The European Union’s Arctic policy discourse: green by omission

ABSTRACT

Climate change has turned the Arctic simultaneously into an environmentally highly fragile space and a region offering manifold economic opportunities. The notion of ‘Arctic Paradox’ aptly captures the trade-off between environmental protection needs and economic prospects. We investigate how the European Union has positioned itself regarding this Paradox by asking to what extent its Arctic policy discourse integrates environmental concerns. Analysis involving the main strategies of EU institutions, and the EU’s Arctic and major non-Arctic members finds three co-existing coalitions with differing visions of environmental policy integration in the Arctic. The aggregate EU discourse on the Arctic is currently ‘green by omission’, that is, by explicitly avoiding a clear stance on the trade-off embodied in the ‘Arctic Paradox’. We attempt to explain this, and conclude by discussing the likelihood of the EU developing a genuinely environment-oriented Arctic policy.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• Arctic
• environment
• environmental policy integration
• energy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

List of interviews

Interview 1: Senior EU Official, DG Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Brussels, 16 March 2018.

Interview 2: Official of the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, via Skype, 16 March 2018.

Interview 3: European diplomat, via telephone, 4 April 2018.

Interview 4: EU diplomat, Brussels, 22 August 2018.

Notes

1. As Hajer observes (1993, p. 44), ‘whether or not a situation is perceived as a political problem depends on the narrative in which it is discussed’.

2. Almost 65% of natural gas and 44.4% of oil imports into the EU stem from Russia and Norway (European Commission 2018), a significant share of which comes from the Arctic (EEA (European Environment Agency) 2015).

3. We do not examine these EU members who are Arctic Council observers: Poland, Spain, The Netherlands and the UK. Whereas Poland does not possess an explicit strategy, the Dutch and Spanish strategies cover both the Arctic and Antarctic (Schulze 2017). Finally, in light of Brexit, the UK’s discourse will weigh less on future EU-internal debates on the Arctic Paradox. Our previous study includes Spain (De Botselier et al. 2018) and a probe into the Dutch strategy; its findings lead us to conclude that these represent cases falling into the same category as the other non-Arctic EU members, further supporting our case choice.

4. We expect several countries to update their Arctic strategies. In Finland, the Prime Minster issued an ‘Action Plan for the Update of the Arctic Strategy’ already in March 2017, but no new strategy has followed so far. As of 2020, Germany and Sweden also were discussing new strategies (Brzozowski 2020).

5. Created under the Finnish Council Presidency in 1997, the ND was initially not fully implemented, prompting the second Finnish Presidency in 2006 to re-launch it as a ‘partnership model’ with Norway, Russia and Iceland. Though not created for Arctic cooperation only, the ND, due to its geographical scope, has facilitated the EU’s involvement in the region (Wegge 2012).

6. In 2016, the Ministry of Environment and Energy complemented it with a memorandum on a ‘New Swedish environmental policy for the Arctic’ (Regeringskansliet 2016), without however calling into question the central applicability of the 2011 strategy.

7. We consider these clusters to be discourse coalitions even if they result from an organic development leading to similar story lines rather than actors’ conscious choice for aligning Arctic-specific discourses.

8. As argued above, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK – analysed elsewhere (De Botselier et al. 2018; see also Schulze 2017) – could also count for this cluster (Interviews 1, 4).