UBC Journal of International Affairs 2021

Contributors

Editor-in-Chief Hannah Exley

Managing Editor Julian Lam

Editorial Board

Tae Young Bae Stephanie Brook Tiffany Chang Henrique Fernandes Gizel Gedik Marcela Gomez Sophia Lee Gabriel Queiroz Imhoff Oskar Steiner Justin Wong JinHua Yip

Production Team

Oskar Steiner Justin Wong Design Oskar Steiner

Authors

Julien B. Cardinal Léna Faucher Esmé Graziani Chelsea Parker David Yang

Faculty Reviewers

Dr. Michael Byers Department of Political Science

Dr. Peter Dauvergne Department of Political Science

Dr. Paul Evans School of Public Policy and Global Affairs

Dr. Steven Lee Department of History

Dr. Richard Price Department of Political Science

Special Thanks

Sarah Baik International Relations Program Manager

Dr. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom Department of Political Science

Claire Sarson UBC Journal of Political Studies

The IRSA

Table of Contents

Contributors Foreword

Introduction

Léna Faucher

Shaping a Sustainable Future for the European Union

Redefining Market Neutrality, an Environmental Requirement for a Greener ECB

David Yang

Nordic Defense Policy

Challenges and Common Ground

Julien B. Cardinal Navigating Choppy Waters

The Disputed Legal Status of the Northwest Passage

Chelsea Parker

Ideologically Informed Investment

Chinese State-Owned Multinational Corporations as Potential Instruments of Political Influence in Cuba

Esmé Graziani

Universalism is Not for Everyone

The Postmodern Feminist Argument Against Gendered Truth Claims within International Relations

Contributor Biographies

Foreword

I am thrilled to be asked to introduce the 2021 issue of the Journal of International Affairs. The past year has been difficult for everyone enduring the global COVID-19 pandemic, but fortunately numerous students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia have spent part of their year producing outstanding research papers for submission to the journal. We owe enormous thanks to the journal’s editorial team, who devoted so much of their time and intellectual energy to producing this highquality publication of some of the best undergraduate work in the interdisciplinary field of international relations at UBC. The JIA is one of Canada’s longest-standing and best student journals, and the editors, assistants, reviewers, and authors involved in producing this year’s issue continued this venerable tradition of excellence. The articles included in this year’s issue cover a broad range of regional and thematic topics. The first two articles deal with European states’ joint policies on pressing issues of concern. Léna Faucher’s article focuses on the conundrum of the European Central Bank’s policy of market neutrality and the barriers it presents to climate change policy action. David Yang’s article, in turn, asks whether the Nordic European states could successfully develop a collective security policy. The next two articles deal with security issues in the Americas. The article by Julien B. Cardinal considers the historical importance of the Arctic, and specifically the Northwest Passage, in the Canada-US diplomatic relationship. Chelsea Parker’s article in turn examines the potential security threats to the United States presented by China’s investments in Cuba. Finally, in a broader sense, Esmé Graziani’s article articulates the contributions that postmodern and postcolonial feminisms can bring to our understanding of international relations, by resisting universalist narratives. These articles together showcase the diverse skills of UBC international relations students. Please enjoy reading them and sharing them widely!

Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom Co-chair, International Relations Program

Introduction

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the 2021 edition of the UBC Journal of International Affairs!

Now in its 36th year of publication, the Journal of International Affairs is UBC’s oldest undergraduate publication and a testament to perseverance and excellence. The 2021 edition is no exception. In spite of the many challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Journal of International Affairs hired a strong editorial board, received an impressive number of submissions from a wide variety of disciplines, produced a polished final product, and continues in its mission to showcase outstanding undergraduate work in the discipline of international affairs.

The five papers published in this edition were selected for their argumentative strength, skilled composition, and originality. They address a diverse array of issues from various disciplinary perspectives, from economics and history to security studies and international relations theory, in a variety of global arenas, ranging from Europe to Canada’s North and the Caribbean. Together, they offer a response to many of the pressing issues of our time, and chronicle a unique moment in global affairs.

I would like to express my gratitude to the students, faculty, and staff who contributed to this year’s edition. Thank you, firstly, to all of the talented undergraduate students who submitted papers to the Journal of International Affairs this year. Even though many papers were not selected for publication, the editorial board took great pleasure in reviewing them and were impressed with the high quality of work we received. Although the editorial board could not meet in person at the Liu Institute this year, I was continually impressed with our editors’ dedication and commitment to their task, as well as their productive and insightful discussions in online meetings. Each of our editors brought a unique set of valuable skills and knowledge to the (virtual) table which helped to shape the Journal of International Affairs into its current form and will surely serve them well in the future. I would like to offer gratitude to managing editor

Julian Lam, for consistently stepping up when required, and to our talented production team, Justin Wong and Oskar Steiner. Thank you also to our faculty reviewers who took the time out of their busy schedules to review and offer suggestions to our authors, and to our program manager, Sarah Baik. Lastly, I would like to thank you, our readers, for your continued support and interest. I hope that you find this year’s edition stimulating, compelling, and thought-provoking.

Sincerely, Hannah Exley Editor-in-Chief, 2020-2021

UBC Journal of International Affairs

Shaping a Sustainable Future for the European Union

Redefining Market Neutrality, an Environmental Requirement for a Greener ECB

Since its creation, the European Union (EU) has proven to be economically, politically and socially ambitious. From the creation of a supra-national democratic system to a monetary union, the 27 countries have converted a visionary future into reality.1 As one of the key international stakeholders, it has committed to being one of the leaders in the fight against climate change. In the Union and beyond, global leaders are now responding to the growing voices warning against the dangers of an anthropogenic rise in temperatures. For the last 20 years, sustainable development has been at the heart of the EU’s political agenda at both the local and international levels. After adhering to the UN’s 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, politicians have introduced a number of policies fostering social, economic and environmental sustainability. Over the long term, these substantial structural changes aim to make the EU climate-neutral by 2050.2

Nevertheless, this demanding deadline will require the remodeling of complex

1 James Harold, “The History of European Economic and Monetary Union,” in Routledge Handbook of the Economics of European Integration, ed. Volker Nitsch Harald Badinger (London, 2015).

2 Eóin Flaherty, “Green Central Banking: Options for the ECB on Climate Change,” Emerging Voices, 2017.

Shaping A Sustainable Future

and interdependent mechanisms that have been slow to evolve in the past.3 This tremendous challenge for politicians, economists and EU citizens will not only entail a deep rethinking of our lives but also colossal investments. According to a survey conducted by the European Union, meeting climate goals set for 2030 is estimated to cost around €180Bn a year.4 The European banking and financial systems will therefore be central to this transition.5 Accordingly, the European Central Bank (ECB), should not only accompany states in their transition but first and foremost engage in a deep transformation of its unsustainable financial practices.6

In November 2019, Christine Lagarde took office as the head of the ECB and expressed her desire to make climate one of the priorities of her mandate.7 By doing so, Lagarde addressed the rising environmental criticisms aimed at the institution, and more specifically at the ECB’s vast asset purchase program known as quantitative easing (QE). In the wake of the slow European economic recovery following the 2008 crisis, the implementation of QE led to the creation of a number of financial programs such as the Corporate Sector Purchase Program (CSPP).8 The CSPP was created to buy nonbank bonds on the European market but has recently been subjected to a questioning of its practices, notably of its “market neutrality” strategy. Market neutrality is a principle that can be described as the necessity that the ECB remain “neutral with respect to the functioning of financial markets”.9 Nevertheless, the traditionally accepted notion of market neutrality strategy has been denounced as one that favours polluting companies, forcing the ECB to take swift actions to rectify this bias. Ms. Lagarde herself has since demonstrated her determination to reform market neutrality: “we have to ask ourselves as to whether market neutrality should be the actual principle that drives our monetary policy portfolio management, asset purchase programs”.10 In order to

3 Thomas Oatley, “Toward a Political Economy of Complex Interdependence,” European Jour nal of International Relations, 25(4) (2019): 957–78.

4 Stanislas Jourdan and Wojtek Kalinowski, “Aligning Monetary Policy with the EU’s Climate Targets,” Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms, April, 2019, 5.

5 Ibid.

6 John Gordon, “The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Programme Is Huge – Use It to Support the Green Transition,” LSE Blog, 2020.

7 Nicolas Hercelin, “Why the ECB Should Go beyond ‘Market Neutrality,” Positivemoney.eu, September 18, 2019, https://www.positivemoney.eu/2019/09/ecb-market-neutrality-doctrine/.

8 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

9 Ibid.

10 Carolynn Look, “Lagarde Says ECB Needs to Question Market Neutrality on Climate,” Bloomberg, October 14, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-14/lagarde-says-ecbneeds-to-question-market-neutrality-on-climate.

evaluate this statement and subsequent policies, one needs to fully comprehend the CSPP’s mandate as well as its unsustainable practices. Therefore, this paper will focus on the following question: How does the concept of market neutrality enable the ECB to justify its misalignment with the EU’s environmental commitments and should the ECB be neutral with respect to climate change?

In this paper, I will argue that the concept of market neutrality has been utilized by the ECB to perpetuate a non-sustainable and non-democratic security purchase strategy. It will demonstrate that the ECB cannot be an impartial financial actor and should hence use this non-neutrality to engage in a positive discrimination towards sustainable assets.

The first part of the paper will focus on the European Central Bank’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. This set of strategies has primarily focused on quantitative easing as an efficient non-conventional banking strategy. I will then introduce the concepts and history behind the widely used principle of market neutrality. In order to understand the criticisms market neutrality has attracted, the second part will analyse the deep environmental consequences of such a notion. Finally, this study will lead us to propose a number of policy recommendations to be implemented to increase accountability, transparency and sustainability at the European Central Bank.

Market neutrality, a guiding principle of the post-crisis ECB

Non-conventional monetary policies, a financial response to economic crisis

Traditionally, central banks have relied on short term interest rates to ensure price as well as financial stability.11 As outlined under the Maastricht treaty, the European Central Bank is no exception, with its first objective being price stability. This objective is described as: “a development of the harmonized index of consumer prices (HICP) for the euro area as a whole of below, but close to, two per cent on an annual basis.”.12 Therefore, similarly to central banks across the world, the ECB predominantly works to ensure price stability as it is “ essential for economic growth and job creation, two of the European Union’s objectives”.13 Nevertheless, the 2008 financial crisis led the ECB

11 Jens Van’t Klooster and Clément Fontan, “The Myth of Market Neutrality: A Comparative Study of the European Central Bank’s and the Swiss National Bank’s Corporate Security Purchases,” New Political Economy 25(6) (2019): 865–79.

12 C. W. Eijffinger Sylvester and Lex H. Hoogduin, “ECB: Quo Vadis?” Intereconomics 53(3) (2018): 170–73.

13 “Objective of monetary policy,” European Central Bank, last accessed September 16, 2021,

Shaping A Sustainable Future

to broaden the scope of its prerogatives.

While the European Monetary Union was reasonably successful in the first years of its implementation, the global financial crisis profoundly questioned its structural mechanisms.14 Confronted with the threat of the collapse of many European national banks, the ECB expanded its powers to intervene more directly in the economy.15 Furthermore, the bleak post-crisis period characterized by high unemployment and extreme economic imbalances encouraged the ECB to pursue a more affirmative role.16 Therefore, in 2015, the ECB launched its first quantitative easing (QE) program. This monetary policy consists of the simultaneous purchase of financial assets and creation of equivalent CB reserves. It translates into the autonomous expansion of the central bank’s balance sheet but more importantly, it has made the ECB into a tangible financial stakeholder.17 Even though economists have not yet fully measured its effectiveness, quantitative easing has largely expanded particularly with the recent creation of four sub-programs.18

The most prominent of these programs is the CSPP. Launched in 2016, it is dedicated to: “provide further monetary policy accommodation and contribute to a return of inflation rates to levels below, but close to 2%”.19 More specifically, the CSPP involves buying euro-denominated bonds issued by private companies so as to provide them with credit, hence stimulating the European economy.20 At the end of September, the QE represented more than €263 billion in corporate bonds with the CSPP portfolio making up to €178billion.21 https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/intro/objective/html/index.en.html.

14 Benjamin Cohen, “Toward a Leaderless Currency System,” in The Future of the Dollar (Cornell University Press 2009).

15 Sini Matikainen, Emanuele Campiglio and Dimitri Zenghelis, “The climate impact of quantita tive easing,” The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, April, 2017. https:// www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ClimateImpactQuantEasing_Matikain en-et-al.pdf

16 Stanislas Jourdan and Wojtek Kalinowski, “Aligning Monetary Policy with the EU’s Climate Targets,” Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms, April, 2019.

17 Matikainen, Campiglio, and Zenghelis.

18 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

19 Van’t Klooster and Fontan.

20 Hercelin.

21 Van’t Klooster and Fontan.

Quantitative easing, a new framework governed by a pre-crisis principle

As previously mentioned, the European Union has witnessed a significant growth in the use of quantitative easing. In the last decade, the European Central Bank has hence largely broadened its political as well as economic prerogatives and influence. While it has taken on a new role in the EU, the ECB has continuously relied on a pre-crisis guiding principle for its strategy: market neutrality.22 This term refers to the minimization or complete disappearance of the impact of the ECB’s actions on “relative prices and unintended side effects on market functioning”.23 In other words, quantitative easing should avoid the distortion of financial markets by favouring certain assets over others.24 Therefore, market neutrality ought to reflect the ECB’s role: “[It] is mandated to act in accordance with the principle of an open market economy with free competition, favouring an efficient allocation of resources”.25 When focusing on the CSPP, its portfolio composition should hence be proportional to the composition of the European financial markets.26

It is crucial to understand that the very concept of market neutrality stems from a longstanding tradition describing central banks as apolitical, independent and technocratic entities.27 Even though the avoidance of the European political inertia proved extremely beneficial in the urgency of the 2008 context, market neutrality has remained the CSPP’s main rationale. On the ECB’s website, one can find more than 70 references to market neutrality while the Bank of England or Federal Reserve refer to this notion less than ten times.28 Given the heterogeneity of the European political landscape and pace of financial transactions, market neutrality is understandably crucial to the CSPP’s strategy. As Yves Mersch, an ECB board member, explains: “Deviating from market neutrality and interfering with economic policy risks exposing the ECB to litigation. It is not up to the central bank but to elected governments to decide which industry is to be closed and when.”29 Nevertheless, it has also led the ECB to repeatedly downplay and

22 Ibid.

23 Hercelin.

24 Martin Arnold, “ECB to Consider Using Climate Risk to Steer Bond Purchases, Says Lagarde,” The Financial Times, October 14, 2020.

25 Van’t Klooster and Fontan, 8.

26 Ibid.

27 Hercelin.

28 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

29 Hercelin.

Shaping A Sustainable Future

disregard the important economic, social and environmental consequences of market neutrality.

Market neutrality, a gateway to override the Union’s sustainability commitments ?

Market neutrality, a “neutral” principle favouring carbon-intensive companies

As seen in the previous paragraph, market neutrality is first and foremost designed to ensure the ECB’s apolitical and neutral character. However, by claiming complete neutrality, central banks have often escaped oversight and the institutional questioning of their practices.30 Still, scholars, activists and members of the European Central Bank have recently exposed the non-neutral dimension of the CSPP’s quantitative easing strategy.31 It is more specifically denounced for favouring carbon-intensive companies, hence disregarding the EU’s climate commitments.32 Therefore, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms leading the CSPP to contribute to non-sustainable sectors.

While market neutrality is more complex than simply creating a portfolio perfectly mirroring the composition of the financial market, the bonds purchased by the CSPP must fulfil clear eligibility criteria. They must be denominated in euros, highly recommended by a credit rating agency and acceptable as a collateral.33 Therefore, in accordance with these requirements as well as market neutrality, the bonds purchased should both satisfy eligibility criteria and proportionally represent the different sectors of the market. However, when studying the CSPP’s portfolio, one can clearly identify a bias towards highly polluting sectors such as fossil fuels, industrial, and manufacturing companies.34

The table below demonstrates that while integrated oil bonds represent 1.71% of all Euro denominated corporate bonds, they make up to 8.4% of the CSPP’s portfolio. Similarly, we observe an increase in the proportion of car manufacturing bonds, from 2.16% of the bond market versus 6.8% of the CSPP portfolio. The most striking figure concerns industries and utilities companies with a respective corporate bond over-representation of 6.6 and 19.7 percentage points. Conversely, renewable energy companies’ bonds are

30 Sylvester and Hoogduin.

31 Look.

32 Van’t Klooster and Fontan

33 Matikainen, Campiglio and Zenghelis.

34 Hercelin.

under-represented as they are entirely absent from the CSPP’s portfolio.35 Overall, according to a report by Positive Money Europe, more than 63% of the CSPP portfolio is directly financing highly polluting sectors. Meanwhile, sustainable (“green bonds”) and the railway sector make up to a mere 7% of the CSPP’s portfolio.36

Table 1. Sectoral distribution (%) of EU corporate bond market, Corporate Sector Purchase Programme-eligible bonds, and estimated purchases, by share of total amount outstanding, according to BICS* sector

Source: Matikainen, Campiglio and Zenghelis Dimitri, 2017

The above table clearly shows that the origin of this bias towards carbon-intensive bonds comes from the CSPP’s eligibility requirements. While car manufacturing bonds are only 2.16% of the European financial market, they represent 9.85% of the

35 Matikainen, Campiglio and Zenghelis.

36 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

Shaping A Sustainable Future

CSPP eligible bond market. Similarly, utilities companies represent 24.45% of the eligible bonds yet only 4.97% of the overall Euro denominated market. These figures show that the set of criteria established by the European Central Bank are pushing the needle towards carbon-intensive sectors.37 As they require greater quantities of capital investment and hence external bond funding than other sectors (e.g. communication, technologies), fossil fuels or manufacturing industries represent a more significant share of the financial market. Furthermore, polluting companies and assets (“brown bonds”) are often highly recommended by credit rating agencies due to their wellestablished financial weight and benefit from longer maturity than “green” ones.38

The ECB’s quantitative easing eligibility standards lead to an over-representation of polluting bonds in the CSPP portfolio.

Although the European Union has explicitly engaged in numerous sustainable commitments, the CSPP perpetuates a financial strategy that mostly benefits highly polluting sectors (car manufacturing, utilities or fossil fuels). By structuring its financial approach on strict eligibility criteria, the CSPP is not respecting market neutrality, worse, this bias actually benefits carbon-intensive companies. While these criteria ensure a safer and more stable portfolio in case of economic stress, they also disregard the current and future environmental crisis. The current market neutrality principle is contested and has so far protected the ECB from undertaking a deep restructuring of its practices.

Market neutrality, a “neutral” principle escaping democratic, institutional and environmental considerations

The CSPP’s financial strategy and overall notion of market neutrality have long been the target of environmentalist criticisms. Nevertheless, the ECB has proven extremely reluctant to change, putting forward its traditional role as an independent institution.39

By relying on the apolitical, technical and complex dimension of its practices, European central bankers have continued to escape institutional supervision, turning a blind eye to the deep consequences of their actions.40 Even though one must acknowledge the complexity of financial markets as well as the political inertia of the EU in comparison to ever-changing and fluid markets, market neutrality should be re-visited.

37 Matikainen, Campiglio and Zenghelis.

38 Ibid.

39 Van’t Klooster and Fontan.

40 Sylvester and Hoogduin.

While ECB officials have repeatedly referred to article 127 of the Treaty of the European Union (TFEU) defining the Union’s monetary policy, to justify market neutrality, it is nowhere explicitly mentioned in the EU treaties or ECB’s statutes.41 Furthermore, Article 3 distinctly stipulates that the “The Union shall [...] work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, […] and improvement of the quality of the environment” and Article 127 states that the ECB “shall support the general economic policies in the Union […] as laid down in Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union”.42 Furthermore, a 2015 ruling by the European Court of Justice created a legal precedent where the ECB directly intervened and corrected malfunctioning markets. It therefore weakened the scope and power of the Bank’s claims on its market neutral role 43 Consequently, the current market neutrality policy raises questions as to the ECB’s integrity from a procedural and substantive standpoint. The first aspect refers to the lack of democratic accountability over the central bank’s financial intervention in European markets. The substantive one refers to the ECB’s participation in practices that are in clear contradiction with a European democratic aspiration for an environmentally sustainable future.44

Even though the independence and competences of the ECB are key to the economic development and stability of the Eurozone, it has continued to overstep environmental and democratic requirements. Market neutrality is effectively a non-neutral notion that has protected the central banks from institutional oversight, perpetuating environmentally harmful policies.45 There is therefore an urgent need for reforms at the heart of the European Central Bank. Nevertheless, reform does not imply a complete change in the ECB’s structures as it could lead to financial instability and distrust from investors.46 As a key actor of the financial market, a green reform should target the CSPP and use the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP) as a channel for green investments.47 When exposing our recommendations, one should not underestimate the complexity of the financial markets and economic imperatives of the Union.

41 Hercelin.

42 Flaherty, 2.

43 Hercelin.

44 Van’t Klooster and Fontan.

45 Matikainen, Campiglio and Zenghelis.

46 Jean Pisani-Ferry, “The ECB’s Response to Climate Change Is Insufficient - Jean Pisani-Ferry,” YouTube, June 27, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds3fGxUyKNA&feature=emb_title.

47 Gordon.

Shaping A Sustainable Future

A greener ECB, policy recommendations and propositions

Sustainable finance, a market neutral approach

More than a “critical mission” as stated by Christine Lagarde, a greener ECB is crucial to preserve the integrity of the Union.48 As a key European Institution, the European Central Bank has the duty to represent the environmental and democratic agenda of the twenty-seven member states. Therefore, proposing and implementing sustainable recommendations is a necessary step in the central bank’s future.

Rather than altogether dismissing the concept of market neutrality, central bankers should employ it to push for more sustainable financial policies. In the long term, the ECB’s strategy of promoting “brown industries” is actively contributing to a long-term distortion of the market.49 In a speech given by Isabel Schnabel in 2020, the Member of the Executive Board of the ECB stated that the promotion of carbon-intensive sectors leads the CSPP to disregard the known climate related financial risks. Climate change does not only represent a risk for the human species and biodiversity but also a soaring danger for financial markets around the world.50 The increase in the frequency and intensity of climate disasters (droughts, wildfires, floods…) will be indeed extremely detrimental for our future economic system. According to the IMF, an average increase in global temperatures by 0.04°C per year will reduce the world real GDP per capita by more than 7% by 2100.51

Therefore, rather than continuing to rely on the concept of market neutrality, the ECB should push for a “climate risk” weight for all European denominated bonds.52 Risk weights are used to calculate the amount of regulatory capital needed to buy a certain bond. The latter should be adjusted to consider the climate change risk of all bonds present on the European market. This would in turn lead to an increase in risk for brown bonds and a decrease for green ones hence promoting a shift to a more sustainable buying strategy.53 Even if certain credit rating agencies have integrated a “climate

48 Ibid.

49 Flaherty.

50 Ibid.

51 Isabel Schnabel, “When Markets Fail – the Need for Collective Action in Tackling Climate Change” European Central Bank, September 28, 2020, https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/ html/ecb.sp200928_1~268b0b672f.en.html.

52 Hercelin.

53 Flaherty.

Léna Faucher

risk” weight, most bonds are not well weighted either due to a lack of transparency or availability of accurate information.54 A 2018 study has shown that only 4.8% of the assets held by the CSPP have undergone a thorough climate risk assessment.55

It is therefore important for the ECB to intervene on the market in order to ensure its future functioning under the climate change context.56 It is indeed unreasonable to perpetuate a financial structure which will lead to a highly disturbed European market and economy: “Is it consistent to tell the private sector you should not invest in such asset because it involves a risk that this asset becomes stranded because of climate change […] and at the same time saying that in the asset purchase of the ECB, you are perfectly neutral and you don’t distinguish between those type of assets?”.57 So, affirmative, direct and swift actions are needed to restore a coherent financial strategy, in line with the democratic, social and environmental aspirations of the European Union.

A future sustainable ECB and CSPP: policy recommendations

One of the most prevailing missions among policy makers is the creation of a “green taxonomy”.58 This would entail an EU wide sustainable classification system that would rate sectors depending on their carbon impact index or overall environmental impact.59 While the European Commission has exposed its efforts and willingness to evolve with the presentation of a “green taxonomy” plan in 2018, this system is not yet enforced.60

Green taxonomy would enable ECB investors to favor financial assets characterized as “green” by the EU taxonomy system and hence partly move away from polluting industries.61 Nevertheless, while it is crucial to promote “green bonds,” it is also important to discourage investors from purchasing “brown” ones.62 So, taking the

54 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

55 Pierre Monnin, “Integrating Climate Risks into Credit Risk Assessment: Current Methodol ogies and the Case of Central Banks Corporate Bond Purchases,” Monetary Economics: Central BanksPolicies & Impacts eJournal (December, 2018).

56 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

57 Pisani-Ferry.

58 Flaherty.

59 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

60 Schnabel.

61 Gordon.

62 Jourdan and Kalinowski.

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additional step of integrating sustainability criteria on corporate bonds would foster a more radical financial climate transition. The sustainability criteria would encompass carbon footprint disclosure, indicators of efforts for business restructuring, recycling criteria as well as an emphasis on revenue dedicated to other activities.63 This would enable European polluting companies to engage in a gradual transition without harming the stability and integrity of the European economy. Overall, one of the key aspects of the restructuring of the European financial system is an improvement of the financial transparency and selection process which would benefit green rather than polluting sectors.

Finally, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to a profound rethinking of the importance and consequences of banking on the European economy. The adoption and implementation of the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) could hence represent a stepping-stone towards greener and more responsible policies.64 Representing more than €1.35 trillion, it will undoubtedly have lasting consequences on the European economic and financial sectors.65 Therefore, it could be partly channeled to foment a green financial transition on the local, national and international levels.66

Even though it should be primarily dedicated to restart struggling economies and benefit vulnerable populations, investment should be subject to strict sustainability criteria.67 Overall, it is necessary for all European financial actors and policy makers to engage in a greener and more responsible transition in the years to come.

Conclusion

Shaping a future sustainable European Union will require diverse adjustments to the Union’s traditional architecture. Each and every one of the twenty-seven states will therefore need to engage in a deep rethinking of its social, economic and political structures. Furthermore, as a key European institution, the European Central Bank should act as an engine of the green transition both by leading states towards more sustainable economic systems but also by promoting greener central banking practices. One of the first steps to be taken towards this transition should be for the ECB to

63 Ibid.

64 Gordon.

65

Governing Council of the European Central Bank, “ECB Announces €750 Billion Pandem ic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP),” March 18, 2020, https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/ date/2020/html/ecb.pr200318_1~3949d6f266.en.html.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

rethink its role in financial markets.

Far from a “neutral” approach, the ECB’s quantitative easing strategy has been repeatedly denounced for its carbon bias disproportionately benefiting polluting sectors. By setting a list of eligibility requirements which have led to an over-representation of carbonintensive bonds, the CSPP has indeed supported highly polluting practices. Moreover, European Central Bankers have long resisted sustainable reforms by covering their actions under the seemingly apolitical and independent market neutrality principle. Nevertheless, important figures such as Christine Lagarde have proven determined to implement greener policies in the years to come. So, from a climate-adjusted risk weight to a “green taxonomy,” numerous solutions can and should be explored to enable a smooth and stable transition towards sustainable finance.

To reply to the research question, the traditional representation of central banks as apolitical and independent institutions has led to an understanding of quantitative easing as a “market neutral” policy. By claiming to mirror the market’s composition, the ECB has therefore continuously escaped institutional, democratic and environmental oversight. Nevertheless, this paper has demonstrated the CSPP’s carbon bias and hence exposed its non-neutrality. The European Central Bank has never been a neutral entity and should channel this capacity towards enacting affirmative environmental policies. These green policies would contribute to making the ECB a sustainable institution and setting the European Union as a global progressive example for leaders across the world.

References

Arnold, Martin. 2020. “ECB to Consider Using Climate Risk to Steer Bond Purchases, Says Lagarde.” The Financial Times.

Cohen, Benjamin. 2009. “Toward a Leaderless Currency System.” In The Future of the Dollar, Cornell University Press

De Santis, Roberto, Geis, André, Juskaite, Aiste and Vaz Cruz, Lia. 2018. “The Impact of the Corporate Sector Purchase Programme on Corporate Bond Markets and the Financing of Euro Area Non-Financial Corporations.” ECB Economic Bulletin 2018(3): 66–84

European Central Bank. 2020. Objective of monetary policy. https://www.ecb.europa. eu/mopo/intro/objective/html/index.en.html

Shaping A Sustainable Future

Flaherty, Eóin. 2020. “Green Central Banking: Options for the ECB on Climate Change.” Emerging Voices. https://www.iiea.com/eu27/green-central-bankingoptions-for-the-ecb-on-climate-change/#:~:text=These%20options%20 include%3A%20mitigating%20climate,greening%20the%20ECB’s%2 0reserve%20assets.

Gordon, John. 2020. “The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Programme Is Huge –Use It to Support the Green Transition.” LSE Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ covid19/2020/09/01/the-ecbs-pandemic-emergency-programme-is-huge-use-itto-support-the-green-transition/.

Governing Council of the European Central Bank. 2020. ECB Announces €750 Billion Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP). https://www.ecb.europa. eu/press/pr/date/2020/html/ecb.pr200318_1~3949d6f266.en.html

Harold, James. 2015. “The History of European Economic and Monetary Union.” In Routledge Handbook of the Economics of European Integration, ed. Volker Nitsch Harald Badinger. London.

Hercelin, Nicolas. 2019. “Why the ECB Should Go beyond ‘Market Neutrality.” Positivemoney.eu. https://www.positivemoney.eu/2019/09/ecbmarket-neutrality-doctrine/.

Jourdan, Stanislas and Kalinowski, Wojtek. 2019. “Aligning Monetary Policy with the EU’s Climate Targets.” Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms. https://www. veblen-institute.org/IMG/pdf/aligning_monetary_policy_with_eu_s_climate_ targets.pdf

Look, Carolynn. 2020. “Lagarde Says ECB Needs to Question Market Neutrality on Climate.” Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-14/ lagarde-says-ecb-needs-to-question-market-neutrality-on-climate.

Matikainen, Sini, Campiglio, Emanuele and Zenghelis Dimitri. 2017. “The climate impact of quantitative easing.” The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/wpcontent/uploads/2017/05/ClimateImpactQuantEasing_Matikainen-et-al.pdf

Monnin, Pierre. 2018. Integrating Climate Risks into Credit Risk Assessment: Current Methodologies and the Case of Central Banks Corporate Bond Purchases.

Oatley, Thomas. 2019. “Toward a Political Economy of Complex Interdependence.” European Journal of International Relations 25(4): 957–78.

Pisani-Ferry, Jean. 2019. The ECB’s Response to Climate Change Is Insufficient - Jean Pisani-Ferry. Positive Money Europe. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Ds3fGxUyKNA&feature=emb_title.

Schnabel, Isabel. 2020. “When Markets Fail – the Need for Collective Action in Tackling Climate Change.” https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2020/ html/ecb.sp200928_1~268b0b672f.en.html.

Sylvester, C. W. Eijffinger and Hoogduin, Lex H. 2018. “ECB: Quo Vadis?” Intereconomics 53(3): 170–73.

Van ’t Klooster, Jens and Fontan, Clément. 2019. “The Myth of Market Neutrality: A Comparative Study of the European Central Bank’s and the Swiss National Bank’s Corporate Security Purchases.” New Political Economy 25(6): 865–79.

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Nordic Defense Policy

Challenges and common ground

Nordic cooperation has generally been seen as a successfully implemented model of regional diplomacy and governance by political science and international relations scholars. Notably absent from the discussion of Nordic cooperation’s success, however, is the topic of security policy. Since the end of World War II, countries in the Nordic region, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, have begun to gravitate towards each other to facilitate a strong level of economic and political integration on many policy areas. More importantly, these countries’ close geographic proximity with one another in the strategic area of Northern Europe and the Arctic has generally presented them with shared geopolitical challenges over the past decades, which seemingly provides fertile ground to cooperate on defense. Despite these conditions, even as the bipolar order of the Cold War fades, consensus on security policy in the Nordics still appears to be weak. Considering these factors, why, and to what extent, should the Nordic countries cooperate on the issue of defense? At the same time, the idea of a common Nordic security policy to address the shortcoming of the Nordic region’s limited defense cooperation has garnered attention amongst researchers. How realistic is a common security policy amongst Nordic countries? This paper seeks to analyse existing scholarly literature and recent developments in Nordic security policy to discuss the state of Nordic cooperation on security policy. Specifically, this paper argues that despite the existing and diverse institutional arrangements in the

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post-Cold War era, which is shaped by national self-interests and limit the viability of a common Nordic security policy, the United States’ uncertain commitment to Transatlantic security as well as Russia’s increasingly provocative presence in the region precipitate a greater need for cooperation amongst Nordic countries, which can be addressed through collective territorial defense initiatives.

To present this argument, this paper first outlines the institutional arrangements that led to the alignment of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland with the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and how Denmark and Norway, despite their membership in the Transatlantic alliance, differ in their interests on security. Then, it presents the Swedish and Finnish experience of non-alignment and assesses the differing motivations for non-alignment within these countries. Finally, it discusses whether Nordic countries and regions, despite the fundamental difference in their institutional arrangements, can find more common ground for security cooperation in the face of the US’s uncertain commitment to Transatlantic security, as well as Russia’s growing presence in the region.

Denmark and Norway: The NATO experience in the Nordic

Immediately following the end of the Second World War, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland became part of NATO as founding members of the organization and are still entrenched under the framework of the Transatlantic military alliance today. While their alignment with NATO remains intact in the post-Cold War period, each of these countries, particularly Denmark and Norway, carry their own set of interests and motivations on security that lead to their continued entrenchment under the framework of NATO.

For Denmark, its security policy is predominantly driven by not only its NATO obligations, but a pivot towards stronger ties with the US militarily. The eager attitude of Denmark in its engagement with the US signifies reciprocity on the security file, by which Denmark activates its capabilities in assistance of US-led missions while retaining protection at home through the guarantee of continued US support for NATO.1 Denmark’s territory of Greenland has also played a role in this exchange of reciprocity historically, as the US seeks to gain a greater presence in the region while Denmark conveniently leverages this interest.2 Thus, this outlook intensified the pace

1 Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen, “So, you want to buy 98 per cent of our territory? A Danish per spective on American-Danish-Greenlandic relations,” September 18, 2019.

2 Ibid.

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of Danish militarization beginning in the 2000s and a more active presence militarily.3 This change in approach was also supplemented with support for militarization following the 2001 election, which saw right-of-center parties dominate the majority of seats in parliament.4 Consequently, the active participation of Danish forces in USled missions such as the Iraq campaign and the War on Terror has led to an emerging warrior identity and popular support within domestic Denmark.5 Furthermore, despite being a member of the EU, Denmark is the only member country that has opted out of the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). While Denmark’s close alignment with the US on security issues was aimed to strengthen its relationship with the US, it comes with a paradoxical contradiction to the country’s longstanding commitment to institutionalized systems of global governance, which fall closer in line with the principles of the EU and the UN.6 As seen through the Danish experience, not only is there an institutional bond with the NATO alliance, the gravitation towards militarization and an increased involvement in US-led military campaigns abroad also signal a direct appeal to bilateral cooperation with the US. Although this approach comes at the expense of Denmark’s distancing from internationalist frameworks such as the EU and the UN, the benefit of sustaining a reciprocal security relationship with the US, in addition to Denmark’s NATO involvement, remains a priority for policymakers Copenhagen in recent decades.

On the other hand, while support for and reliance on NATO remain strong in Norway, its interest in the system of internationalized global governance remains a key pillar of its security policy. As a founding member of NATO, Norway’s involvement in the organization corroborates its longstanding interest in a security guarantee.7 In essence, the geographic location of Norway reinforces the need for a secured North Atlantic where Norway occupies much of its coast. Indeed, the appointment of former Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg as the Secretary General of NATO in 2014 exemplifies Norway’s commitment to the organization.8 Unlike Denmark, however, policymakers

3 Hans Branner, “Denmark between Venus and Mars: How great a change in Danish foreign policy?” in Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook (2013), 134.

4 Branner, 149.

5 Peter Viggo Jakobsen, “Denmark and UN Peacekeeping: Glorious Past, Dim Future” in Inter national Peacekeeping (2016), 753.

6 Anders Wivel, “Between Paradise and Power: Denmark’s Transatlantic Dilemma” in Security Dialogue 36, no. 3 (2005), 419-20.

7 John Karlsrud and Kari M. Osland, “Between Self-Interest and Solidarity: Norway’s Return to UN Peacekeeping?” in International Peacekeeping 23, no. 5 (2016), 796.

8 NATO, “Appointment of Secretary General Designate,” NATO, May 08, 2013, https://www.

in Oslo recognize that continued NATO commitments as well as involvement in the internationalist framework are two sides of the same coin for Norway’s interests. Despite devoting significant military resources to NATO, Norway was still able to contribute 2,000 troops to various UN peacekeeping missions over the span of two decades.9 With a more active involvement in the internationalized system than its fellow NATO counterpart in the Nordics, Norway positions itself according to its interest of maintaining NATO involvement while playing a role on the international stage with the UN. Its successful bid for a seat in the UN Security Council against Canada and Ireland further enforces Norway’s commitment to the internationalist system.10 Thus, the trajectory of Norway’s security policy, while dependent on the security guarantee provided by NATO, is also bounded by its desire to participate in the internationalist framework outside of NATO. Ultimately, although the framework of NATO includes both Norway and Denmark, both countries exhibit a different set of priorities outside NATO, which further complicates the overall institutional arrangements between these countries who would otherwise appear to share the same security goals by virtue of their NATO membership.

Sweden and Finland: Nordic non-alignment

Such a complication in institutional arrangements is further exacerbated when taking into consideration the self-interest and motivations of Sweden and Finland which leads to the policy of military non-alignment in both countries based on the principle of neutrality. In Sweden’s case, the policy of military non-alignment is one that was consistent throughout WWII and the Cold War. However, this approach has been redefined since Sweden’s entry into the EU in the 1990s. While left outside of the NATO framework, Sweden’s departure from strict internationalism and neutrality to Normative Europeanization, defined as the pivot of a state’s policy point of departure towards the European centre, has led to a change in its realistic foreign policy approach.11 This change, marked by the entry of Sweden into the EU in 1995, signified that while Sweden and its security policy remains non-aligned in name, the pursuit of Normative nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_108390.htm.

9 Karlsrud & Osland, 796.

10 Mike Blanchfield, “Canada Keeps up Costly Campaign for UN Security Council Seat amid COVID-19 Crisis,” March 29, 2020, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/covid-19-canada-un-securi ty-council.

11 Douglas Brommesson, “Normative Europeanization: The Case of Swedish Foreign Policy Reorientation,” in Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 2 (2010), 228-238.

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Europeanization enables Sweden to participate in the greater European project and direct its domestic policies, including on issues of security and defense, to align with the EU.12 This is especially true when considering Sweden’s participation in the EU’s CSDP as a founding member, which has allowed the country to engage militarily in conjunction with its EU partners. On the ground, Sweden’s active participation in EUled interventions such as Operation Artemis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as the establishment of the Nordic Battlegroup to supplement the EU’s capacity represents Sweden’s practical shift towards the EU framework under the banner of non-alignment.13

But despite this gravitation towards the EU, the position of non-alignment persists in part because of the public’s skepticism towards military alignment and US influence vis-a-vis its own autonomy. Public opinion in Sweden has been traditionally staunchly opposed to military alignment with NATO, a sentiment that is rooted in the identity of non-alignment of the past.14 Swedish politicians are also conscious of this traditional view on security, as they attempt to balance their messaging to reflect Sweden’s emerging obligations in collective EU security and defense as well as the traditional identity of non-alignment.15 In essence, while Sweden remains non-aligned militarily by definition, its actual security practices are very much tuned towards implicit solidarity with Europe under the framework of the EU, which ironically defeats the principle of non-alignment.16

Compared to Swedish non-alignment, the rationale for non-alignment policy in Finland is less so an exercise of identity posturing but is rather grounded on a strategic need to manage relations with its eastern neighbour with which they share a long border. The Finnish justification for non-alignment was legitimate in an historical sense dating back to the Cold War, and remains so in today’s practical relationship with Russia, as the expansion of NATO and other US and EU-led military influence in Finland would surely pose an legitimate territorial threat for Finland in the face of staunch Russian opposition.17 Indeed, recent missile deployments near the Kola Peninsula by Russia

12 Claes Nilsson and Kristina Zetterlund, “Sweden and the UN: A Rekindled Partnership for Peacekeeping?” in International Peacekeeping 23, no. 5 (2016), 771-72.

13 Ibid, 772.

14 Ulrika Möller and Ulf Bjereld, “From Nordic Neutrals to Post-Neutral Europeans: Differences in Finnish and Swedish Policy Transformation” in Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 4 (2010), 379.

15 Nilsson & Zetterlund, 771-72.

16 Moller & Bjereld, 377.

17 Ibid, 379.

and Russian interference against Finnish counter-surveillance is a reminder that the Finnish-Russian border still remains a contentious international boundary.18 Despite provocations by Russia, political leadership in Helsinki has handled the issue of Finnish-Russian relations with awareness of Russia’s sensitivities. While acknowledging the threat of a more aggressive Russia at its eastern border, Finland continues to practice pragmatism by continuously mobilizing its defense mechanisms, including the activation of the Finnish Border Guard, while maintaining cordial grounds for communication with Moscow.19 Likewise, public sentiment against NATO membership has traditionally informed Finland’s decision-makers. At any time over the course of several governments in the past decades, roughly half of the Finnish public are against NATO membership.20 This sentiment demonstrates that while joining NATO provides Finland with the guarantee of territorial security through Article V, NATO membership is still seen as a contentious option amongst the Finnish electorate when taking into consideration the potential implications of angering the Russian government. Like Sweden, Finland is also a member of the CSDP, but its participation in the EU framework is largely motivated by its need for territorial defense. While recognizing the limitation of the CSDP’s mutual assistance clause on the issue of territorial defense, Helsinki hopes the framework will eventually evolve into a potential security guarantee for Finland in the future.21 Though this may be wishful thinking on Finland’s part, it further underscores Finland’s priority of protecting its own territory from violations and attack. Overall, the objective of Finland’s political leadership is clear - to ensure a stable relationship with Russia while maintaining Finland’s territorial security. Indeed, the ability for Finland to play a prominent role in mediation on the international stage, including the 2018 US-Russia Summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, demonstrates Finland’s capability in practicing non-alignment while maintaining an open door for both its western partners and Russia.

Nonetheless, in comparing the effect of non-alignment policies in Sweden and Finland, there is a significant degree of national interest that influences each country to pursuit

18 Gerard O’Dwyer, “Nordic Countries See Russia Flex Its Missile Muscles,” Defense News, August 06, 2019, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/08/05/nordic-countries-see-russiaflex-its-missile-muscles/.

19 Hans Mouritzen, “Putin, Trump and Norden: From divergence to convergence of Nordic secu rity policies,” in No. 2019: 1. DIIS Working Paper, 2019, 18.

20 Pauli Järvenpää, “Finland and NATO: So Close, Yet So Far,” ICDS, August 6, 2020. https://icds. ee/en/finland-and-nato-so-close-yet-so-far/.

21 Tuomas Iso-Markku, “The EU as a Source of Security: Finland Puts Its Trust in the Mutual Assistance Clause, But Has No Illusions About the Common Security and Defence Policy,” in FIAA Comment, Finnish Institute of International Affairs (2015), 1.

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non-alignment. However, as presented, the Swedish national interest in Europeanization and autonomy differs from the Finnish predominant interest in territorial defense. On a greater regional level, as both Sweden and Finland have conventionally rejected NATO membership in favour of their own pursuit of non-alignment, this reality further highlights the incongruity amongst Nordic countries and regions when juxtaposed with the institutional arrangements of NATO-aligned countries such as Denmark and Norway. These differing institutional arrangements, which in and of themselves reflect each Nordic country’s particular interests, complicate the efforts to establish security cooperation, let alone a common security policy. To do so, each country would need to significantly compromise its existing commitments to their respective institutions, a contentious domestic and foreign policy political risk that Nordic countries have little to no interest in taking.

Trump, Russia, and mutual incentives in the Nordic

However, Nordic countries may be able to look past these institutional incongruities in the face of the US’s uncertain commitment to Transatlantic security and a more aggressive Russia in the region, which create a greater need for collective territorial defense amongst the Nordic states. Since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, European countries have faced growing concerns over the Trump administration’s aggressive protectionist stance on security issues. While Trump has signaled a strong pushback against the US’s traditional leadership role in Europe on defense, difficult questions have also surfaced for each of the Nordic countries in light of an unstable Trump administration. For NATO-aligned Denmark and Norway, the question was whether to appease Trump’s demands and increase defense spending or to seek alternative policy solutions.22 Meanwhile, for non-aligned Sweden and Finland, they must reassess the value of NATO membership and further ties to the US, considering the unsteady leadership in Washington which in turn diminishes the guarantee of US protection.23 Consequently, all of these Nordic countries, much like the rest of Europe, must face the undesirable and paradoxical reality of Trump’s budgetary pressures and his affirmative tone for Putin and Russia.24 Public opinion towards Trump and the US in Nordic countries has also soured, particularly in Sweden and Denmark where a staggering 2/3 of respondents have a negative view of the US.25 Still, Nordic

22 Mouritzen, 18.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid, 22.

25 Richard Wike, Janell Fetterolf, and Mara Mordecai, “U.S. Image Plummets Internationally

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countries have begun a two-fold attempt to address the uncertainty posed by the US administration. On one hand, Nordic countries have significantly increased its defense budgets, particularly in the case of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.26 On the other hand, the interest amongst these countries to strengthen defense cooperation has also intensified. For example, the 2018 Memorandum of Understanding signed between the defense ministers of Sweden and Finland reaffirmed the two countries’ interest in developing areas of defense cooperation, and even outlines the possibility of mutual territorial access in times of the peace and war.27

Another challenge facing the Nordics is the growing concerns over Russia’s ambition in the region following a trend of Russian aggression post-Ukraine and Crimea. Instances of Russian aggression have increased in the Nordic region since the early 2010s, such as the violation of Swedish air space in 2013 and intrusion of Russian submarines in areas of the Baltic Sea controlled by Sweden.28 In light of conflicts in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, these violations have been seen as increasingly problematic by political actors in the Nordics. Citing Russia’s projection and use of military power outside of its own borders, many actors, including the Swedish Social Democrats and the former Danish Liberal foreign minister, raised the alarm on these acts of aggression and warned against the passive approach of Nordic countries in response to them.29 Although NATO’s Article V limits any immediate threat and ensures the protection of NATO-aligned countries, there is also concern expressed by Norway and Denmark over the lack of effort on NATO’s part to address the High North, an area of the Arctic with significant implications on the security of the Nordics.30 Combined with the concerns in the Baltic Sea, the growing threat of Russia is gradually becoming the common security concern for all Nordic countries. Russia’s increasing activities in the region would continue to put the security of the Nordics in a precarious position by virtue of their geographic position.

as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly.” Pew Research Center, September 15, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plummets-internationally-as-most-say-coun try-has-handled-coronavirus-badly/.

26 “NATO Defence Expenditure of NATO Countries (2013-2020),” NATO, March 16, 2021, https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2021/3/pdf/210316-pr-2020-30-en.pdf.

27 Tommy P. Christensen, “If Peace Is under Threat: Sweden’s Defence Policy,” European Secu rity & Defence, May 9, 2019, https://euro-sd.com/2019/05/articles/13190/if-peace-is-under-threat-swe dens-defence-policy/.

28 Nilsson & Zetterlund, 773.

29 Forsberg, 1176.

30 Ibid.

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But how can the Nordic countries address these challenges? As early as 2009, the discussion on the issue of defense coordination intensified between Nordic countries following a report written by former Norwegian foreign minister (and father of current NATO Secretary General) Thorvald Stoltenberg, outlining a broad proposition for collective defense initiatives amongst Nordic countries and regions.31 Since then, there remain doubts on the practicality of Stoltenberg’s ideas, particularly over the Nordic solidarity clause which would resemble a collective security guarantee stipulated in Article 5 of NATO. Although the Nordic countries agreed to further explore this concept in the years following the Report, there is still no consensus over the implementation of the solidarity clause under the premise of a conventional attack.32 Still, there is hope that the Nordic solidarity clause would garner more serious thought should the threat of foreign aggression continue to worsen in the Nordics.33 Furthermore, Gunnar Wetterberg’s report to the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2010 outlined a Nordic Union on foreign and defense policy.34 These recommendations signal towards an increased Nordic cooperation with regards to security, but most calls to action have seen limited results under a lack of perceived threats.35

However, In the midst of concerns over Russia’s aggression and an uncertain US administration, there is still hope that Nordic cooperation can provide more solutions on the issue of territorial defense. Take the example of the Icelandic airspace surveillance. As part of Stoltenberg’s 13-point plan on Nordic security coordination, the joint project proposed to provide surveillance over Icelandic airspace was discussed, albeit with initial reservations expressed by Finland and Sweden.36 Since Iceland is a member of NATO but does not itself have an active military force, the issue of collective Icelandic airspace protection is one that reflects the conflicting institutional arrangements between NATO-aligned Nordic countries and non-aligned countries. Despite the obvious dichotomy between Iceland’s NATO membership and the Swedish and Finnish policy of non-alignment, these barriers in institutional arrangements were resolved through a series of negotiations that led to Sweden and Finland’s agreement

31 Tuomas Forsberg, “The Rise of Nordic Defence Cooperation: A Return to Regionalism?” in International Affairs 89, no. 5 (2013), 1170.

32 Kristin M. Haugevik and Ulf Sverdrup, “Ten years on: Reassessing the Stoltenberg report on Nordic cooperation,” (2019), 20.

33 Nina Græger, “Need to have or nice to have? Nordic cooperation, NATO and the EU in Nor wegian foreign, security and defence policy,” in Global Affairs 4, no. 4-5 (2018), 370.

34 Forsberg, 1162.

35 Haugevik & Sverdrup, 7.

36 Ibid, 1170.

to the initiative in 2014.37 While the task of Icelandic airspace surveillance was further supplemented with the aid of NATO, it has been seen as a relatively successful case of Nordic cooperation on the collective defense file.38

Moreover, Nordic cooperation has intensified in the background of Trump’s presidency through the Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO) framework. NORDEFCO, formed by Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and Finland in 2009, provides a forum for Nordic countries to discuss defense topics such as capabilities, armament, human resources and education, training exercises, and operations. While the framework explicitly defers decision-making powers to the national governments and makes clear that it is not itself a command structure, the recent Vision 2025 document, co-signed by all member countries in 2018, leaves the option open for “the coordination of common Nordic positions on possible crisis situations” and “cooperation on total defence in the Nordic region.”39 This signals that while Nordics countries are not yet ready to commit to a greater level of policy integration (such as a common policy) beyond their current institutional arrangements, they are nonetheless open to further cooperation to address territorial threats in the region.

These successes exemplify a possible path of extended Nordic collectivism on the issue of territorial defense, especially given the immediate security threat posed by Russia’s exercise of force in strategic areas such as the Baltic Sea and the High North. As mentioned, each country currently faces significant challenges with its own institutional arrangements, posed by the changing dynamics of an uncertain US administration, which limit their ability to robustly address Russia’s increasing activities in the region. With the uncertain and evolving exercise of power of both the US and Russia, collective Nordic defense cooperation may ultimately serve as a mutually beneficial solution for all Nordic countries by securing the Nordic region as a whole against any potential repercussions from further weakening of US presence in the region and Russia’s continued encroachment of the Nordics. More importantly, such cooperation on territorial defense provides each Nordic country with flexibility to work outside of their own institutional arrangements in the face of these volatile factors.

As presented throughout this paper, the increasingly uncertain commitment of the US

37 Ibid.

38 Haugevik & Sverdrup, 9.

“NORDIC DEFENCE COOPERATION VISION 2025,” NORDEFCO, November 13, 2018, https://www.nordefco.org/Files/nordefco-vision-2025-signed.pdf.

39

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to Transatlantic security, as well as Russia’s provocative presence in the region, combine to create a greater need for collective territorial defense initiatives amongst Nordic countries, despite the existing and diverse institutional arrangements in the post-Cold War era which limit the viability of a common Nordic security policy. Through this analysis, this paper has identified some of the key challenges of establishing a common Nordic security policy, largely through the lens of institution arrangements and domestic interests. As such, it would be useful for future studies to consider the question of a common Nordic security policy with a specific focus on other prominent perspectives, such as military resources and budgets, domestic implications, and other cleavages that influence the topic at large. While Nordic cooperation on security policy has seen its fair share of limitations and struggles, recent developments and progress on this policy file represent the recognition of common ground on security and a renewed period of greater defense cooperation amongst all Nordic countries and regions. As stated by Nordic prime ministers in their joint statement in 2019, the goal for the Nordics to become an “interconnected region with shared values” may signal an even greater level of cooperation between these countries and regions in the future.40 However, whether or not a more integrated Nordic region, with its “shared values”, will translate into defense policy success still remains to be seen. Nonetheless, with these constructive tendencies, the Nordic model of regional diplomacy and governance continues to be of interest for political science and international relations scholars.

References

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Branner, Hans. “Denmark between Venus and Mars: How great a change in Danish foreign policy?.” Danish Foreign Policy Yearbook (2013): 134.

Brommesson, Douglas. “Normative Europeanization: The Case of Swedish Foreign Policy Reorientation.” Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 2 (2010): 224-244.

Christensen, Tommy P. “If Peace Is under Threat: Sweden’s Defence Policy.” European Security & Defence, May 9, 2019. https://euro-sd.com/2019/05/articles/13190/ifpeace-is-under-threat-swedens-defence-policy/.

40

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Græger, Nina. “Need to have or nice to have? Nordic cooperation, NATO and the EU in Norwegian foreign, security and defence policy.” Global Affairs 4, no. 4-5 (2018): 363-376.

Iso-Markku, Tuomas. “The EU as a Source of Security: Finland Puts Its Trust in the Mutual Assistance Clause, But Has No Illusions About the Common Security and Defence Policy.” FIAA Comment, Finnish Institute of International Affairs (2015).

Jakobsen, Peter Viggo. “Denmark and UN Peacekeeping: Glorious Past, Dim Future.” International Peacekeeping (London, England) 23, no. 5 (2016): 741-761.

Järvenpää, Pauli. “Finland and NATO: So Close, Yet So Far.” ICDS, August 6, 2020. https://icds.ee/en/finland-and-nato-so-close-yet-so-far/.

Karlsrud, John and Kari M. Osland. “Between Self-Interest and Solidarity: Norway’s Return to UN Peacekeeping?”  International Peacekeeping 23, no. 5 (2016): 784803.

Möller, Ulrika and Ulf Bjereld. “From Nordic Neutrals to Post-Neutral Europeans: Differences in Finnish and Swedish Policy Transformation.”  Cooperation and Conflict 45, no. 4 (2010): 363-386.

Mouritzen, Hans. “Putin, Trump and Norden: From divergence to convergence of Nordic security policies.” No. 2019: 1. DIIS Working Paper, 2019.

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Nilsson, Claes and Kristina Zetterlund. “Sweden and the UN: A Rekindled Partnership for Peacekeeping?” International Peacekeeping (London, England) 23, no. 5 (2016): 762-783.

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O’Dwyer, Gerard. “Nordic Countries See Russia Flex Its Missile Muscles.” Defense News. August 06, 2019. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/08/05/ nordic-countries-see-russia-flex-its-missile-muscles/.

Rahbek-Clemmensen, Jon. “So, You Want to Buy 98 per Cent of Our Territory? A Danish Perspective on American-Danish-Greenlandic Relations.” EUROPP, September 18, 2019. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2019/09/12/so-you-wantto-buy-98-per-cent-of-our-territory-a-danish-perspective-on-american-danishgreenlandic-relations/.

Wike, Richard, Janell Fetterolf, and Mara Mordecai. “U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly.” Pew Research Center, September 15, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-imageplummets-internationally-as-most-say-country-has-handled-coronavirus-badly/.

Wivel, Anders. “Between Paradise and Power: Denmark’s Transatlantic Dilemma.” Security Dialogue 36, no. 3 (2005): 417-421.

Julien B. Cardinal

Navigating Choppy Waters

The Disputed Legal Status of the Northwest Passage

Sherrill E. Grace, author of Canada and the Idea of North and professor emerita at the University of British Columbia (UBC), once said, “the Canadian North is as enduring a myth of cultural and national significance as the American West is to the United States.”1 From the unsolved mystery surrounding Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the iconic landscape paintings of Lawren S. Harris, the notion of northernness has captured the Canadian imagination, moulded the national consciousness, and roused passionate debate over the perceived American willingness to encroach on Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. Indeed, since the dark days of World War II, territorial sensitivities about the frozen reaches above the 60th parallel have prompted the federal government to take a stand against Canada’s powerful southern neighbour. Nowhere has this desire of control been more acute than with the fabled Northwest Passage (NWP), the strategic ice-bound strait meandering through the sparsely populated Arctic Archipelago. Any suggestion that the waterway might be anything but Canadian—“[w]e own it lock, stock and icebergs,”2 as Prime Minister Brian Mulroney liked to put it—is challenging something essential to national pride.

1 Gavin Wilson, “An Enduring Myth,” The University of British Columbia, April 17, 1997, https:// archive.news.ubc.ca/ubcreports/1997/97apr17/97apr17pro.html.

2 Adam Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs: A History of Canada’s Arctic Maritime Sovereignty (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 276.

Navigating Choppy Waters

While the cause célèbre of the NWP’s legal status has ebbed and flowed in the deeprooted bilateral relations, the respective positions of Canada and the United States regarding the sea road’s navigational rights have rarely wavered. As far as Ottawa is concerned, there is no controversy over the matter, namely the extent of its authority to regulate the use of the NWP. The web of several (indeed seven) possible routes are part of Canada’s internal waters by virtue of historic title and, as such, subject to the full force of Canadian domestic law, which includes the power to govern access by foreign ships passing through. Consequently, Canada asserts absolute jurisdiction over all vessels within the waterway.3 To underscore this non-negotiable point, the House of Commons passed a bill in 2009 to officially rename the once-impassable sea corridor as the Canadian Northwest Passage.4

The United States, by contrast, has never accepted Canada’s historical claim. Instead, the Americans have long held the view that the NWP, connecting two expanses of high seas (the Atlantic and Arctic oceans), is an international strait sanctioning the right of uninterrupted transit passage for ships of all nations. As a result, foreign-flagged vessels, both civilian and military, are not required to request permission to utilize the seaway and Canadian laws, shipping regulations, and pollution-prevention measures cannot limit or restrict navigation. The U.S. government is concerned that recognizing Canada’s position could set an unwanted legal precedent elsewhere in the world, potentially enclosing maritime choke points that underpin America’s strategic mobility and projection of naval power.5 The longstanding freedom-of-the-seas doctrine, a stance unaltered under President Donald J. Trump’s zero-sum worldview, implies that the “final, authoritative decision-making power” over the NWP does not rest in the hands of the Canadian government.6

As the ice retreats and new commercially viable shipping lanes open across the circumpolar North, forceful rhetoric from the Trump administration has brought the long-dormant disagreement about the nature of the NWP back to the fore. In 2019,

3 Jeremy Seth Geddert, “Right of (Northwest) Passage: Toward a Responsible Canadian Arctic Sovereignty,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 52, no. 3 (2019): 596.

4 Danita Catherine Burke, International Disputes and Cultural Ideas in the Canadian Arctic: Arctic Sovereignty in the National Consciousness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 181.

5 Michael Byers, International Law and the Arctic (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 141.

6 Robert Huebert, “Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security in a Transforming Circumpolar World,” in Canada and the Changing Arctic: Sovereignty, Security, and Stewardship, eds. Franklyn Griffiths, Robert Huebert, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), 21.

B. Cardinal

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised eyebrows when he stated in a high-profile foreign-policy speech that “Arctic sea lanes could [become] the twenty-first-century Suez and Panama Canals,” and rejected Canada’s territorial claims to the NWP as “illegitimate.”7 In an age of winner-take-all American diplomacy, Canada may soon face a renewed challenge to its Arctic sovereignty.8

This paper begins by exploring the historical drivers, intertwining Canada’s claim to sovereignty with the United States’ rigid adherence to continental security, behind the volatile NWP dispute. It then explains the sea of outrage left by the 1969 experimental voyage of the American oil tanker Manhattan and the 1985 transit by the U.S. icebreaker Polar Sea before touching upon the subsequent stroke of diplomatic genius that allowed Ottawa and Washington to comfortably agree to disagree on the wrangle from that point on. With the tried-and-tested arrangement at risk of being overtly challenged by “Mr. Trump’s pathological need to win,”9 the paper concludes by putting forth a legally prudent and politically wise solution—the nuts-and-bolts retooling of the sixdecade-old North American defence pact—to better secure Arctic waters and resolve the lingering imbroglio.

Shared Continental Defence and Arctic Security

Before World War II, Canada did not need to safeguard its northern frontier. The unforgiving environmental conditions of the frigid no man’s land provided “a vast and impenetrable strategic barrier.”10 However, as the rise of militant dictators in the heart of Europe set the stage for an imminent conflagration, North American statesmen recognized the need to deepen cooperation in continental defence, particularly in the Arctic, in the event of hostilities.

Thus, in 1938, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a historic speech that ushered in a new era of Canadian-American collaboration. In velvet words, he made a pledge to Canadians that remains in place to

7 Levon Sevunts, “More assertive U.S. Arctic policy puts Ottawa and Washington on collision course,” Radio Canada International, May 6, 2019, https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2019/05/06/us-navy-arctic-northwest-passage.

8 Robert Huebert, Protecting Canadian Arctic Sovereignty from Donald Trump (Calgary: Canadian Global Affairs Institute, 2018), 1.

9 Robert Huebert, “Winning at all costs: the bizarre position of the Trump administration on the Northwest Passage,” The Globe and Mail, May 20, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/ article-winning-at-all-costs-the-bizarre-position-of-the-trump-administration.

10 R. J. Sutherland, “The Strategic Significance of the Canadian Arctic,” in The Arctic Frontier, ed. Ronald St. John Macdonald (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 256.

Navigating Choppy Waters

this day: “I give you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.”11 Within days, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King made it clear that Canada intended to do its part: “We, too, have our obligations as a good friendly neighbour, and one of these is to see that, at our own instance, our country is made as immune from attack or possible invasion as we can reasonably be expected to make it, and that, should the occasion ever arise, enemy forces should not be able to pursue their way, either by land, sea or air to the United States, across Canadian territory.”12 Both speeches, institutionalized in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) in 1940, laid the groundwork for a myriad of postwar bilateral northern projects—weather stations, over-the-horizon radar systems and, eventually, the North American Air (later Aerospace) Defence Command (NORAD)—and hold the key to the present impasse.13

U.S. Military Presence and Canadian Sovereignty

The smouldering sovereignty issue of the Arctic waters in general, and of the NWP in particular, gained new strategic importance during the post-World War II years. With the disintegration of the uncomfortable wartime partnership and the ideological polarization of world affairs between the communist East and the democratic, capitalist West, the defence of the Arctic became inescapably linked to continental security and the Far North became a bulwark against potential Soviet aggression. In the late 1940s, scarce funds and lack of suitable vessels meant that the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) could no longer afford both an Arctic presence and fulfill its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) collective defence responsibilities.14 Around the same time, the United States Navy (USN) became increasingly interested in nuclear-powered submarine operations and under-ice navigation exercises within hitherto inaccessible portions of the Arctic Basin. In 1958, the USS Nautilus completed the first successful transpolar crossing, and a year later the USS Skate punched through several feet of ice to surface at the North Pole, demonstrating the almost inevitability of regular naval deployments in the strategically significant region. Ever since, American submarines

11 Kim Richard Nossal, Stéphane Roussel, and Stéphane Paquin, The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy, 4th ed. (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 27.

12 Nossal, Roussel, and Paquin, The Politics of Canadian Foreign Policy, 27–28.

13 Elizabeth B. Elliot-Meisel, “Politics, Pride, and Precedent: The United States and Canada in the Northwest Passage,” Ocean Development & International Law 40, no. 2 (2009): 205–207.

14 Elizabeth B. Elliot-Meisel, “Still Unresolved after Fifty Years: The Northwest Passage in Cana dian-American Relations, 1946–1998,” The American Review of Canadian Studies 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 411–412.

have plied Canada’s Arctic waters on secret missions, including the NWP.15

Compared to the traditional route between Asia and Europe via the Panama Canal in Central America, the NWP appeals to military and commercial interests because it represents a 7,000-kilometre shortcut without Panamax restrictions.16 Hence, Ottawa’s deep-seated territorial anxieties increased during the 1960s as it became obvious that “Canada was no more than an observer in the area of the world it claimed with romantic, emotional, and mythical attachment.”17 In 1968, the discovery of enormous petroleum reserves at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope would merge the spectre of an oil spill with the sovereignty issue in Canada’s pristine northern environment,18 creating a paradigm shift in the NWP conundrum.

The Manhattan Affair

The mid-summer trial voyage of the ice-strengthened American supertanker SS Manhattan through the NWP in 1969 embodied the emotion-charged sovereignty problem; it also ignited the Canadian-American quarrel over the waterway’s status and transit rights. The gigantic Prudhoe Bay strike triggered such a shale-drilling frenzy that Humble Oil, a subsidiary of Standard Oil (now Exxon), wanted to test the logistical and economic feasibility of carrying hydrocarbons by ship—as an alternative to pipelines— to refineries on the Atlantic seaboard.19 The United States Coast Guard (USCG) icebreaker Northwind was dispatched to accompany the merchant vessel, but the U.S. government made a point of not seeking permission from Canada to sail the sea route.20 Ottawa nevertheless granted its unsolicited approval and volunteered the services of one of its own icebreakers, the John A. Macdonald. As part of its support, the federal government also appointed an experienced navy officer as its official representative

15 Adam Lajeunesse, “A very practical requirement: under-ice operations in the Canadian Arctic, 1960–1986,” Cold War History 13, no. 4 (2013): 507–513.

16 Michael Byers, Who Owns the Arctic? Understanding Sovereignty Disputes in the North (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009), 40.

17 Elizabeth B. Elliot-Meisel, “Canada, the United States and the Northwest Passage,” in The Oceans in the Nuclear Age: Legacies and Risks, eds. David D. Caron and Harry N. Scheiber (Leiden, Nether lands: Brill, 2014), 378.

18 John Kirton and Don Munton, “The Manhattan Voyages and Their Aftermath,” in Politics of the Northwest Passage, ed. Franklyn Griffiths (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), 70–71.

19 Bern Keating, The Northwest Passage: From the Mathew to the Manhattan, 1497 to 1969 (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1970), 140.

20 Christopher Kirkey, “The Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Initiatives: Canada’s Response To An American Challenge,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 13 (Spring 1996): 42.

Navigating Choppy Waters

aboard the behemoth tanker to prevent any undermining of Canada’s claim.21 “[T]he legal status of the waters of Canada’s Arctic Archipelago is not at issue in the proposed transit of the [NWP] by the ships involved in the Manhattan project,” Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau explained to Parliament in May 1969. “The Canadian government has welcomed the Manhattan exercise, has concurred in it and will participate in it.”22

In the end, the icebreaker-escorted convoy proved that using the treacherous NWP was possible for oil-laden tankers, but not as a commercially viable route given the considerable risk of collisions stemming from unpredictable ice conditions.23

The U.S. refusal to seek prior authorization set off ripples of complaints about threats to Canadian sovereignty, as Ottawa had yet to officially claim the NWP as internal waters. The test voyage also highlighted the risk of accidental oil spills in the fragile Arctic marine ecosystem and the necessity for guaranteeing adequate control over such shipping.24 In response to an aroused public opinion, the Canadian government enacted the landmark Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act (AWPPA) in 1970, which established a 100-nautical-mile pollution-prevention zone in the ice-infested waters within which Canada would control navigation and, if necessary, prohibit passage.25 The other key initiatives were to extend Canada’s territorial seas from three to twelve nautical miles and to enclose exclusive Canadian fishing zones off its coastlines; the multi-faceted stratagem created “territorial water gates” at both entrances of the NWP. Moreover, several television appearances supplemented the practical pieces of legislation. On March 9th, for instance, Mr. Trudeau, live via satellite from an undisclosed Arctic location, told viewers of NBC’s Today Show that Canada extended its maritime boundaries based upon the sector principle and continental shelf.26

When Ottawa revealed the AWPPA, it emphasized that the statute did not constitute a declaration of sovereignty but a “constructive and functional approach whereby Canada will exercise only the jurisdiction required to achieve the specific and vital purpose of environmental preservation.”27 Although large swathes of the American

21 Donald R. Rothwell, “The Canadian-U.S. Northwest Passage Dispute: A Reassessment,” Cornell International Law Journal 26, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 337.

22 Kirkey, “The Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Initiatives,” 43.

23

Elliot-Meisel, “Canada, the United States and the Northwest Passage,” 379.

24 Rothwell, “The Canadian-U.S. Northwest Passage Dispute,” 337.

25 Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs, 167.

26 Kirton and Munton, “The Manhattan Voyages and Their Aftermath,” 91–92.

27 Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs, 170.

public applauded Canada’s clever initiative, with one Alaskan senator even praising the bill and hailing its “intelligent innovation,”28 the unilateral assertion of pollutioncontrol jurisdiction was protested by the United States, who feared it might generate “a hodgepodge of new and stringent regulations around the world.”29 While the Manhattan affair represented a success for Canada because it did not force the federal government to assert a direct claim to the Arctic waters, the country would be forced to revisit the politically charged issue sixteen years later.

The Polar Sea Crisis

In August 1985, history repeated itself when the heavy icebreaker USCG Polar Sea steamed through the NWP from the U.S. air base at Thule, Greenland, to its home port of Seattle. American diplomats insisted that the démarche was not meant to stir up controversy, merely that using the Arctic thoroughfare instead of the Panama Canal would save time, fuel, and transit fees. According to Donald Grabenstetter of the State Department’s Canada desk: “The transit is not motivated by any desire to challenge Canadian claims. It is just cheaper to send this ship that way.”30 Having received formal notification from the United States about the incoming expedition, Canada informed its neighbour that the itinerary traversed its historic internal waters and that a request for permission would be required to navigate the NWP. The U.S. government refused to do so, arguing that the waterway was an international strait. As a result, both nations agreed that the Polar Sea’s crossing would occur without prejudice to their differing legal positions.31

As Ottawa’s stonewalling on the proposed Manhattan-style transit quickly elicited public uproar from the Canadian side of the 49th parallel, Secretary of State for External Affairs Joe Clark was questioned in the House of Commons as to what he would do to ensure “that no icebreaker, even from one of the countries friendliest to Canada, will come into our territory to try to take our sovereignty away from us.” He replied that the question was “deliberately anti-American” and declared that the Polar Sea’s route “does not compromise in any way the sovereignty of Canada over our northern waters.”32

28 Ivan Head and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, The Canadian Way: Shaping Canada’s Foreign Policy, 1968–1984 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 55–58.

29 Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs, 170–171.

30 Robert Gordon, “No escort for Polar Sea,” The Chronicle Herald (Halifax), July 20, 1985, 5.

31 Donat Pharand, “Canada’s Sovereignty Over the Northwest Passage,” Michigan Journal of Inter national Law 10, no. 2 (1989): 653.

32 Charles Campbell, “U.S. ship’s itinerary irks Canadians,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 1,

Navigating Choppy Waters

Opposition parties swiftly lambasted the government’s handling of the perceived crisis; in a fiery declaration, a New Democratic Party member of Parliament went as far as likening the journey to “psychological rape.”33 Be that as it may, the United States firmly rejected the Canadian claim of the Arctic waters as historic internal waters. As a case in point, a U.S. State Department letter mentioned: “The United States position is that there is no basis in international law to support the Canadian claim. The United States cannot accept the Canadian claim because to do so would constitute acceptance of full Canadian control of the [NWP] and would terminate U.S. navigation rights through the Passage under international law.”34

The unwarranted American incursion into Canadian waters touched off a jingoistic furor in Canada. A nationalist group proclaimed its intention to install Canadian flags along the U.S. icebreaker’s route to complain about the “meek and ineffectual” protection of the nation’s sovereign Arctic waters by the federal government.35 For its part, the Globe and Mail printed a scathing editorial on the Polar Sea voyage. Titled “All in the family,” the newspaper article argued that the United States’ insistence upon free transit could lead to unfettered navigation in the Arctic for Soviet submarines thought to already prowl beneath the ice cap. In unequivocal terms, it asserted that this was “a predatory policy, one based on respect for a rival superpower and contempt for a feckless friend.”36 This viewpoint was supported by the late Donat Pharand, a prominent legal authority on Canada’s Arctic waters and specialist on the NWP, who was quoted in the Montreal Gazette as saying that “Canada should take the bull by the horns, draw the lines on the map and say to the world that those waters are internal waters of Canada.”37

Canadian citizens also penned several editorial letters castigating the government’s laissez-faire attitude concerning the Polar Sea expedition. One published in the Globe and Mail declared that “Canadian sovereignty has been challenged, a precedent has been successfully established and Canada’s claim to the northern sea as its territorial waters has been undermined, if not irrevocably forfeited.”38 Another letter, this time 1985, E1.

33 Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs, 257.

34 J. Ashley Roach and Robert W. Smith, Excessive Maritime Claims, 3rd ed. (Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012), 112.

35 “Group plans confrontation with U.S. ship on Arctic ice,” Toronto Star, August 6, 1985, A1–A5.

36 “All in the family,” The Globe and Mail, August 8, 1985, 6.

37 Margaret Munro, “U.S. Arctic voyage stirs debate; Canadian sovereignty undermined, critics say,” Montreal Gazette, July 17, 1985, A8.

38

“Letters to the Editor,” The Globe and Mail, August 7, 1985, 7.

printed in the Toronto Star, noted the following: “By allowing the Polar Sea to trespass in our Arctic region, Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark have opened up a Pandora’s box regarding territorial rights of our nation’s surrounding waterways. Every country in the world may now feel free to walk all over us because of our mindless, incompetent, selfserving leaders.”39

In September 1985, stung by domestic criticism, Mr. Mulroney’s cabinet answered its detractors by introducing a series of legal and military measures designed to shore up Canada’s claim to sovereignty over the northern waters. In a stirring speech to the House of Commons, Mr. Clark stated that Ottawa was enclosing the Canadian archipelago within formal boundaries around its outer perimeter. He said: “Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic is indivisible. It embraces land, sea and ice. It extends without interruption to the seaward-facing coasts of the Arctic islands. Those islands are joined, and not divided by the waters between them.”40 Crucially, Mr. Clark was at pains to stress that the straight baselines “define the outer limit of Canada’s historic internal waters,”41 thus conferring upon the adjacent coastal state total administrative, civil, and criminal jurisdiction over the NWP.

In his statement, Mr. Clark also pledged several new policy initiatives to assert Canada’s presence in the Arctic. The program included the construction of a powerful icebreaker capable of operating year-round in the NWP, an increase in military surveillance overflights and naval exercises in the Arctic, and the withdrawal of Canada’s reservation to having the International Court of Justice (ICJ) adjudicate a boundary dispute regarding the enactment of the AWPPA. Concerning the nation’s neighbour to the south, Mr. Clark called for immediate “talks with the United States on co-operation in Arctic waters on the basis of full respect for Canadian sovereignty.”42

Establishing an Agree-to-Disagree Modus Vivendi

For the United States, the political context of the NWP jurisdictional status was about preserving its historic freedom-of-the-seas policy, “perhaps [its] oldest customary international law doctrine,”43 that is of paramount importance to American national

39 “Letters to the Editor,” Toronto Star, August 9, 1985, A20.

40 Rothwell, “The Canadian-U.S. Northwest Passage Dispute,” 344.

41 Byers, Who Owns the Arctic, 52.

42 Rothwell, “The Canadian-U.S. Northwest Passage Dispute,” 344.

43 John D. Negroponte, “Who Will Protect Freedom of the Seas?” Department of State Bulletin 86, no. 2115 (October 1986): 41.

Navigating

interests. In a private letter to Mr. Mulroney, President Ronald Reagan made this point abundantly clear when he wrote: “I have to say in all candor that we cannot agree to an arrangement that obliges us to seek permission for our vessels to navigate through the [NWP]. To do so would adversely affect our legitimate rights to freely transit other important areas globally.”44 George Boutin, the State Department officer running the Canadian desk, echoed the president’s position heading into the discussions: “[The United States] is interested in reaching agreement on that area without addressing the question of sovereignty.”45 The context of both comments was the Canada-U.S. negotiation of the 1988 Arctic Cooperation Agreement.

Two developments during spring 1987 helped bring the two parties closer. First, both Messrs. Mulroney and Reagan, in the midst of hammering out a pioneering free trade agreement, desired to “inject new impetus” into the bilateral talks to find a satisfactory compromise.46 Around the same time, the Canadian government released its bigspending Challenge and Commitment defence white paper, reasserting Canada’s NATO obligations by commissioning ten to twelve nuclear-powered attack submarines—a contentious economic and diplomatic issue from the day it was announced—to police Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Canada’s defence minister made a case for the procurement proposal by arguing that “[s]omebody’s navy will be in our North, whether it’s Soviet, American or Canadian.” He continued: “I want to make sure it’s Canadian.”47 However, Pentagon bureaucrats were not keen on the project, instead preferring that Canada spend its money on reinforcing its diminishing forces in Europe, a contributory role recognized within the Western alliance more “for [its] political symbolism than for [its] manpower or weapons.”48 U.S. defence planners expressed reservations about Ottawa’s plan and resisted transferring the required American nuclear-propulsion technology to construct Canadian submarines. The officials were “said to be reluctant to help Canada build vessels that would be used to guard against unauthorized intrusions into Canada’s Arctic waters by United States nuclear submarines.”49

44 Brian Mulroney, Memoirs: 1939–1993 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007), 495.

45 Philip J. Briggs, “The Polar Sea Voyage and the Northwest Passage Dispute,” Armed Forces & Society 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 446.

46 John F. Burns, “Canada’s Battle for the Arctic Straits,” The New York Times, April 12, 1987, https:// www.nytimes.com/1987/04/12/weekinreview/canada-s-battle-for-the-arctic-straits.html.

47 Hilary MacKenzie and Marc Clark, “A defence plan for Canada,” Maclean’s, June 15, 1987, https:// archive.macleans.ca/article/1987/6/15/a-defence-plan-for-canada.

48 Burns, “Canada’s Battle for the Arctic Straits.”

49 John F. Burns, “Canada May Drop Nuclear Sub Plan,” The New York Times, November 27, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/27/world/canada-may-drop-nuclear-sub-plan.html

Cardinal

In the early days of 1988, Messrs. Mulroney and Reagan, to the satisfaction of both parties, “salved an old diplomatic wound” and signed a brief agreement to cooperate on transArctic voyages through the NWP.50 The problem-solving initiative, alleviating Canadian sovereignty concerns without prejudicing American legal and strategic interests, is notable for both what it included and what it omitted. Under the settlement, the United States pledged “that all navigation by U.S. icebreakers within waters claimed by Canada to be internal will be undertaken with the consent of Canada.” The treaty only concerned USCG icebreakers because they were the only vessels capable of traversing the harsh 1,000 nautical miles of the ice-clogged seaway.51

However, the constructive, yet neutral, accord failed to settle the competing jurisdictional claims of both countries regarding the legal status of the NWP—the Reagan administration worried about setting a precedent that could be cited in other international disputes. The American president made it clear to his constituents that the mutually accommodative outcome was “a pragmatic solution” to the ownership dispute “without prejudice to [both nations’] respective legal positions.” He added that “it sets no precedents for other areas.”52 Political scientist Christopher Kirkey highlighted the crux of the matter: “The agreement provides that future United States icebreaker passages will no longer be potentially embarrassing or threatening to the political health of the ruling party in Ottawa.”53 Therefore, the transit-per-consent arrangement, not applicable to USN ships or submarines, represented a pause rather than an end to the long-running stalemate.

A Renewed Challenge

While the 1988 treaty has limited the potential for conflict over the last three decades, the status of the NWP has remained an intractable problem. In January 2009, during the final days of the George W. Bush administration, the president issued a national security directive establishing a new policy toward the Arctic—the first such memorandum in the U.S. since 1994. In the ten-page paper, the White House reiterated the traditional

50 Howard Witt, “U.S., Canada sign Arctic accord,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1988, https://www. chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-01-12-8803210656-story.html.

51 Byers, Who Owns the Arctic, 56–7.

52 Herbert H. Denton, “U.S. to consult Canada on use of Northwest Passage,” The Washington Post, January 12, 1988, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/01/12/us-to-consult-canada-onuse-of-northwest-passage/7755dd6a-65d0-44b1-8b54-0b49a5b7af99.

53 Christopher Kirkey, “Smoothing troubled waters: the 1988 Canada-United States Arctic co-op eration agreement,” International Journal (Toronto) 50, no. 2 (1995): 421.

Navigating Choppy Waters

American position that “[t]he NWP is a strait used for international navigation.”54 His successor, Barack Obama, released his own 2013 National Strategy for the Arctic Region, a document that, predictably enough, restated Mr. Bush’s interest in preserving the United States’ freedom of action in the frigid waters.55

Yet, as in decades past, other prominent figures have made attempts to remove the old thorn in the side of the bilateral relationship and bridge the two positions. In 2004, in light of the September 11 attacks and the ongoing war on terror, Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, stated publicly that American national security might be enhanced if Washington were to accept the sovereignty claim of its northern neighbour. “We are looking at everything through the terrorism prism. […] So perhaps when [the NWP] is brought to the table again, we may have to take another look,”56 he said. In 2007, after he left Ottawa, Mr. Cellucci told the Toronto Star that “in the age of terrorism, it’s in [U.S.] security interests that the [NWP] be considered part of Canada.”57 Indeed, if the NWP were an international strait, there would be very few restrictions on foreign navigation: warships would have virtually the same right of transit passage as they have on the high seas, submerged submarines would not be required to surface and alert Canada to their presence, and long-range bombers would have a right of overflight in the air column above the NWP, unless they linger or show hostile intent.58

A decade later, Mr. Trump’s upset-the-applecart approach to foreign policy resurrected many of the old fears and challenges surrounding Canadian Arctic sovereignty, conceivably putting Ottawa and Washington on a “collision course.”59 In 2019, the American secretary of the Navy, Richard V. Spencer, announced plans for the U.S. fleet to conduct a so-called freedom-of-navigation operation, or FONOP, through the NWP as the ice recedes and promises to open new possibilities for shipping across the circumpolar North,60 “an extraordinary comment with potentially serious ramifications

54 Mike Blanchfield and Randy Boswell, “Bush takes final swing at Arctic sovereignty,” National Post, January 11, 2009, https://nationalpost.com/news/bush-takes-final-swing-at-arctic-sovereignty.

55 Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs, 291.

56 Byers, Who Owns the Arctic, 80.

57 Jim Brown, “Ex-U.S. envoy backs Canada’s Arctic claim,” Toronto Star, August 20, 2007, https:// www.thestar.com/news/canada/2007/08/20/exus_envoy_backs_canadas_arctic_claim.html.

58 Suzanne Lalonde, “The Right of Overflight above International Straits,” Canadian Yearbook of International Law 52 (2014): 39–43.

59 Sevunts, “More assertive U.S. Arctic policy puts Ottawa and Washington on collision course.”

60 Huebert, “Winning at all costs.”

for Canada.”61 FONOPs have grabbed the headlines in recent years as the USN has sailed warships near disputed islands in the South China Sea to challenge Beijing’s creeping expansionism over those international waters. The highly publicized patrols “are aggressive and extremely visible political statements, normally reserved for the highest priority maritime disputes.”62 A voyage through the NWP, the likes of which would have seemed impossible only a few years ago, would be an unprecedented break from the nuanced diplomacy that has long maintained a mutually beneficial status quo in the Arctic and risk turning the well-managed irritant into a renewed political crisis.

If the USN indeed carries out a FONOP in the NWP, the Canadian government will need to come up with a cunning solution given its little room to manoeuvre. On the one hand, Canada’s operational capabilities, with no year-round patrol capacity for its Arctic waters, are too weak to prevent the passage of an American warship. On the other hand, referring the question of its historical claim to the ICJ is too risky a gamble since, in the words of Mr. Clark, “[y]ou lose and that’s it.”63 The combination of unsavoury military and legal costs means that Canadian leaders must give up any thought of a confrontational approach. As Canada cannot coerce the United States to respect its position, cooperation becomes the only viable alternative.

To do so, Canada should point to the benefits of smooth continental defence collaboration as a reason for the U.S. to abandon its objections over Canadian sovereignty. As traffic through the NWP increases, America’s outdated position opens the seasonally ice-free Arctic to catastrophic risks that, presumably, will provide an alternative route for illicit weapon-of-mass-destruction shipments and facilitate the entry of would-be terrorists via the continent’s longest, largely unguarded coast. Although the prospect of terrorists infiltrating from the Far North may sound far-fetched, an aircraft allegedly purchased by al-Qaeda operatives made a stopover in Iqaluit en route to the Middle East in 1993.64 Indeed, foreign extremists could surely take advantage of “spotty surveillance” and “lax security measures” in the increasingly accessible territory.65 Add to that the fact

61 Adam Lajeunesse, “Is the next big fight over the Northwest Passage coming?” Policy Options, February 14, 2019, https://policyoptions.irpp.org/fr/magazines/february-2019/is-the-next-big-fight-overthe-northwest-passage-coming.

62 Adam Lajeunesse and Robert Huebert, “Preparing for the next Arctic sovereignty crisis: The Northwest Passage in the age of Donald Trump,” International Journal (Toronto) 74, no. 2 (2019): 226.

63 Lajeunesse, Lock, Stock, and Icebergs, 262.

64 Nancy Teeple, “A Brief History of Intrusions into the Canadian Arctic,” Canadian Army Journal 12, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 51.

65 “Airport security in North a concern: expert,” CBC News, November 19, 2010, https://www.cbc. ca/news/canada/north/airport-security-in-north-a-concern-expert-1.868892.

Navigating Choppy Waters

that Russia is amassing unrivalled military might in the Arctic, notably reinforcing what is already the world’s largest icebreaker fleet (numbering some forty conventionaland nuclear-powered ships spread across the Arctic Ocean),66 and the seriousness of China’s ambitions to become a “polar great power,” an articulation of interest to acquire influence throughout a strategically valuable region ripe for inter-state rivalry and resource extraction,67 and it becomes an immensely complicated security perimeter to manage.

To break the impasse, Ottawa and Washington, both allies in the quest for a practical and responsible navigational regime in the Arctic, need to hark back to the cooperative spirit of consensus experienced by the PJBD during World War II and the Cold War, a forum through which the resolution of thorny problems has been expedited. To secure North America’s “unlocked backdoor,” a possible blueprint already exists. Historically, the two countries have fruitfully collaborated to navigate contentious transboundary water issues, namely the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Great Lakes, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.68 Therefore, expanding NORAD’s current function—by which the two continental partners jointly monitor and respond to state-based and terrorist incursions into North American airspace—to fully include the maritime domain would satisfy Canada’s across-the-North sovereignty concerns without hindering the movement of the USN or forcing America to surrender legal ground.69 Furthermore, the Monroe Doctrine-like strategy, placing the existing naval actors in a subordinate role to a centralized, binational command assuming the maritime control mission for North America, is consistent with the 2006 NORAD amendment that enhanced military-to-military cooperation in the area of maritime warning, i.e., the sharing of information and intelligence related to the respective maritime areas, internal waterways, and ocean approaches to the U.S. and Canadian mainland.70 In this scenario, the RCN and USN, on the strength of a strong tradition of interoperability, would amalgamate their command structures, headquarters, and operations when it comes to tightening up security and controlling

66 Nurlan Aliyev, “Russia’s Military Capabilities in the Arctic,” International Centre for Defence and Security, June 25, 2019, https://icds.ee/en/russias-military-capabilities-in-the-arctic.

67 Petra Dolata, A Global Arctic? Chinese Aspirations in the North (Calgary: Canadian Global Affairs Institute, 2018), 2.

68 Alastair Allan, “Canada needs to cut a deal with the U.S. to control the Northwest Passage,” National Post, August 8, 2019, https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canada-needs-to-cut-a-deal-with-the-us-to-control-the-northwest-passage.

69 Adam Lajeunesse, “The Northwest Passage in Canadian policy: An approach for the 21st centu ry,” International Journal (Toronto) 63, no. 4 (2008): 1047.

70 Andrea Charron, “Canada, the Arctic, and NORAD: Status quo or new ball game?” International Journal (Toronto) 70, no. 2 (2015): 218.

marine traffic across the littoral waters surrounding North America. In other words, the USN would now be included in the policing of Canadian waters, in a fashion similar to American fighters routinely protecting the skies of both countries.

The expansion of NORAD’s mission suite beyond air-breathing threats that use the northern approaches as a throughway to attack Canada or the United States undoubtedly reawakens perennial fears of sovereignty degradation, which are always politically sensitive for Canadian governments.71 Indeed, given the disparity in military power between the two countries, the operational alliance has traditionally been headed by a four-star general and a three-maple-leaf deputy commander, reporting via a single chain of command to the secretary of defence in Washington and the chief of the defence staff in Ottawa. Nevertheless, adding maritime surveillance and enforcement capabilities to the enduring NORAD command-and-control structure represents an opportunity to make meaningful strides toward streamlining the continental security architecture and cross-border cooperation, the next logical step in binational defence at a time where intensified Cold War-type strategic challenges from near-peer competitors (read Russia and China) are emerging across the Arctic and the NWP. The revamped framework would also provide Canada with a means to have some control over its northern flank, neutralizing the menace that the United States unilaterally impose its own defence plans for the vital, if somewhat neglected, theatre of operation, at the expense of Canadian sovereignty.

Moreover, the comprehensive perimeter-security arrangement is not only in line with the 2017 white paper on defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged, which states that Canada will fulfill its NORAD obligations “with new capacity in some areas” and “modernize NORAD to meet existing challenges and evolving threats to North America,”72 but also coherent with the “three functional principles” affirmed in Mr. Roosevelt’s declaration and Mr. King’s acknowledgement more than eight decades ago: joint defence of North America; the United States will defend Canada if necessary; and Canada has its responsibility to contribute to continental defence.73 Using the security argument could be a way for the two countries to prudently manage the legal disagreement and preserve their respective positions while further collaborating on the requirements to deter, detect, and (if necessary) defend Arctic waters from a variety of maritime threats

71 John Ivison, “NORAD could be expanded to land and sea,” National Post, February 11, 2011, https://nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-ivison-norad-could-be-expanded-to-land-and-sea.

72 Michael Dawson, “NORAD: Remaining Relevant,” The School of Public Policy Publications 12, no. 40 (November 2019): 9.

73 Dawson, “NORAD: Remaining Relevant,” 12.

Julien B. Cardinal

Navigating Choppy Waters

emanating from outside and within the continent. As Michael Byers, a leading Arcticaffairs expert and Canada Research Chair in global politics and international law at UBC, once noted: “The obstacle to resolving the NWP dispute isn’t Canadian sovereignty. But sovereignty could be the solution, if combined with new and bold ideas.”74 Thus, on balance, the integrative bargaining method, wrapped under the legal umbrella of the treaty-level defence agreement, which has demonstrated throughout its history an ability to incorporate increased scope and purpose, would not only shelve the win-lose situation permanently but strengthen continental security without compromising the territorial rights of either state.

Conclusion

In 1985, at the height of the Cold War, Oran R. Young, a renowned Arctic expert and a global governance scholar, proclaimed that “the world is entering the age of the Arctic, an era in which those concerned with international peace and security will urgently need to know much more about the region and in which policymakers in the Arctic rim states will become increasingly concerned with Arctic affairs.”75 The prescient pronouncement was premature, but only by three decades. In recent years, the new understanding of the NWP’s strategic value, amidst the converging factors of anthropogenic global warming and a mercurial U.S. president, has brewed tensions in the Canadian-American partnership. As discussed earlier, the “old diplomatic safeguards” mitigated the reoccurring fears of a destabilizing rift.76 However, the repercussions of Mr. Trump’s consolidation of U.S. foreign policy around great-power competition may spell doom for the longstanding agree-to-disagree modus vivendi nullifying the conflicting jurisdictional claims over the waters of the Arctic Archipelago, which are no longer viewed as protective moats to meet the geopolitical challenges posed by a revanchist Russia and a newly assertive China. Until a joint arrangement for surveillance and control is reached, such a predicament may give rise to an uninvited, and perhaps hostile, foreign presence in the increasingly navigable NWP that would pose a significant security threat to Canada and the United States. As the dust settles on the recent U.S. election, questions arise about prospective impacts and changes that the presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr. will bring as America’s neglected Arctic backyard is once again an arena of strategic rivalry.

74 Michael Byers, “Sovereignty will solve the Northwest Passage dispute,” The Globe and Mail, August 11, 2007, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/sovereignty-will-solve-the-northwest-pas sage-dispute/article724748.

75 Oran R. Young, “The Age of the Arctic,” Foreign Policy 61 (Winter 1985–1986): 160–161.

76 Lajeunesse and Huebert, “Preparing for the next Arctic sovereignty crisis,” 239.

While both nations finessed their recurring dispute in 1988 with a political rather than a legal fix, Mr. Pompeo’s jaw-dropping remarks that the Canadian claim over the NWP is “illegitimate” hint that America is no longer content with the status quo.77 The limits of business as usual in the Arctic, where both countries agreed to leave the issue dormant without prejudice to their respective positions, now appear to be cracking at the seams; as the shrinking ice cap opens up new shipping routes in the polar region, “the veneer of friendly differences” is concurrently melting away.78 In the past century, only two vessels, the Manhattan and Polar Sea, have openly passed through the NWP without asking Ottawa’s permission. With a third one looming on the horizon, Canada’s top brass needs to be proactive, not reactive, to avoid a future sovereignty crisis caused by an American ship travelling through the disputed waterway.

References

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Denton, Herbert H. “U.S. to consult Canada on use of Northwest Passage.” The Washington Post. January 12, 1988. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ archive/politics/1988/01/12/us-to-consult-canada-on-use-of-northwestpassage/7755dd6a-65d0-44b1-8b54-0b49a5b7af99.

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Huebert, Robert. “Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security in a Transforming Circumpolar World.” In Canada and the Changing Arctic: Sovereignty, Security, and Stewardship, edited by Franklyn Griffiths, Robert Huebert, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, 13–68. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011.

Huebert, Robert. Protecting Canadian Arctic Sovereignty from Donald Trump. Calgary: Canadian Global Affairs Institute, 2018.

Huebert, Robert. “Winning at all costs: the bizarre position of the Trump administration on the Northwest Passage.” The Globe and Mail. May 20, 2019. https://www. theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-winning-at-all-costs-the-bizarre-positionof-the-trump-administration.

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Chelsea Parker

Ideologically Informed Investment

Chinese state-owned multinational corporations as potential instruments of political influence in Cuba

The island nation of Cuba has been all but isolated from the economic advantages of globalization. Since 1962, the United States has upheld an austere economic and diplomatic embargo against Cuba, excluding the communist state from the sphere of international trade and investment established and maintained by the United States.1 States allied with the United States may have been able to maintain social and commercial ties to Cuba, but shied away from violating the United States’ embargo. While sanctions that deterred investors from Cuba were tempered under the Obama administration, the Trump administration reverted to harsh penalization for those who pursue investment in Cuba to curb any business relations that would have introduced Cuba into the liberal-led international business community.2

This reinstatement of strict sanctions has once again put Cuba under economic stress, but present-day alternatives for incoming foreign direct investment (IFDI) into Cuba do exist now that were not available in the 1990s — primarily Chinese foreign direct

1 Nigel D. White, “Ending the U.S. Embargo of Cuba: International Law in Dispute,” Journal of Latin American Studies 51, no. 1 (2019): 169-75.

2 Ted Piccone, “Want to Improve Border Security? Seek Better Relations with Cuba. The Center for the National Interest, April 26, 2017, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/want-improve-border-securi ty-seek-better-relations-cuba-20369.

Ideologically Informed Investment

investment by way of state-owned multinational corporations (SOMNCs).3 While in recent decades an exodus of illicit Cuban migrants seeking asylum has been framed as Cuba’s chief security threat to the United States,4 China’s seemingly innocuous investments speak to its expanding footprint that could have Cuba once again pose a security threat reminiscent of its role as a proxy of ideological animosity in the Cold War period.5

As such, this paper argues that the embargo against Cuba constitutes an emerging threat to the United States by creating an investment vacuum that is filled by Chinese SOMNCs. This argument analyzes investment in Cuba as a strategic pursuit for China due to their pre-existing relationship, ideological similarity, and the potential for Chinese SOMNCs to project significant influence with little opposition within close geographical proximity to U.S. shores. The ideological expansion of Sino reach into Latin America – once similarly pursued by the United States – accompanies the economic expansion of SOMNCs into regions once heavily dominated by United-States based multinational corporations (MNCs).

This paper will begin by contextualizing diplomatic relations between Cuba, the United States, and China. It will further examine how China and Cuba’s ideological similarities have become a source of strength in their economic partnership exogenous of U.S. influence. State-owned multinational corporations are uniquely adept at advancing state-agendas within foreign markets, and this paper emphasizes China’s de-facto monopoly on foreign investment in Cuba as a political advantage when U.S. sanctions create a prohibitive investment environment for competitors. Subsequently, this paper will analyze the shifting balance of power in relation to the Sino-Cuban relationship in the modern era. Through a structural realist lens, it will explore the consequences of SOMNCs for international conflict as they pertain to the ideological shift between the Obama and Trump administrations, conflicting communist and liberal-democratic ideology, and its implications for the conflict-potential of the contemporary SinoCuban relationship for the United States.

3 Scott MacDonald, “Sino-Caribbean Relations in a Changing Geopolitical Sea,” Journal of Chi nese Political Science 24, no. 4 (2019): 670-2.

4 Marifeli Pérez-Stable, “Cuba in Transition: The Role of External Actors,” in The Obama Ad ministration and the Americas: Agenda for Change, eds. Theodore J. Piccone, Abraham F. Lowenthal, and Laurence Whitehead (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 126.

5 Ted Piccone, “The Geopolitics of China’s Rise in Latin America,” Geoeconomics and Global Issues, no. 2 (November 2016).

Contextualizing the Sino-Cuban Relationship

Hostile bilateral relations between Cuba and the United States can be traced back to the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Once a hotspot for American investment, the Cuban Revolution triggered a full-scale expropriation of American assets in Cuba, following the overthrow of the brutal US-backed Batista dictatorship, by the succeeding communist dictator Fidel Castro — who was committed to asserting Cuban sovereignty and ridding Cuba of American imperialism.6 The US-Cuba relationship was famously antagonized further by the Cold War. Cuba served as a satellite state for the ideologically compatible Soviet Union, and the United States reacted with the enactment of the punitive economic and diplomatic sanctions that isolated Cuba from the West — and ultimately crippled the communist nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.7

In 1960, Cuba was also quick to establish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China, giving way to a cogent relationship shared between two countries that cooperate “closely on the basis of shared values and perceptions of domestic and international affairs.”8 With only four communist states left in the world, shared tenets of a SinoCuban political ideology create a unique and advantageous business environment for China. Chinese influence and encouragement of Cuban development in a socialist framework adapted to Cuban national conditions are akin to that desired by China.9

Once considered “America’s backyard,” in recent decades, Latin America and the Caribbean have seen an uptick in Chinese presence via trade, loans, and investments. Burdensome neoliberal policy reforms outlined by the Washington Consensus had strained the political and economic climate in the region, whereas the “no-stringsattached largesse of the Chinese” has seen much of Latin America and the Caribbean pursue investment from the world’s fastest rising power.10 As China began to lay foundations of leadership in the region, the Obama administration was sensitive to waning American efficacy and sought detente with Cuba to restore American influence

6 Leland L. Johnson, “U.S. Business Interests in Cuba and the Rise of Castro,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (1965): 443-8; White, “Ending the U.S. Embargo of Cuba,” 169.

7 “U.S.-Cuba Relations,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 27, 2020. https://www.cfr.org/ backgrounder/us-cuba-relations.

8 Xianglin Mao, Adrian H. Hearn, and Weiguang Lui. “China and Cuba: 160 Years and Looking Ahead,” Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 6 (2015): 140.

9 Mark Frank, “China Piles into Cuba as Venezuela Fades and Trump Looms,” Reuters, February 15, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-china-analysis-idUSKBN15T2PE.

10 Matthew Jones, “America’s Backyard,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 11, no. 1 (2000): 292; Piccone, “The Geopolitics of China’s Rise in Latin America,” 6.

Ideologically Informed Investment

in Cuba and pushback against China’s encroachment.11

The Trump administration defended the reimposition of draconian sanctions by citing the rudimentary logic of the embargo: To coerce Cuba into a democratic regime change suited to “strong diplomatic engagement” with the United States.12 This hubristic approach to Cuban foreign policy may be consistent for the United States; however, it discounts the contemporary international climate where the United States’ relative power and influence is decreasing as China’s relative power and influence is increasing.13

If Cuba is once again the next battlefront for great power rivalry, China would have leverage not previously enjoyed by rising powers.

The Chinese SOMNC in Cuba

China’s rise to prominence as a great power began in the international political economy of the 1980s. The globalization of production and foreign direct investment can be largely credited for China’s success in spite of maintaining a state-run command economy.14 However, China did not just serendipitously enter the liberal economic order; rather, “Chinese leaders exercised strategic choice and carefully sequenced and modulated their engagement with globalization” to allow for the liberalization of FDI while preserving communist principles such as state ownership of corporate entities.15

Following these principles, the deep involvement of the home government has been a distinctive feature of China’s participation at every level of international trade and investment.16 SOMNCs reflect this tenet of Chinese economic policy, functioning as corporations acting in multiple countries owned and operated by home-state and working to advance their economic and political interests.

11 Rubric Biegon, “The Normalization of U.S. Policy Toward Cuba? Rapprochement and Regional Hegemony,” Latin American Politics and Society 62, no. 1 (2020): 47-52.

12

“National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” The White House (2017): 51.

13 Biegon, “The Normalization of U.S. Policy Toward Cuba?,” 51-65; Ben Rhodes, “Trump’s Cuba Policy Will Fail,” The Atlantic, June 16, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/ cuba-trump-obama-opening/530568/.

14 Ken Davies, “China Investment Policy: An Update,” OECD Working Papers on International Investment (2013): 7.

15 Yves Tiberghien and Robet Muggah, “5 Facts You Need to Understand the New Global Order,” World Economic Forum, January 30, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/five-facts-youneed-to-understand-the-new-global-order/.

16 Daniel M. Shapiro, Carlos Vecino, and Jing Li, “Exploring China’s State-Led FDI Model: Evi dence from the Extractive Sectors in Latin America,” Asia Pacific Journal of Management 35, no. 1 (2018): 12.

Regardless that these state-run actors are not multinational corporations in the liberalcapitalist sense, they are significant economic and political agents. Generally, freemarket capitalists consider SOMNCs inefficient and cumbersome business actors17 — but the use of SOMNCs is intuitive in both China and Cuba due to their ideological commitment to de-facto ownership of corporations by the state.18 It would be a mistake to study any multinational corporation as solely as they pertain to economics, for they are also effective political actors who are widely recognized as a medium to advance state interests.19 In the Sino-Cuban context, Cuba’s dependence on China makes it responsive to Chinese policymaking that can go beyond the scope of the firms’ operations in the host country.20 While investment data in Cuba is considered a state secret, there have been reports of Chinese investment in infrastructure, telecoms, tourism and electronics — and more recently, Cuba forewent Google’s offer to install the island’s first broadband internet service in favour of a contract with Chinese telecom giant Huawei.21

It is China’s deep-pocket diplomacy and camaraderie that allows for China’s unique and politically advantageous status in Cuba — and Chinese SOMNCs serve as a platform for China to respond to international security objectives by leveraging influence on the ground. Chinese investment in Cuba is modest when compared to investments elsewhere in the region, but China is still Cuba’s largest trade partner and largest investor.22 Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) is determined by evaluating both the political and economic circumstances of host states, and thus the SOMNC is an ideal medium to carry out political imperatives. For China, however, goals are ambivalent, and Chinese SOMNCs abroad have been imagined as “Trojan horses,”

17 Raymond Vernon, “The International Aspects of State-Owned Enterprises,” Journal of Interna tional Business Studies 10, no. 3 (Winter 1979): 13.

18 Alvaro Cuerzo-Cazzura, State-Owned Multinationals (New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidel berg, 2017), 921-22.

19 MacDonald, “Sino-Caribbean Relations,” 666.

20 Jing-Lin Duanmu, “State-Owned MNCs and Host Country Expropriation Risk: The Role of Home State Soft Power and Economic Gunboat Diplomacy,” Journal of International Business Studies 45, no. 8 (2014): 1057.

21

Mark Frank, “China Piles into Cuba as Venezuela Fades and Trump Looms,” Reuters, February 15, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-china-analysis-idUSKBN15T2PE; Mark Frank, “Tough er U.S. Sanctions Make Cuba Ever More Difficult for Western Firms,” Reuters, October 9, 2019, https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-sanctions-investment-analysis-idUSKBN1WO2LP.

22 Mao, Hearn, and Lui, “China and Cuba.”; Piccone, “The Geopolitics of China’s Rise in Latin America.”; Frank, “China Piles into Cuba.”

Ideologically Informed Investment

raising serious questions of national and international security in host countries.23 Within this framework, host countries risk SOMNCs being used as a springboard for the Chinese government to advance Chinese interests not only in Cuba but in the international order.

The Trump administration’s reactivation of the most austere statutes of the embargo has seen foreign-owned businesses turn their backs on Cuba and drive Cuba into the arms of China, deepening Cuba’s dependence on China and reaffirming their longstanding camaraderie.24 Though OFDI in China and IFDI in Cuba are shrouded by the states’ adherence to privacy, SOMNCs are exceedingly capable of facilitating home state influence on host state politics. China actively rejects the embargo and defends SinoCuban relations by citing territorial integrity and sovereignty, vowing to “seek new areas of cooperation among the three countries’’ rather than heed its inimical sanctions.25

By investing so heavily in Cuba, China can rationalize its high degree of influence to outsiders by examining the relationship between the two; China’s interest in Cuba is attributable to economic policy rather than its desire to advance its own geopolitical strategic interests. As China seeks greater relative influence in the international system, the potential occurrence of this chain of events is increasingly apparent.

A Burgeoning Dilemma

The study of multinational corporations and their impact on global security is not novel. As stated by Stephen Brooks:

The globalization of production has significant ramifications for security affairs by virtue of the fact that it has altered the parameters of weapons development, the economic benefits of conquest, and the prospects for regional economic integration among security rivals.26

23 Peter J. Buckley, Pei Yu, Qing Liu, Surender Munjal, and Pan Tao, “The Institutional Influence on the Location Strategies of Multinational Enterprises from Emerging Economies: Evidence of China’s Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions,” Management and Organization Review 12, no. 3 (2016): 430-2; Xiaoming He, Lorraine Eden, and Michael A. Hitt, “The Renaissance of State-Owned Multinationals,” Thunderbird Business Review 58, no. 2 (2016): 118; Peter J. Buckley, Adam R. Cross, Tan Hui, Xin Liu, and Hinrich Voss, “Historic and Emergent Trends in Chinese Outward Direct Investment,” MIR: Manage ment Interview Review 48, no. 6 (2008): 721.

24 Frank, “Tougher U.S. Sanctions Make Cuba Ever More Difficult.”; Emily Moris, “Cuba’s Road Ahead,” Foreign Affairs, August 14, 2019, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/cuba/2017-01-02/cubasroad-ahead.

25 Frank, “Tougher U.S. Sanctions Make Cuba Ever More Difficult.”; Mao, Hearn, and Lui, “Chi na and Cuba,” 150.

26 Stephen G. Brooks, Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Chang

Brooks went on to argue that with MNC production dispersed globally might decrease security for weaker states, but it would serve as a bulwark for war between great powers.27 This hypothesis has prevailed in the study of international politics. In 1910, Norman Angell posited that the economic losses associated with war had deemed it obsolete,28 and the optimistic Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree argues that countries with advanced industrial economies will not go to war.29 This paper, however, casts doubt on the notion that the liberal-democratic international political economy is a vector of peace within the international system.

China’s rise has had nothing to do with military capability; instead, it was globalization that put China on track to become an economic powerhouse, which has correlated with an increase in political influence.30 The intricate economic strategy that has afforded China international political authority is still quintessentially Chinese, and while the contemporary Chinese economy is frequently interpreted as more capitalist than communist, Sino-Cuban economic ties are where China demonstrates its adherence to socialist economic principles 31 As the agents of the liberal global order advocate the principles of democracy and their continuance, undemocratic regimes percolate the international economic order upon which liberal powers rely.32 Trump’s mercurial nature only exacerbated this contingency; as rhetorical and legal attacks on liberal-democratic institutions from the former President became commonplace, frustrated allies have pulled away from the United States and its increasingly “damaged” reputation.33 As once-unequivocal American influence was moderated by Trump’s behaviour, Chinese influence only waxed, breaching the traditional balance of power and permitting the inclusion of states which were ostracized by the United States.

Robust overconfidence in the stability of the global world order, despite the precarious ing Calculus of Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 7.

27 Ibid, 207.

28 Angell Norman, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (New York, NY: Cosimo Classics, 2007).

29 Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999).

30 Yves Tiberghien, “An Uncertain World: Rising Powers, Systemic Risk and the Role of Institu tions and Entrepreneurship: A Response to Brantly Womack’s ‘China’s Future in a Multinodal World Order,” Pacific Affairs 87, no. 2 (2014): 291.

31 Mao, Hearn, and Lui, “China and Cuba,” 140-1.

32 Tiberghien and Muggah, “5 Facts You Need to Understand the New Global Order.”

33 Brent D. Griffiths, “Trump’s Approach Is Hurting the U.S., Foreign Policy Experts Say,” PO LITICO, May 14, 2018, https://politi.co/2KoEhgQ.

Ideologically

nature of the balance of powers, has had the United States long believe that their hegemonic position could not be challenged in earnest. However, China’s quick rise has stoked American fears that their era of international ascendancy is coming to an end.34

In Latin America, the tensions between Washington and Beijing can be observed by their incompatible “visions of the international liberal order and competing models of economic and political governance.”35 The trade struggle between the United States and China has been well-publicized. President Trump criticized the Chinese tendency to underhand fair-trade competition through rules violations and currency manipulations, and the United States’ coercive economic tactics that interfere with Chinese commerce see tempers flare, and tensions rise. It cannot be expected that either China or the United States will cede their international influence to the other, setting the stage for a security dilemma.

China’s Investment Strategy Extrinsic of the Liberal World Order

In light of globalization, the international system is still inherently anarchic as there is no system of governance for states at a supranational level. While inter-state institutions are present, such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization, and states do enter voluntary agreements with each other, there are still few means of accountability. That is, there is no coercive correctional component to constrain state behaviour. International Relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that a multipolar international system, like one that sees both China and the United States as competing for international hegemony, is more susceptible to conflict under the assumption that great powers are continually looking to make gains over each other.36 As the global scales begin to tip towards a multipolar world, China’s economic intrusion into the United States’ “backyard” and America’s ardent promotion of liberal democracy can be a trigger for conflict as neither state can be certain of each other’s true intentions.37

Furthermore, China not only jeopardizes the United States’ status in Latin America but also threatens the privileges and economic benefits that the United States has long bestowed upon and withdrawn from the region. This is playing out in other regions

34 Barbara Lippert, Volker Perthes, and Siftung Wissenschaft Und Politik, “Strategic Rivalry be tween United States and China: Causes, Trajectories, and Implications for Europe.” SWP Research Paper (2020), 5-7.

35 Piccone, “Theo Geopolitics of China’s Rise in Latin America,” 21.

36 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Com pany, 2014): 751-3.

37 John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security 43, no. 4 (2019): 9.

of the world as well; notably, China’s One Belt and One Road (OBOR) commits $900 billion to infrastructure and development in mainly lesser developed countries and aspires to reroute global trade from China through Asia, Africa, and Europe.38 OBOR grants China legitimacy and influence because, unlike the Washington Consensus, China does not impart conditions upon recipients of investment to liberalize their markets and democratize their governments. Conditional American investments seek to democratize the world and ensure democratic peace between states, while the United States – like China – is able to project soft power and utilize the economies of developing countries to further develop its own.

Engaging with structural realism sheds light on the potential for conflict between the United States and China when conflicting economic and ideological doctrines, as opposed to military prowess, stoke mutual suspicion and anxieties in respect to the intentions that inform their international operations. Reductive as it sometimes seems, structural realism highlights the manner by which SOMNCs act as agents of the Chinese politick and can threaten American security interests. While American superiority lends itself well to the belief that Cuba will one day be forced into succumbing to the United States’ demands for regime change, China’s influence in Cuba only becomes more pronounced, and by championing on behalf of the current regime, China is securing a very strategic ally.

Globalization has not included a truly international dogma. China remains staunchly committed to its communist regime and will provide a lifeline to others, despite American efforts to spread democracy by international economic and political quasi-coercive tactics.39 Should this stark divide continue to deepen, the basis for multilateralism amongst states becomes more tenuous.40 Due to this possibility, the strategic rivalry between the United States and China has risen to the forefront of American policymaking. Ideologically amicable, Chinese SOMNCs in Cuba behave in coordination and create an active security threat due to the economic influence on strategic political and military power in Cuba. The ideological contrariety between the two states intensifies the perception of the threat of the other state; therefore, the threat of Chinese economic influence in Cuba is enhanced by China’s ideological contrast to the United States and, thus, increases the perception of threat by both nations of the other.

38 Tiberghien and Muggah, “5 Facts You Need to Understand the New Global Order.”

39 Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail,” 15; Rhodes,”Trump’s Cuba Policy Will Fail.”

40 Lippert, Perthes, Und Politik “Strategic Rivalry between United States and China.”; Mear sheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 755.

Ideologically Informed Investment

Conclusion

This paper is not without its limitations. A significant lack of data for both China and Cuba obscures precise and reliable access to investment and policy specifics, compelling this paper to exclude precise and reliable data trends in favour of a generalized causal theory. Additionally, the contemporaneous nature of the subject of this argument limits this paper. As the relationships amongst Cuba, China, and the United States evolve, so shall the prognosis for the potential for conflict and disruption of the liberal economic order. If this paper were to engage with a different theoretical framework, it might reach divergent conclusions. Structural realism was chosen for its permissibility of dissimilar ideological decision-making structures that permeate the Sino-Cuban-American relationship, whereas engagement with liberalism would have required rational and equivalent decision-making processes between states.

In summary, this paper contextualized the Sino-Cuban relationship within the ideological contrast between China and the United States, as the current balance of power shifts in response to China’s economic rise. This argument posits that economic and diplomatic sanctions against Cuba by the United States have the potential to materialize into a security threat for the United States by way of Chinese OFDI. As the insular Trump administration reverted to pre-Obama era sanctions, the possibility of conflict between the United States and China has intensified. Under the American embargo, Cuba’s desire for investment was long neglected as American allies were pressured to comply with sanctions. Nevertheless, China’s rise to economic preeminence has provided Cuba with Chinese IFDI, which is of mutual benefit.

A degree of ideological harmony has facilitated the strong Sino-Cuban relationship, and Chinese SOMNCs are now Cuba’s largest investors. These SOMNCs can work in coordination to advance the interests of the Chinese state and exert undue influence on Cuban politics. This enduring possibility troubled the Obama administration, which then sought to mitigate sanctions and normalize the relationship between the United States and Cuba — if only to prevent the incursion of China into traditionally American investment-dominated Latin America. As tensions have been revived between Cuba and the United States, and China’s influence shows no sign of dwindling, the Sino-Cuban relationship serves as a medium for potential threats to the United States.

References

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Universalism is Not for Everyone

The postmodern feminist argument against gendered truth claims within international relations

Over the past few decades, the discipline of international relations (IR) has been forced into a state of critical self-reflection as an array of post-positivist theories have gradually infiltrated its discourse.1 Such post-positivist theories fundamentally reject the notion of positivism which proposes that the social sciences can be studied objectively through observation in the same way as the natural sciences.2 At the heart of this rejection is the question of universalism, an approach to international politics which posits that all human beings are connected and similar in a cosmopolitan sense, and thus any theory can be understood to apply to all.3 From a positivist point of view, universalism is useful since it emphasizes the “regularities” or common trends throughout international politics, which in turn makes it easier to formulate the necessary generalizations for theory construction.4 Thus, in the context of IR, postpositivist theories have sought to dismantle the field’s epistemological foundations with

1 Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3.

2 Dunne, Kurki and Smith, International Relations Theories, 18.

3 Amitav Acharya, “Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2014): 649.

4 Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013),189.

Universalism is Not for Everyone

their calls for greater intellectual diversity and the deconstruction of grand narratives.5 Entering the discourse of IR as a challenger to entrenched theories such as realism and liberalism, postmodern feminism is one of these critical theories.6 To postmodern feminists, and specifically to postcolonial feminists, mainstream IR theories like realism and liberalism are only capable of making “universally” applicable statements about IR because they have overlooked how differences in identity like gender, race, and class can influence how knowledge is produced or received.7 However, if the actual diversity of humankind is taken into account in relation to IR theory, it becomes clear that the intensely hierarchical nature of the discipline leaves out the experience of women and other people who are marginalized. This paper will argue that by exposing the power structures behind knowledge-production and by challenging the gendered language of international politics, postmodern feminist IR scholars are expanding IR’s disciplinary borders to allow for more diversity, nuance, and inclusivity.8

This paper aims to address three major ways in which the postmodern feminist wave has contributed to the expansion of IR’s theoretical and physical borders. Firstly, I will discuss the importance of critically approaching and dismantling the relationship between how knowledge is produced and who holds power. While understanding how knowledge is produced may appear to be a fundamentally academic concern, promoting inclusivity and diversity in the knowledge-making process can have very real-life impacts. Next, I will explore how postmodern feminists approach the language of international politics as a gendered medium that often relies on the binary of masculinity and femininity. Understanding and confronting language as a tool for generalization is important to the postmodern feminist movement and to IR as a whole since it can contribute to the creation of a more nuanced and sensitive lexicon for disseminating theory. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I will highlight postcolonial feminist theory as potentially one of the most productive avenues by which to simultaneously address all these gendered issues of power, language, and universality. Ultimately, the concerns outlined above all resist a sense of blind universalism which has traditionally been incorporated into the epistemologies of most major IR theories.

5 J. Ann Tickner and Laura Sjoberg, Feminism and International Relations: Conversations About the Past, Present and Future, (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 9.

6 Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 213.

7 J. Ann Tickner “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4, (December 1997): 617.

8 Mary Caputi, Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory, (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013), 12.

Knowledge and Power

When engaging with IR theory, the majority of feminists emphasize the need to approach IR through a gendered lens or in a way that incorporates women’s experiences.9 Where feminists begin to disagree is in regard to the topic of knowledge and power: postmodern feminists are committed to the deconstruction of the foundations of knowledge, while less radical feminists are content with promoting the role of women in international politics without disrupting the liberal status quo.10 According to Kate Campbell (1992), the relationship between knowledge and power is important to postmodern feminists because IR is a male-dominated field composed of “primarily men researching and thinking and producing ‘knowledge’ in men’s ways for men about men.”11 Thus, to postmodern feminists, if equality is ever to be fully realized within IR, women and other marginalized groups must be involved in the knowledge-making process. If not, IR will continue to primarily reflect the opinions of heterosexual, cisgender, white men. The conclusion that postmodern feminists draw is that if such a small portion of the population maintains a monopoly on knowledge generation and others are excluded from the process, they cannot claim to be producing the “truth” or accurate generalizations.12 As Ann Tickner (1997) puts it, postmodern feminists have “a deep skepticism about the claims to universality of knowledge that, in reality, is based largely on certain privileged men’s lives and men’s experiences.”13 A theory cannot claim to speak for everyone if it never took into account the diversity of the human experience to begin with.

Postmodern feminists acknowledge that the desire to construct universally applicable insights or “truth” claims about IR is only natural as it is assumed that a theory is legitimate only if it is able to represent some recognizable truth that can be identified by the masses.14 However, to postmodern feminists, what follows from this is that

9 Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 205.

10 Dunne, Kurki and Smith, International Relations Theories, 208.

11 Kate Campbell, Critical Feminism: Argument in the Disciplines, (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992), 4.

12 J. Ann Tickner “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4, (December 1997): 617.

13 J. Ann. Tickner, “Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities for Dialogue in International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, 3, (2011): 615.

14 Laura J. Shepard, Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, (London: Routledge, 2010): 4.

Universalism is Not for Everyone

each theory, idea, or truth claim is a product of history, personal experience, and socialization, and thus cannot be detached from its creator.15 Tickner (1997) uses the father of classical realism, Hans Morgenthau, as an interesting example of how knowledge and truth claims are a product of personal experience. She describes how his harrowing experience as a Jew fleeing Nazi Germany led him to “dissociate the realm of morality and values from the realpolitik of international politics” and thus create such a bleak picture of an anarchic system composed of states engaged in perpetual warfare.16 IR theorist and feminist academic Marysia Zalewski (2019) delivers the final blow by explaining that if all knowledge is a product of socialization and experience, objectivity is unachievable and men will thus be unable to separate their experience as the traditional beneficiaries of patriarchal power structures from their own theories.17

This approach is in opposition to the epistemology of most mainstream IR theories, like realism and liberalism, which derive the foundations for their truth claims from the Enlightenment idea that human beings possess some inherent aptitude for rationality and reason which allows for the formulation of objective knowledge.18 Postmodern feminists also infer from their rejection of objectivity that if men unconsciously include their own experiences into their theories, the experiences of women and others are excluded or misrepresented.19 As Campbell (1992) puts it, “when a man speaks on behalf of women he necessarily comes from a different position, without the experience of grosser injustices and the pilulous rubs of sexism…”20 Thus, if women and other marginalized groups are to be genuinely respected and given space within the field of IR, they must be allowed to participate fully in the process of knowledge-production in IR scholarship so that the body of information reflects their own unique understanding of the world.

One such example of a specific truth claim that has dominated mainstream IR discourses that postmodern feminists take issue with is the singular focus or even obsession with

15 Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 214.

16 J. Ann Tickner “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4, (December 1997): 618.

17 Marysia Zalewski, “Forget(ting) feminism? Investigating relationality in international relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32, no. 5, (2019): 621.

18 Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 214.

19 Kate Campbell, Critical Feminism: Argument in the Disciplines, (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992), 11.

20 Campbell, Critical Feminism, 11.

the state as the primary feature of international politics.21 Peterson (2014) offers a unique analysis of the ways in which the state is mutually constituted with ideas of gender.22 She argues that when early humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to settled agrarians and thus began engaging in state-building, gender categorization was introduced through the “regulation of reproductive sexual activities through formal laws; institutionalization of stratified divisions of labor and heteropatriarchal household formations…”23 She argues that these systems of hierarchy have been reproduced throughout history, to the point where our idea of sex and gender cannot be isolated from the state, and thus such an understanding of the international system will naturally be influenced by gender.24 Shepard also provides an interesting explanation for the way narrow-minded state-centrism marginalizes the non-male perspective: the rejection of the individual inherent to the state-centric approach causes “a politics of the body,” or political identities informed by different experiences of sex, to be entirely ignored.25

When the intersectional and highly personalized nature of identity is subjugated by the state in this way, it further reinforces hierarchies within IR by silencing any dissenting voices with different lived experiences.

It is important to note that popular theories like constructivism purport this same anti-foundalist approach to international relations and could thus be understood as a suitable companion to postmodern feminism and its opposition to stringent positivism and universalist claims. In terms of ontology, postmodern feminists and constructivists both endorse the idea that actors, whether they be states or individuals, carry malleable identities that are learned and adapted through perpetual repetition and established social expectations of behavior. This process of socialization is what constructs and influences actors in the realm of IR, rather than some fixed structural phenomenon or some obligation to the institutional status quo as realists and liberals would instead suggest. Yet while constructivism may, broadly speaking, emphasize the intersubjective nature of state and interpersonal interactions, it does not inherently advocate for a reevaluation of the gendered quality of international politics. Of course, within constructivism, there is an abundance of theoretical diversity, with many feminists

21 V. Spike Peterson, “Feminisms and International Relations,” Gender and History 10, no. 3 (November 1998): 581.

22

V. Spike Peterson, “Sex Matters,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, 3, (2014): 390.

23 Peterson, “Sex Matters,” 393.

24 Peterson, “Sex Matters,” 401.

Laura J. Shepard, Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, (London: Routledge, 2010), 6.

25

Universalism is Not for Everyone

indeed self-identifying as constructivists and vice versa. However, such an interplay between feminist and constructivist frameworks is not fundamental nor ever-present.26

Gendered Language

The ways in which language informs the discipline of IR are increasingly being analyzed by postmodernists, with postmodern feminist theorists specifically focusing on the gendering of language as a social phenomenon.27 In mainstream thought and in traditional liberal feminist IR, the gender binary based on “male” and “female” bodies is taken for granted, rather than being understood as a linguistic construction. This assumption is based on the notion of gender essentialism: that gender roles are not socially constructed but instead represent a tangible and inherent difference between men and women.28 In addition, describing male and female as real and constant indicators of identity naturally promotes a narrow-minded conception of gender as binary, which thus excludes trans, non-binary, gender-fluid individuals and others from engaging in the discourse.29

On the other hand, postmodern feminists themselves are sensitive to the linguistic implications that result from concrete definitions thus they generally define gender as “a variable but socially and culturally constructed characteristics…”30 Through this definition, postmodern feminists have identified gender as something which is not a rigid reality but instead a product of socialization and linguistic categorization. Acclaimed philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler has been one of the pioneering forces in explaining how gender is a linguistic construct and thus a product of society. In her theory of “gender performativity,” she describes how gender is only given meaning when we announce it through language.31 Butler (2006) further explains how gender has been widely perceived as being built upon conceptions of masculinity and femininity as

26 Birgit Locher and Elisabeth Prugl, “Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart of Sharing Middle Ground?” International Studies Quarterly 45, (2001): 111-129.

27 Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 213.

28 Kate Campbell, Critical Feminism: Argument in the Disciplines, (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992), 30.

29 Cynthia Weber, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, (London: Routledge, August 2004): 83.

30 J. Ann Tickner “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4, (December 1997): 614.

31 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2.

two opposing methods of identification. However, she argues that gender is instead “a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”32 Thus, when gender identities are realized as linguistically constrained by dichotomies such as male/female and masculine/feminine, it is easier to understand how gender has been socially produced and fabricated.33

Many postmodern feminists perceive masculinity as maintaining a hegemony over both IR theory and practice because of the way the term has been constructed to reflect notions of power.34 The standard linguistic expressions of IR which we take for granted such as strength, anarchy, and state all have gendered connotations that further contribute to the dominance of masculinity within the discourse.35 V. Spike Peterson (1998) argues that such linguistic dichotomies create “gendered divisions of power,” so that masculine terms like power and order are valued over their feminine counterparts of weakness and anarchy within IR.36 This analysis reveals how broad assumptions about the international system such as anarchy which are used constantly in dominant IR theories like realism and neorealism serve to reinforce existing patriarchal power structures. Such dichotomization of language has real-life implications for women in the realm of politics where masculine behavior is privileged over qualities traditionally associated with femininity such as weakness, indecision, and irrationality. As Enloe (1989) puts it, “when a woman is let in by the men who control the political elite, it usually is precisely because that woman has learned the lessons of masculinized political behavior well enough not to threaten male political privilege.”37 Thus, to engage with the discipline of IR, women are forced to subscribe to the social construct of masculinity if they wish to be taken seriously, otherwise, they will fall prey to the linguistic connotations of femininity and will ultimately be shunned from any decisionmaking process.

32 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9.

33 Butler, Gender Trouble, 10.

34 Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart, The ‘Man’ Question in International Relations (London: Routledge, 1998), 2

35 Arpita Chakraborty, “Can Postcolonial Feminism Revive International Relations?” Economic & Political Weekly 52, no. 20, (May 2017): 2.

36 V. Spike Peterson, “Feminisms and International Relations,” Gender and History 10, no. 3 (November 1998): 585.

37 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora Press, 1989), 6-7.

Universalism is Not for Everyone

This is not to say that there only exists one expression of masculinity; in fact, postmodern feminists themselves often bring up the diversity of masculine identities.38 Their quarrel lies with the so-called notion of “hegemonic masculinity,” a term coined by R. W. Connell in “Masculinities” (1995) which refers to the dominance of a type of masculinity ascribed to white, cisgender, heterosexual males.39 In Connell’s gender theory, power is centralized around hegemonic masculinities, with complicit, marginalized, and subordinate masculinities in positions of inferiority alongside expressions of femininity.40 In conclusion, postmodern feminists are not concerned with strictly attacking all men and all masculinities, but instead are attempting to bring attention to how linguistic dichotomies reinforce obscure constructions of gender that contribute to hierarchies and oppression within IR.

Postcolonial Feminism

Any conversation about the merits of postmodern feminism would not be complete without an acknowledgment of the importance of postcolonial feminism, a more nuanced and emancipatory branch of feminism located under the postmodern umbrella. While the exact origins of IR as a field are widely disputed, most trace its beginning to the inter-war period, a time when imperialism and colonialism were still very much socially acceptable.41 A new world order was emerging in which the conditions for peace were being negotiated by the great powers, all while brutal and inhumane wars of independence were being fought across the sea.42 It was out of this era of violence, sexism, and Eurocentrism that contemporary IR theory was born. Thus, to fully understand the discourse, it is necessary to reckon with its discriminatory foundations, something which contemporary streams of postcolonial theory are attempting to do.43 Postcolonial IR theories seek to challenge the general assumptions which IR relies on by exposing their origins as oppressive and biased in their application.44 As Sankaran Krishna explains, mainstream IR’s “ideological purpose

38 Enloe, Bananas, 13.

39 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1995): 189.

40 Richard Howson, Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity (London: Routledge, January 2006): 59.

41 Sanjay Seth, “Postcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2011): 168.

42 Seth, “Postcolonial Theory.” 170.

43 Seth, “Postcolonial Theory,” 171.

44 Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, International Relations Theories: Discipline and

is to sanctify, depoliticize, and normalize the domination of the rest of the world by the west.”45 Postcolonial theory shifts the narrative by placing emphasis on the need for intersectionality and challenging the idea of universalism as it, by default, erases the differences in identity and cultural experiences that people of color, women, and nonWestern people might feel.46 Just as many of the postmodern feminists described above define gender as a social construct used to reinforce patriarchal hierarchies, so too are systems of oppression formed around constructions like race, ethnicity, and culture that are present in IR. In this sense, postcolonialism as a whole mirrors the postmodern feminist preoccupation with the relationship between knowledge and power. As Sanjay Seth puts it, “all presumptions, including--and perhaps especially--ones about what it means to be human, to be rational and desiring, are historically and culturally produced, and are thus ‘particular’ rather than universal.”47

In combining discourses about gender and other identity factors to understand international politics, postcolonial feminism champions an intersectional approach, which in turn instills more nuance and sensitivity to IR theory than the traditional generalizations often do. This is not to say that postcolonial theorists and specifically postcolonial feminists do not engage in the use of generalizations. Instead, Arpita Chakraborty explains how such traditional assumptions made by realist and liberal theories are in need of redirection as they are, in fact, not genuinely concerned with the causes of war and conditions for peace because they ignore people of color and women as those most affected by violence.48 In Chakraborty’s words, “the traditional discourse of international relations dealt with the state as the main, if not the only, agent of international relations, thus obliterating the real life implications that concepts such as security, war, and violence have on women as subjects.”49 In this sense, postcolonial feminists like Chakraborty point out how most theories of IR are not genuinely concerned with addressing violence or oppression in the international system.

Diversity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 248.

45 Sankaran Krishna, “Postcolonialism and its relevance for International Relations in a global ized world,” in Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Randolph B. Persaud and Alina Sajed, (London: Routledge, 2018), 24.

46 Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 3.

47 Sanjay Seth, “Postcolonial Theory and the Critique of International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 1 (2011): 176.

48 Arpita Chakraborty, “Can Postcolonial Feminism Revive International Relations?” Economic & Political Weekly 52, no. 20, (May 2017): 2.

49 Chakraborty, “Can Postcolonial Feminism,” 2.

Universalism is Not for Everyone

Postcolonial feminists go further in their deconstruction of universalist assumptions as they highlight the ways in which white, liberal feminists have dominated the feminist discourse and in turn have developed their own sweeping conclusions on the nature of IR theory, thus excluding other forms of feminism.50 Their argument is that white feminists are complicit in the oppression of other feminists and women because their use of terms like “universalism” and “normativity” marginalizes other voices and further promotes the practice of “othering.”51 The Kantian principles which inform liberal feminism are based on ideas of universal freedoms which are supposed to apply to everyone: thus when individuals and communities do not appear to adhere to such ideas of liberty, they are considered to be in need of saving.52 For example, Lila AbuLughod explains how Muslim women are often described as lacking agency because they are “required” to wear the hijab, and thus need white liberal feminists (or white men) to free them from their bonds of oppression.53 Abu-Lughod further illuminates how the white saviorism of liberal feminism is damaging and culturally insensitive; she describes how the burqa was seen as a symbol of the Taliban’s oppression by Westerners and thus used as justification for American intervention in Afghanistan.54 In reality, veiling is not necessarily a symbol of religious oppression or conformity imposed on Muslim women: for many women, it a very personal decision imbued with political, historical, and cultural meaning that can represent liberation for the wearer.55 She says that “veiling must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency…” and argues that this is a perfect example of how mainstream feminism can be blinded by supposed liberal values and ideas of universalism.56 Ultimately, the singular focus on gender which Western postmodern feminism tends to prioritize is considerably lacking: to show true concern with the deconstruction of social hierarchies, feminist IR must embrace an intersectional postcolonial lens to understand how other factors like race,

50 Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith, International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 212.

51 Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 22.

52 Khader, Decolonizing Universalism, 23.

53 Khader, Decolonizing Universalism, 24.

54 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013), 35.

55 Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 8.

56 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013), 39.

ethnicity, and religion contribute to oppressive discourses in IR.57 If not, postmodern feminists will only succeed in falling back into the trend of universalizing the discourse and erasing difference.

Conclusion

The classic tradition of IR has theoretical roots in notions of universality, normativity, and state-centrism which has created an exclusive and oppressive intellectual environment. Postmodern theories have called for a deconstruction of truth claims and a departure from the parsimony of realism and liberalism so as to include a broader spectrum of identities, opinions, and experiences. Naturally, many within the discipline worry that the inclusion of such “radical” theories will undermine the field’s legitimacy as a whole, while others have embraced this new academic diversity as a means to greater progress. Even if converse opinions are held on both sides of this debate or not, most scholars would agree that gender inequality has become an important issue in the field which should be addressed. Postmodern feminism offers unique insight into understanding how gender as a construct has permeated the discipline and subconsciously affected the field both in theory and practice. Through an analysis of knowledge and power, linguistic dichotomization, and the legacy of colonialism, postmodern feminism enables us to see how greatly IR is masculinized and influenced by conceptions of gender. Thus, the assumed existence of some standard commonality which applies to all human beings is actually grounded in prejudiced and selective thinking, and therefore, universalism is not for everyone.

References

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57 Columba Achilleos-Sarll, “Reconceptualising Foreing Policy as Gendered, Sexualised and Racialised: Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Foreign Policy” Journal of International Women’s Studies 19, no 1. (January 2018): 42.

Universalism is Not for Everyone

Achilleos-Sarll, Columba. “Reconceptualising Foreing Policy as Gendered, Sexualised and Racialised: Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Foreign Policy.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 19, no 1. (January 2018): 34-49.

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Esmé Graziani

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Locher, Birgit and Elisabeth Prugl. “Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart of Sharing Middle Ground?” International Studies Quarterly 45, (2001): 111-129.

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Contributor Biographies

Editor-in-Chief

Hannah Exley graduated in 2021 with a major in international relations and a minor in Spanish. Her academic interests lie in twentieth century global history, U.S. foreign relations, and the interplay between international relations, literature, and popular culture. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, hiking, and spending time on her family farm in Agassiz, BC.

Managing Editor

Julian Lam is a third-year international relations student from Vancouver. His interests lie in international trade and development, globalization, and economic history. In his spare time you can find him out on a hike or exploring Vancouver’s culinary scene.

Editors

Tae Young Bae is a fifth-year Combined Major in Science student who is also pursuing a minor in Asian area studies. His current research interests include the role of history and popular memory in shaping international relations between East Asian states. Upon completing his undergraduate degree, he is considering either graduate studies in Asian studies or law school.

Stephanie Brook is in her final year completing a double major in international relations and economics. Her research is focused on labour economics, and the history of grassroots activism in Vancouver. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing and cooking new foods.

Tiffany Chang is a third-year international relations major and law and society minor from Vancouver, BC. As part of the Sciences Po-UBC Dual Degree Program, she spent the first two years of her undergraduate degree at Sciences Po, concentrating in political humanities on the Le Havre campus (the Euro-Asia program). Her research interests include East Asia, post-colonialism, and the intersection of popular culture and international relations. Outside of academics, she loves listening to history, politics, and true-crime podcasts.

Henrique Fernandes is a last year student of international relations. Originally from Brazil, he is particularly interested in global environmental politics and human rights, with a special focus on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, running, and watching movies.

Gizel Gedik is a third-year international relations and history student from Turkey. Her academic interests encompass Middle Eastern history and contemporary politics, along with critical refugee studies.

Marcela Gomez is a last year student of international relations and philosophy. Being from Colombia, she is interested in peace and conflict studies, international development, and political theory.

Sophia Lee is a fourth-year undergraduate with an international relations major from Vancouver, Canada. Her academic and research interests include peacebuilding, militarization, and international diplomacy. Upon graduation, she aspires to further pursue her interest in humanitarianism by devoting her life to the international law and public interest sectors.

Gabriel Queiroz Imhoff is a fourth-year international relations major from Brazil. He has a keen interest in the interaction of public-private sectors in international relations, in the increasing role of regional development banks, and in international history. Moreover, the crossroad between literature and history fascinates him.

Oskar Steiner is a third-year undergraduate student at UBC from Whistler, BC who is majoring in international relations and minoring in economics, having formerly studied economics and sociology at Sciences Po in France. His academic interests lie at the intersection of political economy, ecology, and economics — particularly in addressing the dual crises of environmental degradation and global inequality from an interdisciplinary lens. Outside of academia, Oskar is a passionate musician, artist and skier. After graduation he hopes to pursue a graduate degree in either political economy, economics, or journalism.

Justin Wong is a third-year international relations major with a minor in sociology. He spent his last two years at Le Havre, France as part of the UBC Sciences Po Dual Degree Program specializing in Europe and Asia. His research interests lie in environmental policy, development issues, access to education, and public-private partnerships. He is especially passionate about the diverse languages and cultures of Southeast Asia and hopes to conduct ethnographic fieldwork there. When not engaged in academics, Justin can be found watching DW documentaries, playing his trombone, or wandering around Vancouver’s many green spaces.

JinHua Yip is a fifth-year international relations major and commerce minor. Having grown up in both China and Canada, he is particularly interested in the economic, environmental and geopolitical implications of China’s rise. His hobbies include traveling, exploring new places to eat, sports, and gaming. completing his undergraduate degree, he is considering either graduate studies in Asian studies or law school.

Authors

Julien B. Cardinal recently earned a bachelor of arts with high distinction in international relations from UBC. Born and raised in Montréal, Québec, his academic interests span the areas of global security, great-power politics, and terrorism. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, playing ice hockey, and seeing the world through travel.

Léna Faucher is a third-year international relations major from Paris, France. She is currently enrolled in the Dual BA between Sciences Po Paris and UBC. During the first two years of her bachelor’s degree, Léna majored in economics with a minor in finance. Léna’s academic interests lie in macroeconomics, finance but also history, sociology and literature. Her favourite hobbies are visiting museums, running, reading books while sitting at cafés and having debates with her friends.

Esmé Graziani is a fourth-year international relations major and a Middle East studies minor from New York. Her interests include political theory (particularly postcolonialism), the intersection of religion and politics, the Middle East and North Africa, and U.S. foreign policy. Upon graduation, she hopes to travel abroad and work in journalism or with a local NGO.

Chelsea Parker is in her fourth and final year of an undergraduate degree in political science and international relations and will be continuing with her studies as a graduate student in the fall. Her research interests involve examining mechanisms that increase civil participation in institution building across post-conflict and post-colonial states, as well as the role of non-state actors in international relations as it pertains to the role of intrastate and transnational governance. Outside of her academic interests, Chelsea is an enthusiast of Olympic weightlifting, an avid reader of nonfiction, and loves to travel.

David Yang is a recent graduate from Richmond, BC with a degree in international relations and a minor in law and society. He has also studied abroad for one term at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include the Asia-Pacific region, Canadian politics, international economic development, and environmental policy. Since graduation, he has been working as a constituency staff for the Legislative Assembly of BC. In the future, he hopes to pursue graduate studies in law or political science. Outside of academic and professional life, he enjoys hobbies such as roadtripping, cooking, and playing sports. He is also an avid fan of the Vancouver Canucks.