A less ‘green’ parliament could shift the EU’s Arctic priorities
The current EU Commission has had an increasingly ‘geopolitical’ role, balancing the widely differing interests of its member states. This could change after the coming EU election, researcher tells Polar Journal.
In March of this year, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission made a journey to Nuuk, Greenland, to inaugurate a new EU office in the Arctic country.
With wide smiles and hearty gestures, she and Greenland prime minister Muté B. Egede signed two cooperation agreements that will see the EU invest a total of 94 million Euros in Greenlandic clean energy, raw materials, and education.
Alongside them, also smiling, though signing fewer documents was Mette Frederiksen, prime minister of Denmark. She had gone along for the meeting because of Greenland’s complicated legal status: a member of the Kingdom of Denmark, but, unlike Denmark proper, not a member of the EU.
The conflicting interests on that day encapsulates well, the situation that the EU currently finds itself in with regard to the Arctic. a wish from the larger, southern member states for a more active geopolitical EU presence in the region, but an opposing wish from the northern EU countries with territory in the Arctic.
“With its current Arctic policy, the EU is trying to gain a more active role in the region,” Emilie Canova, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, who is researching the EU’s role in the Arctic, told Polar Journal.
A more active role
Emilie Canova points to two reasons that, from the point of view of Brussels, the EU should have more influence in the Arctic than it has had in the past.
First of all, there is its legislative power in the region. Two of its member states, Finland and Sweden, have territory in the Arctic, and a third, Denmark, has Arctic legitimacy through Greenland. Furthermore, Iceland and Norway, though not EU members, implement EU law because of economic and political ties. This means that, in effect, five out of eight members of the Arctic Council (which also includes the USA, Canada, and Russia) implement EU law.
And secondly, the EU invests large amounts of money in the Arctic regions through research and social programs.
“The EU has been trying to gain a role that is commensurate with its financial means and its normative power in the Arctic, but has been limited by the countries that give it its Arctic legitimacy wanting to keep their own power in the Arctic,” she said.
More geopolitical EU
According to Emilie Canova, the EU has been moving towards a more uniform and internally aligned foreign policy since the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. But the process was accelerated in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president of the USA and called into question the degree to which the EU could rely on NATO for its defense. It was then further accelerated in 2022 when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine.
These events made the EU more “geopolitical”, as Canova described it in a 2023 research article, and are part of the reason why the EU has been trying to take on a more active role in the Arctic.
But unlike the events in the US and in Ukraine, where the EU has been (mostly) aligned, the Arctic is not only a “foreign” arena but also one that is part of the union.
“The EU has 27 member states and all of them have their own priorities in terms of external relations. This is something that the EU struggles with generally. But the difference in the Arctic is that it’s geographically intertwined with the EU,” Emilie Canova said.
“You have member states that are also members of the Arctic Council, member states that are observers to the Arctic Council, and some that are not. This makes it very difficult to form a coherent policy towards the Arctic.”
“The Nordic member states don’t want their prominent roles in the Arctic to be put in the background by the EU, which makes them play an ambiguous brokering role within the EU.
The southern member states, on the other hand, are very keen to get access to the Arctic through the EU,” Emilie Canova said.
Fragile geopolitical balance
It is this delicate balance that Ursula von der Leyen and the current EU Commission has been trying to strike in the Arctic. But with the upcoming EU election the current EU policy towards the Arctic might change, at least slightly.
“To be honest, I don’t think the election will change the policy drastically. The EU Arctic policy is not that dependent on individual personalities like von der Leyen, and the Arctic is not a core interest of the Commission. But still, some elements might change,” Emilie Canova said.
She points to two areas where the Arctic policy might change after the EU parliamentary election and the subsequent selection of a new commission. The first concerns the environment.
“If the parliament becomes less ‘green’, as some polls suggest, it might change the EU policies towards climate change prevention. While the European Green Deal and indigenous rights have been at the core of this Commission’s policies, a new one might value, for instance, resource extraction in the Arctic higher,” she said.
The second concerns the degree to which the EU will be active in the Arctic at all. The current commission has worked hard to establish the EU as an active player in the Arctic, and, Canova believes, the EU might even repeal some of its Arctic activity with a new commission.
“I think the EU has reached a limit on what it can do in the Arctic,” Emilie Canova said.
“During the EU Arctic Forum in May, there was an interesting panel with all the EU Arctic ambassadors, including countries like Italy, France, and Poland. Here, the Nordic countries made it very clear that they were the members of the Arctic Council, and that the others were only observers.”
“To them, the EU was welcome in the Arctic but it was basically for funding reasons. They didn’t want the more political and geopolitical aspects of the EU involved. I don’t think it was because of EU skepticism from the Nordics but simply to preserve the fragile geopolitical balance in the Arctic,” she said.
Ole Ellekrog, Polar Journal AG
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