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Assessments, models and internationalpolitics of the Arctic: why the “NewNorth” narrative includes only bomber,polar bear, oil, and gas deposit models,and no original parts or an assemblymanualJustiina M.I. Dahlaa Department of Social and Political Sciences, European UniversityInstitute, Via dei Roccettini 9, I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole(FI), ItalyPublished online: 17 Jun 2015.

To cite this article: Justiina M.I. Dahl (2015) Assessments, models and international politicsof the Arctic: why the “New North” narrative includes only bomber, polar bear, oil, and gasdeposit models, and no original parts or an assembly manual, The Polar Journal, 5:1, 35-58, DOI:10.1080/2154896X.2015.1025491

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Assessments, models and international politics of the Arctic: whythe “New North” narrative includes only bomber, polar bear, oil,and gas deposit models, and no original parts or an assemblymanual

Justiina M.I. Dahl*

Department of Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute, Via deiRoccettini 9, I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy

With the advancement of global climate change, a special “New North” narrativehas gained popularity as the starting point in studies that make assertions overthe future role of the Arctic in the international political universe. This articleillustrates how this narrative consists of the three more general claims; first, thatby looking at the Arctic today, we will be able to tell something central aboutthe conditions of the international society tomorrow; second, that with theadvancement of global climate change, we will witness the emergence of a new,but yet a very traditional, geopolitical heartland in the melting Arctic; and third,that there is something explicitly novel about the state-supported plans to appro-priate the Arctic in the twenty-first century. By contextualizing each of the threeclaims into the more general socio-technical fabric they are embedded, the articledemonstrates how behind each of the three claims there are a series of problem-atic acts of black boxing of the complexities in the scientific, material and his-torical accounts of activities in the Arctic that make them appear reasonable. Asa result of these acts, any active powers of resistance by non-human elementsare silenced, as well as historical accounts rationalized to benefit the interests ofpresent actors. This is exemplified to be disadvantageous for political analysisand policy-making because in the process the inhabitants of the Arctic end upliving a kind of a laboratory life for the benefit of someone else, and the acciden-tal origins of human-induced global climate change are denied. The article con-cludes by proposing an additional focus for social and political analysis of theArctic that would better enable making the interplay of science, technology andpolitics in decision and policy-making more transparent.

Keywords: history of Arctic politics; international relations; interdisciplinaryresearch; sociology of science; governance

Introduction

The twenty-first century has witnessed a boom in the interest of the non-polar worldto the Arctic. Unlike the previous time, the North gained an increased interest fromsouthern capitals at the end of the Cold War, this time it is not the human habitats orthe military material of the region that have gained or claimed the central stage ofglobal attention. International headlines have rather been made by a group of

*Email: justiina.dahl@eui.eu

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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specific non-human elements. These inanimate objects include the multi-year sea icecover on the Arctic Ocean1; the titanium flag that was planted on the North Pole in20092; as well as oil and gas deposits, especially in the Russian Arctic.3 Theunquestionable king of the new non-human streamline polar imaginary, however, isthe polar bear. In the past five years, the polar bear and the concern for its habitathave been translated into the globally spread iconic language of human- andmachine-made products, from Coca Cola cans, to children’s books, energy savinggadgets, water bottles and photographs printed in newspaper articles and dustcoversof popular science books. The sheer volume of this machine-made polar matter, thenew material polar vocabulary of the globalized world of the twenty-first century, isimpressive. The industrially produced polar material is, however, not representativeof the state of scientific knowledge of the materiality of the actual geographicArctic.

In comparison with more accessible and densely inhabited parts of the globe, thenorthern circumpolar region is still largely unknown.4 This relatively poor state ofpolar knowledge is highlighted by, for example, the 2009 Arctic Marine ShippingAssessment (AMSA), where the authors articulate how, “the Arctic Ocean is theleast sampled of the world’s oceans and many areas remain where few, if any,soundings have been recorded”.5 The lack of basic information of the Arctic is,moreover, not only over basic oceanographic features. It also includes lack ofcumulative data for the modelling of the direction and behaviour of the rapidlychanging global climate. This gap and what it means not only in a regional but glo-bal scale is captured in a very encompassing way in the Arctic Climate Issues 2011:Changes in Arctic Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost – Report (SWIPA):

There remains a great deal of uncertainty about what will happen in the Arctic andhow this will affect the rest of the world. We know changes are happening that havenever been seen before. But we do not know what the ultimate effects or impacts ofthese changes will be, or exactly how fast changes will occur.6

When contrasted with the above-mentioned multidisciplinary assessments over thephysical conditions in the Arctic it seems that Sir David Attenborough was not com-pletely out of line when he characterized the polar regions “as alien as another pla-net” in the introduction to the 2011 released BBC Nature Documentary, the FrozenPlanet.7 The main problem of this article is not the discrepancy between the volumesof industrial and scientific representations of the Arctic, but how it contributes to theone between the horizons of expectation for what is deemed feasible, acceptable and

1Charles K. Ebinger and Evie Zambetakis, “The Geopolitics of Arctic Melt,” InternationalAffairs 85, no. 6 (March 2009): 1468–2346.2Klaus Dodds, “Flag Planting and Finger Pointing: The Law of the Sea, the Arctic and thePolitical Geographies of the Outer Continental Shelf,” Political Geography 29, no. 2 (2010):63–73.3Nikolaj Petersen, “The Arctic as a New Arena for Danish Foreign Policy: The Ilulissat Ini-tiative and Its Implications,” in Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook 2009 (Copenhagen: DanishInstitute for International Studies, 2009), 42–3.4Charles Emmerson, Glada Lahn, and Lloyd’s (Firm), Arctic Opening Opportunity and Riskin the High North (London: Lloyd’s, 2012).5Lawson W. Brigham and Ben Ellis, eds., Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009 Report(Akureyri: Arctic Council, PAME, Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment, 2009), 16.6AMAP, Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic: SWIPA 2011, Executive Summary (Oslo:AMAP, 2011), 94.7“To the Ends of the Earth,” The Frozen Planet (BBC One, 2011).

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reasonable in the Arctic in the multidisciplinary natural and technical sciences, withthose in a special strand of the social and political ones. For this article, I have con-ceptualized this strand of social and political analysis as being constitutive to aspecific generative sort of “New North” narrative.

The “New North” narrative is a generative sort of narrative as it advocates forthe taking of specific kind of actions by making claims over the future role of theArctic in the international political universe. The meaning it gives to specific physi-cal phenomena in the process can be broken down into three general claims.8 Thefirst of the three claims, or in terms of narrative analysis, elements, of the “NewNorth” narrative is the claim that by looking at the Arctic today, we will be able totell something central about the conditions of the international society tomorrow.The second one is the assumption that with the advancement of the global climatechange, we will witness the emergence of a new, but yet a very traditional, geopo-litical heartland in the melting Arctic. The third claim is the assertion that there issomething explicitly novel about the state-supported plans to appropriate the Arcticin the twenty-first century. The texts used as primary research material in this articleinclude one, two or all three of these claims. I have analysed them with a combina-tion of content analysis, deconstructive and critical hermeneutical methods as exam-ples of specific intellectual operations through which not only the social but also thematerial world appears to us in the way it does.9 The combination of methods usedmeans that the intellectual operations and the “deep-structures” that maintain themare in analysis identified as it were, “backwards” from the individual elements thatconstitute the “New North” narrative.

The article proceeds by first giving an overview of how the “deep-structures” ofthe global society of states have been analysed in the Arctic context previously.Then, it moves into a more in-depth contextual analysis of the third element of the“New North” narrative. The next step from this historical overview of some, in hind-sight, failed past state-supported attempts to appropriate the Arctic, is the contextual-ization of the second, geopolitical, element of the narrative with the previous timethe Arctic was raised to a similar position in International Relations (IR). Then, thefuture-oriented element of the narrative is contextualized, and three processes ofmaintaining specific deep-structures of the global political universe intact identified.These are the Realist-Liberalist paradigm of IR, and the structural ontology it baseson; the denial of history of things; and what Bruno Latour has elsewhere called the“Constitution of the Modern”. Finally, the kinds of puzzles for world politics the ele-ments of the “New North” narrative allow are illustrated to be especially problematicas they do not adequately correspond to the array of new global problems of thetwenty-first century. The article concludes not by proposing to have demolished thedeep-structures through deconstructing them in a text-based narrative contentanalysis, but by proposing an additional focus in IR analysis of the Arctic for mak-ing the interplay of science, technology and politics in decision and policy-makingmore visible.

8Maarten A. Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization andthe Policy Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 54, 56, 59.9Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia the Structure of International Legal Argument(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6–7; Klaus Krippendorff, Content Analysis:An Introduction to Its Methodology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 341–2; Stanley E.Porter, Hermeneutics: An Introduction to Interpretive Theory (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.Eerdmans, 2011), 131–53.

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What is this thing called “the Arctic”?

One of the first questions anyone who studies or takes part in the politics of the Arc-tic will come across is: “What exactly is the Arctic?” An acceptable response couldinclude any of the following demarcations: the region constituted of Alaska, Iceland,Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the northern areas of Russia, Finland, Sweden,Norway and Canada10; the circumpolar region meaning the region surrounding theNorth Pole11; the area north of the northern treeline or the area north of the Arcticcircle12; the region where the mean temperature for all months of the year is lessthan 10°13; or the area north of the 60° northern latitude, mirroring the delineationof the Antarctic Treaty that defines the Antarctic as the area below 60° southern lati-tude.14 For the study of IR and different strands of political geography, this fluidityof borders of the Arctic has offered a fruitful venue for analysis.

The existence and enforcement of different understandings of the extent of thenorthernmost regions of the globe has attracted a series of near Foucauldian dis-course analysis of “the Arctic”, as Keskitalo characterizes the region in her analysis,that has focused especially on border drawing, region building and governance inand of the Arctic.15 Simplified, this means the study of how different representa-tions, texts, spaces and discourses all result in different systems of power.16 In poli-tics, and especially IR, these struggles can be, following Reus-Smit, translated intoterms of the social struggles over legitimacy of actors’ identity, interests and prac-tices, or institutions’ norms, rules and principles.17 Even though academic researchis not used as the primary research material in these works, it is also entangled withthe different deep-structures of systems of power that maintain the international soci-ety by directing surplus capital to specific intellectual operations.18 This entangle-ment is, for example, visible in how the non-academic increase in interest towardsthe Arctic in the twenty-first century has been accompanied by a boom of academicinterest on the rights and stakes of non-Arctic actors on the Arctic region, not to

10Lassi Heininen and Chris Southcott, Globalization and the Circumpolar North: An Intro-duction (2010).11Kjetil Skogrand, ed., Emerging from the Frost: Security in the 21st Century Arctic, OsloFiles on Defence and Security 2/2008 (Oslo: Institutt for Forsrvarsstudier, 2008).12Erik J. Molenaar, “Climate Change and Arctic Fisheries,” in Climate Governance in theArctic, ed. Timo Koivurova, E. Carina H. Keskitalo, and Nigel Bankes, Environment & Pol-icy 50 (Springer Netherlands, 2009), 145–69.13E.C.H. Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic: The Construction of an International Region (NewYork: Routledge, 2004), 31.14E.H.C. Keskitalo, “International Region-building: Development of the Arctic as an Interna-tional Region,” Cooperation and Conflict 42, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 187–205.15Sherrill Grace, Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2001); Keskitalo, Negotiating the Arctic; Monica Tennberg, “Is Adaptation Governable in theArctic? National and Regional Approaches to Arctic Adaptation Governance,” in ClimateGovernance in the Arctic, ed. Timo Koivurova, E. Carina H. Keskitalo, and Nigel Bankes,Environment & Policy 50 (Springer Netherlands, 2009), 289–301.16Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, xii–xiii.17Christian Reus-Smit, “International Crises of Legitimacy,” International Politics 44, no. 2/3 (May2007): 158–9.18On the term and mechanism of surplus capital see e.g. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capi-tal: and the Crises of Capitalism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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mention the emergence of funding opportunities for such research.19 One concreteimplication of the new discursive struggles over legitimacy of actors’ identities,interests and practices in “the Arctic” is the emergence of a stock of clarifying def-initions that are retrieved, by academics as well as politicians, as tools for argu-mentation when discussing the northernmost lands of the globe. These includeprefixes such as sub- and High, as well as littoral and near Arctic.20

In short, the underlying questions that the above-mentioned near Foucauldianworks ask are as follows: first, what the Arctic is, and how it came to be a distinctentity in national and IR; and second, who constitutes as an Arctic expert, actor,stakeholder or rights-holder in different decision-making venues. Even though theytake into consideration multiple venues of Arctic politics, I argue that they have leftone important aspect of the relevant socio-political power struggles unexplored. Thisis the one about the different human actors and institutions focused on the non-human material of the Arctic. The question that is not addressed is; why the Arctichas remained something different in comparison to the southern parts of the globeand in many aspects alike countries it now constitutes a part of, or the othercolonized regions of the early modern and modern empires it at first was associatedwith. In the words of Robert Kohler, how the frontier of “the ecological outer limitsof expanding empires, where the economic and political benefits of further expan-sion no longer outweigh the costs” was found in the Arctic?21 One material throughwhich this question can be analysed is the official documents of the eight Arcticstates related to the governance of their Northern periphery. When the history of theregions that nowadays are considered to constitute the Arctic are viewed throughsuch documents, the ignorance of the question of finding the ecological outer limitsof feasibility of settlement is revealed not only to have historiographical relevancebut also be a question of present politics.22 That is because, as I will illustrate next

19Frédéric Lasserre, China and the Arctic: Threat or Cooperation Potential for Canada?(Canadian International Council, 2010); Duncan Depledge and Klaus Dodds, “The UK andthe Arctic: The Strategic Gap,” RUSI Journal 156, no. 3 (June 1, 2011): 72–9; H.Horinouchi, Japan and the Arctic (The Japan-Norway Polar Seminar, Monday, April 26,2010). http://www.norway.or.jp/PageFiles/395907/JAPAN_AND_THE_ARCTIC.pdf (ac-cessed October 30, 2014); “Planning Grants Nordic Centres of Excellence in ArcticResearch,” Nordforsk (2014). https://funding.nordforsk.org/nordforsk/call/call.jsp?cid=404(accessed October 30, 2014); ICE-ARC - EU FP7 Project Website. http://www.ice-arc.eu/(accessed October 30, 2014); Belmont Forum Collaborative Research Action – ArcticObserving and Research for Sustainability. http://igfagcr.org/cra-2014-arctic-observing-and-research-sustainability (accessed October 30, 2014).20Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, “Narrative and Practice – An Introduction,” in Narrat-ing the Arctic: A Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices (Science History Publica-tions, 2002), 25; Odd Gunnar Skagestad, The “High North”: An Elastic Concept inNorwegian Arctic Policy, Report (Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI), September 11, 2010),http://dspace.cigilibrary.org/jspui/handle/123456789/29556; Torbjørn Pedersen, “Arktisk rådsrolle i polarpolitikken,” Nordlit 16, no. 1 (May 23, 2012): 205–13; Depledge and Dodds,“The UK and the Arctic the Strategic Gap.”21Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes, 1st ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2002),16.22For a more comprehensive account of different horizons of expectation for what has beenseen feasible, possible and reasonable in the Arctic region as expressed in such documentssee, Justiina M.I. Dahl, Promise of the Periphery: Western developmental paradigms andhow they have reached their ecological outer limits in the North (PhD diss., EuropeanUniversity Institute, forthcoming).

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through examples of similar to the present, but in hindsight, failed, attempts toappropriate the Arctic, the third element of the above picked apart “New North”narrative is not historically accurate.

Attempting to expand Whig history into the Arctic in the East

The most grandiose of all of the previous attempts to transform the “icy, hostilewastes into a bountiful, productive powerhouse” in the Arctic was planned in theSoviet Union after the New Economic Policy initiated by Lenin in 1921 wasreplaced by the second step in Stalinist “rational modernization”.23 The First Five-year Plan introduced in 1929 was seen by the planners as the first step in replacingwhat they considered to be the irrationality of the capitalist landscape, the concentra-tion of industry in regions where it yielded the quickest and greatest profit, withmore centralized and scientific forms of socialist industrialization.24 In general, thegoal of the First Five-year Plan was to facilitate the large-scale reconstruction andmechanization of industry and agriculture.25 In the Second Five-year Plan, the focusturned to the sovietization of the previous peripheries.

In the briefings on the Second Five-year Plan from the XVII Congress ofCommunist Party in 1930, both Vyacheslav Molotov, the Chairman of the Councilof People’s Commissars (1930–1941) and Valerian Kuybyshev, one of the principaleconomic advisors to Stalin and the director of the state planning committee,Gosplan, highlight how introducing industry to what they call “backwards regions”was central to the new plan. Industrializing the periphery would discharge the Sovietsystem of the previously mentioned irrationality of capitalism because it would, fol-lowing the rationality of Lenin, bring industry closer to raw materials reducing costand time of transport and energy. The economic improvement would also bring withits cultural improvement to “the backwards peoples” in such regions.26 The SovietArctic held a special role in these plans beginning with the passage of the shipSibiryakov along the Northern Sea Route in one season in 1932.

For the central government, the voyage of Sibriyakov signified that the difficul-ties of the Northern Sea Route had now been overcome.27 This is apparent in howthe voyage was followed by rapid centralization and institutionalization of the effortsrelated to the opening up of the Northern Sea Route for regular transport. The firstdecree for the establishment of a Central Administration of the Northern Sea Route

23John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the SovietUnion, 1932–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.24Katri Pynnöniemi, “In Celebration of Monumentalism: Transport Modernisation in Russia,”in Modernisation in Russia since 1900, ed. Markku Kangaspuro and Jeremy Smith (Helsinki:Finnish Literature Society, 2006), 244–5.25Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917–1932, 118–34; V.M. Molotov and V. Kuibyshev,NKP (b):n XVII edustajakokous [The XVII Meeting of the People’s Commissariat of theSoviet Union] (Petroskoi: Karjalan Puoluekustannus, 1934), 13; R.W. Davies, The SovietEconomy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989),187–208, 212; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917–1932, 120.26V. Kuibyshev, Toinen viisivuotissuunnitelma: selostus NKP(b):n XVII edustajakokouksessa3–4 p:nä helmik. 1934 [The Second Five-year Plan: An overview in the XVII meeting of thePeople’s Commissariat 3–4 February 1934] (Petroskoi: Karjalan Puoluekustannusliike, 1934),47; Molotov and Kuibyshev, NKP (b), 60–8.27Kenneth Mason, “Notes on the Northern Sea Route,” The Geographical Journal 96, no. 1(July 1, 1940).

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(GUSMP) was issued in December 1932 by the Council of Peoples’ Commissars ofthe USSR. The new horizon of expectation is visible already in the setting of themain goal of this new organization, which was to:

be charged with final development of the Northern Sea Route from the White Seato the Bering Strait, full equipment of this route, maintenance of it in proper condition,and procurement of means for the safety of navigation over the same.28

After its initial organization, the activities as well as funding of the GUSMP grewrapidly indicating an increased belief in the feasibility of its mission. In the decreeof 11 March 1933, the duties and organization of the Komseveroput were transferredunder the GUSM. With this annexation, the mandate of GUSMP grew to include“aiming at the development of natural productive resources of the North, at theirrational exploitation and most effective utilization, at the strengthening of manage-ment, and at better utilization of cadres”.29 The issuing of yet a third decree for theGUSMP the following year tells something about the anticipated speed and scale ofchange the opening of the NSR would bring about in the Russian Arctic.

In the third decree of GUSMP dated at 20 July 1934, its tasks were noted tohave “considerably widened, as this administration has been charged also withexploration and exploitation of all natural productive forces in the Soviet Arctic”.30

In this decree, the activities of the GUSMP are also combined with the SecondFive-year Plan, under which it is expected to establish, for example “river transporton the Lena (below Iakutsk), Kolyma, Taz, Piasina, Khatanga, Anbar, Iana, Indi-girka, and Anadyr as well as coastwise navigation”.31 The expectation for the NSRis high also in the introduction of Molotov of the Third Five-year Plan of 1939:

During the period of the Third Five-year Plan the Northern Sea Route is to become anormally functioning water route providing us regular communication with the FarEast32

In order for it to become normally functioning, it needed to be accompanied by thegeneral development of the resources in the region. In short, the Soviet Arctic was,as the quote below indicates, imagined to turn into a new, yet very traditional,geopolitical heartland.

The Arctic and our northern regions have colossal wealth. We must create a Sovietorganization which can in the shortest period include this wealth in the generalresources of our socialist structure. (Deputy Chairman of the Council of peoples Com-missars to Stalin in 1936)33

The above examples from the official documents related to governance of the SovietArctic indicate how the exploration of the region in the Soviet Union was not onlyabout quick dashes to the pole and back as the conduct of Arctic exploration is

28T.A. Taracouzio, Soviets in the Arctic; an Historical, Economic and Political Study of theSoviet Advance into the Arctic (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 383.29Ibid., 285–387.30Ibid., 389.31Ibid., 390.32Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, The Third Five-year Plan for the National-economicDevelopment of the U.S.S.R. Report Made to the Eighteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U. (B)and Reply to the Discussion, March 14 and 17, 1939 (Moscow: Foreign Languages House,1939), 36.33In Terence E. Armstrong, Russian Settlement in the North (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1965), 154.

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normally portrayed to have been. The goal of the Soviets was, rather, to transformthe North as accurately put by McCannon into a “part of their homeland”.34 Thatthe scientific central planning of the Soviets had to yield to the power of the mate-rial, or in other words, how the speed and size of the centralized plans in front ofthe Arctic nature was unsustainable with the scientific knowledge and technology ofthe time, is visible in the current state of usage of the mega projects of the SovietArctic, such as the Belomor Canal, the Northern Sea Route, and the socio, eco-nomic, and environmental state of the mono-towns in the Soviet Arctic such asNickels.35 The modernization of the Arctic through industrialization as well asurbanization was, however, not only the dream of the Soviet state and its propa-ganda machine. A set of less grand scale, but very similar goals of making the Arc-tic environment productive were voiced in Canada when the “Northern Vision” ofConservative candidate John Diefenbaker was instrumental in his securing the seatof Prime Minister in 1957.36

Attempting to expand Whig history into the Arctic in the West

The 1957 elected Conservative government of Diefenbaker had as one of its mainagendas the increase of the rate of resource development in the Canadian North.Their vision is best examined through Diefenbaker’s speech from 1958 where hedeclared that: “There is a new imagination now. The Arctic. We intend to carry outthe legislative programme of Arctic research, to develop Arctic routes, to developthose vast hidden resources the last few years have revealed”.37 The cornerstone ofthis Northern Vision was the “Roads to Resources program”, drafted and imple-mented in cooperation with the Department of Northern Affairs and NationalResources, and aimed to extend the southern transportation system into the North byusing public funds.38 This program as the Northern Vision in general was, however,as concluded by Grace, “a vision he (Diefenbaker) could not possibly realize”.39 Inthe end, there was little more activity than exploration and very small improvementson infrastructure in the Arctic during the five Diefenbaker years, and his NorthernVision has been regarded, in hindsight as well at the time of its execution by theLiberals, as an overall failure.40

34McCannon, Red Arctic, 25.35Nordic Council of Ministers, Megatrends (Copenhagen: Nordic Council of Ministers,2011); Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal(Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998); Claes Lykke Ragner, “The Northern SeaRoute” (Fridtjof Nansen Institute, 2008). http://www.fni.no/doc&pdf/clr-norden-nsr-en.pdf(accessed October 30, 2014).36Michael Byers, Who Owns the Arctic?: Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North(Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010), 20; Philip Isard, “Northern Vision: NorthernDevelopment during the Diefenbaker Era” (University of Waterloo, 2010), 20. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/5032.37John Diefenbaker, A New Vision (Winnipeg, February 12, 1958). http://byers.typepad.com/arctic/2009/03/john-diefenbakers-northern-vision.html.38Robert Bone, “Resource Development,” in Canada’s Changing North, ed. William C. Won-ders (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press – MQUP, 2003), 216.39Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, 69.40Robert Bothwell, Ian M. Drummond, and John English, Canada Since 1945: Power, Poli-tics, and Provincialism (University of Toronto Press, 1989).

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Canada and the Soviet Union are not the only members states of the currentArctic Council that have as part of the industrialization of the state tried to push theecological outer limits of development further northwards.41 Sverker Sörlin has anal-ysed how the Northern part of Sweden, Norrland, was regarded as “Sweden’s Amer-ica”, a natural resource rich base for the enrichment of the state and itsindustrialization and modernization in the nineteenth century in his PhD dissertationThe Land of the Future: The Debate over Norrland and natural resources at thetime of the industrial breakthrough.42 In the 1920s and 1930s, The Finnish Parlia-ment, in turn, had great expectations for the productivity and revenues of the regionof Petsamo on the shore of the Arctic Ocean that it tried to negotiate to be annexedto the newly independent state in the Paris Peace Conference, but which it eventu-ally only gained sovereignty over in the Peace of Tartu in 1920. In the words of thePetchenga memorandum that the state provided for the Paris Peace Conference tojustify its northern territorial claims.43

Things would be completely different was Finland given the opportunity to have itsown industrial area on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and was granted the possibilityto draw a railway through Lapland to the Arctic Ocean (…) Through this railway thewhole economic life of Lapland would finally be given the first opportunity to developfrom its current state.44

Similarly to the Stalin and Diefenbaker plans, neither the Finnish nor Swedish hori-zon for expectation for the development of their Arctic provinces managed to mate-rialize in the original, what in hindsight can be judged to have been, a utopian scale.

In Finland, the annexation of Petsamo was not followed with the construction ofthe railway, but a twenty-year political struggle over the economic feasibility of suchrailway.45 In Sweden after the First World War, it became obvious that thecelebrated modernization of Norrland had only been partially successful. Large partsof the county remained underdeveloped and poorly connected to the transportationgrids of Sweden. In the 1950s, the county was characterized as in need of specialdevelopmental aid.46 All of the above-mentioned past attempts to push theecological outer limits of feasibility for specific modern development furtherNorthwards could be regarded as random examples without significance for current

41Arctic Council, Establishment of the Arctic Council (2012). http://www.arctic-council.org/index.php/en/about-us/history.42Sverker Sörlin, Framtidslandet: debatten om Norrland och naturresurserna under detindustriella genombrottet (Stockholm: Carlssons, 1988).43Erno Paasilinna, Kaukana maailmasta: historiaa ja muistoja Petsamosta (Helsinki: Otava,1980), 292–4.44Petchenga memorandum, in Archives of the Finnish Foreign Ministry, Ryhmä 10, OsastoA-AB, Pestamon Muistioita.45Östen Elfving, Petsamon taloudellisesta elämästä ja toimenpiteistä sen kehittämiseksi: Lau-sunto Maatalousministeriölle [About economic livelihoods in Petsamo and procedures fortheir development: A memorandum for the Ministry of Argriculture] (Valtioneuvoston kir-japaino, 1924); V. Tanner, Voidaanko Petsamon aluetta käyttää maan hyödyksi?: Keinoja jatarkoitusperiä, Maatalousministeriön julkaisuja [Can the Petsamo region be used for thebenefit of the country?: Means and Ends] (Valtioneuvoston kirjapaino, 1927); Jalmar Castrén,Petsamon radan taloudelliset edellytykset [The economic preconditions for the Petsamo rail-way] (Valtioneuvosto, 1923); Lapin taloudelliset olot ja niiden kehittäminen: Lapin KomiteanMietintö [The economic conditions in Lapland and their development: A memorandum bythe Lapland Committee] (Komiteanmietintö, 1938).46Sörlin, Framtidslandet, 254.

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“New North” narrative were the contemporary studies that make claims over thefuture of the Arctic not based on very similar resource-filled dreams, and moreimportantly, did they not completely black box these attempts through the thirdelement of the “New North” narrative.

The history of state-supported exploration in the North is in the third claim thatthe “New North” narrative constitutes of rather than being symmetrically summedup, equated with activities of individuals who were in many senses the romanticepitome of bravery of their times such as Fridtjof Nansen, Adolf Nordenskjöld andSir John Franklin. The black boxing of the complexity of history by focusing onwhat with the privilege of hindsight has come to be regarded as successful venturescorresponds to what Bruno Latour has categorized as the denial of history for things,and their connection to human societies.47 By black boxing the failed attempts topush the light of modern human development further northwards, the active powersof resistance by non-human elements are silenced, and history rationalized to benefitthe present political interests of specific actors. In other words, the act of black box-ing enables the projection of the activities in the Arctic that constitute the secondelement of the “New North” narrative, the emergence of a new geopolitical heart-land in the Arctic analysed more in depth next, as something novel even thoughsimilar horizons of expectations have been narrated by individual political scientistsas well as political elites of states also before. They have just failed to materialize asconcrete spaces of experience. It is not only the third element of the New Northnarrative that uses questionable acts of black boxing, but also the second one thatclaims that with the advancement of the global climate change, we will witness theemergence of a new, but yet a very traditional, geopolitical heartland in the meltingArctic.

The twenty-first-century prophets of the North

According to the new visionaries of the Arctic, we are now witnessing the fasterthan expected emergence of the “New North”, which Lawrence C. Smith character-izes as “a place of rising world interest and human activity in the twenty-first cen-tury”.48 The bases of his estimates lie in the assessed consequences of globalwarming in the North: “As the Arctic becomes more accessible, the northern coastof Eurasia may take the place of Mackinder’s pivot, as both a route of passage andan area of exploitable resources”.49 As Zellen explains, we are entering “an age ofopportunity and change, as globalization and climatic transformation finally reunite

47Bruno Latour, “Clothing the Naked Truth,” in Dismantling Truth: Reality in the Post-mod-ern World, ed. Hilary Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989),117, 120–1; Gerd von der Lippe, “Fridtjof Nansen – The Making of His World of Men,”Sport in History 22, no. 2 (2002): 98–118; John Wilson, John Franklin: Traveller overUndiscovered Seas (Dundurn, 2001).48Laurence C. Smith, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s NorthernFuture, Reprint (Plume, 2011).49Caitlyn Antrim, “The Next Geographical Pivot: The Russian Arctic in the Twenty-first Cen-tury Caitlyn,” in Arctic Security in an Age of Climate Change (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2013), 125.

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the four corners of the earth, with the North Pole at its very center”.50 In the wordsof Järvenpää and Ries: “our far northern neighborhood” will be turned into “a majorgeopolitical playing field”.51 This traditional geopolitical shift at the contemporarymeans, as Ebinger and Zambetakis accurately put it, that “melting Arctic ice trans-forms the region from one of primarily scientific interest into a maelstrom of com-peting commercial, national security and environmental concerns, with profoundimplications for the international legal and political system”.52 The certainty withwhich these what in IR terms can be characterized as traditionally realist or neoreal-ist narratives are represented is, however, not due to, in statistical terms, a smallmargin of error in the data they built upon. As will be illustrated below, it is ratherdue to a successful act of black boxing of complexity of science and technologicalmateriality in analysis with the overarching realist or neorealist structural ontologythat was the dominant starting point for analysis even in its rival, liberal school, inIR until the 1990s. As such, these works provide solutions to problems characteristicmore to the structures left over from the Cold War than to the current global, politi-cal situation. I will begin the unravelling of this argument with a look at the previ-ous time predictions over which the future state of the Arctic were framed accordingto this paradigm by IR scholars and that was during the Cold War.

The previous coming of the academic prophets of the New North

In 1986, Oran Young predicted in very realist terms in an article written for the For-eign Affairs that the world was entering an “Age of the Arctic”. According toYoung, this was partly because the Arctic was becoming more important to the twomilitary blocks of the Cold War especially due to advancements in the developmentof submarine-launched ballistic missiles, air-launched cruise missiles, nuclear-powered attack submarines and the North Warning System.53 The strongest initiativefor the new coming of the Arctic, however, was, according to Young, the promise ofsecure access of its energy potential: “No price or supply manipulation like thoseof the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries are going to disrupt suppliesof Arctic raw materials”.54 Unlike in support of his realist arguments based on mili-tary technology, for the harnessing of the energy potential, Young, however, doesnot give any detailed support in the form of scientific or technological data.55 As thearticle unravels further, in IR terms, liberalist cards behind Young’s argument arerevealed, as it becomes apparent that at the heart of Young’s analysis were not newtechnological specificities dealing with the extraction of natural resources from theremote, frozen, periphery, but an argument for the crafting of a coherent AmericanArctic policy and research program, which would aid in making what was claimedto be the inevitable resource-based development of the region into a peaceful one.The new policy and research plan were needed because of Young’s conclusion that

50Barry Scott Zellen, Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom the Geopolitics of Climate Change in theArctic (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), 162–3.51Pauli Järvenpää and Tomas Ries, “The Rise of the Arctic on the Global Stage,” in ArcticSecurity in an Age of Climate Change, ed. James Kraska (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2011), 130.52Ebinger and Zambetakis, “The Geopolitics of Arctic Melt,” 1215.53Oran R. Young, “The Age of the Arctic,” Foreign Policy, no. 61 (December 1985): 160–5.54Ibid., 169.55Ibid., 160–5.

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conflicts over the use of Arctic resources, rather than the consequences of its milita-rization, “will become both more common and more severe”.56 In hindsight,Young’s work created a model for arguments over the future of the Arctic in IR thatinstead of basing their arguments in developments of science and technology basedthem on the paradigm of one of the two major schools of American IR, liberalismor realism, which as illustrated by Wendt to a large extent shared the structuralontology of Realism.57 As Young developed his argument further in 1989 when he,in cooperation with Gail Osherenko, claimed to provide a more compete account ofthe “growing conflicts between military, industrial, environmental, and Native inter-ests in the region” in The Age of the Arctic: Hot conflicts and cold realities,58 hisreliance on the liberal paradigm instead of scientific, technological or economic dataas the basis of his predictions in the opening of the Arctic resource base for extrac-tion remained unaltered.

The above-mentioned work begins with the characterization of the situation inworld affairs as one where “Mercator projection maps must give way to polar per-spectives in schools, legislative chambers, corporate conference rooms, and militaryheadquarters”.59 Through the analysis it, however, becomes soon clear that this, ineffect, is a prediction of the future state of affairs, and not an account of the currentsituation based on field work and analysis, geographical or political beyond militarymeasures. On the contrary, in “the taxonomy of the Arctic conflict,” Young andOsherenko conduct in the volume by investigating recurrent themes running throughthe array of issues behind the emergence of the Age of the Arctic, the biggest threatturns out to be the general lack of interest, especially governmental, to the develop-ment of the region beyond possible military armament. In effect, in this volume, asin the previous article by Young, the focus in relation to materiality is again mainlyon military materiality, rather than in the materiality related to the promoteddevelopment of the energy potential, and further industrialization of the HighNorth.60 The consequences of this lack of reference to science and technology areapparent in how even after the Cold War conflict did not follow, what was seen asits almost imminent path, the Age of the Arctic Armament that Young andOsherenko predicted in international security politics at the end of the 1980s did notbecome a reality in the 1990s.

In the 2004 published Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR), a compre-hensive attempt to document and compare systematically the welfare of Arctic resi-dents, Young and Einarsson acknowledge the popular accounts of the Arctic toportray the region as “the place of unmitigated gloom and doom, ridden with pollu-tion, social problems, and depression”.61 The situation is not as dark when theseproblems are opened up in the follow-up project to AHDR the Arctic SocialIndicators project from 2010, but challenges to social welfare in the challenging,

56Ibid., 173.57Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press,1999), 1–44.58Gail Osherenko and Oran R. Young, The Age of the Arctic: Hot Conflicts and Cold Reali-ties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10.59Ibid., 4.60Ibid., 241–2.61AHDR. Arctic Human Development Report. Akureyri: Stefansson Arctic Institute, 2004.

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and radically altering, environmental conditions do take up the main stage.62 Thatthe Arctic was not turned into a new resource heartland as predicted by Young illus-trates the weak reliance of his predictions on science and technology beyond themilitary material and a strong reliance of his work on more fundamental liberalistvalues. That the resource rich age of the Arctic failed to materialize, and the regionbecame, instead, plagued with unplanned problems of modernization by means ofindustrialization that originated from elsewhere in the world indicates what kind ofeffects black boxing not only science, but as will be illustrated later, technology inthe “New North” narrative might have in the future. That is especially as theseunexpected by-products are also black boxed in the research frameworks of the newprophets of the Arctic.63

The point of departure for our present embarkation into an Age of the Arctic bythe “New North” narrative is the essentially the same as Young and Osherenko’s, thepotential of Arctic raw materials. The main difference between the past and currentprophecies of the Arctic lies in the catalyst for change in Arctic relations. For thetwentieth-century scholars, this was found in Cold War dynamics. Conversely,twenty-first-century scholars turn to climate change. The main message of bothgroups of scholars, however, is best summarized in the conclusion of Emmerson; thatthe region “has come of age”.64 It is finally ripe to be picked up and turned into atraditional strategic resource base for the global society constituted of resource ori-ented modern market economy. However, what the confident narratives of both setsof scholars elude is that in both cases, the Arctic is, in fact, only about to come of age.The Age of the Arctic under the inspection of the IR studies in the 1980s as well aspresent is not a future that is here yet, but one that is constructed at present, and aimedat dominating the direction of actions in the future by constructing it at present. In thecontext of the “New North” narrative, this temporal element is purposefully maskedeven further by the choice of concepts the scholars making claims over the future ofcircumpolar politics. In the conceptual framework used in this paper, this takes placethrough the discourses that constitute the first element of the “New North” narrative,which claim that by looking at the Arctic today, we will be able to tell something cen-tral about the conditions of the international society tomorrow.

Canary in the coalmine

According to the arguments that constitute the first element of the New North narra-tive, the Arctic is “the proverbial canary in the coalmine of planetary health and aharbinger of how the warming planet will profoundly affect US national security”65;“a test bed for efforts to develop new approaches to the supply of governancebeyond the state”66; “an early warning system and living laboratory to the world onthe impacts of climate change”67; “a bellwether for how climate change may reshape

62Joan Nymand Larsen et al., Arctic Social Indicators: Follow-up to the Arctic HumanDevelopment Report (Copenhagen: Nordisk Ministerråd, 2010).63Ibid.64Charles Emmerson, Future History of the Arctic (Bodley Head, 2010), xiv.65Scott Borgerson, Arctic Meltdown. Foreign Affairs (March/April 2008), 77.66Oran R. Young, “Whither the Arctic 2009? Further Developments,” Polar Record 45, no. 02(2009).67Meinhard Doelle, The Climate Change Regime and the Arctic Region (2009), 29.

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geopolitics in the post-Cold War era”68; and “a lens through which to view theworld”.69 Whatever the metaphor that the author has chosen to use, the message isthe same: By looking at the Arctic today, we will be able to tell something about theconditions of the international society tomorrow. However, even though these stud-ies adopt language from experimental science and technology, they do not adopttheir results or methods. As the multidisciplinary studies of the Arctic referred to inthe introduction of this paper highlight, the Arctic may be characterized as a livinglaboratory, canary in the coal mine, and a bellwether of global climate change, butbeing ahead of its time in this sense is not a reference to what is considered modern,controlled and predictable, development. On the contrary, it is related to showingthe first signs of the future problems related to the progress of human-induced globalwarming and the progress of global climate change. By not referring to the acciden-tal, unplanned and hard to model nature of the origins of the ripening of the Arctic,the prophets of the New North conduct a quite dangerous act of black boxing. Thisis the black boxing of the unexpected by-products of industrialization elsewhere Ireferred to earlier, which gives their construction of the future at present furtherappeal, but when this black box of origins of global climate change is opened upthey start to appear less secure.

The “Constitution of the Modern” in action in the Arctic

The foundations of the global climate change are not in rational planning, innovativeinvention or raw physical power, the stuff that traditional polar hero tales are madeof. Rather, they are in the unplanned and uncontrolled by-product of industrializa-tion and modernization: in the human-induced global warming. Nonetheless, as thestudies related to the geopolitical, and historical dimension of the “New North”narrative analysed in the previous section reveal, despite the man-made origin of thedestructive power of man in the Arctic, the solution, the new hero tales of the novelArctic, are not woven of different yarn, but of the same cloth as the ones that pro-duced not only novel opportunities but also the novel threats for the inhabitants ofthe Arctic, including the polar bear and its future referred to in the introduction ofthis paper. What Bruno Latour in the 1990s identified as the double task of theWestern modern man, the emancipation and domination of people as well as natureand thus remains intact as the main purpose of the contemporary “New North”narrative of the Arctic even when the more fundamental ideological origins of thistask, the deep-structure behind it, was broken with the fall of the Soviet Union.What is more, even though these studies do not deny global warming, the novelproblems of the Arctic and the world going through a global climate change areproposed to be able to be tackled with the old modern superpowers of politicsconstituted of discourse of domination, experimental science and technology thatproduced the problems in the first place.70 In this kind of setting, the inhabitants of

68Rob Huebert et al., Climate Change & International Security: The Arctic as a Bellwether(2012), 5.69Emmerson, Future History of the Arctic, xvi.70Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (HarvardUniversity Press, 1993), 9–10; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes toImprove the Human Condition Have Failed, new ed. (Yale University Press, 1999), 309–57;S.S. Strum and Bruno Latour, “Redefining the Social Link: From Baboons to Humans,” So-cial Science Information 26, no. 4 (December 1, 1987): 783–802.

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the Arctic are subject to increasing amounts of testing, but when what is at stake inthis testing is opened up, they, nonetheless, seem not be given much more choicesfor actual action as a result of the increased testing than were the scallops of St.Brieuc Bay, voiced by Michel Callon.

In the article in question, Callon focuses his analysis on a series of “interres-ments”, processes by which human actors seek to lock the non-humans into rolesthat are proposed for them. In the article, Callon claims to give the wants and needsof the scallops a human translation in the situations under analysis, and thus to actas their “spokesperson”. However, even though Callon analyses the negotiations offishermen and scientists with the scallops and larvae, the latter are not really givenmore choices for action in the situation under analysis, which is the attempt toincrease the reproduction of the stock of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay than fulfillingthe mission set by the humans in the new environmental conditions set by thehumans and their systems of power or diminishing. That is because the obligatorypassage point for the scallops, much like the polar bears in the Arctic, to be chosenas items of interest in the first place, is the stake their survival has for an interestgroup of humans outside of the habitats of the scallops, or the polar bears.71 In moreaggravated words, the scallops or polar bears, as well as other inhabitants of theArctic in the “New North” narrative, are given choices only as subordinates of theother groups of humans; adapt to the environment and systems of power we havecreated, or in the case of global warming accidentally created and continue to createfor you, or diminish. The inhabitants of the Arctic are not the only element of mate-riality in the gospel of the new prophets of the new north that is being black boxed.A further contextualization of the second element of the “New North” narrativereveals, how the denial of history of things is not only applicable in presenting thepast, but also applicable to the presentation of current international Arctic politics.

The technical difficulties behind the race for the undiscovered Arctic resources

The numbers quoted in most analysis of Artic raw materials in the “New North”literature are from a study of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), whichstates that it: “has assessed the area north of the Arctic Circle and concluded thatabout 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13% of the world’s undiscovered oilmay be found there, mostly offshore under less than 500 meters of water”.72 Whatis left out of focus when using these numbers as the bases of argument is the methodused for producing these numbers, which in the actual report comes before theprevious sentence “By using a probabilistic geology-based methodology”.73 Whatthis means is as the lead author of the USGS report in a later interview emphasizedthat “this is a very uncertain area and these are probabilistic estimates with a greatdeal of uncertainty associated with them”.74 In effect, as Ingimundarson hasobserved, the estimates of the USGC Survey “can only by be verified with 50%certainty because they are based on geological probabilities, not actual finds”. What

71Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scal-lops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology ofKnowledge? ed. John Law (London: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1986), 196, 211, 224.72Donald L. Gautier et al., “Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas in the Arctic,” Science324, no. 5931 (May 29, 2009).73Ibid.74Alan Bailey, “90 Million Barrels,” Petroleum News 13, no. 30 edition (July 27, 2008).

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is more, even if the Arctic did contain these numbers of oil and gas or the higherones from a Russian study, what the “New North” narrative studies that take theUSGS report as the starting point for geopolitical calculations also fail to mention isthe estimated costs of extraction in the Arctic Ocean.75 In relation to the actualreport, the numbers in it were, as observed also by Ingimudarson, “presented with-out reference to costs of exploration and development – a major factor when assess-ing the viability of oil and gas production in offshore areas and inhospitable Arcticclimate terrain”.76 This oversight is closely related to another missing feature ofmateriality in the studies that purport the “New North” narrative; reference to actualtechnology needed for these activities in the Arctic Ocean.

Another author of the USGS report has commented that the assessment did nottake into account the technical difficulties of operating in deep water or sea ice. Theauthors “assumed these resources are recoverable in sea ice and despite waterdepth”.77 Such an assumption is problematic first as, according to Chris Nelder:

Whatever oil and gas is extracted from the top cap of our planet will be the mostexpensive and difficult oil ever produced. (…) to exploit it will require technologiesthat don’t yet exist, enormous amounts of capital, and a high tolerance for risk.78

Second, because it does not take the problems of prediction of changes in the iceconditions on the Arctic Ocean, which do not only include multi-year ice seriously.In an interview with Robert Howard, the author of Arctic Gold Rush, RobertMandley, the director of sales and marketing at a Robertson International Oil andGas Consultants, explains why such an assumption is problematic:

Drilling on the ocean shelf is currently restricted to ice-free periods in the summer (…)and it is only if there is a significant reduction in ice cover that drilling would becomemuch less costly and production much more economic.79

He does not specify whether he is talking of the multi-year ice cover or the first-yearice cover. Predicting the behaviour of either accurately is problematic, and gettingeffectively more so with the advancement of global climate change.80 This difficultyin making predictions over the future sea-ice conditions of the Arctic is also relatedto the other major industry at the heart of the “New North” claims over the emer-gence of a new heartland, shipping.

In AMSA, the bases for the rationalization behind the expectation of increase inArctic shipping are explained as “the large distance savings on global trade routesby using the Arctic Ocean”, including “the nominal 11, 200 nautical mile routebetween Rotterdam and Yokohama (using the Suez Canal), versus a 6, 500 nautical

75A.E. Kontorovich et al., “Geology and Hydrocarbon Resources of the Continental Shelf inRussian Arctic Seas and the Prospects of Their Development,” Russian Geology andGeophysics 51, no. 1 (Tammikuu 2010): 3–11.76Valur Ingimundarson, “The Geopolitics of Arctic Natural Resources” (The European Parlia-ment, Directorate-General for External Policies, 2010), 7.77Bailey, “90 Million Barrels.”78Chris Nelder, “How Much Oil is in the Arctic?” Business Insider (June 13, 2009). http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-oil-is-in-the-arctic-2009-6.79Roger Howard, Arctic Gold Rush: The New Race for Tomorrow’s Natural Resources (Con-tinuum, 2009), 234, 77.80Ibid., 77; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2013: The PhysicalScience Basis (Geneva: IPCC Secretariat, 2013), 741–866.

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route across the top of the World”.81 However, unlike in the gospels of the “NewNorth” narrative, the problems of the changing materiality of the Arctic Ocean arementioned in AMSA. One of them is that “there will always be an ice-covered Arc-tic Ocean in winter although the ice may be thinner and may contain a smaller frac-tion of multi-year ice”.82 This has profound consequences to shipping as will thepossibility of the increase of icebergs that originate from melting terrestrial ice. Assome current Arctic Surface Ship Commanders highlight “‘ice-Free does not meanice free’ and unmapped and misunderstood ice offers the biggest danger to opera-tions in the Arctic”.83 As explained in the article “Arctic Shipping Routes – Fromthe Panama myth to Reality” by Frederic Lasserre: “There will always be ice in thewinter time, as well as polar night and Arctic temperatures in the winter”.84 InAMSA, these challenges and their ignorance or downplay in specific social andpolitical scientific analysis are also noticed: “Many maps are shown promoting thesepotential marine trade routes without indicating a key factor – that the Arctic’s seaice cover will be present for a majority of the year during the century”.85 As RobertCorell, a global climate scientist put it when interpreting the climate models in hispresentation in the Arctic Science Summit Week in Krakow in 2013: “If the Arcticwould be ice-free all the year around, the global climate would have warmed somuch the Earth would basically be a burning rock”. Against this background, con-temporary maps are presented as part of the New North narrative not only in aca-demic articles, but also in the Arctic policies of the Arctic states, which byexcluding seasonal changes, such as the map from the Finnish Arctic policy below,present a more dystopian view of the Arctic than utopian one (Figure 1). Yet, despitethe increase in multidisciplinary assessments of the conditions of the Arctic such asAMSA, the preachings of the contemporary prophets of the North continue to arouseacademic as well as administrative audiences.

As AMSA was published in 2009 and the Finnish strategy in 2013, the trend thatwas recognized already in AMSA seems to stick despite its criticism. The lack ofreferences to seasonal variability is also not the only problem that follows fromusing such maps as the bases of justification of the feasibility of the “New North”narrative of the increased role of the Arctic in global politics. Even though theymake claims on the global, political, scale they completely silence the changedgeography in other parts of the globe where the global sea level rise that would havefollowed from the melting of terrestrial ice to make this scenario a reality, would forexample have wiped out other island nations and coasts. These shipping projectionsalong with the policies that highlight the possibilities emerging in the melting Arctic,in fact, illustrate how the narrative of the “New North” by black boxing science andtechnology and denying history for things securitizes global climate change. That isto say they, following the Constitution of the Modern, present climate change as

81Arctic Council, Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009 Report (Arctic Council, PAME,Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment, 2009), 102.82Ibid., 27.83Stein Sandven, “Ice Free Does Not Mean Ice Free – Understanding the Arctic Sea Ice,”Arctic Patrol and Reconnaisance (May 20, 2013). http://www.arcticpatrolandrecon.com/AgendaSection.aspx?tp_day=31689&tp_session=8136.84Frédéric Lasserre, “Arctic Shipping Routes: From the Panama Myth to Reality,” Interna-tional Journal 66 (2010): 800–1.85Arctic Council, Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009 Report, 102.

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knowable, controllable and predictable without acknowledging how these technolo-gies accidentally produced the problem in the first place.

Addressing the elephant in the room

The emerging of the bright and prosperous future of the Arctic in the global societyof states as a result of global warming is, despite the uncertainties highlighted by thenatural sciences in their predictions of how the future Arctic and its ice conditionswill function, presented as more and more certain by some academics, whose argu-ments I have in this article conceptualized as purporting the “New North” narrative.Through contextualizing the three elements this narrative constitutes of, I have inthis article illustrated how their rationality comes from specific acts of problematicblack boxing of complexity of materiality in history, science and technology. Myfocus has been on how the uncertainties of the natural and technical sciences are nottaken into consideration in a specific strand of social and political analysis. The

Figure 1. Prime Minister’s Office Publications 16/2013: Finland’s Strategy for the ArcticRegion 2013, Government Resolution on 23 August 2013, 29.

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success of this narrative should not, however, be explained merely with the lack ofobjectivity or lesser validity of the social sciences. That is because it is also closelyconnected to the more general question of the evidential context of all informationand knowledge; why observations are made for and the context upon which the evi-dential significance of these observations depends.86 In reference to Pinch and thesociology of testing: “In testing there is always something at stake”.87 What is atstake in the narrative of the New North seems to ultimately be the legitimacy of theConstitution of the Modern Latour picked apart already in the 1980s.88 That thisConstitution of the Modern and the maintenance of specific social systems of poweraffects the natural sciences dealing with the Arctic in a rather similar way as thesocial and political ones is for example visible in how, as one of the reviewers ofthis article accurately acknowledged, it is not “only the problem of Arctic IR studiesto discuss the region as a laboratory, testing site or in some other limited way – thisis a common approach across the fields of study”. Because of the shared approachin framing the role of the arctic in the global political universe in the natural andsocial sciences, I conclude my criticism of acts of black boxing by suggesting theintroduction of two steps to the multidisciplinary study of what kind of role theArctic will hold in the global political universe in the twenty-first century.

As the first step out of the road to the possibly very unpleasant effects continuing tolegitimize the Constitution of the Modern in analysis could bring with it, I suggest theabandonment of the usage of the metaphors of the Arctic as a laboratory and a testingsite. Rather than bolstering the status of the laboratory sciences as a standard for allscience what could be highlighted when talking of Arctic science instead is how muchof the Arctic science on global climate change, oceanography or glaciology is not basedon laboratory observations but fieldwork. This would enforce the acknowledgement ofhow the phenomena under analysis are not controllable, fully reproducible and easilystandardizable as the ones tested in laboratories, but more multivariate, often fleetingand uncontrollable. What is most important, as field sites are, unlike laboratories, neverexclusively scientific domains, this would also enable to include in science communica-tion how the Arctic is not an uninhabited site reserved only for science or industry but ahomeland of multiple peoples and species.89

The second step out of legitimizing the illusory Constitution of the Modern andthe domination of framing questions related to IR to fit the Realist-Liberalist para-digm of IR and its overarching structural ontology would be for the social andpolitical sciences to combine the analysis of the global–political structures andinstitutions with the analysis of how the materials that are used to maintain theseinstitutions and their power are produced, presented, and by whom in the first place.Including actual fieldwork in scientific as well as political environments would givean insight on how the deep-structures and specific intellectual operations thatmaintain these institutions are kept legitimate in practice. That is to say, how the

86Trevor Pinch, “Towards an Analysis of Scientific Observation: The Externality and Eviden-tial Significance of Observational Reports in Physics,” Social Studies of Science 15, no. 1(February 1, 1985).87Trevor Pinch, “Testing – One, Two, Three … Testing!”* Testing: A Test Case for the NewSociology of Technology (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur sozialforschung, 1990), 4, FS II90–502.88Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993),13–56.89Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, “Introduction,” Osiris 11 (1996): 2–6.

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social struggles over legitimacy of actors’ identity, interests and practices, or institu-tions’ norms, rules and principles are reinforce in and through specific deep-seatedstructures and frameworks. Such an approach would ensure that, in Depledge’sterms, “taking geopower seriously”90, or in Latour’s, not denying history of thingsin social scientific study would not lead to taking the institutional or ideologicalpower of the established practices, including those embedded in party-politics, leg-islation, economics or academia, with any less gravity. That is the balancingbetween what Edward Said already in Orientalism described as his two major fears:“distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by toodogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus”.91

AcknowledgementsThis article would never have come to be without my graduate student exchange at theScience and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University in the Fall term of 2012.My special thanks in preparing and reviewing the article go to Sahar Tavakoli, Russell Milesand Jaakko Laitakari.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

FundingThis work has been supported by the Finnish Academy of Science [grant number 284626]and the European University Institute.

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