The Arctic and World Order. Группа авторов

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      Still, to realize the kaleidoscope of its Arctic ambitions, Russia has to crack the Potemkin problem. It still lacks the necessary technology and finance to open up the new Arctic, onshore and offshore. Deep sea ports and supply stations need to be built along the Northern Sea Route, as well long-distance railway lines, motorways and undersea fiber-optic data cable networks. Because of U.S. and EU sanctions since 2014, Russia cannot rely primarily on investment from the West. That is why it has begun to turn to China for money and markets.⁸⁰

      To President Xi Jinping, Russia’s Arctic ambitions present an opportunity for China to use its economic might to increase its global influence. Xi, like Putin, sees the Arctic as a crucial element of the country’s geopolitical vision. Now that the People’s Republic is no longer an introspective state, but one that has “grown rich and become strong,” as Xi declared in his December 2017 New Year’s Eve speech, it intends not only to become “a great modern socialist country” but the “keeper of international order.” America’s long-time abstention from Arctic power politics seemed then to be offering the PRC an unexpected gift.⁸¹

      The scale of Xi’s vision is remarkable. In 2013 China embarked on the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, the most expensive foreign infrastructure plan in history. It is a two-pronged development strategy, encompassing the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21^st Century Maritime Silk Road,” which together map out a highly integrated set of land-based and maritime economic corridors linking thousands of miles of markets from Asia to western Europe. Late in 2017 Xi called for close Sino-Russian co-operation on the Northern Sea Route in order to realize what he called a “Silk Road on Ice.” Although cast in terms of mutual benefit, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a means to strengthen China’s influence and security along its strategically important periphery.⁸²

      By making the infrastructure plan an integral part of its constitution and announcing that by 2050 China would be a “leading global power,” Xi has shown long-term thinking on a grand scale. He has done so by arousing genuine excitement about the future—so different in tone from the small-minded negativism about lost greatness that emanates from Trump. Indeed, this is the kind of visionary leadership that Washington has not shown since the early Cold War era, when it set out to rebuild western Europe. And once the BRI reaches its predicted spending of $1 trillion, it will amount to almost eight times the value in real terms of America’s Marshall Plan.⁸³

      Xi’s grand global vision is combined with shrewd diplomatic tactics. His string of state visits in May 2017 to Finland, Alaska and Iceland was no coincidence: Finland was just about to take over the rotating chairmanship of the Arctic Council from the United States, to be followed by Iceland two years later. In Iceland—situated at the crossroads of the transatlantic shipping lanes and the gateway to the Arctic Ocean—China had used the opportunity of the global financial recession to push a free trade agreement, concluded in 2013. The new Chinese embassy in Reykjavik is the biggest in the country.

      Xi’s visit to Finland was a chance for him to shore up support in the EU, China’s biggest trading partner. When lobbying for Chinese financial involvement in the creation of new shipping and transport corridors such as Rovaniemi-Kirkenes railway line and the Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel, he had his eye also on penetrating Eastern and Central European markets as part of the glittering BRI silk-road web.

      Furthermore, China is working with Russia and Nordic partners to build the shortest data cable connection between Europe and Asia: a 10,000 km trans-Arctic telecom cable from Finland via Kirkenes in Norway and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Another intersection of this is planned with a cable for the Bering Strait, from Chukotka to Alaska. The Finnish project, called “Arctic Connect,” plans to deliver faster and more reliable digital communications between Europe, Russia and Asia through a submarine communication cable, built by Huawei Marine, on the seabed along the Northern Sea Route (NSR). The $1.2 billion, 13,800 km cable is expected to be finished between 2022–2023. It will be owned by an international consortium, also including Russian and Japanese companies.⁸⁴

      Finland, home to the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, hopes to turn itself into a node of digital communication in the netflow world through this interconnection and attendant investment in Finnish data centers. With Arctic Connect, Finland wants to improve regional connectivity while providing the necessary infrastructure. It is an attractive destination due to its geopolitical location between East and West and history of neutrality are believed to make Finland the “Switzerland of data,” but also because of its reliable energy and internet infrastructure, access to green energy and cold climate-related reduction of cooling cost, reduced energy tax for data centers, transparent legislation and skilled workforce. Arctic Connect is believed to benefit the Finnish economy with €1.38 billion and over a decade generate over a thousand jobs annually. This is not pie in the sky; Google, for example, has already invested almost €2 billion in a data center in Hamina.⁸⁵

      China is interested within the framework of the “Digital Silk Road” in building transcontinental and cross-border data cables that would bypass data cables and as such would be better shielded from outside actors. It must be noted, that for all the excitement, there are no illusions in Finland and the EU at large, that Chinese (and Russian) offensive intelligence gathering capabilities are likely to increase. After all, the Chinese companies contracted to build the project, including Huawei, are obliged by PRC law to collaborate with intelligence services. In addition, the construction of Arctic Connect will enable China to implement underwater surveillance capabilities it has been developing through military-civilian fusion in the South and East China Seas.⁸⁶

      Beijing unveiled its systematic Arctic strategy with a grand white paper on the “Polar Silk Road” on January 26, 2018. The paper openly challenges the dominant position in the region of the Arctic Eight or the inner Five. China declared that it was time for Arctic countries to respect “the rights and freedom of non-Arctic States to carry out activities in this region in accordance with the law.” Since “the governance of the Arctic requires the participation and contribution of all stakeholders,” China said it would move to “advance Arctic-related cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative”—a potentially hegemonic claim of its own, as we also see with its digital network activities.⁸⁷

      The Arctic is thus definitely heating up, physically as well as politically, raising a multitude of questions at all levels as to the region’s future in terms of its resource management and governance.

       Understanding the Present, Exploring the Future

      To look further into the plethora of “Arctic issues,” and to understand the various networks underpinning the Arctic “regime,” we invited policy practitioners, environmental and political scientists, historians, lawyers, and energy experts, from Arctic and non-Arctic states, from Anchorage to Adelaide, to take stock of present-day circumstances in the North. We asked them to explore the changes underway in the earth system, climate and ecology, in culture and society as well as in the spheres of politics and economics, law and security. We also encouraged each to look ahead, to consider where the Arctic may be headed, and how the relationship between the Arctic regime and world order may evolve, over the next 20 years as the planet literally heats up.

      In his lead essay, Oran R. Young examines the recent course of Arctic international relations as well as likely future developments in this realm through an account of the narratives that have guided the actions of key players over the past three decades. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, the Arctic zone of peace narrative dominated the landscape of Arctic policymaking. The period since the late 2000s has witnessed the rise of competing perspectives on matters of Arctic policy, including narratives highlighting the global climate emergency, energy from the North, and Arctic power politics. Though the Arctic zone of peace narrative remains alive in the thinking СКАЧАТЬ