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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Finger
Business-Government Relations
In this chapter I use the Arctic as a case in point so as to understand whether governments, or other
actors for that matter, can slow down fossil fuel exploitation. The key, in my opinion, to answering
this question is the way nation-states (governments) and TNCs (business) relate to each other, in the
Arctic and elsewhere. Actually it seems to me that, in the Arctic, this relationship can be observed in
its purest form.
Evolving Business-Government Relations
As said above, TNCs emerged most markedly during the era of globalization. Of course, there were
some companies that preceded even the Industrial Revolution, such as the East India Company. In
terms of business-government relations, these companies are particularly interesting as they
illustrate, just as is the case today, how colonization and modernization go hand in hand. Yet, one
can argue that these companies are merely predecessors of what happened during industrial
development.
During the era of
industrial development
, firms in the West generally grow ―in the shadow of‖ the
nation-state, often with the active support of the nation-state, which creates the necessary favorable
conditions for them. In many industries, the military also plays an active role, as it is not uncommon
that nation-states develop entire industries (e.g., the nuclear industry) based on an originally military
agenda (Pringle & Spigelman, 1981). This quite symbiotic relationship between governments and
firms in the West (and even more so in the East) during the industrial development era became
temporarily obscured towards the end of the Cold War, inspired as it was by an ideological (actually
Cold-War driven, yet artificial) conflict between business and government. Yet, in retrospect, this
conflict appears to be misguided, as both governments and firms agree on the fundamentals, i.e.,
industrial development and economic growth. The disagreement actually pertains to the way one
should go about furthering industrial development: should it be the firms that reinvest and, by doing
so, further industrial development, or should it be governments doing the same? Indeed, for both
government and business, industrial development is both a means and the goal. In other words, the
conflict between government and business during the industrial development era is rather artificial:
both agree that development must go on, and, in the pursuit of such industrial development, both
need each other.
When the Cold War ended, the private firms of the West were of course in much better shape than
the SOEs of the East. Therefore, during the
globalization
era, some of these private firms of the West
have now stepped out of the shadow of their respective governments and became so-called ―global
players‖ on the world stage (Bernhagen, 2007; Wilks, 2013). To recall, this stage had been prepared
for them by the governments themselves via the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and,
most importantly, the World Trade Organization, and thanks to market liberalization, free trade
agreements and all kinds of other active governmental support. But once on the world stage, the
relationship between business and governments changed from being symbiotic to becoming
predatory in nature. More precisely, TNCs now instrumentalize their own, as well as many other
governments, along with international organizations, so as to derive (short-term) business
advantages for themselves (Finger, 2013).