The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty

Oil, Ice, and Inuit Governance

Jessica Shadian

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415640350
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Interest in Arctic politics is on the rise. While recent accounts of the topic place much emphasis on climate change or a new geopolitics of the region, the history of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) and Arctic politics reaches back much further in time.

Drawing out the complex relationship between domestic, Arctic, international and transnational Inuit politics, this book is the first in-depth account of the political history of the ICC. It recognises the politics of Inuit and the Arctic as longstanding and intricate elements of international relations. Beginning with European exploration of the region and concluding with recent debates over ownership of the Arctic, the book unfolds the history of a polity that has overcome colonization and attempted assimilation to emerge as a political actor which has influenced both Artic and global governance.

This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of Arctic politics, indigenous affairs, IR theory and environmental politics.

1 Sovereignty historicized

‘Sovereignty’ is a term that has often been used to refer to the absolute and independent authority of a community or nation both internally and externally. Sovereignty is a contested concept, however, and does not have a fixed meaning. Old ideas of sovereignty are breaking down as different governance models, such as the European Union, evolve. Sovereignties overlap and are frequently divided within federations in creative ways to recognize the right of peoples. For Inuit living within the states of Russia, Canada, the USA and Denmark/Greenland, issues of sovereignty and sovereign rights must be examined and assessed in the context of our long history of struggle to gain recognition and respect as an Arctic indigenous people having the right to exercise self-determination over our lives, territories, cultures and languages.

(ICC 2009a)

Social science studies of indigenous peoples and of the Inuit in particular are nothing new. It was, after all, with an expedition to Baffin Island in search of the Inuit that Franz Boas, the father of modern American anthropology, began his career. In the early 1970s, as the Inuit land claims settlements that began in Alaska spread throughout the North American and Greenlandic Arctic, new forms of domestic Inuit governance were established, and many political scientists and legal scholars began studying this new political phenomenon.¹ Social Scientists including Will Kymlicka (1996), Francis Abele et al. (2009), Elana Wilson-Rowe (2007), Jens Dahl et al. (2000), Marybelle Mitchell (1996), Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox (2009), Mark Nuttall (2000, 2010), Gerard Duhaime (2010), Frank Tester and Peter Kulchyski (1994), and Michael Bravo (2008, 2009, 2011), to name only a few, have all written about the role of Inuit governance at the domestic level.

Coinciding with the rise of indigenous agency at home, indigenous peoples in the international arena also began to connect across state borders to demand international recognition as global political actors. In the field of international relations (hereafter IR), authors such as Franke Wilmer (1993), Julia Emberley (2009), Paul Keal (2003), Ronald Niezen (2003), and Peter Jull (1998) have written about the ways in which indigenous activists have engaged with, and are affecting, international discourse. Franke Wilmer, for instance analyses the ways in which indigenous groups affect IR through moral persuasion rather than traditional means such as military or economic force. Julia Emberley has looked at how films and literature have distinguished between the ‘inferior’ indigenous Inuit and modern white civilization; and Paul Keal has examined the role played by indigenous peoples in international society from a historical perspective. Peter Jull, finally, has written about Arctic indigenous actors in international policy-making, coining the term ‘indigenous internationalism’ (1998). Scholars of international law such as Federico Lenzerini (2006), Natalia Loukacheva (2007), and Dalee Sambo Dorough (2010, 2011) have analysed the legal implications of indigenous autonomy. Loukacheva, for instance, has studied the legal structures of Nunavut and Greenland and whether Inuit autonomy may be shifting from de facto to de jure law. Similarly, Lenzerini argues that indigenous peoples have attained parallel sovereignty in the context of international law (2006: 155). Sambo Dorough writes, through extensive practical experiences, about the role and impacts of indigenous peoples in the international sphere; namely the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples and accompanying Declaration from an Inuit perspective.

Despite the attention now being paid by social scientists to indigenous politics, many of IR’s traditional theoretical assumptions have remained intact (namely, assumptions regarding state sovereignty). Much of the theoretical and empirical work on indigenous politics has either been quite critical (Corntassel 2007) or focuses on the influence they now have on international state behaviour – a political system that is perceived as static. Most often, the literature points to the ways in which indigenous political entrepreneurs have been able to participate in and, at times, influence international policy-making (a politics that remains focused on state interaction).

At the same time, another literature, that of ‘indigeneity’, has emerged. A growing number of IR scholars (e.g. Karena Shaw (2002), Marshall Beier (2009), Noel Castree (2004), and Jessica M. Shadian (2010) examine indigenous politics as a path to enter the grand debates in IR theory. For instance, Castree (2004) has looked at how indigenous groups have constructed new ways of thinking about political relationships to land that go beyond traditional considerations of traditional state sovereignty. According to Castree, indigeneity is ‘both a reaction to and an embrace of translocal connectivity … or [globalization]’ (2004: 156).³ Shadian (2010), likewise, has looked at the ways in which non-state groups are changing traditional assumptions of sovereignty. Shadian contends that traditional notions of Westphalian sovereignty are now ceding space to newer ideas of non-state sovereignty. The Inuit (through the ICC), for instance, have attained a form of cultural sovereignty (i.e. cultural integrity), rather than state sovereignty (territorial integrity), affording Inuit the authority to participate formally in global politics.

Karena Shaw also focuses on the impact of indigenous politics on our traditional understandings of sovereignty and the state. According to Shaw, indigenous struggles are our problems, not because they are our fault, but because of the implications those struggles have for understanding our own identities (2002: 59). If we want to understand current world politics, Shaw argues, and so ‘shift [our] exploration of the diverse special, temporal, and discursive conditions under which forms of authority are being constituted, enabled and authorised today’, then we need to move the centre of our analysis from ontologically given assumptions about authority to the ontological conditions of possibility (ibid.; Howarth et al. 2000: xi). Marshall Beier has written about indigenous politics at the global level from the perspective of ‘indigenous diplomacies’. For Beier, the point is to look at the role of indigenous diplomacies for understanding the international political system and the principle of state sovereignty (Wilson 2007 applies this concept to the Inuit).

Indigeneity studies point out that while indigenous groups often seek political control, it is not necessarily with secessionist aims. Rather, their goal is to attain political control over various aspects related to place, as opposed to simply seeking ownership of physical territory (or territorial integrity). These alternative political aims often relate to land and resource rights and control over indigenous knowledge and ideas. Efforts to articulate indigenous claims to self-determination – which includes control over territory, culture, and knowledge – have involved the effective use of the international system alongside transnational discourses. Thus, many indigenous political groups simultaneously work both inside and outside the traditional boundaries of IR, as these authors demonstrate. Using the work of these authors as a point of departure, this case study of the Inuit polity engages Beier’s challenge for ‘International Relations scholars to engage seriously with indigenous diplomacies’ (Beier 2009: 12).

The politics of Westphalian international relations

The literatures on indigenous governance often confront an intellectual divide between domestic politics (the province of political scientists) and IR. Whereas the ICC has many attributes of a typical transnational NGO, its politics are co-constituted with local Inuit politics. The narrative of the ICC in this book is just as much about local Inuit politics as it is about regional and global politics, and consequently a theoretical framework is required that can account for the relations among these varying political levels. One approach to developing this framework is to take a historical perspective that acknowledges that the history of indigenous politics in general has always been co-constituted with the history of the Westphalian political system (the making of the international state system). According to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP),

it is impossible to make sense of the issues that trouble the relationship today without a clear understanding of the past. … We simply cannot understand the depth of these issues or make sense of the current debate without a solid grasp of the shared history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people on this continent.

(Indian and Northern Affairs Canada 1996)

This book, then, treats the narratives of the ICC and the Westphalian political system as contingent histories. Local and domestic Inuit politics receive significant attention rather than being neglected as is often the case in many accounts of IR including most recently regarding the international political discussion about who owns and controls the Arctic. Similarly, by moving beyond modern, Westphalian-based assumptions that only states engage in politics and that the ICC is merely an NGO, this book will be able to analyse the ICC from the historical perspective of the Inuit polity. But before discussing this further, it is necessary to define the space of ‘Westphalian’ politics.

Historicizing the Westphalian political system

The modern Westphalian political system has its roots in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The treaties of Munster and Osnabruck amounted, essentially, to the first international treaty. Under its provisions, the ‘European powers asserted the principle of “right before might” thereby concluding the Thirty Years’ War with negotiations instead of force’ (pamphlet from Peace Hall in Osnabruck, Germany). As sovereignty and political loyalty were transferred from God (vertical sovereignty) and, later, from feudal powers to states (horizontal sovereignty), the Westphalian political system came to dominate European and, eventually, world history. The Westphalian peace was premised on the principle of religious equality (between Protestant and Catholic states), as well as on two assumptions: that no individual can be the subject of more than one sovereign; and, that only one power can prevail in a single territory (Linklater 1998: 131, in Archibugi et al. 1998).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French and American revolutions brought about yet another shift in sovereignty, this one from the monarchy to the people. The French Declaration of Rights (1795) stated: ‘Each people is independent and sovereign, whatever the number of individuals who compose it and the extent of the territory it occupies. This sovereignty is inalienable’ (Hobsbawm, in Rudolph 2005: 5). From that point on, sovereignty was no longer invested in monarchs; it had migrated to the people of the state as a collective. Through the idea of ‘popular sovereignty’, the people of the state became the narrative of the nation-state: ‘The state is the land, the people, organization of coercion and a majestic idea, each supporting and even defining one another, so they [become] indivisible’ (Onuf, in Rudolph 2005: 5).

Each sovereign state bound itself together through the construction and legitimization of a national narrative. Nation-building was thus a process of constructing ‘a people’ sharing a bounded territory (Rudolph 2005). In this new international division of authority, sovereignty became the symbolic affirmation of the nation-state. The individual was sovereign, but that individual’s sovereignty depended on the existence of the state. Sovereignty would prevail for as long as the national narrative of the state was affirmed.

The founding of the United Nations in October 1945 reaffirmed the concept of sovereignty through the creation of modern international law. Writing at the time of the UN’s founding, almost 300 years after the Peace of Westphalia, Leo Gross noted that while the political map had changed greatly since the treaty, its chief political idea had ‘undergone relatively little change’ (1948: 21). In modern international law, sovereignty entailed a highly specific conception of ‘nation’ – one that was closely related to territory (i.e. to territorial integrity). Because of the long-standing premise that land was something that could be owned and exchanged, nationhood also became a legal aspiration, which was to attain territorial integrity (Rudolph 2005: 127). In effect, territorial integrity became a precondition of international standing. This link between land ownership and nationalism precluded all political alternatives that deviated from the legalities of the state. According to Anghie,

sovereignty represents at the most basic level an assertion of power and authority, a means by which a people may preserve and assert their distinctive culture. … For the non-European society, personhood as recognized internationally was achieved precisely when the society ceased to have an independent existence, when it was absorbed into European colonial empires or when it profoundly altered its own cultural practices and political organizations.

(1999: 62)

The founding of the UN was, in effect, the realization of the Peace of Westphalia. According to Leo Gross,

if the efforts of the United Nations are crowned with success by the adoption of an international bill of the fundamental rights of man, they will have accomplished the task which originated in the religious schism of Europe and which had found its first … solution on an international basis in the Peace of Westphalia. … The Peace of Westphalia was the starting point for the development of modern international law.

(1948: 24, 26)

In 1977, 30 years after the founding of the modern Westphalian international legal system, Hedley Bull, a prominent IR scholar, wrote of a world beyond the sedimented beliefs of the Westphalian political system. At that time he wrote:

One may imagine that if nationalist separatist groups were content to reject the sovereignty of the states to which they are at present subject, but at the same time refrained from advancing any claims to sovereign statehood themselves, some genuine innovation in the structure of the world political system might take place … [creating actual doubt as to] whether sovereignty lay with national governments or with the organs of the community … [and granting] cultural differences the political recognition that had been withheld in the past.

(Bull 1977, in Linklater 1998: 115–16)

Bull’s hypothesis has since given birth to this reality. The end of the Cold War has been witness to more and more polities that transcend the long-entrenched idea of the Westphalian political system.⁴ This new political terrain has been marked not by a waning of nationalism and nationalist movements or the demise of the nation-state system, but rather by what Rosenau referred to as fragmegration or ‘resistances to boundary-spanning activities’ (1997: 243). For Rosenau, fragmentation also acts simultaneously with the rise of new orders and institutions or integration (ibid.). Nationalisms appear to be growing in force, but the self-determination desired by national groups is not necessarily conceived as a matter of territorial integrity. Rather, today’s emerging nationalisms are increasingly coalescing around aspirations for cultural integrity (or the right to be political) (Broderstad and Dahl 2002; see also Shadian 2010). According to Broderstad and Dahl, many indigenous groups in response to past assimilation policies have reinvented the concept of nation-building in their own indigenous terms. They equate nationalism not with nation-building, but rather with ‘efforts … to increase their capacities for a self-rule and for self-determined sustainable community and economic development. It also involves building institutions of self-government’ (2002: 2).

In a world of fragmegrating and integrating politics, political actors (indigenous groups included) that operate outside the boundaries of individual states (by operating either at the local level or by transcending the state altogether) have stimulated a broader move in IR to revisit the Westphalian assumptions about the role of the state in global politics (Archibugi et al. 1998; Habermas 2001; Hewson and Sinclair 2000; Krasner 1999; Sassen 2002; Albert et al. 2000; Biersteker and Weber 1996; Bartleson 1995; Rosecrance 1999; Held 1996; Shaw 2000; Kaldor 2003a, 2003b; Keane 2003; Shadian 2010). Accompanying these discussions is the desire to better understand shifting meanings and conceptions of sovereignty as part of a larger process of change in the international system (Hall 1999; Alfonso Martínez 1996; Rugg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Introduction
• 1. Sovereignty historicized
• Part I: Constructing Westphalia
• Part II: Expanding the boundaries of Westphalia
• Part III: Governance beyond Westphalia
• References
• Index