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Arctic Yearbook 2013
New Possibilities for the Northern Peripheral Regions in the Post-Cold War Era
economic areas – like the European Union – is growing. The dominant ideologies in the modern
international system have been nationalism and – especially after the Second World War – capitalism
and communism. One aspect of state-centric nationalism has been the delineation of borders
between states and the dominance of national culture inside the state borders.
In the frontier regions of northern Finland, the transition of the international system became
tangible through the enlargement of the European Union into the area. Finland's membership in the
European Union was confirmed on 19 August 1991, after the unsuccessful coup attempt in the
Soviet Union. The coup and its failure have had a dramatic effect on Finnish policy. After Boris
Yeltsin‘s Russia had substituted the Soviet Union within world politics and the independence of the
Baltic States had been recognized, Finnish politicians considered themselves free from commitments
toward the East. Partly as a continuation of Finnish post-WWII integration politics, Finland chose
to follow Sweden and joined the European Union (Jakobson, 2003: 372). Along with the
membership the frontier regions in northern Finland connected with the inner borders of the
European Union. At the same time, globalization and the transition of the role of the state - and that
of the borders – started to increasingly affect life and politics at the borders and in the frontier
regions of Northern Finland.
The post-Cold war transitions also give more importance to the so-called ‗new‘ security threats. The
threats to security respective to European states were no longer primarily aligned with the potential
for war between major powers (e.g. the Soviet Union and the United States) or even between smaller
nations. Rather, the dangers to security were linked alongside military threats to, among other things,
environmental problems as climate change as well as social and economic insecurity (see e.g. Buzan,
1991). One of the first signals for the ―post-Cold
War change‖ in the European North was the
discussion about the threat for the northern
forests in Finland by pollution from the Kola
Peninsula in the end of 1980‘s. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union the ―new security threats
discourse‖ erupted also in the European North.
The conflict between two superpowers was not
the dominating security problem in the world and
it became possible to notice other kinds of
security threats and discourses. Since then cross
border pollution, scarcity of resources (oil, water),
terrorism, international crime, economic threats
and climate change have become embedded and
intertwined as a part of post-Cold War system
transition.
The Barents Region
The states in the Barents region are Russia,
Figure 1
Map of the Barents Region