Cold War legacies in Russia’s Svalbard policy - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 27

During his two-day visit to Norway in November 2002, President Vladimir
Putin raised the issue of the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act and a pur-
suant Protection Plan. In the course of his meeting with Prime Minister Kjell
Magne Bondevik, Putin expressed worries over the environmental protection
regulations for Svalbard (Fyhn and Tjønn 2002:2; Pedersen 2002:3). The
Norwegian measures, he asserted, could obstruct Russian coal mining and thus
also impede the Russian presence on the archipelago. Implicitly, the issue was
considered existential to Russia's only remaining Svalbard settlement and pos-
sibly a matter of Russian security. The attention that President Putin devoted
to the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act during his visit to Oslo in 2002
indicated that the issue was highly politicized. Still, according to observers,
Putin's worries were perceived as 'mild' , 8 reflecting that the president hardly
had serious security concerns regarding Svalbard (Jørgensen 2004:187-8).
The numerous 'securitizing moves' in Russia in connection with the adop-
tion of the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act in 2001 can perhaps be
seen as indications of an underlying value conflict between Norway and
Russia. Norway's main objective at the time was to protect Svalbard's frag-
ile Arctic environment (environmental security), whereas Russia was mainly
concerned about how the Act would affect ongoing and future Russian min-
ing activities on the archipelago (economic security) and ultimately the future
of the Russian settlement in Barentsburg (societal security).
Environmental concerns were not at the top of Russia's regional and global
agenda, since the country had 'limited financial possibilities to deal with
these issues to the extent they deserve' (Fedorov et al . 2001:3). International
environmental disputes, or, as the Finnish lawyer and former diplomat Martti
Koskenniemi (1991:73) calls them, 'disputes concerning the relationship
between environmental and economic values', are often hard to resolve.
In this particular case, the apparent incompatibility of Russia and Norway's
value hierarchies led the Russian public as well as decision makers within the
country's political and military establishment to believe that Norway had
a hidden agenda, that is, that the Environmental Protection Act was part
of a Norwegian plan to undermine Trust Arktikugol and force the Russian
population to leave Svalbard . 9 Such a turn of events could in Russian eyes
jeopardize Russia's military security if Norway at a later stage were to take
advantage of the situation and convert the archipelago into a military strong-
hold, in violation of article 9 of the Svalbard Treaty (1920).
The Russian moves to 'securitize' the Svalbard Environmental Protection
Act have many similarities with Soviet efforts to counteract Norwegian con-
servation measures on Svalbard in the Cold War period. As noted by Clive
Archer and David Scrivener (1982:74), '[t]he Soviet Union has often argued
that Norwegian regulatory measures, such as the post-1971 introduction of
conservation areas covering almost 45 per cent of Svalbard, are subject to
prior Soviet agreement on their content'. In the 1970s, as in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, Russian concerns were primarily related to the potential for