Arctic Politics, the Law of the Sea and Russian Identity

The Barents Sea Delimitation Agreement in Russian Public Debate

G. Hønneland

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137414052
• eBook ISBN: 9781137414069
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the Russian opposition to the 2010 Barents Sea delimitation agreement in light of both the Law of the Sea and Russian identity, arguing that the agreement's critics and proponents inscribe themselves into different Russian narratives about Russia's rightful place in the world.

1

Arctic Scramble, Russian Compromise

Abstract: Russia’s flag planting at the North Pole in 2007 unleashed a surge of media attention and political interest in the Arctic. A scramble for the Arctic was underway, with Russia as the wild card. This chapter draws attention to the internal Russian criticism of the delimitation agreement that Russia entered into with Norway in the Barents Sea in 2010. The agreement was a compromise which split the formerly disputed area into two equal parts. Critics call for President Putin to establish an international expert commission to assess the validity of the agreement. The author argues that international agreements cannot be annulled by commissions or experts, so the question is not so much how, but why Putin should claim the Barents Sea back.

Hønneland, Geir. Arctic Politics, the Law of the Sea and Russian Identity: The Barents Sea Delimitation Agreement in Russian Public Debate. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137414069.0003.

In August 2009, Russia planted a titanium flag on the seabed at the North Pole. It was actually accomplished by a Russian scientific expedition collecting data for Russia’s submission to the Continental Shelf Commission – in accordance with the Law of the Sea – but was widely perceived as Russia flexing its muscles in the Arctic. At the same time, the summer ice sheet in the Arctic had shrunk to ominous proportions amid growing interest in the possibility for commercial oil and gas production in the Arctic. Scott G. Borgerson famously captured the atmosphere in his seminal article ‘Arctic Meltdown’:¹ ‘The Arctic Ocean is melting, and it is melting fast. ... It is no longer a matter of if, but when, the Arctic Ocean will open to regular marine transportation and exploration of its lucrative natural-resource deposits.’² But the situation is especially dangerous, he adds, ‘because there are currently no overarching political or legal structures that can provide for the orderly development of the region or mediate political disagreements over Arctic resources or sea-lanes’.³ ‘[T]he Arctic countries are [therefore] likely to unilaterally grab as much territory as possible and exert sovereign control over opening sea-lanes wherever they can. In this legal no man’s land, Arctic states are pursuing their narrowly defined national interests by laying down sonar nets and arming icebreakers to guard their claims.’⁴

Russia’s flag-planting and Borgerson’s article unleashed a surge of media attention and political interest at the highest levels in the Arctic. To many it looked as if Russia had laid claim on the North Pole itself, a claim one assumed other states would contest. The scramble for the Arctic was allegedly underway, with Russia as the wild card. On the one hand, the relations between the other Arctic states – those bordering the polar waters, that is, Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway and the United States – are excellent and sustained strategically by their common membership in NATO. Russia, on the other hand, is the successor state of the erstwhile Soviet Union, NATO’s declared enemy during the Cold War. What happens in the country is often shrouded in mystery – Russia, in Winston Churchill’s characterization of it, is ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ – and one aspect of its multi-hued national identity is also as a state with a stake in the North: who doesn’t think of snow, long winters and endless Siberian forests in connection with Russia? Some expect Russia to do as it pleases in the Arctic, whatever international law and other norms of civilized political behaviour dictate. Much of the ‘Arctic fuss’, then, is about what Russia wants.

* * *

‘What can Putin do to get the Barents Sea back?’ ran the headline of an article printed in several Russian newspapers in late winter 2013.⁵ The author wanted the border between Norway and Russia in the Barents Sea, established by treaty in 2010, revoked forthwith. What’s more, it’s time the international community stood up to Norway and its management of the waters around Svalbard. The article attracted a lot of attention in the Norwegian media, too, as winter progressed into spring. It just goes to show, some said, we still have a Russian bear as a neighbour – it’s best to be on our guard and expect the worst. The viewpoints expressed in the article were pretty eccentric, commentators suggested, but an anomaly, even a misunderstanding. What more could you say about such obvious absurdities? Let’s be clear, the maritime delimitation treaty is a binding agreement between two sovereign states. It was entered into in accordance with the principles of the Law of the Sea – it’s not something you withdraw from, they said, at the drop of a hat.

Vyacheslav Zilanov, formerly Soviet deputy fisheries minister and now a prominent political commentator in northwest Russia, is cited as the article’s main source. Zilanov has been up in arms against what he sees as Russia’s weakness in its dealings with Norway since the 1990s. To those of us who know him he is affable and affectionate, a sort of wise grandfather figure – and he is also a friend of Norway. It’s not the Norwegians he’s irritated with, but his own countrymen. The Russians have recklessly let Norwegians trick them into signing deals and agreements which weren’t in Russia’s best interest, like the fishing quota system and new regulatory standards for the fisheries (see Chapter 2). The Norwegians led the way – savvy, prescient and not a little crafty – while Ivan dozed on his ‘shopping trip abroad’ (a Russian euphemism for spending time at conferences abroad). Now, to top it all, there is this delimitation treaty. It takes the madness to new heights. Russia has gambled away the oil and gas deposits in the Barents Sea.

* * *

Hailed by Norwegians as a great example of what friends can achieve when they put their heads together to reach a compromise that protects the interests of both, the 2010 delimitation treaty which gives Norway and Russia equal halves of the formerly disputed area in the Barents Sea was not greeted with the same unqualified enthusiasm in Russia. Circles in the Russian fishing industry – in Murmansk as well as in Moscow – were clearly dismayed. Russian negotiators, they intimated, had bent over backwards to give Norway whatever it wanted, and ignored the interests of the Russian people. Even members of the State Duma, which adopted the treaty by a slender majority in 2011, were critical. In fact, it was only due to the votes of the president’s party, United Russia, that the treaty was approved; all the other parties abstained.

Criticism has not abated since – on the contrary, it is even louder. The Russian negotiators were guilty of a sin of omission, in the opinion of the article’s author and of many others in the Russian media. ‘In their talks with Norway, the Russian delegation failed to invoke Russia’s preferential right to a coastline under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, or to mention the historic borders of Russia’s Arctic areas determined in 1926, or various other arguments speaking in our favour.’ The agreement, in other words, is seen as the result of negotiations between more or less equal parties – and the Russian side was under no compulsion when it signed over waters rightfully belonging to Russia. The effect of this ‘outrageous’ treaty could easily be to close off the entire western part of the Barents Sea where the biggest fish stocks are to the Russian fishing industry, leaving it to fish in the much poorer waters further east. It would also allow Norway to tighten the thumbscrews on Russian fishing vessels within the fisheries protection zone around Svalbard, a zone Norway unilaterally put in place in 1977 and Moscow has never officially recognized. What the critics do not explain, however, is precisely how the delimitation agreement has caused all these problems. We will have something to say about it later (see Chapter 3).

Not only will the treaty cost the Russians a great deal of money but also it is patently unfair. Vyacheslav Zilanov wants a ‘roadmap for the President’, with instructions on how ‘to repossess the Barents Sea’. It should include the appointment of a commission of Russian and foreign experts to assess whether the treaty can be said to be reasonable in the sense of the Law of the Sea. When the commission presents its conclusions, the President may then consider whether to have the treaty modified or amended, or even annulled. There should be a new ‘Spitsbergen Conference’ of the original signatories to the Svalbard Treaty (1920) with a view to assessing the validity of Norway’s fisheries protection zone around Svalbard. Both ideas are exceptionally controversial from the Norwegian point of view, to put it mildly. The delimitation treaty is, as mentioned, a binding agreement based on the principles of international law on the delimitation of areas of sea between states. Of course, national parliaments do not always ratify treaties, but to go so far as to annul one is virtually unheard of. Nor are commissions usually appointed to consider an agreement’s soundness in light of international law. States can agree to whatever boundaries they like, but once the agreement is in force they have to respect it. If being bound by the treaty becomes a cause of concern to one of the signatories, it can withdraw from the agreement if the procedures for doing so are in place. The usual option, however, is simply not to ratify the treaty rather than taking the trouble to annul it. In the event of interpretative disputes, the parties can bring the case before an international court, assuming both agree – either for this particular dispute or by prior agreement – to let the court, such as the International Court of Justice at the Hague, decide the issue. It is the courts that decide whether an agreement complies with the guidelines in international law, not an international commission of experts of the sort Zilanov proposes. To call for a new ‘Spitsbergen Conference’ is also a radical ploy politically speaking, even though opinion is divided on whether the treaty applies to the waters around Svalbard (see Chapter 2). The points in the proposed roadmap do not represent official Moscow policy. So the issue is not so much what Putin should do to recover the Barents Sea, but why he would want to.

Former president and current Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev is the implied villain of the piece. The article starts by noting that the agreement ‘which was signed during the presidency of Dm. Medvedev in 2010’, meant that Russia lost ‘huge fishing grounds to Norway’. ‘The document’, the article continues, ‘which was approved by Dm. Medvedev, fails to satisfy the basic principles [under the Law of the Sea] of justice and fairness’ (emphasis in original). Vladimir Putin, Russia’s strong man over the past 15 or so years, you are needed. ‘Putin, clear up the mess Medvedev left behind!’, the article suggests. To an untrained eye, what the article says about Putin and Medvedev is a mixture of fact and ordinary political opinion. Medvedev happened to be president when Russia and Norway signed the agreement. Putin is in charge now. It was a bad deal for Russia – end of story. But to an eye trained in observation of Russian affairs, there’s more to it. The article’s author need not have mentioned the presidents by name, or at least to repeat their roles as if to emphasize a point. Medvedev was not personally involved in the negotiations, apart possibly from the run-up to the signing in Oslo a few days in spring in April 2010. The author could have asked the Russian government to look at the agreement again without calling on Putin himself. Medvedev and friendly relations with the West (represented here by Norway) are linked together in the article; reading between the lines, Medvedev comes across as at best naive, at worst a traitor – weaknesses to which Putin, apparently, does not succumb. True, many Russians, it is alleged, prefer having a ‘strong man’ at the helm – macho Putin against brainy, flabby Medvedev – but there is more to it than that. Putin is a ‘real Russian’ – indeed, many would call him an ‘ideal Russian’, echoing the sentiments of a song performed by a female singer during Putin’s first term as president. Russian men are hopeless, she sings, ‘What I want is a man like Putin, a man like Putin, full of strength, a man like Putin, who keeps off the bottle.’⁶ Now, Medvedev is not known to be a drunkard either, but many Russians do feel there is something indefinably alien about him. Like the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, he is a man ‘we can do business with’, to quote Margaret Thatcher’s famous remark after her first meeting with Gorbachev.⁷ Can the Russians trust someone who gets on so easily with foreigners? Is he really one of them?

* * *

I met Zilanov, the chap with the roadmap for Putin, in Moscow in the mid-1990s. He was a fisheries adviser to the Russian parliament; I was a young social scientist specializing in the study of Russian fisheries management, though I had spent a few years as a Russian interpreter for the Norwegian Coast Guard and fisheries authorities. Zilanov was sympathetic, interested, receptive, forthcoming. I was used to officials of Zilanov’s rank badgering me when I used to work as an interpreter, though to be honest, nothing really changed when I became a researcher. These were the elderly men who used to fill senior positions in the Soviet civil service. The collapse of the Soviet Union had robbed many of them of their prestige, and they were far from happy to see youngsters pouring into the new Russia from the West, doing whatever they got up to. The job of interpreter, I realized soon enough, was considered menial work in Russia, on a par with serving coffee. Fluency in Russian did not merit much respect either. Comrades from non-Russian Soviet republics and satellite states were typically expected by citizens of the superpower to at least make themselves intelligible in the main language of the commonwealth. Russians are not easily moved by linguistic p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Arctic Scramble, Russian Compromise
• 2  Jurisdiction and Fisheries Management in the Barents Sea
• 3  Russian Reactions to the Barents Sea Delimitation Agreement
• 4  Russia and the West The Foreign Policy Perspective
• 5  Russia and the West The Everyday Perspective
• 6  Looking Up to the West
• Selected Bibliography
• Index