The Great Barents Awakening

Abstract

Norway’s foreign policy in the European Arctic during the 1990s was mainly about bringing Russia into committing collaborative networks. Bilateral cooperative arenas were developed and expanded in areas such as environmental protection, nuclear safety, and fisheries management. The hallmark of the new times was the Barents Euro-Arctic Region, which on Norwegian initiative formalized cooperation in a number of functional fields between Russia and the Nordic countries. The aim of the initiative was to counter military tension, reduce the threat to the environment, and narrow the gap in living standards between people in the Nordic countries and Russia. This chapter describes how Norwegian authorities went about this region-building project, assuming that regions can be “talked and written into existence”.