Chapter 1
Shifting Ground: Competing Policy Narratives and the Future of the Arctic
Oran R. Young
Policy narratives are interpretive frameworks that both analysts and practitioners develop and use to facilitate thinking in an orderly and coherent fashion about issues arising in policy arenas. Because they are social constructs, the core elements of such narratives are non-falsifiable. Nevertheless, policy narratives exercise great influence not only during processes of agenda formation in which they help to identify emerging issues and to frame them for consideration in policy arenas but also, and more specifically, in efforts to assess the pros and cons of alternative ways to address those issues that move to the top of the agenda. Sometimes, a single appealing narrative comes to dominate an issue domain so that there is broad agreement regarding ways to think about specific issues arising within that domain. At other times, by contrast, alternative narratives compete with one another for the attention of those active in policy arenas. In such cases, debates about the suitability of different narratives often play roles that are more important as determinants of agreement and disagreement among policymakers than differences regarding matters of fact.
Policy narratives are not simply products of unbiased efforts to explain or predict the course of events in the realm of public affairs. They reflect the outlooks of those who create and deploy them: interests on the part of policymakers and representatives of nonstate actors and intellectual commitments on the part of scholars and commentators. This means that efforts to shape prevailing policy narratives and debates about the relative merits of using different narratives to interpret real-world developments are political in nature. Both practitioners and analysts devise and deploy narratives that reflect their own mindsets and cast their preferred interpretations of reality in a favorable light. But this does not detract from the significance of policy narratives. On the contrary, it makes it easy to understand why debates about the suitability of different narratives are often protracted and can spark intense controversy in specific settings.
In this chapter, I apply these observations about policy narratives to the recent history of the Arctic to explain both the remarkable rise of cooperative initiatives in the region in the aftermath of the Cold War and the growth of conflicting perspectives on Arctic issues in recent years, a development that makes it increasingly difficult to arrive at mutually agreeable responses to prominent Arctic issues arising on policy agendas today. Coming into focus initially toward the end of the 1980s, what I will call the Arctic zone of peace narrative provided the conceptual foundation for a series of cooperative measures that the Arctic states launched during the 1990s. Foremost among these initiatives were the adoption of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy in 1991 and the establishment of the Arctic Council in 1996, along with a series of activities carried out under the auspices of the council in the 2000s (e.g. the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment completed in 2004, the Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment completed in 2009).
As the 2000s gave way to the 2010s, however, consensus regarding the Arctic zone of peace narrative began to fray, a process that has accelerated over the last few years. What is striking in this regard is that no single new narrative has arisen to replace the original Arctic zone of peace narrative as a dominant interpretive framework. While many continue to adhere to the principal tenets of this narrative to guide their actions, three alternative frameworks have emerged and now compete for the attention of policymakers. In this chapter, I will call these competitors the global climate emergency narrative, the energy from the North narrative, and the Arctic power politics narrative. It remains to be seen how the competition among these narratives will play out during the coming years. But there is no doubt in my judgment that the outcome will have profound consequences for the course of Arctic international relations and, more generally, for the place of the Arctic in the overarching global order during the coming years.
I develop this line of thinking in several steps.1 I start with a brief account of the content of the Arctic zone of peace narrative together with a commentary on its impact on policymaking, before turning to the erosion of consensus regarding this narrative and the emergence of the three competing narratives. I then direct attention to the future, offering some reflections on the likely course of developments during the 2020s and beyond with regard to the rise and fall of interpretive frameworks dealing with Arctic affairs and what this will mean for those concerned not only with the future of the region itself but also with broader questions regarding the place of the Arctic in the global order.
The Arctic Zone of Peace Narrative
There is broad agreement that a speech Mikhail Gorbachev delivered on October 1, 1987 in Murmansk in which he called for treating the Arctic as a “zone of peace” and proposed cooperative initiatives dealing with a range of concerns including arms control, commercial shipping, environmental protection, and scientific research provided the first high-level public expression of a policy narrative that had been percolating among analysts and practitioners interested in the Arctic starting in the mid-1980s.2 Propelled by a desire to celebrate the end of the Cold War and subsequently by the erosion of the bipolar order brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the closing days of 1991, international cooperation in the Arctic seemed both appealing to the Arctic states themselves and lacking in global consequences that would engage the interests of the rest of international society.3 Under these circumstances, the vision of the Arctic as a distinctive “zone of peace” took root promptly and led in short order to the creation of the International Arctic Science Committee in 1990 and the adoption of the Rovaniemi Declaration establishing the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy in 1991.
As it crystalized during the period 1987–1991, the Arctic zone of peace narrative acquired a set of interlocking tenets.4 First and foremost is the premise that the circumpolar Arctic is a distinctive region in international society with a policy agenda of its own. The defining features of this agenda are a common commitment to the pursuit of environmental protection and a broader desire to promote sustainable development in the circumpolar North. Second, the Arctic states themselves are the primary players in the Arctic arena; they can and should take the lead in addressing Arctic issues without regard to the preferences of outsiders. Third, the perspectives of the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic who have lived in the far North for centuries and who rightly regard the Arctic as their homeland deserve special consideration. Above all, the Arctic is not a vacuum with regard to the existence and operation of effective governance systems. Unlike Antarctica in the period prior to the conclusion of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the terrestrial portions of the Arctic lie securely within the jurisdiction of the Arctic states. The marine portions of the region are subject to the prevailing law of the sea, as articulated in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and a collection of associated arrangements. The Arctic states are willing to work cooperatively within this framework and are prepared to take the lead in establishing any supplemental arrangements needed to facilitate collaboration regarding issues of environmental protection and sustainable development in the region.5
The validity of these tenets was not beyond doubt.6 Even in the late 1980s, many of the Arctic’s environmental challenges (e.g. the impacts of radioactive contaminants, persistent organic pollutants, stratospheric ozone depletion) were non-Arctic in origin. The identity of the members of the set of Arctic states was subject to disagreement between those emphasizing the primacy of the five Arctic Ocean coastal states (the A5) and those advocating a broader perspective joining Finland, Iceland, and Sweden to the A5 producing the now familiar configuration of the A8. American policymakers were skeptical about the very idea of treating the Arctic as a distinctive region, especially as the United States emerged as the sole remaining superpower concerned with the need to maintain a global profile.7 Even the effort