The Arctic As European Periphery

Of all the relevant fields of activity, North Polar and Arctic exploration, scientific research, and monitoring may have attracted the greatest assortment of Europeans (and indeed, of non-Europeans) over time. The earliest instance of organized international cooperation for this purpose, the International Polar Year, was launched in the 1880s by citizens of Austria-Hungary (Karl Weyprecht) and Germany (Georg Neumayer). Today’s research networks, both within and outside the Arctic Council structure, draw experts from dozens of different states to the High North – mostly in summer – to work on the region’s geophysical, oceanic and climatological features, its fish, flora and fauna, and the characteristics and challenges of its human inhabitants. The Arctic Council’s six scientific working groups[15] attract cooperation from individuals with equally varied national backgrounds.

European involvement in the Arctic economy is intense and diverse in all phases: exploration, investment, production, transport and consumption. In the late Middle Ages, fishermen from Germany, the Netherlands, England and Scotland fought pitched naval battles over access to Icelandic cod; later, with French and Basque vessels, they explored even more northerly fishing grounds up the Greenland coast. The Dutch were especially active – competing with French, Danes and Brits – in Greenland whaling from the 17^th century onwards, and the three UK/Iceland ‘cod wars’ of the Cold War period bring the story of often-contentious European involvement up to date.

Today, Norway and Russia are the only nations producing oil and gas above the Arctic Circle in the European quadrant, although Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland are all prospecting for similar resources. However, the major Europe-based companies in this sector – Shell, BP and Total – and some newer ones are, or are bidding to be, partners in Arctic exploration and production schemes. Equally to the point, European customers sustain this whole branch of activity: as much as 80% of Norway’s production of oil, and practically all its gas, is sold within Europe,[16] and only 8.8% of the oil is sold to other continents. [17] Similarly, 84% of Russia’s oil exports and 76% of its natural gas exports (not, of course, exclusively extracted in the High North) are destined for Europe.[18] Looking at it the other way, the EU relies on Norway for 31.4% of its total gas imports and on Russia for 30.9%; the equivalent figures for oil are 10.26% and 30.14%. [19] If Arctic output grows significantly it may allow for more diversity in the energy trade – as seen in a recent Russian-Chinese gas contract[20] – and events in 2014 have strengthened the EU’s motives for curbing its dependence on Russia; but it is hard to imagine that this strand of Arctic/European interaction will dwindle any time soon. [21]

The picture is comparable on fish. Despite high-profile arguments over EU countries’ rights to fish in Arctic nations’ EEZs, [22] it is the latter nations who take around 90% of the catch. Iceland and Norway alone accounted for 74% of all commercial fishing in European Arctic waters from 1990-2006.[23] However, Iceland sells around 80% of its catch, and Norway 60% of its catch, to EU customers, including a sizeable proportion of raw products that are further processed in Europe. Since the EU also imports fish from Canada, Russia and the USA, around one third of fish caught in the whole circumpolar Arctic is estimated to be consumed by Europeans; and if fish stocks increase overall through ocean warming, Europe is capable of importing even more.[24]

Given the lively speculation over a potential boom in Arctic shipping – which at the moment takes place almost exclusively by the Northern Sea Route over Russia and thus enters the Atlantic by way of northern Scandinavia – it is worth noting that Europe provides by far the largest single share of maritime insurance services world-wide. London alone does nearly 20% of all such business, ahead of centres in Germany and France. [25] Figures on the number of cargo and cruise ships active in the Arctic that have their operating base in and/or are flagged in European countries are hard to find, and current openings for Europe are modest since many current cargo transits are Russian internal ones;[26] but it is fair to assume that a European stake exists, and may be set to increase, in this sector too.

Insurance is not the only mode in which European financing and investment, company expertise and consultancy are and may be increasingly relevant to the Arctic. The EU includes several well-known hubs for investment (including venture capital) and other financial transactions, which are not only used by Europeans themselves. A recent and somewhat controversial recent example of Europeans acting as middle-men for an Arctic venture was the bid by a company called London Mining to open a new iron-ore mine in Greenland. At the time, Chinese industrial and financial partners had a significant share in the project, giving rise to much speculation about China’s motives and the risks arising from its involvement. Although London Mining did receive a licence, its main Chinese backer has now withdrawn;[27] but this may be far from the last time that EU-based actors find themselves channelling both Europe-wide and extra-European economic interventions in the Arctic market.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of Europeans are gaining individual experience of the High North through tourism and transit travel. Iceland alone, with just 320,000 inhabitants, attracted 807,000 visitors – an all-time record – in 2013 of whom 95,000 arrived on cruise ships. [28] The total number passing through Iceland’s Keflavik international airport that year, however, was over 3 million,[29] underlining that Arctic routes often offer the fastest way to fly between Europe and North America, When the latest Icelandic volcanic eruption started at Barðabunga in August 2014, no Icelandic flights were affected but a score of foreign airlines overflying the country were advised to adjust their routes.

Last but in a sense first, everyone living in Europe affects and is affected by the Arctic in the context of climate change. Past emissions from industry, agriculture and households in Europe have been among the drivers of temperature rises that have heated the Arctic twice as fast as the global average in the last two decades (although, interestingly, less so in the parts of the Atlantic gateway). [30] While Europe’s share of global black carbon (soot) and methane emissions – now seen as crucial short-term climate ‘forcers’ – is relatively low, the proximity of European sources to the Arctic means that their local impact is high, and it is estimated that the Arctic states themselves could achieve up to 30% of the feasible mitigation in this field. [31] In return, the rapid Arctic warming is not only opening new economic vistas for Europe, but threatening to disrupt the lives of people across the continent through its ability to destabilize weather systems and ocean currents and, eventually, cause dangerous sea level rises. If, as some experts believe, a reduced temperature gradient in the Atlantic could weaken and eventually stop the Gulf Stream that brings warmer surface waters to Europe’s north-western coasts, the latter areas could be plunged into a mini-ice age instead of enjoying balmier times.[32]

Europe, and more specifically the EU, has a fair claim to have been a world leader in exploring responsible climate policies, especially when it comes to efforts to mitigate climate change. It has not been slow to advertise the fact, notably in the series of documents designed to shape a collective EU Arctic policy (on which more in Section IV).[33] It is worth also noting here, however, that Europe is a stronghold of NGO and civil society activity aimed at raising consciousness of climate change and, more specifically, at protecting Arctic nature. Brigitte Bardot was the figurehead of one of the earliest campaigns making use of a consumer boycott, in this case against natural furs, which had a real impact on Arctic livelihoods at the time. Today, the famous or notorious pro-nature organization Greenpeace has its headquarters in Amsterdam, where it runs a specific ‘Save the Arctic’ programme.[34] In September 2013 when the Greenpeace ship ‘Arctic Sunrise’ took action against a new Russian drilling station in the polar sea, 16 out of the 30 on board who were arrested by the Russians were European citizens (including two from Russia itself and one from Ukraine).[35]

III. Governance in the European High North: a Periphery Model?

Turning now from practical issues and interactions to the governance structures for handling them: Europe has developed an idiosyncratic international architecture and institutional culture that no other continent can fully match. When comparing Europe with the other two land-masses bordering the Arctic – North America and Russia – the former’s multiplicity of nation-states stands out as the basic difference, with NATO and the European Union (EU) now having nearly 30 members apiece. Coexistence and cooperation among so many actors clearly demands more institutionalization, or a different kind of institutionalization, than a space belonging to a single state or just two neighbours. Many factors have been at work, however, in producing the extraordinary density and variety of European and Euro-Atlantic institutions. They coexist both horizontally – groups with similar sets of members but different tasks, like the EU and NATO – and vertically, like sets of Chinese boxes of different sizes. The largest, like the OSCE, extend from North America to Central Asia; then come NATO and the EU which have grown from a Western base, with some of the world’s most binding and advanced[36] models of multilateral cooperation; then there are neighbourhood groups covering geographical sub-regions of Europe; and finally some small special partnerships like the Benelux union of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. [37]

To an unusual degree, Europeans have also had to consider the inter-relationship of these different fora, which have not always found it easy to coexist, especially where their competences and ambitions overlap. Explicit codes have been worked out, for instance, on EU-NATO and OSCE-Council of Europe cooperation, while the EU has developed a doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’ – the desirability of settling an issue in the lowest/smallest framework of governance that can cope with it – which offers a logical place for sub-regional and local groupings as well as national competences. The most comprehensive approach is the notion of ‘mutually reinforcing institutions’, developed by the OSCE and enshrined in the 1999 Platform of Cooperative Security. [38] It recognizes the need to use differently constituted organizations for different purposes, and calls for them to show mutual respect (including respect for nations’ rights to join their preferred groupings) and to work together for maximum transparency and coherence. Europeans’ familiarity with, and acquired skills in handling, such a multi-institutional, multi-level system may provide another reason why many of them find the idea of a single omnicompetent Arctic Treaty strange.

It is natural that the interwoven fabric of these institutions should, as it were, fray at the margins: either because the ‘core’ institutions have not (yet) reached out to (all) of Europe’s peripheries; or because the countries in the outer zone do not fully share – for geo-strategic, economic, historical or cultural reasons – the same imperatives felt by more centrally-placed countries to integrate as fully as possible. To Europe’s south-east, the former is the case since the Western Balkan states and Turkey have shown much greater keenness to join the EU than the Union has shown to absorb them. The Northern periphery fits the latter explanation, since no-one could doubt that Norway and Iceland would be welcome in the EU if they were determined to join, [39] and the same should be true of Sweden and Finland in NATO. As it is, the five Nordic states with their autonomous territories provide a uniquely large zone in Europe of semi-integration or ‘integration lite’, since only Denmark is in both NATO and the EU [40] and even Denmark has four major opt-outs from features of European integration developed since the 1990s.[41] This important difference from the politics of other European frontiers does not, however, prevent the Nordic states from acting as transmitters of the ‘European way’ towards the High North and Atlantic/Arctic gateway. It will be argued here that the governance pattern special to these areas more fully mirrors European practice than it does any other political or institutional influence; and, conversely, that the things many observers find problematic and opaque about High Northern governance may best be explained by the region’s ‘peripheral’ nature.

The first of these points is relatively easy to prove since there are, realistically, no rival models of multilateral governance being offered from the North American or the Russian side. No European Arctic player has seriously thought about joining NAFTA, though the option might be aired in the event of Greenland’s independence. Russia has not managed, or even tried, to draw any neighbour north of Belarus into its own economic (EurAsEC [42]) or military (CSTO[43]) cooperation structures. The Pacific/Arctic gateway through the Bering Strait lacks high-level inter-governmental organizations, although cooperation networks exist for local coastguards and for fisheries. The one non–European institutional factor that plays a key role in European Arctic governance [44] is, in fact, the United Nations through its Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and its agency competent for shipping matters, the International Maritime Organization (IMO).[45] To a degree highly untypical of Europe as a whole,[46] UNCLOS sets the basic international-legal framework for Arctic coexistence and conflict avoidance, including the EEZ system that defines ownership of sea-bed/marine resources and the procedures for defining and mediating new territorial claims. In the absence of a specific shipping organization for the Arctic, the IMO has taken on the task of developing a polar shipping code, designed to set universal standards for safety and responsible environmental practice. Working from proposals first developed in the Arctic Council, the IMO was in autumn 2014 approaching the point of being able to issue a legally binding draft for signature. [47]

In at least two other ways, however, Europe’s Northern frontier does fit into the broader pattern of presence and activity by home-grown European institutions in peripheral zones. The first is the role of NATO, about which confusingly different statements are sometimes heard. Russia’s position is simply that ‘there is no place for NATO’ anywhere in the Arctic.[48] In recent years Canada has stood against the creation of a formal or explicit Arctic policy for NATO, arguing that the Arctic powers can manage the area well, and peacefully, on their own. Even the smaller members of NATO in the area, such as Iceland and Norway, have taken pains since they joined the Alliance to restrict the more visible forms of NATO presence and action in their neighbourhood: they, and Denmark, do not accept any stationing of or visits by nuclear objects in peacetime, while Denmark and Norway also refuse permanent basing by foreign forces.[49] Yet at the same time, these Nordic nations attach great importance to NATO’s collective guarantees (including the promise of US aid and reinforcement) for their entire territories and territorial waters, including the most northerly ones. NATO’s founding Treaty[50] defines no northern cut-off point for NATO’s responsibility and actions, as it does in the south. In fact, the US nuclear arsenal has flight-paths across the top of the globe and US, British and French nuclear submarines have felt free to patrol anywhere under the polar ice. Since 2010 when NATO’s new Strategic Concept placed a renewed emphasis on ‘core tasks’ including territorial defence for vulnerable Allies,[51] a new round of discussion has begun on contingency plans for traditional war scenarios in the North, as in other parts of Europe – and has gained further impetus from the events of 2014 in Ukraine.

The key to these seeming contradictions is to recognize that in most parts of its periphery (earlier often called its ‘flanks’), NATO chooses to work through ‘over-the-horizon’ deterrence combined with rapid reaction options, rather than by permanent troop stationing or multilaterally-manned frontier defences. Even during the Cold War, the defence needs of Portugal and Turkey as well as Norway were covered by an ‘ACE Mobile Force’ concept, occasional reinforcement exercises, and a light-basing pattern providing hubs for US and other air forces (but no ground combat forces or permanent naval stationing). The hub for the northern region was at Keflavik in Iceland and was unilaterally closed by the US in 2006 when the need for it was no longer deemed pressing, though similar bases remain at Lajes in the (Portuguese) Azores and Inçirlik in Turkey. Strikingly, when Central European states joined NATO in 1997 and 2004, it was agreed not to station any multilateral forces (or place nuclear objects) in peace-time on their territory either, though some of them had strategically sensitive borders with or close to Russia. NATO’s Cardiff Summit in September 2014[52] decided to arrange a ‘rolling’ troop presence and more frequent exercises along this Eastern periphery, for reassurance to the Baltic States and others, but the Alliance is still not contemplating anything remotely like the permanent force concentrations along the inner-German border in the Cold War.

In short, NATO has gambled from the start on being able to provide deterrent cover, and effective ad hoc protection, for its peripheries without the ostentatious and possibly provocative ‘flag-waving’ of a permanent presence and constant exercises. Such solutions have often been welcomed by local states – certainly in the north – as well as by larger Allies who would have paid the price. The point here is not whether NATO’s calculations are reliable or not, which could certainly be questioned, or whether the whole Alliance would actually back up one of its Arctic members who came under fire.[53] The argument is simply that the defence cover of the European High North conforms, in institutional terms, to a model shared with other European peripheries, and one in which the Euro-Atlantic institution of NATO – rather than some custom-made ‘Arctic defence’ regime – holds a central place.

Along other frontiers where the typically European institutional complex comes up against less organized or differently organized regions, ‘sub-regional’ groupings have played a significant, growing, and generally positive role since the late Cold War period. [54] Their motivation is precisely to reach out across borders to states that are not yet, or may never be, integrated; that may have different political values, and even opposing security interests; but with whom some common, practical, ‘neighbourhood’ interests can still be identified. The visible work of these groups commonly focuses on economic (especially transport and infrastructure) development, environment protection, health and education, and ‘softer’ types of security cooperation such as border control including anti-smuggling, anti- human trafficking and anti-crime work, radiation safety, and the handling of civil emergencies. They bypass ‘hard’ military and strategic issues, and also ‘hard’ economics in the sense that they do not attempt to manage private business, currencies or trade relations, but – at most – to work on security- or norm-related aspects of the regulatory environment. These limitations on their scope, together with the fact that they are commonly under-institutionalized with limited funds and weak or absent secretariats, make it easy to view them as ‘weak’ institutions, and that is fair enough when they are compared with either NATO or the EU. But it is equally possible to argue that NATO and the EU would have a much harder time without these groups: not just because they share the burden of some lower-level tasks in ‘subsidiarity’ fashion, but because their secondary ‘process effects’ ease and stabilize local relationships, making formal dividing lines less sharp and frontier conflicts less likely.[55]

Europe’s Northern frontier is the home of one of Europe’s longer-standing neighbourhood groups, the Nordic Cooperation of the five Nordic states, which dates back to the 1950s and has a parliamentary Nordic Council and a Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) as its main vehicles. [56] While hardly needing to pre-empt conflict within the group, Nordic inter-governmental cooperation does help to soften distinctions between the North’s EU and non-EU, NATO and non-NATO states. It now includes many activities with explicit security goals, both inward-looking – such as the ‘Haga’ cooperation on handling civil emergencies[57] – and outward-looking, such as the NORDEFCO defence cooperation network which includes collaboration on peace missions abroad.[58] In recent years both the Nordic Council and NCM have regularly addressed Arctic issues, often producing a common Nordic line on matters discussed in larger groups, and a series of joint Nordic programmes have been funded for Arctic-related research.[59] Further, Iceland and the two non-sovereign nations of Greenland and the Faroe Islands have intensified their local ‘West Nordic’ cooperation, raising it to the level of concerted government action as well as parliamentary dialogue, and agreeing to prepare a joint Arctic strategy. [60]

Thanks partly to Nordic initiatives and mutual support, the Northern periphery also became one of the earliest post-Cold War laboratories for creating more diverse and ‘inclusive’ sub-regional groupings. The Council of Baltic Sea States, including Russia, Poland and Germany as well as the Nordic and Baltic states, was launched in 1992 and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council (BEAC) – basically a Norwegian-Russian invention – in 1993. The latter covers the provinces of Norway, Russia, Sweden and Finland that lie wholly or partly above the Arctic Circle, and has mechanisms for developing common policies and projects at ministerial, official, and provincial level (the leaders of provinces meet in the Barents Regional Council), as well as further specialized sub-groups. It is generally seen as a successful venture which over its first 20 years[61] has not only improved the living conditions of High North dwellers and eased cross-border cooperation between them, but also helped to ensure a calm and peaceful atmosphere along Russia’s border with NATO in Norway. Although the Barents cooperation does not extend to matters at sea, it is thought to have helped create the atmosphere in which Russia and Norway were finally able to agree on a disputed stretch of their maritime border in 2007. [62]

When the Arctic Council (AC) took its present institutional form in 1996, led by an inter-governmental Council of Canada, the USA, Russia and the five Nordic states (with six indigenous peoples’ groups also at the table), it could most straightforwardly be seen as a continuation of the pan-Arctic cooperation for environmental and scientific goals that had brought the same players together since the mid-Cold War period. From that heritage the AC drew its six scientific working groups, which still provide its main substructure alongside shorter-term working parties. [63] This feature sets the AC aside from Europe-based sub-regional structures, as do its much larger geographical purview and non-European members. In all other respects, however – and above all in the features that observers most often find ‘weak’ and confusing – the neighbourhood grouping for the Arctic closely resembles those overlapping with it in the northern segment of Europe. [64] Like them it is very lightly institutionalized, with a small (recently created) central secretariat; few funds to cover anything more than its own staff; and much reliance on a rotating chairmanship. Like them it avoids discussing ‘hard’ defence – aside from military support for civil tasks like search and rescue – and thereby seeks to compartmentalize, ‘de-securitize’ [65] and work around the toughest issues dividing its members. Like them it lacks ownership or control over the main economic dynamics of its region, working instead on developing regulatory norms that it transmits to member nations or other institutions for enactment – such as the IMO has supplied for the polar shipping code – for want of any legislative competence of its own.

Such typical features of sub-regional governance may well be described as weaknesses when compared with the way the EU and NATO operate. On the other hand, not only would the multi-institutional complex be the poorer (and probably less stable) without them – as argued above – but any attempt to ‘strengthen’ the AC and other neighbourhood groupings in ways that ran counter to their peculiar governance styles would almost certainly be counter-productive. They could too easily lose the trust of their members, and whatever good will they enjoy abroad, by failing in the face of essentially insoluble problems. Higher stakes and higher drama would increase the risk of political disruption, whereas up to now one of the core merits of these groups has been their ability to quietly maintain dialogue with Russia during periods of crisis and sanctions. It is far from clear that NATO and the EU – which both have stronger de facto roles in the Arctic than meet the eye (see also next section) – would welcome such competition in any case.

As things stand, the governance system of Europe’s High North and the Atlantic gateway carries up into the Arctic a typically European web of parallel and concentric institutions, even more complex when specialized groups like fisheries commissions[66] are included. There are of course gaps and overlaps, leaving some essential issues to be managed – for good or ill – by national jurisdictions and old-fashioned diplomacy. It is a messy system, but one that has so far allowed a smoother, more consistent build-up of cooperation across strategic frontiers than would easily be found at any other European periphery, or in other segments of the Arctic. Messiness also has the merit of leaving room for evolution and adaptation in several different directions, as the still unpredictable course of Arctic development unfolds. It is time now to add the final element to the mix by looking at the role of the European Union.