A central aspect of future cooperation in the North is the relative rise of North-west Russia. An important variable is how Moscow will allow Murmansk to progress and develop. There are, on the one hand, no visible signs that Medvedev is about to revise the centralisation process that has accompanied Putin’s reign since the very start and bolstered it since. But, on the other hand, with the en-ergy of the North and with the Murmansk area becoming a strategic enen-ergy and
275 In the words of former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Naryshkin, cf. the visit to Svalbard of the delegation headed by Naryshkin in October 2007, supra note 17.
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personnel have much in common, they nonetheless compete for position, sta-tus and influence in the federal centre and in the regions. Sovereignty provides meaning and substance to the concept of security. Prioritisation between security and cooperation in the North will in all likelihood continue to be characterised by shifts and arbitrariness. Security will remain a factor in the High North al-though the strategic security overlay from the Cold War has shifted altogether.
Instead of having a de-securitising effect, the presence of natural resources may generate another security agenda rooted in considerations of sovereign and ter-ritorial rights.
3. How may energy fuel the High North with geopolitical significance and what is the scope for bringing questions of sovereignty onto a more political track?
In chapter eight I returned to the unsettled issues of sovereignty in the re-gion. My approach to the question of the status of the maritime zones around Svalbard and the delimitation of the Barents Sea shelf is political, and looked at interests not easily perceived in positive-sum perspectives. Due to the im-peratives of security, Norway’s bilateral relations with Russia have traditionally been kept on a practical level and within the scope of selectively chosen issue areas. Emphasis on international law has been used to de-politicise issues. Bilat-eralisation of security was to be avoided. In so doing, Norway has consistently insisted that the modern Law of the Sea is broadly enough conceived to tackle present and future challenges to the international order and rule of law in ocean areas. It is not the body of law itself which is in need of revision and moderni-sation. Rather, it is the enforcement and compliance structures that need to be addressed. By playing the cards of law and pragmatism, it has proved possible for Norway to carefully tailor relations with a view to edging cooperation for-wards and solving even the most complex problems in modest, but workable ways. The prudent mix of pragmatism and principled approaches has, not least, made it possible for Norway to stay the course in dealing with the still unsettled issues of sovereign rights and enforcement of jurisdiction in ocean areas. This balancing act, echoing the earlier practice of mixing reassurance and deterrence, is still employed and is dubbed “pragmatic realism”. It is a low-key incremental approach allowing for gradually deeper and broader cooperation, with energy as the latest and most important issue area. Energy embraces both external pil-lars of the High North strategy, and may actually build bridges between them.
On the other hand, energy impinges on matters of sovereignty and geopolitics and ties one more firmly to the other. If the exact success criteria of pragmatic realism remain vague, it still denotes a policy that is flexible yet predictable and has achieved results over the years.
One may expect that Russia’s positions in the Arctic will be guided by con-servatism and is inspired by long-standing preferences (including from the Soviet period), and that these are only minimally mitigated by commercial urgencies or other sudden needs of the moment. Radically changed positions on issues of sovereignty are unlikely. The influential actors will have Russia’s long-term in-terests in mind. In the global context, these include ensuring a multipolar order in the international state system. For this, Russia needs to retain its territorial greatness and cannot afford to become “smaller” than it is, and certainly not in the North. Having established the geopolitical significance of the High North to Russia, I find that sovereignty is an overriding interest on the Russian side, and that energy cooperation is relegated to second place. Most likely it is therefore not capable of spearheading a breakthrough on outstanding issues of delimita-tion and sovereign rights. Russia’s interests in Svalbard and its coinciding geo-political interests in the Arctic may further reduce the scope for settling disputed issues. This is based on the assumption that the Russian leadership may fear that a delimitation agreement in the Barents Sea would weaken its position regarding Svalbard and, by extension, in the Arctic as a whole. Russia’s interest is most probably directed towards securing a political hold over Svalbard and the mari-time zones around it. The reason for this is that a foothold on Svalbard secures Russia’s presence in the western Arctic.275 Moreover, Russia’s interests are com-parably more precarious regarding the unresolved issues pertaining to Svalbard than the Barents Sea shelf delimitation, which, seen in isolation, is probably within reach. This leads me to ask whether Norway ought to include Svalbard issues more broadly in the High North dialogue with Western countries, and whether it should consider bringing the question out of its legal confines and onto a more politicised track.
Interests of security, sovereignty and cooperation
A central aspect of future cooperation in the North is the relative rise of North-west Russia. An important variable is how Moscow will allow Murmansk to progress and develop. There are, on the one hand, no visible signs that Medvedev is about to revise the centralisation process that has accompanied Putin’s reign since the very start and bolstered it since. But, on the other hand, with the en-ergy of the North and with the Murmansk area becoming a strategic enen-ergy and
275 In the words of former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Naryshkin, cf. the visit to Svalbard of the delegation headed by Naryshkin in October 2007, supra note 17.
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commodities export hub, Moscow cannot allow itself to ignore the potential of the region.
A big if, however, is whether the Russian authorities will be able to recon-cile energy interests with the interests of the military in the North. This question will in all probability be decisive for the future aspects of international coopera-tion in the region. It looks, however, as if the military is gradually regarding with less hostility the presence of the energy sector, and has become more accom-modating with regard to the construction of infrastructure and the localisation of facilities. In part, this softening of the military’s stance must be attributable to the political significance of Russia’s great power ambitions, behind which energy is the main force. But one may also ask if this sense of reconciliation is a sign that energy development is increasingly being premised on the needs of the military. If this is the case, one must expect a gradual securitisation of the energy sector, along the whole chain of petroleum activities in the region: from explora-tion to construcexplora-tion, extracexplora-tion and producexplora-tion, distribuexplora-tion and export. This will not only affect energy cooperation, but spill over to aspects of sovereignty regarding the Northern Sea Route and questions of the status of ocean areas and resource management. As a trend, it is reinforced by the combination of military might and energy as instruments of international political power.
During the Cold War, Norway’s most serious challenges in the north were provoked by forces exogenous to Norway itself. Geographical coincidence and the bipolar order positioned Norway on a strategically important flank, so to speak in the middle of the East-West divide of the North. Security policy provid-ed the interpretive framework within which interests of sovereignty were definprovid-ed and the scope for practical solutions identified. Either by tacit consent or politi-cal arrangement, Norway’s positions regarding the status of ocean areas in the Barents Sea or Svalbard had as a rule Western backing. But take away the Cold War and the accompanying security imperative, and certain “persistent” aspects of sovereignty seem to re-emerge. Norway has traditionally kept the unsettled issues of sovereignty strictly within a legal context in order not to politicise or unnecessarily securitise matters in the High North. By bringing political aspects of sovereignty to the fore today, Norway could possibly construct a political ar-gument that Western states (with an interest in Svalbard) would find more con-vincing than the legal ones. Within the framework of the political High North dialogue, Norway should look again at the arguments for keeping the Svalbard and the Barents Sea delimitation issues separate from each other. Whereas they are legally different cases, politically they could still be linked. Norway consid-ers itself to be on firm legal ground as to Svalbard’s maritime zones and the delimitation of the Barents Sea shelf. This seems plausible, since no one has so far seriously sought to bring Norway before the court in Haag on either count.
But the legal argument may now gradually be getting in the way of a more con-vincing political argument. To lift the issues out of their legal confines, Norway probably needs to identify how the two issues may interrelate in the Russian perspective, and to communicate and discuss this within the framework of the broader High North dialogue.
International institutions and law have taken regulatory relations between Norway and Russia important steps forward, while the execution of authority and stewardship under the new regimes of the Law of the Sea have at times strained bilateral political relations. The overall effect has, however, been posi-tive. Multilateral and bilateral regimes of resource management have as a rule enjoyed authority and respect. They have in turn gained cooperative momentum and spread to new areas, checked only by security concerns. As such, one may in fact speak of the international Law of the Sea as a gentle civiliser of the North.276 Revolutions in technology have contributed to the restructuring of the interna-tional Law of the Sea. It grants considerable rights to individual coastal states, but forces them to act collectively through cooperation. Two acknowledgements are essential: first that the riches of the ocean areas are not inexhaustible, and second that the sea can be ruined by the activities of man. The onus is on coastal states to give the necessary attention to the environment, since the sea is part of humankind’s common heritage. The regimes, and the practices and institu-tional arrangements that they embody, have contributed to shifting the logic of relations in the North from coexistence towards cooperation. Yet, they still fall short of a convergence of interests.
Norway’s main political challenge in the High North continues to be Rus-sian, as do the main opportunities. Norway’s national challenges in the North are strongly affected and influenced by Russia’s global challenges and those it faces in the Arctic region as a whole. Norway’s bilateral and regional policy orientations, and Russia’s global ambitions and intentions regarding the North, cause differences in policy that create challenges of their own. Internal develop-ments in Russia constitute an important set of factors. Another is the increasing urgency of enabling international society to put in place effective regimes for responsible and integrated resource management. Consequently, the practical question is how closer cooperation with Russia should be organised and to what degree it should be bilateral or linked to European institutions and trans-Atlantic dimensions. Bringing Europe’s attention to the High North and embedding coop-eration in the High North with Russia in European structures are possible ways to go. Russia’s interests in security and sovereignty in the Arctic could provide
276 Borrowed from Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations.
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commodities export hub, Moscow cannot allow itself to ignore the potential of the region.
A big if, however, is whether the Russian authorities will be able to recon-cile energy interests with the interests of the military in the North. This question will in all probability be decisive for the future aspects of international coopera-tion in the region. It looks, however, as if the military is gradually regarding with less hostility the presence of the energy sector, and has become more accom-modating with regard to the construction of infrastructure and the localisation of facilities. In part, this softening of the military’s stance must be attributable to the political significance of Russia’s great power ambitions, behind which energy is the main force. But one may also ask if this sense of reconciliation is a sign that energy development is increasingly being premised on the needs of the military. If this is the case, one must expect a gradual securitisation of the energy sector, along the whole chain of petroleum activities in the region: from explora-tion to construcexplora-tion, extracexplora-tion and producexplora-tion, distribuexplora-tion and export. This will not only affect energy cooperation, but spill over to aspects of sovereignty regarding the Northern Sea Route and questions of the status of ocean areas and resource management. As a trend, it is reinforced by the combination of military might and energy as instruments of international political power.
During the Cold War, Norway’s most serious challenges in the north were provoked by forces exogenous to Norway itself. Geographical coincidence and the bipolar order positioned Norway on a strategically important flank, so to speak in the middle of the East-West divide of the North. Security policy provid-ed the interpretive framework within which interests of sovereignty were definprovid-ed and the scope for practical solutions identified. Either by tacit consent or politi-cal arrangement, Norway’s positions regarding the status of ocean areas in the Barents Sea or Svalbard had as a rule Western backing. But take away the Cold War and the accompanying security imperative, and certain “persistent” aspects of sovereignty seem to re-emerge. Norway has traditionally kept the unsettled issues of sovereignty strictly within a legal context in order not to politicise or unnecessarily securitise matters in the High North. By bringing political aspects of sovereignty to the fore today, Norway could possibly construct a political ar-gument that Western states (with an interest in Svalbard) would find more con-vincing than the legal ones. Within the framework of the political High North dialogue, Norway should look again at the arguments for keeping the Svalbard and the Barents Sea delimitation issues separate from each other. Whereas they are legally different cases, politically they could still be linked. Norway consid-ers itself to be on firm legal ground as to Svalbard’s maritime zones and the delimitation of the Barents Sea shelf. This seems plausible, since no one has so far seriously sought to bring Norway before the court in Haag on either count.
But the legal argument may now gradually be getting in the way of a more con-vincing political argument. To lift the issues out of their legal confines, Norway probably needs to identify how the two issues may interrelate in the Russian perspective, and to communicate and discuss this within the framework of the broader High North dialogue.
International institutions and law have taken regulatory relations between Norway and Russia important steps forward, while the execution of authority and stewardship under the new regimes of the Law of the Sea have at times strained bilateral political relations. The overall effect has, however, been posi-tive. Multilateral and bilateral regimes of resource management have as a rule enjoyed authority and respect. They have in turn gained cooperative momentum and spread to new areas, checked only by security concerns. As such, one may in fact speak of the international Law of the Sea as a gentle civiliser of the North.276 Revolutions in technology have contributed to the restructuring of the interna-tional Law of the Sea. It grants considerable rights to individual coastal states, but forces them to act collectively through cooperation. Two acknowledgements are essential: first that the riches of the ocean areas are not inexhaustible, and second that the sea can be ruined by the activities of man. The onus is on coastal states to give the necessary attention to the environment, since the sea is part of humankind’s common heritage. The regimes, and the practices and institu-tional arrangements that they embody, have contributed to shifting the logic of relations in the North from coexistence towards cooperation. Yet, they still fall short of a convergence of interests.
Norway’s main political challenge in the High North continues to be Rus-sian, as do the main opportunities. Norway’s national challenges in the North are strongly affected and influenced by Russia’s global challenges and those it faces in the Arctic region as a whole. Norway’s bilateral and regional policy orientations, and Russia’s global ambitions and intentions regarding the North, cause differences in policy that create challenges of their own. Internal develop-ments in Russia constitute an important set of factors. Another is the increasing urgency of enabling international society to put in place effective regimes for responsible and integrated resource management. Consequently, the practical question is how closer cooperation with Russia should be organised and to what degree it should be bilateral or linked to European institutions and trans-Atlantic dimensions. Bringing Europe’s attention to the High North and embedding coop-eration in the High North with Russia in European structures are possible ways to go. Russia’s interests in security and sovereignty in the Arctic could provide
276 Borrowed from Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations.
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Norway with good reasons to use this course. The domestic condition of Russia, and the present strain on relations between Russia and the West, may assist in creating a broader international understanding for the multifaceted complexities of Norway’s position. With Russia at its side in the High North, Norway may on the one hand succeed in filling the region with practical cooperation, and on the other in preventing its own marginalisation. Energy cooperation is not in itself
Norway with good reasons to use this course. The domestic condition of Russia, and the present strain on relations between Russia and the West, may assist in creating a broader international understanding for the multifaceted complexities of Norway’s position. With Russia at its side in the High North, Norway may on the one hand succeed in filling the region with practical cooperation, and on the other in preventing its own marginalisation. Energy cooperation is not in itself