Arctic governance

Power in cross-border cooperation

Elana Wilson Rowe

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526121738
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526121752
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the Arctic is sometimes presented in media debate as the potential site of the 'next Great Race' or even military conflict, the striking feature of the region is its largely cooperative and peaceful nature. This book seeks to understand better how Arctic cross- border cooperation is developed, sustained and periodically contested against a backdrop of power relations.

1

Arctic international relations: new stories on rafted ice

In October 1988, an Inupiaq hunter saw that three grey whales were trapped in the sea ice off of Point Barrow (Nuvuk), Alaska. These younger ‘teenage’ whales were on a migratory route between Arctic waters and the warm seas of southern California and Mexico, but they had failed to leave their northern feeding ground in time and had become trapped. The North Slope community immediately set to work attempting to break the ice and create breathing holes for the trapped whales. An attempt to borrow a barge from the nearby oil and gas development at Prudhoe Bay failed. As attention to the whales’ plight and the villagers’ efforts grew, national resources were brought in to cope, with whale biologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency lending assistance.

Eventually, the issue went international. The United States State Department contacted the Soviet Union to secure the cooperation of two icebreakers stationed in the Russian Far East – the Admiral Makarov and the Vladimir Arseniev. Over the course of several days, Soviet icebreakers rammed the tough ridge of sea ice attempting to make a path through the Arctic sea ice.

Figure 1North Slope (USA) villagers passing a Soviet icebreaker, flying a Soviet flag in 1988.

Federal authorities had closed the airspace above the ships, thinking that the Soviets would appreciate all efforts made to ensure secrecy during their volunteer effort in American waters. However, the spirit of glasnost was in the air and the American media were invited aboard the Makarov to take a look. One of the ship’s officers, Vladimir Morov, told American reporters that the Russian audience was following closely too: ‘Our whole country is watching, just like everyone else. We love animals, just as anyone’ (Mauer, 2010).

By the time a channel of ice-free water was opened, the whales had been given names in both English (Bone, Bonnett and Crossbeak) and Inupiaq (Putu, Siku and Kanik). One whale died during the wait, but it was hoped that the two surviving, but weakened, whales had escaped via the channel opened by the Soviet icebreakers and resumed migration. ‘Operation Breakthrough’ received high levels of media attention and was also the object of critique from those who found the use of resources disproportionate to the likelihood of successful survival for the whales or the importance of the effort (Archer, 1988).

The whale rescue incident brings into focus many of the actors, ideas and physical elements that continue to shape Arctic politics today. Migratory species, interlinked Arctic ecosystems gathered around the narrowing circumference of the globe, and vast distances challenged the ability of one country – even a global superpower – to bring its ‘own’ military/coast guard resources to bear. The Soviet icebreakers were the best alternative. Local indigenous villagers – inspired by the animals’ plight and relations to the whale extending back to mythological timescales (Bodenhorn,1990) – took action. The problem triggered the application of resources and expertise from the national level. The quick mobilisation of resources possibly drew steam from the campaigns of environmental NGOs that had sought to limit commercial whaling and had used the whale as a flagship ‘charismatic megafauna’ in their campaigns to raise global environmental awareness (Epstein, 2008).

This book is designed to give us insight into how power relations have been important to structuring and sustaining cross-border Arctic cooperation and cooperative governance of the region. Taking a close look at power necessitates jostling and unpacking established narratives about regional history and key actors. This chapter, however, aims to provide readers less familiar with Arctic settings with important background and, therefore, draws upon established narratives and classifications that later chapters may re-examine. We begin with an introduction to various Arctic actor groups in a brief historical context. The difficulty of keeping these actor groups separate from one another underlines the complexity and interconnectedness of Arctic governance today, and it is on this topic of Arctic multilateralism and cross-border innovation that the chapter concludes. In preparing the ground for the contemporary chapters that follow, a lot of the richness of detail that historians of the Arctic have brought to light is, by necessity, glossed over. Hopefully, however, the referenced works used in this brief long-lines look at the Arctic past will point the curious reader in the right direction for comprehensive historical works.

Politics on rafted sea ice: a bird’s eye view of Arctic political actors

This section introduces actor groups in a historical perspective, rather than trying to use a chronological approach that pulls these actor groups into particular eras. Of course, the emphasis on actor groups may delineate too sharply among them, just as a purely chronological approach could gloss over the different ways in which key historical events or eras were experienced by differently positioned actors at the time. However, the focus on actors serves the book’s purpose well given the emphasis on power relations (which are manifested among individual actors and sets/kinds of actors). Secondly, the emphasis on actor groups in a historical perspective – and in the more contemporary chapters that follow – encourages us to see how Arctic politics today is shaped by layers of historical experience that are authored and narrated from multiple perspectives.

Indigenous peoples and their organisations

The high northern latitudes of the globe have long been occupied by humans, and one could argue that the region’s political history started with them. The peopling of the Americas is believed to have occurred via a land bridge between today’s Chukotka in the Russian Far East and today’s Alaska at the height of the last ice age, although the theories of how America was populated are frequently revised and revisited (Schweitzer, Sköld and Ulturgasheva, 2015). Much of the world’s ocean water was then bound up in ice, which exposed new tracts of land connecting the continents. In the North American Arctic and Greenland, the archaeological record and Inuit oral histories document occupation by the mysterious Tuniit people, who are understood to have been distinct from and displaced by a twelfth-/thirteenth-century migration of Inuit from Eurasia and Alaska (McGhee, 2006). The migration and success of the Inuit people over a wide range of territory that came to be encompassed by the emerging Russian, Canadian, American and Danish states were later a key element underlining the regional nature of the Arctic and challenging the primacy of state borders in the international politics of the Arctic (English, 2013; Shadian, 2014).

In the Nordic and Russian Arctic, many of the indigenous peoples also shared – and many continue to share – traditions surrounding a reliance on reindeer herding, in addition to the opportunities for fishing, hunting and gathering afforded them in their particular territories. The state borders that grew up around Saami territories in today’s Nordic Arctic also served to catalyse cross-border Saami connections, starting in the 1950s. These organisations, like the Inuit Circumpolar Council, made a similar contribution to a conceptualisation of the Arctic as a region that transected state borders (Vik and Semb, 2013).

It is important to keep in mind that the indigenous Arctic has long been a place of mobility and interconnection, even as North–South ties remained non-existent, weak or contested (see Dodds and Nuttall, 2015; and McGhee, 2006 for a circumpolar discussion). Historical interconnections in the Bering Strait are an interesting example of this (Fitzhugh and Crowell, 1988). While the Cold War period made the expanse of Arctic seas separating Alaska and Chuktoka seem like an insurmountable geopolitical distance, the Bering Sea had, for indigenous communities, been no obstacle. Kinship ties, visits, trading routes and marriage journeys criss-crossed the region.

For example, the Inupiat living on Big and Little Diomede Islands had cousins, friends and trading partners on each island and up and down the Alaskan and Russian coasts. Residents of Big Diomede Island regularly traded and intermarried and visited residents of Little Diomede. Even as these territories became gradually more incorporated into the new ‘motherlands’ growing up on both sides of the Bering Sea, the travel and interconnection continued across the 2.4-mile separation. The schoolteacher on Little Diomede recorded 178 people visiting in a six-month period during 1944 (Alaskaweb, 2015). However, as the uneasy alliance of the Soviet Union and the United States grew chillier after the end of the Second World War, and eventually cooled into the strategic stand-off of the Cold War, these longstanding connections and visits ceased, and travel between the islands was no longer permitted.

Figure 2Big and Little Diomede Islands and the Alaskan and Chukotka coasts.

Reactivating these kinship and language ties across a geopolitically significant border was an important catalyst in the active Arctic region-building of the immediate post-Cold War era. In John English’s wonderful account of the history of the Arctic Council, he describes the first North American Inuit delegation to travel across the ‘Ice Curtain’ of the Bering Sea to Chukotka in the waning days of the Soviet Union in 1988. The delegation was inspired and led by the Inuk leader and later Canadian Circumpolar Ambassador Mary Simon, and was part of a broader exploration of the ground for interconnected, innovative forms of circumpolar governance. Moments of the joyful, tearful reunion, which also brought together some family relations who had been separated for four decades, took place in the border-crossing Inupiaq language of the Bering coasts. This was to the consternation of the English-speaking KGB ‘listeners’ assigned to monitor the delegation (English, 2013).

Likewise, the ICC had always kept an empty chair for the Russian Inuit of Chukotka (Chukchi) since the organisation was first established in 1982. The aim of the newly founded organisation had been to bring together all the Inuktitut-speaking peoples of the Arctic – the Inuit people – to develop a shared voice. The driving forces behind this increased political organisation were growing interest in the Arctic’s natural resources (oil, gas, mining) and an increasing impact from global environmental movements, such as the anti-whaling movement, on Arctic communities (Shadian, 2014). The Chukchi finally joined a meeting of the ICC in Iqaluit in 1988.

Similar international organisations were established by the Saami people (Saami Council, founded in 1956), the Athabaskan peoples of the North American sub-Arctic (Arctic Athabaskan Council in 2000), the Aleut International Association (1998), Gwich’in Council International (1999) and the indigenous peoples of Russia (RAIPON, 1992). These organisations vary in their staffing and ability to represent their interests in all forums (see Knecht, 2017, for an overview of Arctic Council participation), but are generally active in the UN Forum for Indigenous Peoples and meet in the Arctic Council as ‘Permanent Participants’. We return to the topic of the diplomacy of indigenous organisations in the international Arctic in Chapter 5.

While indigenous contact with ‘outsiders’ between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries had generally been based around mutually beneficial exchange of goods (Dodds and Nuttall, 2015), the intensity of contact between indigenous peoples and ‘outsiders’ increased with the advent of modern states extending and asserting their sovereignty over their putative Arctic ‘backyards’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we shall see below. These colonial efforts included the growing use of native lands for non-renewable resource extraction (Mitchell, 1996; Berger, 1985), religious conversion processes (Balzer, 1999), extension of law and justice (Grant, 2002), residential schools, medical care (including isolation of those with infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis) (Shkilnyk, 1985), and forced relocation and settlement policies (Marcus, 1995; Damas, 2002; Vitebsky, 2005). The effects of this internal colonialism and the rapid social and economic disruption that accompanied it continue to be felt (for scholarly works on these dynamics, see Alfred, 1995; Mitchell, 1996; Shkilnyk, 1985; Irlbacher-Fox, 2009; Vitebsky, 2005).

A passage from Hugh Brody’s book The Other Side of Eden gives one vivid illustration of the colonial legacy. Brody was collecting interviews for a film in northern British Colombia, amongst the Nisga’a people. He decided to interview an artist assisting with the film, George Gosnell, about his experience in the residential school system in the 1950s. Gosnell recounted his travel to St George’s residential school; the first night in a huge dormitory too frightened to sleep; the incomprehensibility of the sole language used, English; and the four times he was strapped across the hands with a belt for speaking his Nisga’a language. He said:

I don’t why the residential school … I don’t know why they had such far distant places for education. To get torn apart from, from your parents and your brothers and your sisters to educate us … they made us forget our own language … And then in the summer, after the school was finally finished with our one year, spending our time in the residential school was over, we came back on the train. Again the trip took three days. I got off the train. I looked in my mother’s face. And I used English. She asked me why I used the English. I told her that’s what we went away for.

(Brody, 2000: 170–172)

George Gosnell relearned Nisga’a languages at the insistence of and with help from his parents. During this interview, the film’s sound recordist had searched desperately to eliminate what seemed like a source of background noise in the room. Listening to the recording later, they realised that the noise they had picked up – a faint beating – had been the sound of George Gosnell’s heart suddenly pounding a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: a power perspective on Arctic governance
• 1 Arctic international relations: new stories on rafted ice
• 2 The power politics of representation
• 3 Power positions: theorising Arctic hierarchies
• 4 Establishing and navigating the rules of the road in Arctic diplomacy
• 5 Non-state actors and the quest for authority in Arctic governance
• Conclusion
• References
• Index