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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Arctic Regionalism in Theory & Practice
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) introduced additional layers of inter-
state governance by
providing to its members mutual benefits such as collective security,
development assistance or economic integration.
In the world‘s northernmost periphery, however,
an ‗icy curtain‘ persisted after the Iron Curtain had long fallen and made the Arctic little more than a
subsidiary arena for regional and IR studies. Having said that, since the late 1980s the Arctic has
evolved at impressive speed as a political region, in which various heterogeneous actors, first and
foremost the
Arctic Eight
(Denmark/Greenland, Norway, Canada, the USA, Russia, Finland, Sweden
and Iceland), but also non-governmental stakeholders collaborate to effectively deal with a region in
a state of flux. With the ice sheet collapsing swiftly as an effect of accelerated global warming, Arctic
governance becomes ever more important in world politics as long-covered social, environmental,
economic and political interdependencies are more and more brought to light. Those challenges
evoke collective regional action in order to address, for instance, environmental degradation,
sustainable development, pollution control, standardization of maritime traffic, resource extraction
and trade regulations as well as aspects of human, national and international security.
While the regional dimension of the Arctic as an environmental security complex has recently been
stressed (Exner-
Pirot, 2013), it is the purpose of this chapter to argue for Arctic regionalism in a
broader theoretical and historical
perspective. The argument elaborated here is that the Arctic has
moved beyond sheer inter-state cooperation and towards organisational and procedural patterns of
regional integration. More
specifically, in this analysis the Arctic Council (AC) of the 21
st
Century is
not treated as the Arctic states‘ devoted servant any more, but is assumed to possess individual
agency and rich instruments to shape regional governance and state behaviour. To place the Far
North in the regionalism debate, the following section develops a typology and provides a brief
description of central propositions and
concepts of the
New Regionalism
approach (NRA). Further,
the theoretical part dwells on the maritime geography of the Arctic and how this alters the study of
circumpolar regionalism. Arctic regionness will then be put to the test and traced historically.
Theorising Regionalism: A Very Brief Research Synthesis
The finding that the Arctic constitutes a distinct political region is not entirely new to the polar
studies
community (see Griffiths, 1988; Baerenholdt, 1997; Keskitalo, 2004; Exner-Pirot, 2013).
Already two and a half decades ago, Franklyn Griffit
hs formulated a ‗template‘ to codify the degree
of
regionality
in the Far North. He was, to the author‘s knowledge, the first to make the case for
Arctic regionalism along three possible classifications, a
minimal region
marked in principle by
unilateral action, a
coordinate region
with bilateral and multilateral accords and an
integration
region
where
states delegate sovereignty to a regional organization (Griffiths, 1988). Because a few multilateral
initiatives to target hazardous waste prevention and disposal, indigenous interests and nuclear
disarmament were already in place in the Cold War era, Griffiths classified the Arctic as in the state
of ―transition from minimum to coordinate political regionality‖ (ibid: 10), but at the same time
ruled out that the Arctic is ―soon likely to acquire the characteristics of an integration region‖
(ibid: 4).