The scramble for the Arctic will not be settled by a single act.Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic
unscramble v.t. 1. Reverse the process of scrambling. 2. Put into or restore to order; make sense of, render intelligible (anything muddled or intricate); disentangle (lit. & fig.); separate into constituent parts; spec. restore (a scrambled signal), interpret (a scrambled message).Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money.George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Introduction: A Tale of Two Islands
Consider two isolated islands, one little more than a speck, separated by thousands of miles of sparsely inhabited space in the High Arctic. The smaller of the two, Hans Island, can be found almost exactly halfway across the Nares Strait that divides Greenland from Ellesmere Island; the larger, Wrangel Island, lies 85 miles north of the Russian mainland, surrounded by a shifting layer of seaice that cuts it off from the Siberian coast. 1 Neither is a prepossessing place: Hans Island, viewed from above, has all the charm and consistency of a petrified cowpat, while Wrangel Islandâan appropriate name, as will soon become apparentâcan often barely be seen at all, being subject for much of the year to violent storms and blanketing fog.
Still, the two islands have both assumed a historical and political importance that transcends their uninspiring physical geography. Wrangel Island, Russian territory today, is most readily associated with the controversial twentieth-century Canadian polar explorer VilhjĂĄlmur StefĂĄnsson, whose characteristically vainglorious attempts to colonise the island would eventually propel it into âa diplomatic tug of warâ involving Russia, Canada, Great Britain, and the USA. 2 Most readily associated outside Russia that is: for StefĂĄnssonâs would-be colonists, incorporating Americans as well as Canadians, several of whom would lose their lives as a result of his three catastrophically misguided colonisation experiments, went unrecognised by Russia, which promptly pronounced them trespassers, confiscated their property, and repeatedlyâdefinitivelyâdeclared the island to be Soviet domain. 3 Then as now, Russians connected Wrangel Island to one of their own, the no less self-aggrandising nineteenth-century explorer Ferdinand von Wrangel (alternatively transliterated as âWrangellâ). Wrangel is often credited with having discovered the island, though his own expeditions in the area had led him no further than deducing its existence. Probably he is better known today for his expansionist exploits on behalf of the Russian-American company (RAC) in Alaska prior to its 1867 saleâwhich he himself bitterly contestedâto the USA. 4
As the American historian Melody Webb asserts, it would be difficult to find a more implausible object of imperial rivalryâin the Arctic or elsewhereâthan the now largely forgotten Wrangel Island. Yet for a few decades in the early part of the twentieth century it was subject to competing claims of sovereignty and an unfortunate sequence of at best temporarily successful, at worst hopelessly hare-brained colonisation schemes. 5 Webb concludes that the fulsome tributes given to StefĂĄnsson on returning to Canada from his first major Arctic expedition in 1913 âobscured the poor planning, mismanagement, egotism, and death that marked the enterpriseâ 6 âa tragicomic scenario all too familiar to chroniclers and readers of polar exploration, north and south alike (McCannon 2012; Moss 2009; Spufford 1996).
Scarcely less edifying, though in their own way just as entertaining, are the multiple stories that surround the still-unresolved sovereignty of Hans Island. Most versions return to 1973, whenâin Michael Byersâ suitably breezy accountââCanada and Denmark agreed to divide the ocean floor between Canada and Greenland down the middle, using an equidistance line defined by 127 turning points.â 7 The issue of where Hans Island fell along this line was notionally cleared up by fixing the boundary at the low-water mark on one side of the island and then continuing it from its corresponding mark on the other, only for subsequent calculations to reveal that the island was slightly closer to Greenland than Canada. 8
Vigorous Danish claims to the island ensued, accompanied by an alternating pattern of increasingly bizarre diplomatic stand-offs. The Danes argued that Hans Island had been used for centuries by Greenland Inuit as an integral part of their ancestral hunting grounds and was therefore âtheirsâ (i.e., the Danesâ) as a result of continuous use and occupation. This does not appear to be a particularly convincing argument insofar as the same Inuit would frequently travel across to Ellesmere Island, now generally accepted as falling under Canadian sovereign control. 9 Canadaâs territorial claim, meanwhile, revolved around the original transfer of the North American Arctic Archipelago (which excluded Greenland) from Britain in 1880; it also shakily cited âuse and occupationâ insofar as Canadian scientists had deployed the island as a research station, if only for a brief period during the Second World War. 10
Tempers frayed after it was discovered that a Canadian oil company had been using the island to sound out the possibility of setting up drilling rigs in the area. 11 âThreateningâ appearances were staged involving Danish military jets, backed up by a semi-regular series of officially attended flag plantings. Not to be outdone, the Canadian government sent jet fighters of its own, while the rhetoric of Danish interference (âViking hordes,â etc.) was crudely ratcheted up in the Canadian national press, which conflated the Hans Island disputeâa minor maritime border controversyâwith larger Arctic sovereignty issues and land-based territorial claims. 12
Byers suggests that one way of resolving the dispute might be to declare Hans Island a condominium, with Canada and Denmark sharing sovereignty over it. 13 A more recent, also more interesting, suggestion of Byersâ is that should the Greenland Inuit pursue native title, this would effectively invalidate both sets of national claims, operating on the principle that since the island has never been formally colonised, it is they, the Inuit, who âretain pre-existing, pre-colonial rights.â 14 This conundrum raises larger questions about what constitutes colonialism in the Arctic. It seems pointless to dispute that the Arcticâhowever definedâhas not been, and to some extent still is, a colonised region, but it is equally obvious that not all areas of the Arctic have been formally colonised, and that those which have, have not been colonised in the same way.
A comparison between Wrangel Island and Hans Island is instructive in this context. The recent history of Wrangel Island would certainly fit most current definitions of colonialism, notably James Mahoneyâs to the effect that âin modern world history, colonialism is marked by a stateâs successful claim to sovereignty over a foreign land.â 15 Much more tenuous, however, are the legal criteria for sovereignty, for example, those founded on âuse and occupation,â and their instrumentality as a basis for colonisation. Even the most systematic accounts of colonialism, such as JĂŒrgen Osterhammelâs, have difficulty forging precise links between colonialism and sovereignty and between both of these and occupation. These accounts prefer to distinguish broadly between types of colony (âsettlement colonies,â âexploitation colonies,â etc.) that require a greater or lesser colonial presence; and between colonialism as a system of domination, colonisation as a process of territorial acquisition, and colony as a particular kind of sociopolitical formation, usually if not always subject to metropolitan control. 16
As Osterhammel admits, colonialism can exist without the formal existence of colonies, just as colonies can exist without the full apparatus of colonialism, but exceptions of these kinds tend to complicate rather than confirm the rule. 17 Similarly, colonisation can take place without the formal process of colony building, while some colony building does not rely on colonisation, but on other more obviously violent forms of incursion that are based âon the sword rather than the [plough].â 18 Colonisation, indeed, is a singularly amorphous entity despite the routine brutalities it engenders, just as âthe multiformity of colonial situations conti...