” comes from the Latin for “Royal.” To speak of real estate references the royal patent to occupy tracts of land.
Let me rephrase that, in case you missed it: in the most fundamental sense, real estate means “the king’s permission to live on and use the land.” You and I don’t own the land we occupy, no matter how long our families have lived on and worked our tract. No matter what you’ve done to improve the territory, what you’ve grown or built or worked to sustain ecologically, that land isn’t really yours. You only own the state’s permission on that land, permission the state could revoke.
In attempting to resurrect the feudal practice of uti possidetis, the Administration wants to enable the state to renegotiate its royal patent on anybody’s land claims. This as opposed to the current practice of uti possidetis juris, that all territorial claims are sovereign and immutable without an intervening treaty, one of the founding principles of the United Nations. Under this apparent Trump Doctrine, money makes all sovereignty negotiable.
Given the history of European colonialism, this isn’t incidental. Without the UN’s precepts of sovereign governments within sacrosanct borders, uti possidetis allows states to take claims away from other states, particularly weak or chronically impoverished central governments forced to delegate regional authority. World history shows what happens when strong governments think state authority is something they can purchase or take.
If governments can purchase territorial control from one another, literally nothing stops strong states taking land from weak states, as James I and VI took North American colonial claims from Spain and the Netherlands. And nothing stops strong states taking land from citizens, as James regularly took from Catholics. There’s nothing stopping him taking land from, well, from you.
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