Abstract
With the COVID-19 pandemic upon us for the foreseeable future, it is easy to lose sight of other pressing global issues, even those that have occupied considerable attention in recent years. Notwithstanding the ongoing pandemic disruptions, challenges related to climate change, geopolitical rivalries, democratization, decolonization, and the creaking architecture of the post-war international order continue—many aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these, the circumpolar Arctic continues to capture international interest amid mixed signs of both dynamic multilateral cooperation and contentious international politicking.
In that context, Danita Catherine Burke’s Diplomacy and the Arctic Council seeks to dispel common misunderstandings and cast light on the workings of the premier regional forum for research, cooperation, and, increasingly, policy-making. Burke’s goal is “to offer insight into the way the council addresses challenges and has been able to weather the storm of major international political events involving its core membership” (6). Divided into eight chapters, in two sections that highlight internal and external challenges, the book explores the Arctic Council (AC) as a unique “club” comprising eight member states, six Indigenous permanent participants, and nearly 40 non-voting observers. Burke is particularly focused on the consequences for Arctic cooperation since 2014, when the conflict in Ukraine began. The conflict, she argues, has posed a serious challenge to the status and integrity of the AC, overcome only through the determination of Arctic states to maintain co-operative relations despite significant external and internal strains.
The major contribution of this book is its methodological focus on practitioner accounts of the council’s strengths, weaknesses, and inner workings. Drawing on primary interviews with dozens of former AC officials, diplomats, and outside experts, as well as archival and other materials, Burke expands the existing academic literature with a welcome emphasis on the perspectives of those who know the council best. Her detailed study of its internal workings—including its somewhat opaque finances, struggles to maintain institutional memory, and the logistics surrounding language and official communication—will interest scholars and students of Arctic politics, diplomacy, and international organizations. Likewise, many of the interviews that Burke anonymously cites offer valuable insights into regional and organizational politics and offer rich material for related research questions.
But there are limits to what can be gleaned from examining the AC alone, and Burke necessarily incorporates non-council and non-Arctic issues that have affected the region and sometimes divided its members. It is in this respect that Diplomacy and the Arctic Council enters choppy waters, as Burke attempts to navigate her analysis through the shoals of international tensions that have threatened to sink the council’s role in promoting regional cooperation. Her effectiveness in doing so is limited by two choices: a dubious emphasis on neutrality with respect to the conflict in Ukraine; and a limited account of status and hierarchy among the Arctic states.
Burke makes her position on Ukraine explicit early on: “The Russian–Ukrainian conflict over the Crimea region” (4) is presented as a political dispute of uncertain legitimacy, and she argues that “to use words like ‘annexation’ and ‘illegal occupation’ to describe the conflict … only serves to alienate the Russian audience who clearly have an alternative position on the issue” (45). This desire for neutrality forms the cornerstone of her criticism of Canada’s second AC chairmanship, during which its condemnation of Russia’s actions violated the council’s prohibition on discussing matters related to military security. Burke’s claim that Canada’s criticism of Russia damaged its chairmanship is valid, but she does not explain her choice not to engage with the substance of that criticism—echoed by the US, the European Union, and a majority of members in the UN General Assembly—that Russia’s actions in invading Ukraine, and the resulting deaths of more than 10,000 people, constitute gross violations of Ukrainian sovereignty and international law. Burke’s concern that without Russian participation the AC cannot function properly is doubtless correct, but her desire to promote such participation leads to a cul-de-sac of moral relativism vis-à-vis the consequences of Russia’s foreign behaviour. That Arctic cooperation has been sustained despite the tensions surrounding Ukraine is to be celebrated, but this success does not justify ignoring the seriousness of the underlying conflict or excusing Russian actions in order “not to align this book … with a specific side on the diplomatic debate” (45).
Burke’s criticism of Canada also omits the most significant achievement of its chairmanship of the AC: the establishment of the Arctic Economic Council as a new forum to promote sustainable economic development. The omission implies that Canadian diplomacy during its chairmanship failed entirely as a result of its position on Ukraine, when, in fact, Canada produced some significant outcomes and the AC’s work was mostly unaffected. 1 All told, Burke’s critique of Canada, while frequently accurate, remains lopsided and singles out that country when other members of the council have also taken significant actions against Russia since 2014.
The concepts of “status hierarchies” and “pecking orders” recur throughout the book, at times fitting awkwardly with Burke’s analysis of the council as an exclusive club governed by its members. The challenge is pervasive for circumpolar politics: all Arctic states, except Iceland, are both Arctic and non-Arctic polities in that large majorities of their populations and territory are outside the polar region. Even among Arctic states, Arctic issues are thus often of secondary concern, complicating the determination of hierarchy and status among them. Burke never provides a full ranking of the “Arctic Eight,” but the differences among them makes the answer more obvious than she implies. There is little doubt that the US and Russia are at the top of the Arctic order, followed by Canada and Norway due to their size and significance, respectively. Denmark/Greenland is the fifth coastal state, complicated by a long colonial history and uncomfortable modern relationship. Sweden and Finland occupy a lower tier as non-coastal states and, finally Iceland, with no military and a population 1/15 the size of the next smallest Arctic state, lies at the bottom of the regional hierarchy. Burke’s vagueness on this point appears to derive from the use of “club diplomacy” and “diplomatic practices” to organize her analysis, which keeps her focus on the behaviour of states within the council, rather than drawing on other theories that emphasize the social and material factors that underpin state power and prestige.
The result is that Diplomacy and the Arctic Council is more effective at examining the council’s inner workings than at situating the relations among its members within the landscape of international relations. In Arctic studies there is always the danger of events moving faster than our analyses can keep up, which, here, exists alongside the risk that too much focus on the metaphorical trees of diplomatic practice within the AC overlooks the forest of global politics in which they are rooted. There is much to appreciate in what this book offers for our understanding of the AC, but its unwillingness to offend equally and its ambivalence toward its own analytical framework leaves room for further and deeper discussion of both the challenges facing the council and the power dynamics among its members and beyond.
