Future Security of the Global Arctic

State Policy, Economic Security and Climate

Lassi Heininen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137468246
• eBook ISBN: 9781137468253
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the globalized Arctic there has been a transformation from military security to human security. Climate change, the utilization of Arctic resources and other global challenges have caused the Arctic 'paradox' and a need to redefine security.

1

High Arctic Stability as an Asset for Storms of International Politics – an Introduction

Lassi Heininen

Abstract: In spite of the exploding Middle East, the ISIS’s and Israel’s aggressions, the Ukrainian war, the continuous fight against terror and all the manipulation and falsification, the international community is facing bigger challenges, such as worldwide nonmilitary human catastrophes (e.g., the Ebola virus); global environmental challenges (e.g., unavoidable global warming); holistic environmental degradation (e.g., the ‘Arctic Paradox’); structural societal problems of the global system (e.g., inequality between the elites and the masses), and going beyond the carrying capacity. This introduction argues that the globalized Arctic with high stability and keen international cooperation could be left out of all this and be interpreted as a human-made asset. It could act as a common ground to test soft ways of governance and alternative ways to definite security.

Keywords: asset; Cold War; common ground; global challenges; international cooperation; regional crises/wars; stability; the global Arctic

Heininen, Lassi, ed. Future Security of the Global Arctic: State Policy, Economic Security and Climate. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137468253.0006.

In the autumn of 2014, when I wrote this introduction, the air was full of misinformation and disinformation, rumors, manipulation and falsification and anger by several actors (governments, armies and their agencies, TV and radio channels and newspapers and social media) due to several regional and local wars and constant warfare, as well as human catastrophes. Those include civil war kind of warfare in Syria, Libya and Sudan; wars on religion and/or due to the legacy of a fight against international terrorism, like in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia; hybrid kind of warfare, for example, the Syrian crisis that started as a civil war; a new kind of very rapid and aggressive conquest of vast territories by the ISIS/ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or Levant)¹ and an establishment of a caliphate by the Islamic State, which led, consequently, to a worldwide and US-led continuous fight against international terrorism and religious Muslim extremism or salafi-jihadism; and, finally, a shift of a guerilla kind of urban city warfare into a real war in Eastern Ukraine.

The last one, and the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, was much emphasized in Europe, and said to mean a new ‘Cold War’ (in Europe). In its cover, TIME magazine (August 4, 2014) stated that ‘Cold War II’ has already started. Further, that there is ‘a high probability’ that the Russian military will intervene in (Eastern) Ukraine, as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated (TIME, August 25, 2014, p. 5; see also Rifkind, 2014, p. 16), which would require NATO to ‘stand strong against a resurgent Russia’. This raises another thought that maybe the rhetoric is due to the fact that in the major member states of NATO there is seen a need to have NATO back to its roots. Indeed, the NATO Summit in September 2014 strongly reacted to the Ukrainian crisis and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which can be taken as an indicator of Realpolitik’s return. Actually, it has been discussed for some years, particularly after the Georgian War in 2008, that the enlargement of NATO toward the East to the borders of the Russian Federation will decrease the interest of Russia to cooperate with the West, as well as make Russia unwilling to become integrated into Western institutions, such as the European Union. All this had caused political instability in Europe and increased mistrust between Russia and the United States (e.g., Trenin and Weiss, 2013), despite some joint campaigns against international terrorism and a manifestation to press reset by the foreign ministers of these two states. According to diplomatic messages, leaked by Wikileaks, there were several political efforts supported by the United States, not necessarily by European major member states, to tie Ukraine with NATO that Russia will not accept. It was even taken into consideration that, if Ukraine joins NATO, Russia will most probably annex Crimea (e.g., Muhonen, 2014).

In the background of all these is the fact that the Western military alliance has not been so successful in fulfilling its new missions of military crisis management and the fight against international terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as is clearly seen by the new raise of insurgency and violence in Afghanistan after the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) operation. These were outside the original geographical area of NATO, and they broadened Article V of the NATO to protect the parties, as they have agreed that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered as attack against them all’ (NATO Handbook, 1989, p. 14). In the recent fiscal, economic, political and moral crisis in many European countries there is no political will to allocate resources to continue this kind of activities, if you can avoid it. Behind is the fact that in the 1990s, the NATO had an identity crisis due to the end of the Cold War, and there were even suggestions that NATO should disband, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of the Warsaw Pact. This was not allowed to happen – winners hardly feel a need to give up their power structures – and instead the military alliance was enlarged in Europe beyond the borders of the former socialistic bloc, and a new mission was found. Instead, the Western military alliance started its enlargement to the East, and to soften relations with the Russian Federation established in 2002 the NATO-Russia Council to discuss, as well as try to solve together, security issues. Although this strategic partnership and cooperation was given the most priority in NATO’s Strategic Concept of 2010, it did not really function and in fact failed, and the NATO Summit 2014 did not really focus on long-term prospects of the NATO-Russian relations (Klein and Kaim, 2014, p. 1). Now, with recent changes in Europe due to the Ukrainian war and Russia’s growing military activities the NATO again redefines itself, or simply takes back the original mission, the defense of the Western Europe.

All this sounds a bit different as were the – rather misleading or too optimistic – prognoses of the end of history inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall at the turn of 1980s–1990s (e.g., Fukuyama, 1992), and the statements by Western major powers that the West, as well as capitalism and democracy, has won. Now there are slogans and titles that ‘Realpolitik’, or Geopolitics in general, is back by claiming that a new ‘Cold War’ has started. Although the atmosphere in the summer and autumn of 2014 indicates of, and reminds us about, ‘Realpolitik’, this is a bit misleading, since we still live in the unified state system, with nuclear weapons as both political weapons and military threats, and that geopolitics has been there all the time, though taken over by geoeconomics and global financial liberalism. The slogans of a new ‘Cold War’ are more self-predictive prognoses and wretched slogans, or signs of frustrations, than analytical diagnoses on the current state of international politics. It is not focused on ideological, political, economic and cultural competition on the efficiency of production and rivalry between two different superpowers and blocs, as the Cold War’s global conflict was. Instead of the Cold War period, we may refer to the period of World War I, ‘the war without an end’ has, so far, lasted 100 years, and its legacy still lives. Or, ‘the never-ending war on terror’ that should end, as President Obama declared (Crowley, 2014) (or which has already been ended according to the ‘the mission accomplished’ statement by President W. Bush), though actually it, as well as the threat, has become even more global.

The latter one shows that the situation is more complicated, the scale is broader or global, the post–Cold War world order seemed to be much more complex and multipolar than it was thought, and not to be determined by the ‘Pax America’. An example of this is the existence of the BRICS cooperation – between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – with ambitious institutional cooperation (e.g., a joint development bank) and growing mutual confidence between these five large, though much different, powers and emerging economies. In spite of the current fiscal and economic crisis, which has also stagnated their growth, this new kind of cooperation and potential alliance challenges the existing world order and shows the pluralism of the global world. Also, the Ukrainian crisis/war is more complicated than a new Cold War, or an issue of Russia’s intention to enlarge its territories, or to conquer back the borders of the former Soviet Union (e.g., Trenin, 2014; Sergunin, 2014).

More importantly, the international community is facing bigger and unpredicted challenges and serious irrational violence than the exploding Middle East, including the ISIS’s, other extreme groups’ and Israel’s state terrorism, or the Ukrainian war including the warfare in Eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea by Russia: first, worldwide nonmilitary human catastrophes, such as the Ebola virus as a zoonotic disease (Walsh and Sifferlin, 2014); second, global environmental challenges, such as unavoidable rapid climate change and global warming, such as loss of sea ice and that of glaciers, and the consequent ‘climate vs. capitalism’ conflict; third, holistic environmental degradation accelerated by the ‘Anthropocene’ (see Finger in this volume), such as the ‘Arctic Paradox’ (e.g., Palosaari, 2012); fourth, structural societal problems and challenges of the global system, such as the faith of constant growth, poverty, growing greed, the unsolved cumulative – from fiscal, economic and political to moral – crises of the Western system, and the consequent inequality between the elites and the masses with a possible ‘irreversible collapse’ (Ahmed, 2014); and final, according to rough calculations by the middle of August (2014) the inhabitants of the globe had already used all the annual natural resources, which should belong to us according to the criteria of sustainable development.

Going back to the current situation of regional conflicts and the fight against international terror there is no direct connection between them and the current situation in the Arctic region, at least not so far, but reflections and indirect impacts. The Ukrainian crisis, and the war there, has wrought tension between Russia and its Arctic neighbors casting a shadow over Arctic affairs, particularly the Arctic intergovernmental cooperation, if not outright putting them into danger. The first ever boycotting of Arctic Council meetings is an example of this, though it was also influenced by the disagreement of Canada and Russia over the North Pole (e.g., Heininen, Exner-Pirot and Plouffe, 2014)

Following this, there is a growing and legitimate concern that due to this situation the current era of high political stability of the Arctic may be lost (Heininen, 2014a). Also, the United States, supported by other NATO member states, and the Russian Federation have obviously become rivals, and there is a potential conflict of interests between them: Russia is economically and (geo)politically, as well as partly militarily, involved in the conflict. The United States is also (geo)politically and economically involved in it, as are the other NATO member states following (solidarity) Article V of the NATO. As a result, six of the eight Arctic states – Canada, Iceland, Kingdom of Denmark, Norway and the United States (as NATO member states) and Russia – are involved in the conflict in some way or the other. Actually even the rest of the Arctic states – Finland and Sweden (the two non-NATO member states) – are involved in the crisis economically and politically due to the sanctions by the European Union.²

Interestingly, some years ago it was predicted by some journalists, politicians and even scholars that in the Arctic a new Cold War is emerging, and that a ‘scramble’ for the Arctic has been started, for example, ‘Cold War in the Arctic’ in Times Online, in September 2009 and ‘The Battle for the North Pole’ by Der Spiegel, in September 2008. Furthermore, there were some cynical comments that although the Arctic states may be talking on cooperation, they are actually ‘preparing for conflict’ (Huebert, 2010).³ The slogans of emerging conflicts and a race on resources were media sexy, and much due to the Russian expedition to the bottom of the North Pole in 2007 regulated by the rules of UN Convention on a Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), as well as the competition (between Canada and Russia) to control the North Pole because of globalization and its flows in the Arctic region (e.g., Globalization and the Circumpolar North, 2010), the geostrategic importance of the Arctic in world politics and the global economy is increasing (Heininen, 2005). Not surprisingly there were different opinions on Arctic geopolitics: the first discourse (e.g., Heininen, 2010) emphasized, and still emphasizes, the achieved stability – that there is no rearmament in the Arctic, and the Arctic states have done only limited modernization (Wezeman, 2012); the second discourse challenged this by predicting a ‘scramble’ for the Arctic emerging conflicts and a race of natural resources, as mentioned earlier. It was much supported by international media as well as the hypothesis of a research project, Geopolitics in the High North (2008), that ‘security in a military-strategic sense is about to experience a renaissance’ in the Arctic.

All this sounds like an academic dialogue or political debate, and thus is normal in academia and politics, but can also be much misleading. We, who did not admit something that was neither really happening nor we could see any signs of, were however right (e.g., see Heininen, Sergunin and Yarovoy, 2014).⁴ Also, among the Arctic states, as well as among the Arctic Council observer states, there was, and is partly still, a consensus that there are no military conflicts in the Arctic region, not even emerging ones, but a high stability based on multilateral – both intergovernmental and interregional – cooperation. The Arctic states even started ad hoc military cooperation in the context of climate change with a plan of annual meetings of the commanders of the armies.

Owing to the fact that the high stability and intensive cooperation is human-made and an achievement by the eight Arctic states, Northern indigenous peoples and several nonstate actors, the situation can be changed. Therefore, a timely and relevant question is whether high stability is in danger, or at least in a real test, first time since the end of the Cold War due to the conflictual situation of international politics. Theoretically, the answer is yes: all this could mean that instead of the current low-military tension we might have growing political tension in the Arctic, as Luszczuk speculates in his chapter.

However, more relevant, and definitely more interesting, question is why those prognoses and slogans of a new ‘Cold War’ and emerging conflicts in the Arctic were not, yet, materialize...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  High Arctic Stability as an Asset for Storms of International Politics an Introduction
• 2  Security of the Global Arctic in Transformation Potential for Changes in Problem Definition
• 3  Military Cooperation and Enhanced Arctic Security in the Context of Climate Change and Growing Global Interest in the Arctic
• 4  Russian Subnational Actors: Paradiplomacies in the European and Russian Arctic
• 5  The U.S Arctic Policy Agenda: The State Trumps Other Interests
• 6  Ripple Effects: Devolution, Development and State Sovereignty in the Canadian North
• 7  The Arctic, Laboratory of the Anthropocene
• Index