Context
The Arctic region has recently assumed considerable strategic significance as it has been underlined by the policies enunciated by major powers. The interests and concerns of the Arctic states are vast and varied. India, being an observer in the Arctic Council, has legitimate interests in the region and has, of late, come out with its own Arctic policy.
India’s Arctic policy notified as a draft document in early January 2021 has come as a shot in the arm for the country’s science diplomacy. The policy claims to concur with India’s fast expanding scientific-technological power status.
However, it has been drafted in a strategic milieu of countries like China having invested with great ambition in the region. Though India has stepped up with its sustainable engagement diplomacy in the Arctic, the question remains whether the draft policy adequately addresses the emerging power equations in the region. The article examines this challenging scenario in the Arctic region and explores the potentials and constraints of India’s Arctic policy.
India’s Arctic Policy (IAP)
As per the global ranking, India currently occupies the third position in scientific and technical person power in the world. Its research and development (R&D) expenditure and science and technology (S&T) publications also rose significantly. With the surge in S&T publications, India is globally at the third position.
China’s “Polar Silk Road” is essentially a part of its robust “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) which seeks to reinforce its geopolitical and geoeconomic posture in the region. India has stepped in at the right time with its “sustainable engagement” diplomacy and “SciTech” power in the Arctic.
Geospatially, the Arctic is located above the Arctic Circle, which encompasses the Arctic Ocean basin (roughly 6.1 million square miles) and the northern parts of Scandinavia, Russia, Canada, Denmark (Greenland), and the United States (US) state of Alaska. Canada, Russia, Denmark, Norway and Alaska have direct access to as well as jurisdiction over the Arctic Ocean.
The Arctic Council was formed as an intergovernmental forum with these countries along with Finland, Sweden and Iceland, following the Ottawa Declaration in 1996. The declaration has provisions [3(a), (b) and (c)] for non-Arctic states and organisations to participate in and contribute to the working of the council with an “observer status.” The council is envisaged as a forum to promote cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic states, Arctic indigenous peoples and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues such as environmental protection and sustainable development in the region (Arctic Council 1996).
There are five states from Asia holding “observer status” in the Arctic council (India, China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore) and all joined in 2013. India renewed its membership in 2019 for another five-year period. The admission of “observers” in the council was made conditional upon recognising the “Arctic states’ sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the Arctic” besides recognising the broad international legal framework that has a bearing on the Arctic Ocean, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The US had insisted at some point that the council “should not deal with matters related to military security” and this was added as an addendum upon signing the Ottawa Declaration. Curiously, after 20 years, the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in a statement in 2019 said that since the situation in the Arctic region had changed, that is, having become a terrain of “power and competition,” the eight Arctic states should “adapt to this new future”.
However, geostrategic concerns continued to generate anxieties among the Arctic states and, consequently, countries like Russia, Canada and Norway have had to bolster defence infrastructure in the region.
India and the Arctic Region
India’s Arctic contacts began a century ago with its signing of the “Svalbard Treaty” in February 1920 in Paris. A breakthrough in India’s Polar research came in 1981 when the country joined the nations engaged in Antarctic exploration.
However, its engagements did not make much headway till 2007 when the scientists undertook India’s first Arctic expedition with a view to initiating studies in glaciology, biological sciences, ocean and atmospheric sciences. In the following year, India set up a research station, Himadri, at the international Arctic research base at Svalbard, Norway.
In another six years’ time, scientists from the ESSO‒National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research (NCAOR) and the ESSO‒National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) set up another facility at Kongsfjorden (which is part of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean).
The facility is India’s first multi-sensor moored observatory called “IndArc” which is to undertake studies and collect real-time data on the Arctic climate and its impact on the monsoon. The successful deployment of this facility is seen as a model of Indo-Norwegian scientific and technical cooperation in addressing global climate change.
Another atmospheric laboratory was established in 2016 at Gruvebadet in Ny-Alesund with the aim of initiating studies on clouds, precipitation, long-range pollutants, and other background atmospheric parameters. The Arctic research has helped to initiate studies on glaciers in the Himalayan region.
The importance of such comparative studies is underlined by the Annual Report 2018–19 of the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR), which acts as the nodal agency for India’s Polar research programme, that also includes Arctic studies. According to the report, “the glaciers are melting world over and those in Arctic and Himalaya are no exception.
The Svalbard glaciers and ice caps cover an area of 34,600 km2 while Himalayas occupy nearly 38,000 km2 area. Observation revealed that for the last one and half decades, the process of glacier retreat has been significantly enhanced in both the regions”.
Needless to say, this has tremendous implications for the agroclimatic conditions of countries like India whose food security itself is dependent on ecosystem stability. The draft IAP itself says that “there are several synergies between polar studies and the study of the Himalayas.
Arctic research will help India’s scientific community to study melting rates of the third pole–the Himalayan glaciers, which are endowed with the largest freshwater reserves in the world outside the geographic poles” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
The institutions involved in Polar studies are not many in India. The Goa-based NCPOR, under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, focuses on Polar studies and research. While the Ministry of External Affairs looks after the engagements with the Arctic Council, other ministries such as the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Ministry of Science and Technology and the Department of Space are involved in Polar research.
In fact, India’s interest in Polar studies began in 1981 with the first scientific expedition to Antarctica. Since then, several projects have been underway in the areas of the Arctic, Antarctic, Southern Ocean and the Himalayas.
According to the note attached to IAP, “India seeks to play a constructive role in the Arctic by leveraging its vast scientific pool and expertise in Himalayan and Polar research. India would also like to contribute in ensuring that as the Arctic becomes more accessible, the harnessing of its resources is done sustainably and in consonance with best practices formulated by bodies such as the Arctic Council” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
The IAP is enunciated with five major areas of engagement which are science and research, economic and human development cooperation, transportation and connectivity, governance and international cooperation, and national capacity building.
It is clear that the IAP, apart from underlining the significance of science and research, sees the Arctic region as a potential area of engagement in diverse areas of human development and commercial activities. The document says “India seeks to engage in economic development in a manner that is sustainable and is of value to the Arctic residents, especially indigenous communities. The Arctic offers viable opportunities in different sectors where Indian enterprises can be involved, become part of international commerce, promote traditional indigenous knowledge, businesses and best practices” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
IAP sees the Arctic as “the largest unexplored prospective area for hydrocarbons remaining on earth” besides its vast reserves of mineral deposits. It also keeps in perspective India’s investment in Russia which amounts to $15 billion in oil and gas projects. Hence India seeks to explore “similar opportunities in other Arctic nations as well” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
The draft policy document is also confident of utilising India’s expertise in the digital economy for facilitating establishment of data centres for commerce in the region. It further explores “opportunities for investment in Arctic infrastructure in areas such as offshore exploration/mining, ports, railways and airports.”
This inevitably calls for encouraging participation by Indian public and private sector firms with an expertise in these sectors. India’s chambers of industry and commerce will be encouraged to enhance private investment in the Arctic and explore the public–private partnership model. The draft policy also indicated that Indian companies will be encouraged to obtain membership to the Arctic Economic Council (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
Another area where India has leverage in the Arctic region is human development. The document says “Specialised cultures of the Arctic’s indigenous inhabitants are being inexorably impacted by climate change as well as economic development and improved connectivity. This is similar to the socio-ecological-economic predicament of the Himalayan peoples.
The disruption of unique ecosystems and erosion of traditional knowledge are common to both. India has substantial expertise in addressing such issues and is uniquely placed to make a positive contribution in assisting the Arctic’s indigenous communities cope with similar challenges” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
In the realm of transportation and connectivity, India has vital stakes. According to IAP, “India ranks third in the list of seafarer supplying nations catering to almost 10% of global demand. India’s maritime human resources could contribute towards meeting the growing requirements of the Arctic” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
India expects that ice free conditions in the Arctic would soon result in the “opening of new shipping routes and thereby lowering costs and reshaping global trade. Traffic, especially through the Northern sea route, is rising exponentially and is projected to quadruple by 2025.”
The draft policy also seeks to “explore the possibility of linking the International North-South Transport Corridor with the Unified Deep-Water System and its further extension to the Arctic.” India expects that “the North-South connectivity will result in lowering shipping costs and overall development of the hinterland and of indigenous communities more than East-West connectivity” (India’s Arctic Policy 2021).
India is well aware of the fact that the Arctic governance is very crucial in the geopolitical milieu and the region itself is “governed by numerous national domestic laws, bilateral agreements, global treaties and conventions and customary laws for the indigenous peoples.” Hence, the Arctic states’ “respective sovereign jurisdictions as well as areas beyond national jurisdiction” need to be reckoned within the framework of international and national regulations.
While the overall focus of capacity building is on science and technology, the draft document does not seem to have given adequate space for social sciences, including the strategic component in the making of India’s Arctic policy, even though the four sections of the five pillars IAP outlines deal with these diverse areas.
China and Arctic Policy
India notified IAP at a crucial time of global and regional power realignments, even in the midst of the pandemic. It was in 2018 that China declared itself a “near Arctic state” and brought out a white paper in this regard. Though China does not have territorial sovereignty and related sovereign rights in the Arctic, it has been so eager to establish a foothold in the region with its self-assumed identity as “near Arctic state.”
The strategic significance of China’s Arctic Policy (People’s Republic of China 2018) outlined through its white paper cannot be glossed over. It underscores that the Arctic is a region having “global implications and international impacts.” Referring to the Arctic situation, the white paper says that the geopolitical scenario “goes beyond its original inter-Arctic States or regional nature, having a vital bearing on the interests of States outside the region and the interests of the international community as a whole, as well as on the survival, the development, and the shared future for mankind” (People’s Republic of China 2018).
China has also gone to the extent of conceding, perhaps for the first time, that its interests in the Arctic region cannot be limited to scientific research but would move to an array of commercial activities. This obviously becomes a part of its project to build a “Polar silk road” that links China with Europe through the Arctic and fits in with the new “blue ocean passages” extending from Beijing’s Maritime Silk Road (MSR), put in place in 2013.
A document by the European Parliament Think Tank (EPTT) says that “China’s Arctic policy suggests a strong desire to push for the internationalisation of the Arctic’s regional governance system. The white paper is not a strategy document, and is more interesting for what it omits, such as the national security dimension that is a major driver of China’s Arctic ambitions”.
By calling itself as a “responsible major country,” China, however, tries to dispel concerns of the Arctic or non-Arctic states about the extent of its geopolitical ambitions in the region, by emphasising Beijing’s “commitment to international law and cooperation and balancing economic interests with environmental protection” as EPTT pointed out.
Though there were frequent references to UNCLOS in the white paper, experts contest China’s sincerity and credentials. In 2016, for example, as EPTT document says, “China bluntly disregarded the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling on China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea versus the Philippines’ claims, and on the environmental damage China’s large-scale artificial island-building on several maritime features entailed”.
China became more assertive in its maritime policy during the last decade, but the scholars and experts were already absorbed in reimagining the Chinese power in the global strategic landscape.
For example, Li Zhenfu, who teaches at the Dalian Maritime University, and is one of the most ardent Chinese commentators on Arctic issues, wrote a decade back that “whoever controls the Arctic sea route will control the world economy and a new internationally strategic corridor.” Li said that China must “play an active, pre-emptive, and vigilant role in Arctic affairs”.
In Conclusion
No doubt, the Arctic is rich in resources (with as much as 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30% of its undiscovered natural gas reserves). However, the Arctic has become so sensitive these years and the region is warming far more rapidly than anywhere else on the planet.
Scientists say that temperatures mounted almost 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1 degree Celsius) in the past decade alone. It certainly calls for extreme vigilance when powers like China and Russia think about transforming the Arctic into a terrain for big business and rapid economic development.
Plausibly, India’s draft Arctic policy is embedded in its basic approach which underlines the significance of sustainable engagement through its SciTech power. IAP is also cognisant of the “vulnerability of the Arctic to unprecedented changes in the climate” (Ghosh and Aggarwal 2021b). Hence, its emphasis on “rule-based” governance architecture in the region fits in with India’s long-standing policy.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.