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Arctic Yearbook 2013
New Possibilities for the Northern Peripheral Regions in the Post-Cold War Era
my analysis the periphery is the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) and especially the frontier
regions in this area. A ‗periphery‘ is of course a complicated concept. But certainly a geographical
periphery
somewhere
requires
the
geographical
center
elsewhere. Periphery is about contrast. As Karl W.
Deutsch wrote ―[w]ithin each center country there is again a center region, usually the capital city
and the regions where the most advanced industries are located, and the periphery, mostly rural,
where the less technically developed activities and the poorer and less skilled people are found‖
(Deutsch, 1988: 300–301). Peter Taylor and Colin Flint take into account the relationship between
boundaries and capitals in the modern state-centric international system. For them:
both boundaries and capitals come to be the two locations where the state could be seen
to impinge directly on the landscape. Border landscapes with customs houses and
associated controls, and varieties of defensive structures, have become distinctive locations
in the modern world. Similarly, capitals cities have come to represent their states
symbolically with a variety of distinctive grand architectures. In boundaries and capitals, we
have the two most explicit products of the inter-state system (Taylor & Flint, 2000: 161).
The Transition in the International System
In the northern frontier regions, the post-Cold War transitions are evident foremost in the
phenomenon of space. The post-Cold War structure of the international system for the northern
space is not a hierarchic relationship between (distant) peripheries and a (close to power) centre.
Also the main symbols for that hierarchical structure – the borders of the states – are changing. In
my analysis, the structural factors that are moving the post-Cold War international system into the
European North are the end of the Cold War, globalization and the European Union. The transition
factors are embedded in the other post-Cold War ‗transition discourses‘ as the ‗changing role of the
states‘ discourse‘ and the new post-Cold War security threats discourse‘.
The transition of the international system is a disconnection of the factors that have constituted the
modern international system before the end of the Cold War. The factors characterising the modern
international system were the primary position of the two superpowers in world politics, colonialism,
and the economic integration of Europe. These factors represent a modern geopolitical imagination
that has produced a peripheral perception of northern Finland‘s frontier regions. The regions in the
European North have been the peripheries of the states (Sweden, Finland, Norway and
Russia/Soviet Union) and of the whole modern international system. The changes in the structure
of the international system constitute possibilities for new actors and enable new kinds of political
acts and speech in the world, including the European North. Possibilities for ‗politics beyond states‘
are emerging. The local and regional actors are not simple consequences and objects of the state
actors, but rather they now shape both political and economic living environments of their own and
influence the development of the international system, including actors like the European Union.
The transition can be summarized as follows: