Cold War legacies in Russia’s Svalbard policy - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 19

Norwegian military activity on Svalbard. Nor does it, in the Norwegian
view, preclude visits to Svalbard by Norwegian naval or coast guard vessels,
landings by military aircraft or temporary presence by Norwegian military
personnel in uniform (Ministry of Justice and the Police 1999).
Given the strategic significance of the Barents Sea in the Cold War period,
as the Soviet Northern Fleet's only gateway to patrol areas in the North
Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean, Norway's handling of its Treaty obligations
regarding the strategically located archipelago was a subject of constant Soviet
scrutiny. There was widespread fear that Svalbard would be used for military
purposes by Norway or its NATO allies, and it was the task of the Soviet
Foreign Ministry and the country's consulate in the Soviet mining town of
Barentsburg to monitor the situation and report any suspicious activity.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine contemporary Russian-Norwegian
security relations in the northernmost part of Europe and to discuss simi-
larities and differences between the old and the new security dynamics on
the northern flank of NATO. Specifically, the chapter explores Russian per-
ceptions of, and responses to, Norwegian Svalbard policies in the 1990s and
2000s. The next section of this chapter presents an overview of the theo-
retical framework, methodology and sources of the study. The three sections
after that discuss the three cases mentioned above: Russian reactions to the
establishment of Norwegian ground radars and satellite stations on Svalbard
(1997-1999), the adoption of the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act
(2001) and the enhanced Norwegian efforts to enforce fishery regulations in
the FPZ (early 2000s). Findings from the case studies' analysis are summa-
rized and discussed in the concluding section.
Theory, method and sources
Securitization theory, as laid out by the so-called 'Copenhagen School ' 2 of
security studies in the mid- and late 1990s, offers a conceptual framework
for studying how and why certain issues become security issues. In addition
to the military sector (military security), the Copenhagen School includes the
political sector (political security), the economic sector (economic security),
the societal sector (societal security) and the environmental sector (environ-
mental security) in its theoretical framework (Buzan 1991:19; Buzan et al .
1998:7-8).
The essence of the theory is that security can be understood as a 'speech
act' through which a particular issue is framed by one or more 'securitizing
actors' as constituting an existential threat to a designated referent object.
In the words of Danish political scientist Ole Wæver, the term 'securitiza-
tion' denotes 'the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with
a saliency sufficient to have political effects' (Wæver 2003:11). The aim of a
'securitizing move' is typically to enable 'emergency measures' that can secure
the survival of a referent object. If and when the content of the security 'speech