Negotiating the Arctic

The Construction of an International Region

E.C.H Keskitalo

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415947121
• eBook ISBN: 9781135938437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

This work draws upon the history of Arctic development and the view of the Arctic in different states to explain how such a discourse has manifested itself in current broader cooperation across eight statistics analysis based on organization developments from the late 1970s to the present, shows that international region discourse has largely been forwarded through the extensive role of North American, particularly Canadian, networks and deriving form their frontier-based conceptualization of the north.

CHAPTER 1

Region-building in “The Arctic”

It is not difficult to read an element of romanticism in the notion of area studies as a vocation. In the most banal terms, we say that one is drawn to study Japan or Thailand because one is in love with ‘it,’ whatever that ‘it’ might be at different moments in one's life. And it is here in the realm of the romantic that sentiment and mystification become difficult to tell apart. Having fallen in love with the foreign, learning its language and reconstructing its history, one might then begin with some justification to consider oneself to be an authority who can speak for the place and its people to those at home (Rafael 1999, para. 19).

The quotation above accurately captures some of the main issues addressed in this work. Area studies are often undertaken by outsiders, those fascinated with and romanticizing a region. How can those in area studies then represent the region in a way that is recognizable and relevant to its inhabitants and their everyday life? This problem is an acute one for researchers examining any political development within area studies, and perhaps especially for those investigating the Arctic.

Historically, and in Arctic studies, the Arctic has largely been conceived of as a polar region—the High Arctic where polar bears roam. Perhaps even more so, it has been conceived of as something apart from this world, an area for exploration and exploitation through which one may gain fame and fortune back home. One does not stay in the Arctic: one uses it for something, or ignores it. In short, it is for most people a romanticized and imagined area, not a naturalized place of everyday life. The northern areas of Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland, which for the most part are climatically Arctic and have traditionally been considered Arctic by their respective states, have, for example, largely been seen in this light. The largely indigenous population of these areas has long been ignored in favor of a focus on “the Arctic” as an uninhabited, romanticized land of outside adventurers and ice.

However, especially since the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the environmental and indigenous movements and increased international organization, political cooperation has significantly expanded the geographical area connoted by “the Arctic.” In recent cooperation, this area is seen as covering not only the areas climatically and historically considered Arctic but large parts of the mainland Nordic countries as well. For example, this extended geographical delineation is applied by the Canadian-initiated Arctic Council, which covers cooperation between eight states (Canada, USA, Russia, and the five Nordic countries¹) and the area extending from the Pole to at least the Arctic Circle and at most 60° north latitude. This is an area of significant diversity and larger in size than any previous delineation of “the Arctic.” As such, it includes boreal forest areas and a population of close to four million people, who, to a large extent, live in town-sized settlements (AMAP 1998:142–179); in the most extensive assessments, it encompasses fifteen percent of the world's land and a population of as many as ten million people (cf. Young 2000).²

In region-building processes in political organization and especially in the Arctic Council, such a broadly delineated Arctic is nevertheless portrayed as a region, with many common needs and characteristics and considerable similarities between populations.

The principal question that this work addresses is how such a regionbuilding process has come into existence and presently defines the “Arctic.” This includes not only how the geographical delineation has been made, but which characteristics and identity are seen as “Arctic” in order to construct a region out of the wide-ranging area. The core topics for analysis are the following: (1) How has Arctic discourse developed and the region been delineated for policy purposes? (2) How is the discourse of the region framed in the focal international fora? (3) How has this discourse and delineation become prominent? and (4) How does it accommodate the variety of participating actors (i.e., non-state actors as well as states) and other descriptions of the areas?³

This study takes the concept of region-building (cf. Neumann 1999, 1996, 1992) as its starting point: it assumes that identity developments do not simply happen but require effort and a systematic selection of features that are advocated as being genuine to a region. The work draws upon an understanding of region-building as a discourse, in which different actors are seen as connected through their involvement with certain concepts and in certain areas and in which the actors’ knowledge or understandings cannot be assumed to be objective or apolitical. The work is interested in making apparent the particular selection of features and actors into Arctic discourse and then asking how the discourse thus described relates to understandings of the areas in other than “Arctic” literature and development.

As the Arctic in this development has been extended beyond its climatical and historical delineations, it will be referred to in this work as “the Arctic”: it is not a given and unproblematized entity, but one that has been discussed into being, and is largely contested. The Arctic is thus here not seen as a unit, but as a focus for deconstruction and investigation. To highlight this constructedness, the term Arctic is bracketed as “Arctic.”⁴ The focal point is also squarely placed on the establishment of an Arctic international circumpolar region, which means that the work will not take up different meanings given to “north” as such, to which discussions of for instance other broader organization might have been relevant; rather, it proceeds from the definitions of “the Arctic” with special emphasis on the current political conception of the term. The study thus centers on developments that are seen as indicating contemporary ways of speaking about and constructing “the Arctic” as a recognizable field within policy and academia as well as on certain operational definitions of what the region and issues are and whom these issues and developments concern.

In this, the focus of discussion is the Arctic Council and Council-related conceptions of the Arctic. This has to do, firstly, with the importance imputed to the Council in developing “the Arctic” as a region: it “has become a symbol of the emergence of the Arctic as a distinct region in the international society” (Young 2000, ch. 4, recommendation 2, para. 2). In short, the Arctic Council is the focal point of current Arctic discourse. The Arctic Council has defined the currently prominent conception of an eight-state Arctic which, in that it also determines the land areas, can be considered “Arctic.” The Arctic Council is also the parent organization of the largest systematic work undertaken on the circumpolar level (i.e. the AMAP 1997,1998), which is gaining prominence globally (e.g., UNEP 1997). Additionally, the Council has spurred further organization on basis of “the Arctic,” such as the Standing Committee of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region, the University of the Arctic, and the Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat (cf. Standing Committee of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region 2002; Huebert 1998:144; ch. 5).

In the work, the main argument is the following. The circumpolar Arctic has emerged as a policy-relevant region, indeed as a “region” at all, over the last 20–30 years as a result of multiple factors. One principal factor in the development of the “Arctic” region has been the changing world context, which can be generally described as one of globalization. As advances in communication technology make possible instantaneous communication over a geographically wider scale than ever before, organization and coalition-building takes place on a larger scale, and the world of actors to which the individual needs to relate is extended. The geographical conception of the region is likewise extended to large multinational areas, as states are pressured to cooperate on wide-ranging issues and to extend their own foreign policy scope. For “the Arctic,” the end of the Cold War in particular yielded the possibility to organize on a circumpolar basis and beyond traditional security concerns into the eight-state region discussed here. With this development, “the Arctic” has been used by certain actors, in consideration of their particularly vulnerable situations, to, amongst other things, strengthen their foreign policy roles in a changing environment.

The two main state actors in circumpolar Arctic discourse have been Canada and Finland, the initiators of the Arctic Council and the AEPS respectively, and a comparative focus will initially be placed on these two states. What this comparison most clearly shows, however, is how well established and wide-ranging the Canadian discourse on “the Arctic” is. For Finland, the development of an “Arctic” region-building initiative was largely a result of the state's relation to the USSR/Russia, and a direct response to Gorbachev's 1987 Murmansk initiative for increased openness in Arctic and northern areas. Finland thus established an unprecedented focus on the Arctic when it seized the opportunity to re-define its foreign policy, which had long been constrained by its relation to its superpower neighbor. For Canada, on the other hand, the motivation for Arctic cooperation was well established: Arctic “northerness” had long been a factor whereby the state had defined itself, especially in sovereignty conflicts with the US but also domestically, and the Arctic was an area where Canada possessed a well-developed discourse and organization.

In comparing the roles of actors involved in Arctic discourse, the work finds that the Canadian state context has been extensive in that it came to organize already parts of the AEPS and has defined Arctic discourse both in setting the issue foci and utilizing the domestic conception of an “Arctic.” The main argument of the work is that Canadian discourse dominance in a conceptualization of the “Arctic” that includes also social factors has largely determined the foci of discourse on the circumpolar “Arctic” internationally. In this relation, major actors beyond the Canadian state have included an indigenous non-governmental organization that is well established within Canada and researchers who deal with traditional Arctic conceptions in which Canada has played a large part. The view of the “Arctic” forwarded among these groups is, however, one largely related to frontier conceptions. These are prominent especially in the Canadian view of its Arctic areas, but prevalent also in Alaska, Greenland and Russia: states with a frontier conception applied to areas that have historically and climatically been seen as “Arctic.” This is revealed especially in the discussion of Canadian discourse on “the Arctic” (in ch. 6) that compares this view to that in other states.

On the basis of this comparison, and the study of present Arctic discourse, the work concludes that the frontier conception of the Arctic is not part of the dominant understanding within all state areas, for some neither have the climatically arctic conditions that could have retained the areas as frontiers, nor have they developed directly in keeping with a frontier conception. While Arctic Canada is characterized by large, recently modernized land areas where indigenous peoples were until recently in the majority, the Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian north as well as Iceland are defined by significantly different dynamics, i.e., more mixed and integrated populations, less easily definable ethnicities, and areas which have been modernized earlier and are culturally more integrated into the national and international framework. The main argument is thus that there are significant differences across the eight-state “Arctic,” and that these are not brought out through the focus on Canadian descriptions and the major role that Canada plays in Arctic cooperation internationally; these differences can serve to explain the conflicts in cooperation. The representation, both directly political and narrative, of areas and peoples is thus inherently one question taken up in this work.

The book is organized as follows: This first chapter describes the main arguments, theories and methods used in the work. The second chapter presents the historical view of “the Arctic” as an area of exploration and conflict and the early organizational developments in the 1970s that started to make a discourse of the Arctic as a region possible. Chapters 3 and 4 then take up the development of the Arctic Council out of the rather limited environmentally-focused initiative the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS), and the internal contradictions and conflicts that were faced in extending this initiative into sustainable development and a more integrated view of the area as an environmental-social region. The main differences and main discourse on the Arctic are then also seen as played out in the Councilrelated establishment on the basis of this new “region” of the University of the Arctic as a mechanism for organizing regional knowledge and education (ch. 5). This chapter especially shows the conflicts in Arctic discourse which manifest when the discourse is questioned. The discourse on “the Arctic” is subsequently traced in historical perspective in chapter 6 to provide an understanding of the “Arctic” label and how conceptions vary in the areas seen as “Arctic” in Council developments. The chapter thus examines the different national backgrounds and issues in viewing the Arctic with the aim of explaining the different issues and contexts subsumed under “the Arctic” in different states, some of which have not previously regarded their northern mainlands as primarily Arctic. In the final chapter (chapter 7), the mechanisms through which an Arctic region has been developed and the foci of its discourse are then discussed and criticized.

On the whole, the study argues that the content and unitary conception of a region can be understood through a focus on the interlinkage between power and knowledge, i.e., in the way the discourse of the Arctic has evolved in certain state and knowledge contexts.

The remainder of the present chapter describes the theoretical and methodological basis of the study: the concepts of region-building and discourse analysis as well as the historical perspective associated with the study. It outlines the constructed nature of region-building and how discourse is to be seen not only as language but as framing in that it deals with selecting the paradigmatic in a situation and, thereby, with creating identity. In the region-building approach, there is no clear delineation between epistemological and political actors: rather, the actors in region-building consist of those with authoritative narrative power. This is something that places a special focus on the role of representation in creating discourse.

REGION-BUILDING AS A RESEARCH PERSPECTIVE

In the development of large-scale international regions, globalization has been an important force. Globalization is often seen as entailing new ways and a new scale and awareness with which individuals and groups relate to the world, beyond existing categories of nation and state (cf. Robertson 1992). It results from and emerges through the unification of markets, increased networking of political institutions, and the creation of transnational cultural spaces through new communication technology. While these processes of extended trade, contact and travel have emerged increasingly over time (in some interpretations, over hundreds of years), the last fifty years or so represent a major increase in the orientation to a larger world.

Yet many accounts of globalization identify not only these increasing, broad networks and a changing world-view but also the emergence of local, fragmentary, regional entities (Halliday 2000, Gamble and Payne 1996a, Amoore et al. 2000). While globalization does create the need for interaction on a larger scale than regional activities, it may be politically more viable to construct institutions for cooperation at the regional (rather than global) level, where there exists some commonality of culture, history, social systems and values, and political and security interests. The development of interaction may also take place on this scale in response to those effects of globalization felt most directly within particular regions and by earlier suppressed groups (Hurrell 1995, Gamble and Payne 1996b). This search for new forms of interaction has increased especially in the international turbulence following the end of the Cold War and under the impact of internationalization. In an effort to understand the nature of these multifaceted processes, regional developments have often been dichotomized as “regionalism” (assumed to proceed “top-down,” driven by national elites) or “regionalization” (seen as a “bottom-up” expression of previously subdued identity and cultural similarity; see e.g. Hurrell 1995, Käkönen and Lähteen-mäki 1995). Regionalization is thus seen as a process advanced by civil society and through the emergence of cooperation inside the region, while regionalism is seen as a state-led development that does not necessarily reflect understandings in the designated region. These two concepts imply that one should be able to clearly assign regional cooperation to either of these two categories.

The view taken here, however, is that these categorizations obscure the way in which the development of a “regional entity” takes place. The way a region will develop is not a given but a selection made on specific historical and political grounds and dependent on which actors are able to access and involve themselves in initiatives; actors may include, for instance, both civil society and states, but only the specific sections of these that are able to involve themselves with the regional discourse. That a region is developed at all is also not a given, but a result of effort and the expenditure of political capital among the different actors.

To illustrate this partial, fragmented and constructed nature of the processes, the concept of region-building has been developed (cf. Neumann 1999, 1996, 1992).⁵ Rather than viewing regions as either top-down or bottom-up developments of any assumed “emerging” kind, region-building sees these as actively formed through region-building processes that demand effort and are undertaken among the actors who are situated to influence descriptions. The region-building approach does not assume that areas naturally form a region in the absence of continuous efforts to construct it as such. Instead, the focus is placed on the process by whic...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Studies in International Relations
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Main Abbreviations and Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Region-building in “The Arctic”
• Chapter 2 Region-building and Definitions of “The Arctic”
• Chapter 3 The “Arctic” in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy and Arctic Council: An Environmental, Indigenous, and Foreign Policy Concern
• Chapter 4 Sustainable Development in the Arctic: A Conflict Between Conservation and Utilization
• Chapter 5 The Development of a Regional University for the Arctic
• Chapter 6 Views of “The Arctic” in Different States
• Chapter 7 Arctic Discourse Dominance
• Notes
• References
• Appendices
• Index