A new national anthem may soon be needed. Greenland has taken its first tentative steps towards becoming an independent state.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, travelled to Greenland – which has been part of Denmark since 1721 – to present a report that sets out the road to full sovereignty. The plan, which has been drawn up by a committee of politicians from Denmark and Greenland, envisages the phasing out of subsidies from Copenhagen as the huge island makes increasing use of its rich mineral and oil resources under a thick layer of ice.

“This is a platform that really can launch us into independence,” Lars-Emil Johansen, a Greenland politician who helped to draft the plan, said.

Greenland already boasts some striking statistics: its territory – 85 per cent of which is iced over – is six times larger than Germany, although it has a population about as large as that of Folkestone. Nuuk, the capital, has 15,000 inhabitants.

The road to independence will be a long one and no one is writing the national anthem just yet, but one thing is already clear: when Greenland makes the final break it will rank as one of the most politically incorrect states in the international community.

Whalemeat figures large in its traditional cooking and its hunters enthusiastically track down some of the cud-dliest animals on the planet, including polar bears, seals and walruses. Even the seats of the lounge at Nuuk airport are covered in seal skin.

As for global warming, Greenlanders cannot get enough of it. The melting of the icebergs may, as some climate scientists predict, ultimately end up by flooding American cities, but it has given political bargaining muscle to the 57,000 inhabitants of the world’s largest island.

“Climate change will be very beneficial to society there,” Jesper Madsen, of the DMU environmental research institute in Roskilde, in mainland Denmark, said. “It will improve fishing and above all make it easier to drill for oil and gas. The US geological survey calculates that the greatest unused oil reserves on Earth are in the Greenland waters – and they are in the east, where the ice is melting fastest.”

Greenland was given home rule by the Danes in 1979 but the island’s economy is still dependent on subsidies. Almost everything, from beer to lavatory paper, has to be imported from Denmark. It is subsidised to the tune of €400 million (£315 million) a year.

Under the terms of the plan the country would eventually keep all the revenue from mineral and oil exploitation. To begin with the islanders will be allowed the first €10 million earned each year from the country’s resources. When it starts to earn more than that – if and when multinational energy companies invest – the Danish subsidies will be capped. By the time Greenland earns €800 million a year, the money from Denmark will stop. There would then be no obstacle to independence.

The plan has yet to be approved by the Danish parliament and by the Greenlanders, but there is no significant resistance within Denmark, even though the country would be losing 98 per cent of its territory.

The only party to oppose the move is the far-right Danish People’s Party (DF). “This would be one of the biggest political mistakes in Danish history,” Søren Espersen, who was the DF representative on the commission, said. He argued that because Denmark has propped up Greenland for so many decades it should not abandon the place just at the moment when it might produce some useful revenue.

But many Danes see Greenland as a millstone. It has big social problems: the poverty of fishing families whose waters have been taken over by foreign fleets, a high suicide rate and high levels of HIV and Aids. The calculation is that, even as an independent state, Greenland will need development aid from Denmark – and in return will have to grant Copenhagen some share in whatever energy bonanza emerges when the ice is thinner.

Greenland broke ranks with Denmark and left the European Community, as it then was, in 1985 and has shown no interest in rejoining.

Whether Greenlanders – 88 per cent of whom are Inuit or mixed Danish-Inuit – drift politically closer to America than to Europe after independence is unclear. At present Denmark has control over Greenland’s foreign and defence policies even though Greenland is outside the EU. The US has a radar station in Thule and may want to expand this base to incorporate it into its missile defence system.

It was the Viking Erik the Red – whose family later went went on to set up a Christian community in America – who gave the island its name. He had been exiled from Iceland after committing multiple murders. No doubt Erik – along with other great Inuit inventions such as the kayak and anorak – will figure in the national anthem when it comes to be written.

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