Moving above and below the State

Abstract

It appears now to be a truism that globalization is the hallmark of our contemporary era. Globalization is said to be ushering in important changes in the constitutive features of the states system. In this story, globalization helps to unleash vertical and horizontal centrifugal processes that give rise to global, supranational, and transnational arrangements, and these developments in turn undermine states' ability to coordinate policies across sectors and issue-areas, thus reconfiguring or undermining state sovereignty as we know it.The story of state systemic change has been told many times and comes in many iterations. But it remains a contested story. Many chroniclers, particularly post-9/11, tell a story of state resilience and even resurgence. It may also well be that globalization is an uneven phenomenon, with greater changes in certain issue-areas or in certain regions than in others. It is against this backdrop that we consider the Arctic.The opening of the Arctic is in part a matter of subjecting this remote and forbidding region to the pressures of globalization. One important aspect of globalization with obvious bearing on the Arctic is juridification through the rise of international law and agencies. The Arctic does not escape what appears to be a rising penchant for rule-making, as well as rule interpretation and application, in international and global settings. The global juridification process covers a broad range of issue-areas, such as economic regulation, security, labour standards, the environment, and product and food safety standards, with variable impacts on the Arctic.1 We see such impacts on the Arctic in, for instance, the central role of the United Nations law of the sea convention (UNCLOS), but also in such arrangements as the UN framework convention on climate change.As several of the contributions to this special issue emphasize, the Arctic is now on the agenda of the European Union, which is a prime example of regional juridification beyond the nation-state. The EU subjects its citizens to regulations that stem from community law-making and intergovernmental proceedings. Directives enacted by the EU take direct effect in member-states, and thus automatically bind individual citizens and their elected representatives.2 The EU is clearly one of the foremost cases of nation-state transformation.These comments remind us that it is important to keep in mind that renewed interest in the Arctic is occurring amid a certain expansion of the rule-of-law principle in the international arena. This expansion complements the domestic one in areas such as international trade, security, labour, and environmental law. Similarly, human rights are of great importance to the Arctic: the rights of indigenous peoples are institutionalized in international courts, in tribunals, and, increasingly, also in rule-making bodies over and beyond the state.In the globalization story, the weakening of the state's external sovereignty is understood to be amplified by increased contestation over its internal sovereignty by increasingly assertive regions and other subunits. Such fissiparous vertical developments interact with, and are reinforced by, the horizontal pressures that emanate from states being more closely tied together under supranational arrangements, and through the broad patterns of interweaving and interdependence of globalization.The interesting question is what implications these developments have for the Arctic region, especially since this has been a part of the world where states have resisted the development of strong trans- or supranational organizations. The most important body, the Arctic Council, which groups the eight Arctic states plus numerous nonstate participants or observers, is basically a forum with no decision-making ability. In other words, is the Arctic a case of statist resilience or resurgence that shows the limits of the global transformation saga? …