Abstract
Over the last ten years, the European Union (EU) has felt an Arctic allure, with its various institutions attempting to formulate a coherent policy approach for its ‘Northern Neighbourhood.’ However, the EU’s decade-long involvement in the Arctic can be characterized by ambivalence. On the one hand, the Union has an obvious presence in the north in terms of geography, legal competence, market access or its environmental footprint and contribution to Arctic science. On the other hand, three factors have made the EU’s efforts to become constructively involved in the Arctic both controversial and complex. These factors are its lack of direct access to the Arctic Ocean, its slightly paternalistic Arctic policy statements portraying the EU as part of the ‘solution’ to the region’s challenges without sufficiently taking into considerations Arctic sensitivities, and the sustained difficulty to find a convincing Arctic narrative that would attract broader attention throughout the Member States. This chapter will go to the bottom of the EU’s decade-long Arctic endeavour, analysing the Union’s search to find and understand its very own Arcticness.
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Notes
- 1.
For the purposes of this chapter, we define ‘Arcticness’ as the EU’s decade-long endeavour to internally determine its Arctic identity, as well as externally justifying its regional presence as a stakeholder mostly located outside the Arctic.
- 2.
After attending several AC ministerial meetings as ad hoc observer, the European Commission officially applied, on behalf of the EU, for AC observer status in December 2008. However, predominantly due to (now solved) Canadian and (still existing) Russian concerns, official observer status has not yet been granted to the EU (Raspotnik 2018: 91–92). However, the EU has obtained de facto observer status and the ‘right to attend all AC meetings (…) without having to receive an invitation each time’ (Garcés de los Fayos 2015: 2).
- 3.
The EU has pulled competences from its Member States and manages some policy areas at the supranational level. In some domains, the EU has exclusive competences, such as international trade or the conservation of living marine resources (e.g. allocating fishing quotas). In other areas, the EU shares competences with its Member States, for example regarding environment, energy, international transport, and European transport networks. If we consider part of EU policies operating in Northern Fennoscandia to constitute elements of the EU’s Arctic policy, then virtually all policy domains mentioned above may be one way or another Arctic-relevant.
- 4.
Fennoscandia means Finland, Norway and Sweden, with a different geographical scope than Nordic or Scandinavian states. The term may also be related to the geological formation of the Fennoscandian Shield, which also includes Russian Karelia, the Murmansk region and the Kola Peninsula.
- 5.
For example, Directive 2006/21/EC on the management of waste from the extractive industries and Directive 99/31EC; Directive 2000/60/EC of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy (extended later to the EEA) and Directive 2006/118/EC of 12 December 2006 on the protection of groundwater against pollution and deterioration; Council Directive 92/91/EEC of 3 November 1992 concerning the minimum requirements for improving the safety and health protection of workers in the mineral-extracting industries through drilling; Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006 of 18 December 2006 concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH).
- 6.
EU space programmes and the EU’s support for initiatives such as the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System or Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks (SAON) are important for Arctic observation and monitoring.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
To a certain extent this limitation aspect also holds true for the EU’s market power as only Norway, in terms of oil and gas, and Greenland and Iceland, as regards fisheries, are primarily dependent on the EU market.
- 11.
Policy officer, DG Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, European Commission, interview conducted in Brussels on 4 September 2012.
- 12.
It is important to note that the EU’s multidimensional Arctic presence also gives an indication of the diverse meaning of both the ‘EU in the Arctic’, as well as ‘the EU’ as an international actor. Accordingly, ‘the EU’ can not only signify, inter alia, a strong market and economy community, a source of regulations, a combination of its three main institutional bodies, but also the grouping of its Member States.
- 13.
Between 1999 and 2006, the ND was an EU umbrella policy aimed at facilitating synergies between different EU policies and instruments applicable to cooperation in Northern Europe. From 2006 onwards, the ND was reformulated as a joint policy between the EU, Iceland, Norway and Russia, with common budget and objectives, implemented via four sectoral partnerships.
- 14.
The ND’s Arctic window turned out to mean not much more that Greenland, Iceland and the northernmost Norwegian regions became part of the ND. Rather than a pillar of the EU’s Arctic policy, the ND itself remains an element of a broader framework established or co-created by the EU to maintain cooperative cross-border relations with Russia in northern Europe.
- 15.
By adopting its Regulation 1007/2009, the EU banned seal products, imported for commercial purposes from its internal market. This led to controversial legal and political debate in Arctic international circles, especially with regard to the EU’s broader support of Arctic indigenous issues, eventually negatively affecting the EU’s application for AC observer status (Sellheim 2015; Wegge 2013).
- 16.
The scope of these agreements was in fact adjusted so that Finland and Sweden could be parties by making aeronautical search and rescue an element of SAR Agreement and including the Gulf of Bothnia into the oil spills agreement.
- 17.
Although even in these cases, the Arctic states managed to play a key role or acted as gate keepers: it was the five Arctic coastal states that invited other actors to the CAO negotiations, and it was the AC’s AMSA report of that served as one of the triggers for the efforts within the International Maritime Organization to make the Polar shipping guidelines into a mandatory set of standards.
- 18.
Authors’ observation of meetings related to the EU Arctic policy and regional development: Brussels, September 2014; Brussels, May 2016; Luosto, Finland, May 2016; Brussels, November 2017; Brussels, November 2018.
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Raspotnik, A., Stępień, A. (2020). The European Union and the Arctic: A Decade into Finding Its Arcticness. In: Weber, J. (eds) Handbook on Geopolitics and Security in the Arctic. Frontiers in International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45005-2_8
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