An Ocean of High Modernity

As a project of historiography, then, the Arctic Ocean becomes almost a non-entity, a void in between the Arctic nations, with few sources, and with little connection, and recognised as an integrative space by an extremely small number of people.

This is particularly true for the Arctic Ocean space since the first half of the twentieth century. Elements of such a reading existed from an early Arctic imperial phase from circa 1870, but to define its history as ‘transnational’ at all before, say, 1918 is possible only because it lacked comprehensive and spatially covering national histories, not because it did actually transcend the national. On the contrary, nations tried as best they could to claim their own slices of it, a practice that has only been reinforced after the end of the Cold War. It was during and after World War I that more serious modern diplomacy and politics entered the Arctic Ocean with the Svalbard Treaty, decided at Versailles in 1920, and the sector principle as a foundation for claims on the Arctic Ocean up to the North Pole that were put forth by Arctic coastal states, starting with Canada in 1925 and followed by the Soviet Union in 1926.

It may be useful to think of the Arctic Ocean, despite its relative smallness and its position in between three major continents and the world’s largest island (Greenland), as in fact the opposite of a ‘medi­terranean’ such as the Baltic or the Black Sea.^[760] Rather it stands out as what we may wish to call a barrier region, a black hole, despite its whiteness. Such regions have drawn a lot of interest in recent years. The Amazon, the Sahara, Antarctica, Siberia, the wider Himalaya/ Pamir are examples of regions with relatively limited access, sparse and scarce communication, internal and external. They are also meta- geographical projects, with contested borders but each with their par­ticular significance, economic, political, environmental, cultural and with a set of structured narratives that could be mobilised as evidence in the meta-geographical work at different points in time. Nonetheless, these regions are typically read as lands ‘without history’. The Amazon region for example, has been validated for its natural exuberance rather than as a place of dynamic political change, as wild, not modern.^[761] They have been perceived as outside of R. G. Collingwood’s definition of ‘human affairs’ as the criteria for history, hence the place of ‘events’ rather than ‘actions’.^{[762] [763] These are also spaces which have become state spaces only recently, thus fulfilling John Agnew’s point that modernity often appears as a set of spatial binaries where certain geographies rep­resent the past, while others appearing as fully integrated state territo­ries represent the normal present.11}

But not even these binaries tend to work all that well for the Arctic Ocean space. True, it is the object of intensified interest from all five current coastal states - Canada, the United States, Russia, Norway and Denmark - that in the UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) process have launched claims for extended coastal zones based on the sea floor principle.

While certainly part of the history of colonialism, the exceptional feature of the Arctic Ocean seems to be that it emerges as a histori­cal and meta-geographical entity through high modernity rather than high imperialism. As a strategically important region it is more con­temporary with the atomic bomb, the computer, long-distance missiles, space stations and issues of human survival, including Arctic warfare, climate change and environment, than with trade, colonies, the allure of temperate wilderness and emerging consumer markets of food, spices and fabrics, the traditional luxuries of overseas cultures. Even in terms of goods, cultural and material, the relative contribution of exotic goods from the Arctic Ocean and its ‘rims’ tended to be sparse and relatively recent. Hans Sloane’s vast private eighteenth-century collec­tion in London included Inuit artifacts from west Greenland and east­ern Canada (barely parts of a strictly defined Arctic Ocean), including snow goggles, ivory tools, a snow knife, harpoons, a kayak model, walrus teeth, a decorated belt. But numbers were unimpressive, only forty from Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, Davis Strait and Greenland.^[766] Although some of this ethnographic collecting started to appear in early modern colonial coffee-table books and collections (tusks of walrus, Inuit art objects, seal fur), and despite occasional shows by Inuit in the Danish imperial capital, it was marginal compared to other ocean colonial exot­ica and became more common only in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries.^[767]

This is to some extent countered by the role of certain parts of the Arctic Ocean in early modern resource economies, for example the Barents region (again a boundary zone to current definitions of the Arctic Ocean) where trade and technology transfer included not only Russians and the neighbouring Scandinavians but also the Dutch and the British.

The exceptionalism in historical terms is borne out in geographical fea­tures as well. The Arctic Ocean is the smallest of the world oceans, with less than three per cent of the world’s saltwater surface and even less of its saltwater volume, and the shallowest, with an average depth of 1,200 metres. Its deep regions, reaching a maximum depth of little more than 5,000 metres are separated by undersea ridges, three of the largest, Lomonosov, Gakkel and Mendeleyev named after Russian scientists, at the same time indicating where some of the formative oceanographic science has taken place. It has major tributaries from all directions: the Pechora, Ob, Yenisey and Lena in Russia, the Tana from Finland and Norway, the Coppermine and the Mackenzie in North America, and many smaller ones, plus a sprinkling from the melting Greenland ice cap.

The Arctic Ocean is semi-closed and has a very irregular extent. It is commonly defined as including both the Davis Strait west of Greenland and the Hudson Bay, extending as far south as the 57th Parallel, but is otherwise far from congruent with the extent of the Arctic region. The modern orthodoxy is that the sea ice cover, with seasonal variations, has existed for at least 800,000 years. Although still standing, this claim has been questioned by recent research and it is now also challenged by pro­jections of the future extent of summer sea ice.

Arctic Ocean coastal populations are, and have always been, very small. The Arctic, commonly defined as the territory north of the Arctic Circle at latitude 66^o 33' N, holds little more than four million inhabit­ants, many of whom are concentrated in several inland cities and com­munities and the large majority at considerable distance from the Arctic Ocean proper. The Arctic as a whole has a much wider expanse than the Arctic Ocean, although the terrestrial Arctic, circumscribing the ocean, is only a small portion of the whole. The total and integrated region com­prises parts of the North Atlantic and adjacent seas around Greenland and northwestern Russia, and parts of the north Pacific. Contact with European whalers, traders and missionaries introduced indigenous pop­ulations to a range of diseases and changed their traditional nomadic lifestyle.^[769] Inhabitants are largely sedentary or semi-nomadic and, if they belong in certain communities, practise traditional methods of hunting, fishing, reindeer herding and arts and crafts, and are distributed across the territories of eight nation-states.

Yet another special feature of the Arctic Ocean is that it is, through the thermohaline circulation, fed by warm waters from the mid- and western Atlantic (the Caribbean, hence ‘the Gulf Stream’) which makes the boundary to the North Atlantic a zone of unusually northerly agri­culture, especially affecting Scandinavia which had sizable populations since the Bronze Age and through the Middle Ages.

With these conditions it is obvious that much of the history of the Arctic Ocean is both one of the life and cultures of sparse northern pop­ulations over long periods of time and one of forays into the ocean from European nations. This pattern is not dissimilar from colonial ocean encounters elsewhere in the world but with the major difference that non-indigenous Arctic colonisation was small in absolute numbers and large in relative terms.

Perhaps more importantly, it is an ocean that has not been sailed across as part of trade, travel, migration or happenstance; only research vessels and icebreakers have done so. While for centuries there had been extensive coastal sea-ice navigation among Inuit in the Canadian archi- pelago,^[770] there was never any trans-oceanic travel on the ice. The shores of the Arctic Ocean have therefore not stood in relation to each other before the era of air travel, and even then to a very limited extent given the sparsity of population and the political divides across this ocean that during the Cold War was literally the closest boundary between the North American part of the West and the Eastern bloc, and also a potential the­atre of war. The first Arctic Ocean crossing was done with the Norwegian ship Fram on an expedition, which lasted from 1895 to 1897, led by explorer-scientist and later Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtjof Nansen. It demonstrated empirically that there was a major east to west current that transported ice towards Greenland and the western Arctic. The first sur­face crossing of the ocean was led by Wally Herbert in 1969, in a dog sled expedition from Alaska to Svalbard, with air support. The first nau­tical transit of the North Pole was made in 1958 by the submarine USS Nautilus (the first on foot was claimed by Frederick Cook (1908) and Robert Peary (1909); a dispute that has been lingering ever since),^[771] and the first surface nautical transit occurred in August 1977 by the 23,400 ton Russian icebreaker NS Arktika propelled by its 75,000 horsepower engines.

The first flight to reach the North Pole was claimed by US Admiral Richard F. Byrd in 1926, but not documented and much doubted (Byrd also made the first flight to the South Pole). Even today, with the polar air route established by Scandinavian Airlines in 1950, there are literally no connections between the shores of this major ocean. To get from Iqaluit on Baffin Island, a mere 400 miles from the Greenland capital of Nuuk, it is necessary to fly to Ottawa, then to a major hub in the US or Canada, from there to Copenhagen, only to fly all the way back across the North Atlantic to Nuuk, a trip hard to complete in less than thirty-six hours. Other Arctic destinations are in real terms even farther apart. Oceans typically connect continents, islands and people but the Arctic Ocean has traditionally divided east from west, north from south, and major industrial and energy resources from their potential users, possibly more than in any other oceanic part of the world.

Recent geopolitics of the Arctic Ocean remain a feature of distinc­tion. With its natural resources such as minerals, oil and gas for a long time unattainable for climatic, technical or economic reasons they have become more accessible through new technologies, the end of the Cold War and climate change which makes offshore activities and all-year open sea routes more likely. After a long period of relatively stable geo­politics the general situation has turned more dynamic and a new scram­ble for resources and political turf-holding has arisen, involving new Arctic interests from countries such as China, Korea, India and several European states.