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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Jegorova
With interdependence and globalisation trends gaining momentum, the realist approach has ceased
being the leading ideology to explain international relations. While cooperation on preserving the
Arctic environment was started on the ministerial level of the Arctic Eight in 1989, the consequent
establishment of the Arctic Council seven years later envisioned a greater role for, and ensured the
inclusion of the indigenous peoples in the decision-making process. The balance of power in the
region, crucial during the Cold War period, has now evolved into the state of strategic
interdependence as any changes in one state‘s behaviour will trigger reactions from all other parties.
Moreover, great effort is being poured into strengthening cooperation on micro- and macro-regional
matters in the Arctic: the once self-interested nation-states have arrived at the conclusion that in a
modern world a lot more can be gained by peaceful means. With growing globalisation all
economies are bound together, and although a healthy competition should never cease to exist, the
era of outright confrontation has successfully ended.
This leads us to the third and fourth levels of Hettne and Söderbaum's regionness – the
regional
society
and the
regional community
. The former notion includes a growing number of multi-level multi-
actor interactions, the emergence of a primary regional organisation that defines the region as such,
and a partial loss of sovereignty following the inclusion of a nation-state to the larger regional entity
among its criteria. The latter, on the other hand, represents an even further step towards a regional
approach: the development of a regional identity, a self-sustainable apparatus of decision-making,
and a consequent transformation of a region into a political actor; a further consolidation of a
region via the emergence of voluntary multidimensional interaction; and a following abandonment
of military means of conflict resolution as ineffective. To a certain extent these criteria resonate with
the current situation in the Arctic. Although the region has not yet reached a state of transnational
political entity, the participation of different society levels in the collaborative frameworks as well as
emerging cross-border cooperation projects is unmistakeably moving toward a more inclusive
governmental structure.
As for the fifth and final regionness level – the
regional institutionalised polity
, or
region-state
, Hettne and
Söderbaum define it as a hypothetical entity, which, although based on slightly different principles
and incentives, could potentially become an alternative to a nation-state. Currently there is no region
that would be close to reaching the state of regional institutionalised polity: even the European
Union, a voluntary multinational alliance of nation-states, has not abandoned the concepts of
sovereignty and centralisation of power.
Thus, after a thorough inspection we can reach a verdict that the Arctic is indeed a region, analysed
with both Väyrynen and Hettne and Söderbaum‘s definitions. It possesses features not only of a
physical but also of a functional region, constituted by its natural borders, and social and cultural
interaction. The Arctic also corresponds to the first four levels of regionness: regional space (fully),
regional complex (mostly in historical perspective), regional society (with an exception of nation-
states blending into a larger entity), and regional community (partially, with all criteria fulfilled only
to some point, and developing further). With these characteristics in mind, we can analyse the Arctic
as a fairly developed region, composed of the eight states (mostly their northernmost parts) in direct
proximity to the Arctic Ocean with relatively strong social and political ties and even stronger