High noon in the High North?

Two books offer different scenarios for the Arctic’s new role in geopolitics.

As a boy, when Charles Emmerson first went north of the Arctic Circle, he expected the train to be filled with “the musty smell of fear, Aquavit and pipe tobacco” while charging through the sunny night to the outer reaches of civilisation to Kiruna, the last urban outpost in Sweden’s Lapland, where buildings could be moved around like furniture to accommodate the iron-ore workings.

It was not the Shangri-La of his hopes, nor did he see a bear, but he was seized with a fascination for the High North – beyond 66° 33’ 39” – of which this book is a result decades later.

And it is well timed. He is convinced that the Polar ice cap is where history is already being written.

Last month ministers of the five Arctic coastal states – Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the US – held a rather furtive meeting in Chelsea, Quebec, to discuss developments in the region, which holds an estimated 30% of the world’s unexploited gas and 13% of oil.

This was within days of a truculent speech by Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev about how climate change will provoke arguments between countries seeking access to those resources. Barack Obama, his US counterpart, has just announced the opening of vast new areas in US waters for new oil and gas drilling, half in the Arctic Ocean.

The European Commission, with some input from the European Parliament, is also drawing up an Arctic strategy to position the EU in the new geopolitics of the High North. The EU may be something of a peripheral player in the Arctic, particularly since Greenland withdrew from the European Economic Community, but the terms of its home-rule agreement with Copenhagen mean that it shares its natural resources with Denmark.

Flag planting

The event that brought the Great White Yonder to the world’s front pages took place in August 2007, when the Russians managed to place a flag 4,261 metres under water on the seabed of the North Pole in a technically brilliant project funded by Swedish financiers.

Fact File

The future history of the Arctic

By Charles Emmerson (419 pages)
The Bodley Head, 2010 (€23.99)
The scramble for the Arctic
By Richard Sale and Eugene Potapov (223 pages)
Frances Lincoln, 2010 (€19.99)

It was not, as many first thought, a Russian claim to minerals in the area, for the flag had no more validity than the American pennant on the Moon, but like that example, the Russian symbol was instantly ‘historic’.

The endeavour meant that never again will a government leader give the stammering response of US President William Howard Taft in 1909 when he was ‘presented’ with the North Pole by an American explorer: “Thanks for your interesting and generous offer. I do not know exactly what I could do with it…”

It is broadly agreed that the flag affair was overrated, but the authors of the shorter, and pessimistic, volume – “The scramble for the Arctic” – see it as a starting gun for “the world’s last colonial scramble”, one that could re-define the phrase ‘Cold War’. A chapter in Emmerson’s more nuanced assessment bills the future as “the (slow) rush for Northern resources”.

This shapes two schools of thought: firstly, the game is on and the Arctic will become a place of dispute, say ‘scrambologists’ such as Sale and Potapov, the latter a wildlife scientist.

The other view suggests that too much is made of the Arctic’s role in geopolitics; although there are possible dangerous ambiguities, especially in the Barents Sea where Russian and Norwegian interests may come into conflict, most oil and gas resources are already in national territories or are governed by the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention (or both).

Limited EU role

In either scenario the European Union will be confined to the reserve benches, chewing gum, as will China. In any case, there are overlapping skeins of bilateral arrangements covering the Arctic’s land, sea and seabed of such complexity that only madmen or lawyers would be tempted to unpick them.

However, as both these engrossing studies show, global exploration and production budgets in the Arctic have swelled once again. Canada is committed to building a High Arctic research station and has announced a new fleet of Arctic patrol ships, plus a deep-water port, and is re-equipping the Canadian rangers. With juicy consultancy contracts in prospect, long-retired Arctic drillers are being tempted back to work. Meanwhile, the North-West Passage is opening up.

Russian investments

Simultaneously, Russia is building a fleet of military, nuclear-powered icebreakers for the Arctic Basin. “Is the aim to add Arctic fuel supplies to its massive land reserves?” ask Sale and Potapov.

“The geopolitics of energy are more pronounced,” Emmerson concedes.

The fear in the 1970s was pollution. At the start of this century that has been partly replaced by the prospect of irreversible climate change. If oil and gas prices leap again, as they did in the 1980s, who knows, in a few years energy supplies may be defined by Arctic ‘methane hydrates’, of which there is an abundance.

“In Brussels, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about the Arctic,” Canada’s ambassador snapped at a recent meeting here.

Well, no excuses now. Clear some space, please, for Messrs Emmerson, Sale and Potapov.

David Haworth writes for the Irish Daily Mail.