Britain and the Arctic

Duncan Depledge

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319692920
• eBook ISBN: 9783319692937
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

British interest in the Arctic has returned to heights not seen since the end of the Cold War; concerns about climate change, resources, trade, and national security are all impacted by profound environmental and geopolitical changes happening in the Arctic. Duncan Depledge investigates the increasing geopolitical significance of the Arctic and explores why it took until now for Britain – once an 'Arctic state' itself – to notice how close it is to these changes, what its contemporary interests in the region are, and whether the British government's response in the arenas of science, defence, and commerce is enough. This book will be of interest to both academics and practitioners seeking to understand contemporary British interest and activity in the Arctic.

© The Author(s) 2018

Duncan DepledgeBritain and the Arctichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69293-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Britain and the Arctic

Duncan Depledge¹

(1)

Fleet, UK

Abstract

Britain’s interest in the Arctic is at its highest level since the end of the Cold War. As the Arctic Ocean undergoes a profound state change from being permanently ice-covered to seasonally ice-free, British policymakers, businesses, scientists, and civil society have all entered the global scramble to redefine why the Arctic matters. This chapter introduces Britain’s stake in the Arctic and the challenges it faces in making its contemporary interests in the region heard.

Keywords

Britain and the ArcticClimate changeGlobal ArcticCircumpolarisationContested ArcticProximity

End Abstract

In April 2006, the leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron , visited the Norwegian Arctic as part of a trip supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). During the trip, several iconic photographs emerged of Cameron riding a husky-powered sled as he visited a remote Norwegian glacier and saw for himself the effects of climate change on the Arctic. As Cameron urged voters to ‘vote blue to go green’ in local elections back in Britain, he wanted to show the British public that he understood their concerns about climate change. How better to do so than by choosing the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth, for his first major trip after becoming party leader. However, Cameron’s record on climate change and environmental issues during his time as Prime Minister (2010–2016) left many doubting whether his visit to the Arctic was anything more than a publicity stunt. Instead, Cameron was criticised for using the Arctic, and the vulnerability that it represents to environmentalists, to get elected, only to later renege on his commitment to lead the ‘greenest government ever’. For Cameron, it seemed, the Arctic was merely another place for performing domestic politics (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The Arctic

***

In 2015, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Arctic (hereafter, Arctic Committee ) called on the British Government to appoint an Ambassador to the Arctic (Arctic Committee 2015). Diplomatically speaking, that would be considered an exceptional act: Britain appoints Ambassadors to countries, not regions. Yet as other countries such as Finland, France, Japan, and Singapore went about appointing their own ‘Arctic’ or ‘Polar’ Ambassadors, there seemed to be something about the Arctic that attracted exceptional acts and exceptional interest (Dittmer et al. 2011).

The Arctic is still, after all, one of the world’s most extreme, least understood, and inaccessible environments. In much of the Arctic, it is enormously expensive to deploy the nationalistic, commercial, scientific , and militaristic means of geopolitical intervention that have tended to define interstate competition elsewhere in the world. For instance, during the Cold War, only the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain could afford to engage in cat-and-mouse submarine warfare under the ice, and only then because control of the Arctic promised a safe haven from which to launch a nuclear attack, while denying opponents the same. When the Cold War ended, all three countries substantially reduced their operations there. In the years that followed, international scientific cooperation, and institution-building to support it, took centre stage in a way largely unseen in other parts of the world. Except, perhaps, in Antarctica , where similarly, no single nation had the political will or economic resources to act alone.

Political events may have been the primary driver of geopolitical events in the Arctic in the twentieth century, but awareness is now growing of the profound environmental changes that have also been under way in the region since 1979, when satellite monitoring of Arctic sea ice started. The summer sea ice minimum has fallen from around 6 to 7 million square kilometres in the 1980s and 1990s, to between 3 and 5 million square kilometres since 2007, an average decline of 13.4% per decade. Low summer minima have subsequently become the norm, with the ten lowest on record all occurring since 2005. More widely, there is no longer any part of the Arctic where the Arctic sea ice coverage is greater than it was during the 1980s and 1990s (NASA 2017).

As the Arctic Ocean transitions from being permanently ice-covered to seasonally ice-free, the possibilities of human activity there are being restructured (Berkman and Young 2009). The extent of Arctic environmental change was demonstrated in 2016, when the Polar Ocean Challenge team led by the British explorer Sir David Hempleman-Adams sailed an aluminium-hulled yacht through the Northeast and Northwest Passages in a single summer, encountering only modest ice conditions along the way. In that same summer, the wrecks of two British ships—HMS Terror and The Thames —were discovered, nearly two centuries after they had foundered in thick sea ice in those very same passages. As this book goes into production, the British explorer Pen Hadow , is leading another team in an attempt to sail two yachts between cracks in the ice to the geographic North Pole.

Others have responded to Arctic environmental change by variously imagining an ice-free Arctic as a front line for climate change, a commercial frontier, a strategic theatre, an increasingly populated homeland, or a protected nature reserve (Dodds 2010; Steinberg et al. 2015). Interest in the Arctic has also become more widespread. While explorers, merchants, scientists , and states have long been interested in the Arctic, they mostly stemmed from Europe, and later North America. Today, several Arctic scholars write of a ‘Global Arctic’ , to analyse and examine the increasing diversity of contemporary interest, including from countries such as Brazil, China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam (Heininen and Finger Forthcoming). Part of their interest is in how changes in the Arctic environment will affect sea levels and weather patterns in temperate zones. Simultaneously, however, they are also looking whether it will become easier for actors from beyond the region to traverse the Arctic and harvest the region for resources. Both perspectives were on display at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in 2017 when leading climate scientists and senior political figures set out the global economic risks of Arctic change.

Meanwhile, the international news media has tended to exaggerate the extent to which Arctic environmental change is driving interstate competition by claiming that a new ‘Great Game’ is under way, as if the Arctic is being subjected to the same imperial machinations that Africa was in the nineteenth century. However, the struggle for influence in the Arctic is different. Contemporary contests are better described as a scramble¹ between different constellations of state and non-state actors to define what kind of place the Arctic is becoming as it warms, loses ice and permafrost, greens, and unwittingly becomes host to alien species and geopolitical intrigue.

When, in 1921, Frank Debenham , who went on to become the first director of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge, wrote about ‘The Future of Polar Exploration’ he included a map in which much of the Arctic was simply labelled ‘unexplored’ (Debenham 1921). Less than 100 years ago, much of the Arctic was still unknown, at least to Western science, business, and industry. Today, despite significant advances in knowledge and understanding, as climate change transforms the region, the Arctic is once again becoming a blank space in our mental maps of the world, a space which is dominated by uncertainty and lack of knowledge about the risks and opportunities that might be found there. As the political geographer Richard Powell (2008: 827) observed during the media hysteria that surrounded the Arctic in 2008:

The Arctic Ocean has again become a zone of contestation. In this contemporary clash of scientific knowledges, legal regimes and offshore technologies, the uncertain spatialities of the Circumpolar Regions are being reconfigured.

There are, then, several possibilities in play that different constellations of actors, involving Arctic as well as non-Arctic, state as well as non-state, will have a say in defining whether the Arctic comes to be imagined as a ‘New North’ of economic enterprise tied into global commerce, a homeland for indigenous peoples, an environmental sanctuary, a strategic theatre, or the harbinger of global climate terror—and consequently, whether the Arctic is seen as a place to be occupied, harvested for resources, militarised, or protected from human activity.

However, in this scramble to redefine the Arctic, the kinds of nationalistic, commercial, scientific, and military enterprises witnessed in the Arctic for several centuries have largely given way to more cooperative means involving international scientific programmes, institution-building and international law, and joint commercial ventures. Today, a country’s influence in Arctic affairs is arguably far more likely to be defined by its ability to shape the form and direction of those international programmes, shared institutions, and commercial ventures than it is by nationalistic means. The Arctic Committee ’s call for Britain to appoint an Ambassador for the Arctic , who could represent a wide range of British interests to such programmes, institutions, and ventures spoke directly to this changed reality by proposing that an exceptional type of diplomatic intervention, to serve as a bridge between Britain and the Arctic, was needed to bolster Britain’s influence in the region.

The New (and Contested) Arctic

British interest in the Arc tic today is based around the need to comprehend how the Arctic is changing, and the related desire to put any new knowledge to work in ways which are productive in terms of science, trade, conservation, and national security. That interest is widespread, encompassing stakeholders from civil service, industry, national research centres, academia, and civil society. However, both the Arctic’s diversity and attempts to fathom it have been complicated by int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Britain and the Arctic
• 2. Britain: The Forgotten Arctic State?
• 3. The Circumpolar Arctic
• 4. Britain in the Arctic Today
• 5. To Strategise in the Arctic, or Not?
• 6. Conclusions
• Back Matter